How to improve your mind

Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance. Impress your mind with a deep and painful sense of the low and imperfect degrees of your present knowledge that you may be incited to labour and activity to pursue after greater measures.

— Isaac Watts, Improvement of the Mind (published 1741)

Spare me from strange sins

A good penitential prayer (prayer of confession) from St Augustine:

O Lord,
The house of my soul is narrow;
enlarge it that you may enter in.
It is ruinous, O repair it!
It displeases Your sight.
I confess it, I know.
But who shall cleanse it,
to whom shall I cry but to You?
Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord,
and spare Your servant from strange sins.

AMEN

Lloyd Jones' key evangelistic strategy

The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first.

—D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972), 28.

Most disagreements do not require division, they require vision

Praise the Lord for Toby Sumpter who repeatedly comes up with such wonderful insights as this one:

Of course there are disagreements that sometimes require division, but most disagreements do not require division, they require vision. They require a renewed vision of the big picture, the death and resurrection of Jesus, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, the Church triumphant marching gloriously through history – when you step back and catch a glimpse of this vision, joy wells up inside you and when you glance back at your differences, those differences seem small and insignificant.

Praise the Lord indeed.

Can't believe it - Russell Brand is right

I know I'm a bit a late to the 'party' but this rant by Russell Brand - despite his being a raging pagan - is brilliant + profound for it's honesty and simplicity. His main point: pornography is evil - you don't say? Indeed! I can't believe I am about to say this of Russell Brand: Preach it 'brother'!