Coram Deo ~

Looking at contemporary culture from a Christian worldview


Leave a comment

Six New Resources for Your 2026 Devotional Reading

There are many excellent resources for you to choose for your devotional reading. For example, here is an article I wrote sharing several resources for use in 2025. I would now like to highlight six new devotional books (published in 2024 and 2025) that you may want to consider for your 2026 devotional reading:

  1. The Sing! Hymnal – Keith Getty and Kristyn Getty

This hymnal was released at the 2025 Sing! Getty Music Worship Conference. The hymnal includes 498 classic and contemporary hymns carefully curated and beautifully presented in a treasured resource you can carry with you through life. There are also 403 liturgical readings, psalms paired with popular hymns, and stories about each hymn. This resource is perfect for church services and group gatherings, as well as private and family worship. My wife Tammy and I have been using the hymnal as a part of our devotional reading, with Tammy often singing the hymn for us! Continue reading


Leave a comment

MUSIC REVIEWS and NEWS

When I Think of Christmas – Amy Grant and Vince Gill
***

Amy Grant and Vince Gill’s annual Christmas at the Ryman is one of the most successful residencies in the history of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium (former home of the Grand Ole Opry).
Since 1993, Grant and Gill have celebrated Christmas with hometown concerts. What began at the Opry House as “A Tennessee Christmas”, opened Bridgestone Arena, moved to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, and finally took up residence at The Ryman Auditorium. They have now performed their Christmas show more than 100 times in front of nearly a quarter-million people. This new collection of songs captures the spirit of those shows.
When I Think of Christmas is a compilation featuring nine of Gill and Grant’s favorite holiday songs along with two brand-new recordings. The new songs are  including Grant’s version of the album’s title track and “Til the Season Comes Round Again,” a Grant/Gill duet, the song they end their Christmas concerts with.
The track list includes holiday favorites like “The Christmas Song”, “Winter Wonderland”, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, “O Come All Ye Faithful”, “O Holy Night” and more.

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

  • More of this review and a review of Hallelujah! It’s Christmas by Phil Wickham and In Excelsis (EP) by Matt Redman
  • Music News
  • Song of the Week Lyrics

Continue reading


Leave a comment

A Prayer for Christmas

Father in Heaven,
Tomorrow will be Christmas Day! As we prepare to celebrate this joyous day, we look forward to gathering with family and friends to worship at Christmas Eve church services, exchange gifts, enjoy meals and our family traditions. But most importantly, we remember the incarnation, the day when everything changed. On that day, Jesus, your only Son, left Heaven and came to earth to live as a man. This was a plan that was made in perfect unity with the Trinity before the foundation of the world. That baby in the manger, the baby that would one day go to the cross for us, was your beloved only Son – truly and fully both God and man. He came to earth to save us from our sins and reconcile us to You, and we are so thankful. Continue reading

Book Reviews


Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEWS and NEWS

Recapturing the Glory of Christmas: A 25-Day Advent Devotional by Albert Mohler. B&H Books. 162 pages. 2024
****

In this Advent devotional, Albert Mohler tells us that Christmas means worship and adoration. He intends this devotional as a call to worship and praise. In each of the twenty-five devotions leading up to Christmas, Mohler mines the depths of the Bible and its teachings about Advent and Christmas. He dwells on all the theological riches God has gifted to his people through Christmas.
Each daily reading begins with a verse or short passage from Scripture followed by a devotion that you can read in five or six minutes that will help you recapture the glory of Christmas. This is a wonderful resource to read either individually or with your family.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:
BOOK REVIEWS ~ More of this review and a review of Let Earth Receive Her King: Daily Readings for Advent by Alistair Begg
BOOK NEWS ~ Links to Interesting Articles
BOOK CLUB ~ Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst
I’M CURRENTLY READING…. Continue reading


Leave a comment

THIS & THAT: A Gathering of Favorite Articles and Quotes

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

  • More interesting article links
  • Favorite Quotes of the Week

Continue reading


Leave a comment

FAITH AND WORK: Connecting Sunday to Monday

Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

  • Work as Worship. On this episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast, John Piper responds to a question based on “I’ve been reflecting on a few verses in Ecclesiastes lately, particularly Ecclesiastes 2:243:133:22, and 5:19. Those texts repeatedly speak about enjoying the fruit of our labor as a gift from God to be enjoyed. But I struggle a bit to know exactly what that looks like in real life.”
  • Does God Really Care About My Job? In this video, Bryan Chapell tells us that our jobs are important because they are a primary place that we are reflecting our God in what we do and how we do it.
  • “Our Secular Vocation” Interview. This conversation is part of an interview between  J. Daryl Charles, senior fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, and CRCD’s executive director, Dr. Jordan Ballor.

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

Continue reading


Leave a comment

Leadership Attributes: Leaders Leave a Positive Legacy

In our series on leadership attributes, we now look at the legacy that a leader leaves. I’ve previously written an article titled What Will Your Legacy Be? This article will focus specifically on the legacy that we leave as leaders.
In the Law of Legacy from John Maxwell’s classic book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, Maxwell writes:
“Every person leaves some kind of legacy. For some it’s positive. For others it’s negative. But here’s what I know: we have a choice about what legacy we will leave, and we must work and be intentional to leave the legacy we want.” Continue reading


Leave a comment

MUSIC REVIEWS and NEWS

I Heard the Bells (EP) – Sandra McCracken
****

This five-song project from Sandra McCracken was recorded at Sound Emporium Studios in Nashville, and produced by McCracken and Seth Talley. It features collaborations with other artists, including Dave Barnes, Cindy Morgan, and Joseph Bradshaw.
The songs have a gentle – acoustic guitar, bass, piano and drums – sound. Four of the songs are Christmas standards – “White Christmas”, “I Heard the Bells”, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”, and “The Christmas Song”, and the final song is McCracken’s “The Space Between”, which she wrote with Cindy Morgan and Gabe Dixon.
I Heard the Bells will be an excellent addition to your Christmas music collection. Also recommended is McCracken’s 2019 Christmas album, titled simply Christmas.

