What thoughts can Wayne Grudem offer to my prayer life?

I am stuck in the middle of a process renovation. That is fancy wording for simply saying that I am trying to make my time alone with God in the morning more effective in my life. My greatest need is a remodel of my prayer life and I am always keen to good advice on this subject.
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WorldMagBlog: A parental invasion, of sorts

Ever since Facebook dropped its student-only restriction and opened its doors in September 2007 to anyone, many student users have cried foul, saying the unrestricted access allows their parents to spy on them. Some 5,819 disgruntled high school and college-aged students have even joined a Facebook group entitled “For the love of god–don’t let parents join Facebook.”

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The best lessons of 2008

2008 light drawing imageAs the year comes near to a close, I am reflecting on the things that I am most thankful for. To use the proverbial expression, “…drinking from a firehose…” it is difficult to cull my list to just a couple of items. However, the exercise of summarizing the year to just a few bullet points helps me focus on the essence of what I learned from the past year that I can carry with me to the coming one. → Read the rest

Hopeful Post-Christmas Melancholy: Desiring God

Desiring God blog reposted this entry from last year. It was written by Jon Bloom and gives great perspective on post-Christmas emotions.

Each year Christmas night finds members of my family feeling some melancholy. After weeks of anticipation, the Christmas celebrations have flashed by us and are suddenly gone. And we’re left standing, watching the Christmas taillights and music fade into the night.

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Oliver North: The Reason for the Season

From Oliver North’s blog:

Washington, D.C. —  It’s the “the holiday season” — the politically correct euphemism for this time of year when we’re supposed to demonstrate the “spirit of the season” by going shopping. We do this so that we can help retailers hit their year-end sales targets. Shopping, we are told, stimulates the economy and what’s good for the economy is good for all of us.

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Marley’s Message to Scrooge – R.C. Sproul

This excerpt is from R.C. Sproul’s blog. It is an excellent and well thought analysis of some issues surrounding the celebration of Christmas.

Every generation has its abundance of Scrooges. The church is full of them. We hear endless complaints of commercialism. We are constantly told to put Christ back into Christmas. We hear that the tradition of Santa Claus is a sacrilege.

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What happened to optimism?

Cal Thomas writes about optimism in spite of the economic news surrounding us…

Where is that optimism today in the midst of the sharp economic downturn? One doesn’t hear much of it from politicians and especially not from the media, which trades exclusively in gloom and doom. President Bush has said he believes things will get better.

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Where the “tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree” magnets go to die

image of yellow ribbon magnetDo you have one? You know, the ribbon shaped magnets that you are supposed to put on your car, van, SUV, tank. I don’t have one (I hope that doesn’t make me unpatriotic or any less supportive of our fine folks serving in uniforms). I guess I would rather support our troops with prayers, letters, or other ways.
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Learning a lot from kindergarten

I have the great privilege of teaching every other week in the kindergarten class at our church. I started out somewhat apprehensive of the responsibility and found myself stressed every other Saturday because I just wasn’t ready mentally for the task. What really bothered me was that this seemed ridiculous to me that someone like me who taught for nine years (7 of those with elementary students) would struggle with teaching kindergartners a Sunday school lesson.It
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