Michael Barrett’s fourth book, The Beauty of Holiness, has just recently been released. He seeks to provide the foundation of a solid, biblical theology of worship that is missing in so much of the debate about music. As anyone who has read a Barrett book would expect, it looks like it’ll be a good read. I’ve posted an excerpt that gives an overview.
PastorBookshelf Weekly Email
Some of you are subscribed to the PastorBookshelf weekly email, but for those of you who are not, I thought you might be interested in seeing this week’s email. If you think you’d find it helpful, I encourage you to sign up. I’ll probably start posting them here each week. So if your inbox is already swamped, just subscribe to my feed and look for the web version of the email here.
Google Analytics
I just set up our company websites to use Google Analytics. It’s a free service (of course, it’s Google!) that will track traffic on your website and give you some downright amazing statistics to help you improve your site. Granted, the service is intended for businesses that are trying to get more page views and make more sales. But bloggers can use it as well. It’s kind of fun to know that someone from Singapore visited your blog! :) Just paste a snippet of code on every page of your website (or into your template), and you’re good to go. If you use Blogger, it’s fairly simple. You can go to your layout, add a new HTML page element as a footer, and paste in the code they give you. Enjoy!
Adobe Reader 8
Adobe Reader 8 is now available for download. In addition to it’s improved UI, it has some nice new features. It now handles booklet printing. It also has a built-in tool that will read your PDF out loud. Check it out.
PastorForums.com
I know there are several solid forum sites out there, but I wanted to make you aware of the site our company just launched: PastorForums. Check us out, and help us get started. In case you’re not familiar with our other sites, we also have PastorResources, PastorBookshelf, PastorBlog, and PastorOpenings (coming soon).
$20 off $50 Purchase and Free Shipping
I just bought three books from Buy.com for a little over $30. The same three books would have cost me closer to $60 at Amazon. If you use Google Checkout, you save $20 instantly. There is no limit to the number of orders that you can place. This really is a phenomenal savings (that’s 40% off for those of you who were reaching for your calculator). Plus you get free shipping on orders over $25. I highly recommend checking this out.
Wright on Imputation
I found this selection from Wright (see the whole lecture) to be helpful in clarifying his view on imputation:
The covenant plan of God has what may loosely be called a ‘participationist’ aspect, and this, too, is part of the glorification of God, as I have already shown from Romans 15. Abraham’s true family, the single ‘seed’ which God promised him, is summed up in the Messiah, whose role precisely as Messiah is not least to draw together the identity of the whole of God’s people so that what is true of him is true of them and vice versa. Here we arrive at one of the great truths of the gospel, which is that the accomplishment of Jesus Christ is reckoned to all those who are ‘in him’. This is the truth which has been expressed within the Reformed tradition in terms of ‘imputed righteousness’, often stated in terms of Jesus Christ having fulfilled the moral law and thus having accumulated a ‘righteous’ status which can be shared with all his people. [Read more…] about Wright on Imputation
RapidShare
Have you ever wanted to email a file to someone but couldn’t because your email server restricts the size of emails that you can send (e.g., Gmail’s max is 10 MB)? I recently came across RapidShare—a free site that will let you upload files (up to 100 MB each) to their server and give you a link that you can share with others. Here’s an example of a file I uploaded and the link that I received: http://rapidshare.com/files/5587830/02_Plantinga.mp3.html. Here’s some additional info that may interest you. I’m sure there are other sites like it, but if you’ve ever found yourself needing something like this, you might want to bookmark it for future reference.