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

  • A review of Song of the Saints by Phil Wickham
  • Music News
  • Song of the Week Lyrics ~ Rise With The Sun by CityAlight

Continue reading


Leave a comment

Do You Have Any Idols in Your Life?

Recently, in Paul Tripp’s excellent new devotional Everyday Gospel: A Daily Devotional Connecting Scripture to All of Life, he wrote about idols. When we hear someone mention an idol, we might think of people bowing down before something made of wood, metal or stone. Tripp tells us that the sad truth is that many of us who would never bow before a religious idol have idolatry in our lives. He writes that an idol functions as a God-replacement in our hearts, and that sometimes good things become idols. Things in our lives that were once blessings rise in level of importance in our hearts until they control our thoughts, desires, choices, actions, and words. A desire for even a good thing will become a bad thing when it becomes a ruling thing.   Just as Eve saw the forbidden tree was “good for food,” a “delight to the eyes,” and “to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6), so we are allured by idols—good things that become ultimate things.
Do you have any idols in your life? Think of your spouse or children. Tripp writes that someone’s love can become a life-shaping idol. It’s not wrong to want to be loved of course, but this desire must not be allowed to capture the place in your heart that only God should have. Tripp tells us that anything in creation can function in your heart and life as a God-replacement. Continue reading


Leave a comment

25 More of My Favorite Quotes from Paul Tripp’s Everyday Gospel

25 More of My Favorite Quotes from Paul Tripp’s Everyday Gospel: A Daily Devotional Connecting Scripture to All of Life

Over the past year, I used Paul Tripp’s Everyday Gospel as a part of my devotional reading. In the book, Tripp takes us through the entire Bible over 365 days. Beginning in Genesis, each day has a few chapters assigned to read, and Tripp then writes a devotion to go along with those chapters. I chose to use the free ESV Bible App to listen to these chapters as I did my daily walks of our neighborhood.

I found this book to be a valuable resource to assist me as I read through the entire Bible in a year, and highly recommend it to you.

I previously shared 25 of my favorite quotes from the book. Be encouraged by these 25 more quotes from Everyday Gospel:

  • Our standing before God is based not on our righteousness but on the perfect righteousness of Jesus.
  • Our hope in life and death rests on our Savior’s faithfulness, not our own.
  • In the darkness of the days we live in, do not panic. Our Lord is on his throne in power and glory, and he will win.
  • Once God has chosen you as his own, you cannot outrun his grace.
  • As a wise Father, God always knows what is best for his children. His plans are always best. His way is always right. We will never know more than he knows or be wiser than he is.
  • The power of prayer is not in the beauty of my language or in my track record of righteousness, but in the character of the one to whom I pray.
  • You may not always see God’s hand, but you can rest assured that your Lord never ceases working for your good and his glory.
  • Prayer is not about bringing your list of wants or perceived needs to God and asking him to sign off. No, prayer is surrendering all your wants and desires to the perfect plan and will of your heavenly Father.
  • The theology that you actually believe is always exhibited by the way you live. For too many of us, a disconcerting gap lies between what we say we believe and the way we live.
  • You will walk through dark valleys, but your identity and future are secured by the fact that the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever. May this shape the way you think about your life as a child of grace.
  • Contentment depends not on your situation but on the heart that you bring to each situation.
  • Joy in labor is possible only when you are thankful that God has provided you with a job and the ability to work.
  • Although we face hardship, disappointment, and suffering, our lives are built on Jesus the sure foundation. We have a security that can never be shaken.
  • In his greatness, God has more than enough power to meet you in your weakness and to empower you to be what he has redeemed you to be and to do what he has redeemed you to do.
  • If you forget or minimize the extent to which Jesus had to suffer in order to deal with your sin, then you will forget or minimize the gravity of your sin.
  • The Sabbath is for us. It gives us regular times of rest without feeling guilty that we are not being productive. It calls us out of the distracting clamor of our daily lives into worship, reminding us that our identity, meaning, purpose, and hope are found in the Lord alone.
  • God will crush evil and restore and purify his people. Evil will not win. Renewal is on the way. There’s reason for hope.
  • It is important to remember that God’s grace never calls wrong right. Grace reminds us of sin’s consequences and then offers us forgiveness and the power to say no.
  • An idol of the heart is anything other than God that you allow to rule your heart.
  • On the cross of Jesus Christ, God’s anger with sin and his grace toward the sinner embrace. There we find everything we need to finally be what we were created to be and to live as God designed us to live.
  • Hope is found in only one place: the power of our Lord to bring dry bones together again and breathe life into them. Our God has the power to bring life out of what is dead.
  • As you look at broken things in your life, remember that your Lord is the Lord of fresh starts and new beginnings. Because of his grace, what seems irreparably damaged can be restored and live anew.
  • The life of faith is about standing at the intersection of brokenness and longing, not questioning God’s presence, power, or goodness, but continuing to trust and obey, assured that he still rules and is marching his world toward the fullness of all he has promised.
  • God makes it clear in his word that, for our good and his glory, he will lead us through the unexpected, the unwanted, and the difficult.
  • When I root my identity in the eternal grace and love of God rather than in an ever-changing world, temporary situations, relationships, or achievements, I can live with peace and security of heart, no matter how my circumstances might change.