Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 10:23PM 
Those Who Don’t Look Like Us
Amy Scott encourages us to learn from people who are not exactly in our group.
[T]he more we invest our lives into learning and growing from those that don’t “look like us”, the more we’ll learn.
(Amy’s Humble Musings)
Those on Whose Shoulders We Stand
There are so many reasons to learn about (and from) the Church fathers (The Upward Call).
Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 8:56PM 
The word total in the term total depravity means that the depravity that came to all of us as a result of the fall affects every part of our being. If I’d been naming the doctrine, I’d have called it “comprehensive” depravity, but no one asked me, so we’re stuck with a name that many find confusing.
It all boils down to this: Post-fall, nothing in us works the way it was created to work. Our bodies have their faults. We get sick; our teeth decay; we have genetic imperfections; and we all eventually die. Our minds are imperfect, leaving our thinking powers warped. Our emotions run amuck, too. And this depravity extends to our wills, leaving us with desires that have also been corrupted.
The corruption of our desires—of our will—puts us in a pickle when it comes to the demands God makes on us as his creatures. He commands that we obey him, but in our natural state, we don’t really want to, and even when we make an attempt to obey, we don’t do it for the right reasons. Ephesians 2:1-3 tells us that people in their natural post fall state—those who remain dead in trespasses and sins—are living out their lives in the cravings of their flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind. They don’t care about pleasing God; but rather, they care about pleasing their own flesh. This problem of persistent warped desires is universal. Those who are not yet believers remain in that state and those who are believers were once in that state.
You see the predicament, right? God’s commandments are nothing more than what people ought to be doing, yet the corruption that came to every one of us through the fall warps our desires so that we just keep on indulging our twisted cravings instead of doing what God asks us to do. Fallen human beings are so intransigent in this disobedience that scripture tells us that the natural person—a person who remains as they are born post fall without any supernatural intervention—is unable to submit to God’s commands (Romans 8:7-8).
Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 2:57PM Of Lazarus
Jon Bloom (Desiring God Blog) discusses a few of the possible reasons Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.
Of Hezekiah
Jeremy Pierce on why it might have been better for Hezekiah to die earlier rather than later.
Perhaps Hezekiah should have accepted God’s prophetic message that it was his time. Perhaps there’s even a reason why it was for Hezekiah’s own good that he die then rather than later. Perhaps it was to spare him the moral corruption that would have come had he continued on, and his refusal to accept it then led to God to give him over to that moral corruption that God would have graciously spared him from. If your life is going to end in a way that seems cut short, it might well be because of what you would do if you were to live longer. It might be a mercy.
D. A. Carson agrees (Triablogue).
But I remembered the fate of King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20; 2 Chron. 32:24-31; Isa. 38-39). When he was under sentence of death, he begged the Lord for fifteen more years, and received the extra span. And in the course of those fifteen years he blew his entire reputation for integrity in one incident prompted by foolish pride. Nor was his reputation alone at stake: the bearing his action had on the future of his nation was disastrous.
That is why I decided there are worse things than dying. I do not know how many times I have sung the words, “O let me never, never / Outlive my love for Thee,” but I mean them. I would rather die than end up unfaithful to my wife; I would rather die than deny by a profligate life what I have taught in my books; I would rather die than deny or disown the gospel. God knows there are many things in my past of which I am deeply ashamed; I would not want such shame to multiply and bring dishonor to Christ in years to come. There are worse things than dying.
Of a Sparrow
Potent Prooftexts: He Watcheth Me (The Calvinist Gadfly)
…[A]s the sparrow flies or falls only by the will and providence of its creator, so we also live, suffer, and die in his hand.