Jesus never fails!

“Keep your eye simply on Him; let His death, His sufferings, His merits, His glories, His intercession, be fresh upon thy mind; when you wake in the morning look to Him; when thou lie down at night look to Him. Oh! let not your hopes or fears come between thee and Jesus; follow hard after Him, and He will never fail you.”

C.H. Spurgeon

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Encouraging missionaries during the holidays

Read the article, pick one or two of ways you can encourage a missionary over Thanksgiving or Christmas and do it!

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Why Christians should care about productivity

All right, this week most of us are not going to be super-productive in terms of getting a lot of things done in our normal life–like work whether you work for someone else, for yourself, at home or outside the home.

However, with the thanksgiving holiday this week, you might have a little downtime to read this article on productivity by Matt Perman and why it should matter to Christians.  It’s a stimulating article because we here so much today about productivity and efficiency.  But it’s so often couched in terms that aren’t always consistent with a Christian worldview.  Matt helps us think biblically.

Matt also did an interview here on the matter that’s worth reading.

Hope you have a restful and enjoyable Thanksgiving and then apply some of this principles to your normal, productive life!

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What’s going on with the NIV?

I grew up basically on the NIV.  This version of God’s Word guided me through my life as a high school, college, and seminary student and I used it as my primary English text for the first 15 years of my ministry.  Today, I believe the Old NIV still has value as a translation if one understands that is translational philosophy is inferior (in my opinion) to those employed by the KJV, NKJV, NASB, and ESV.  For translational accuracy, clarity [ease of understanding], and literary beauty, I prefer the ESV personally.

So what’s going on with the NIV?  A lot has changed in the past 15 years or so.  The publishers at one point “froze” the text.  Then they really “unfroze” it with the publishing of the TNIV.  And now they are introducing an updated NIV (already available on line).  When the new version comes out in print, the publishers plan to stop producing the old NIV (which doesn’t make any sense to me.  Who would have thought of ending publication of the KJV when the NKJV was produced?  I know there is a difference in copyright, etc, but the parallel is worth noting).  They will also stop publishing the TNIV (to which I say “hooray!”)

If you want to delve into this saga more, I suggest you read Trevin and Dr. Veith’s articles on the NIV, TNIV, and NIV 2011.

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