What is our only hope in life and death?
That we are not our own but belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Savior Jesus Christ. (New City Catechism, Q1)
by Stephen Rodgers
I’m going to try to structure this a bit differently today…we’ll see how it goes.
FEATURED RESOURCE
Not everyone is familiar with the word, so it might be helpful to begin with the fact that Google defined “catechism” as follows:
- A summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers, used for the instruction of Christians
- A series of fixed questions, answers, or precepts used for instruction in other situations
Compared to some of the other catechisms, it’s considerably shorter: just 52 questions and answers, one for each week of the year. And it tries to claim the difficult-to-occupy middle ground between a child’s catechism (A Catechism for Boys and Girls, Catechism for Young Children, First Catechism) and the more well-known but difficult adult’s catechisms (Westminster Shorter, Westminster Larger, Heidelberg, etc.). It does this by having two answers to each question: a simple/short one for the child, and an expanded one for the adult/parent.
More information can be found here:
- Introducing New City Catechism
- Why Catechesis Now?
- Why Write New Catechisms?
- Catechism – with OUR Kids?
- Catechesis Miscellanies
OTHER RESOURCES
- The free audiobook from christianaudio.com for November is Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s What is the Mission of the Church? For anyone at LBC, that’s pretty much a no-brainer. Enjoy!
- 9Marks recently did a series of talks at Southern Seminary on the topic of “conversion.”
- The new Tabletalk issue is on the topic of “The 5 Solas.” If you want to see what the previous topics were, I’ll plug my index once again.
- Last but not least, Ligonier Ministries is giving away their “Luther and the Reformation” series, which is pretty incredible.
NEW AWESOMENESS
- Remember the whole hubbub about the “Jesus’ Wife” thing? Me too. Remember the embarrassment over the fact that it was likely faked? Me neither.
- Douglas Wilson has a rather devastating critique of Rachel Held Evans’ new book, which is getting quite a bit of media attention.
- In light of the upcoming election, I appreciated this list of 10 questions that a pro-choice candidate is never asked by the media.
- Even though October is officially “Pastor Appreciation Month”…and it’s now November…you’ll want to check out this article (which in turn is really a round-up of other articles) on the subject of praying for your pastor.
ONGOING AWESOMENESS
- I’ve hyped RefNet before, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you might want to see their new weekend lineup.
- Tim Challies has a new article in his “Essential” series on the doctrine of election.
That’s it…hopefully you made it through all that. See you Sunday!
Pro Rege