Christian Book Notes

This is from an email I receive weekly from the MLJ Trust about the Ephesians sermon series now being available week by week for free.  It will take about 4 years to publish the whole series, but will certainly be worth the wait!

Dear Friend,
This is a day that all of us, in the UK and the US, having been looking forward to with great anticipation. This morning, on the MLJ Trust’s page on Oneplace, we are launching the full series preached by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the book of Ephesians. This series of over 200 sermons was started by Dr. Lloyd-Jones in 1954, and became one of four prolonged treatments of New Testament books that he undertook during his 30 year ministry at Westminster Chapel.

The launch of this series of full sermons comes after 92% of you, in a survey conducted in late 2011, said that you would prefer a full-length sermon format to the shorter format we have been using, which means that the length of these sermons will vary between 45 and 60 minutes. We are extremely grateful to our brothers on the UK Recordings Trust for giving us permission to air full-length sermons, and to Oneplace for allowing us to upload longer content than they are used to.

Today’s sermon is an introduction to the Epistle, and you can go straight to the sermon by either clicking on the Oneplace logo beneath my signature below or clicking on the following link: http://www.oneplace.com/ministries/living-grace . We do hope that you will enjoy this series and, more importantly, we hope that it will be helpful to you in your Spiritual journey.
To those who have been able to donate to our ministry, we thank you so much. For those who have not had an opportunity, but would like to help us continue funding this ministry, a link to our donations page is at the bottom left of this eMail (Your GeoTrust secured contribution will be processed by Network for Good). As a reminder, the MLJ Trust is 501 (c) (3) charitable consisting of four Board members who volunteer their time, and no staff. You can learn more about us at www.mljtrust.org.
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Thank you again for your interest in the Ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones!

Every blessing,

Jonathan
www.mljtrust.org
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Swanson, Kevin. Suffer the Children: The Blessing of ‘Imperfect’ Children. 42 minutes. $10.00. Purchase at Vision Forum for $7.00.

Introduction

Kevin Swanson hosts a radio show entitled Generations Radio. You can find out more information about his ministry at his website, Generations with Vision.

Summary

This sermon is not what I thought it would be. I was thinking, based on the title, that this was going to be all about children with mental retardations or disabilities or something along those lines. I was wrong. While he does use a young man as an example, he moves on to other “imperfect children” found in the church.

Ultimately, Swanson calls for radical church membership. I use the word radical because in many of today’s churches, church membership means nothing. Instead, Swanson wants to see the body of Christ unified and involved in one another’s lives and not just on Sunday mornings!

He calls for a “regulative principle” of church life; i.e., what does the Bible say about how the church should handle certain situations. He gives an example of a widow and a single woman and how his church allowed the Bible to direct how they handle each individual situation.

Recommendation

For $7.00, this cd ought to be purchased and listened to by pastors and lay leaders in the local church. Swanson challenges us all using the Bible as his means to drive home his points. Some will not agree with what he is saying (he does take the mega-church to task a bit) but no one will be able to say that he is not basing his arguments on the Bible.