Category: Freebies

A Special Christmas Memory

~ fundyreformed ~ 1 Comment

This morning, I entered the first of 12 contests at Bible Geek Gone Wild. Shaun Tabatt is running a 12 Days of Christmas promotion there as an excuse to give away lots of free books.

Today’s contest asked the entrants to share a favorite Christmas memory. I’m usually not good with memories, but the one I have was a blessing to me in the remembering And I thought it’d be a great memory to blog about as well. So here goes…

It’s hard to pick a favorite memory. But one stands out from my childhood days.

My sister was either 2 or 3, and for me it was still a new thing to have a cute little sister (I was 6 years older than she). I believe Mom had her dressed up in a little red nightgown with a night cap on. The special gift for her was to be a Cabbage Patch doll. Rather than wrapping it up, Mom had it just sitting under the tree.

When I saw the gift, I was overcome with excitement for how little Katie would respond. Sure enough, she got up and rushed out to the tree and her eyes lit up with wonder and she grabbed her doll, treasuring it as only a little toddler can.

I think that Christmas was when I first learned that Christmas giving is not about me getting stuff, but about family and friends sharing love with one another. As the years passed from that day, the giving rather than receiving of gifts became more and more what I looked forward to at Christmas.

Now as a father of my own four little girls, I can’t wait to see the sparkle in their eyes this Christmas!

Christmas Miscellanies

~ fundyreformed ~ 5 Comments

Wow, we’re talking about Christmas already. Time sure flies!

More and more businesses are removing “Christmas” from Christmas. Happy Holidays from Costco and others…. Personally, however, I’m not too disturbed when our secular nation rejects a Christian holiday. For the first 300 years of Christianity all secular nations rejected all Christian holidays, and they persecuted us to boot.

R.C. Sproul’s radio broadcast Renewing Your Mind is offering daily specials. Yesterday I gave a gift to receive a copy of Sproul’s new kid’s book, The Prince’s Poison Cup. They gave an audio cd of it along with the book. Today, for any gift, you can get a new Christmas music CD (The Word Became Flesh), with narration of the Christmas story. Check it out.

I read an interesting post over at Parchment and Pen challenging many of the traditional trappings to the Christmas story. You think Christ was born in a lonely stable built into a cave away from the town? With no happy relatives there assisting? They say think again. Makes me want to research this topic out even further….

Finally, I’m going to strongly suggest that you stay tuned to BibleGeekGoneWild.com. Shaun Tabatt has an announcement to make this weekend. Something about tons of free book offers in the 12 days before Christmas. It may be in your best interest to follow his blog over the next couple of weeeks 😉 . UPDATE: here’s the link to Shaun’s announcement.

Online Gospel Resources

~ fundyreformed

Today’s online world presents a great opportunity for Christians to spread the gospel electronically. I want to highlight a few online gospel resources here, and encourage you all to share them via email, or promote them on your blogs.

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“Two Ways to Live: The Choice We All Face” is an excellent online presentation of the gospel. It uses clear visual illustrations as it presents the heart of Christianity. I really appreciate its perspective and emphasis on following Christ as Lord. It also connects people to many helpful resources for further study.

2 Ways to Live, an online presentation of the Gospel, the heart of Christianity -- why don't you click it to learn more? You've got nothing to lose.I found the button on the right at Justin Taylor’s blog, and it is a great way to link to 2 Ways to Live. Feel free to save the button and use it on your blog.

2 other helpful tools are needgod.com and proofthatgodexists.org. The buttons below can be found at their websites and can be used to link to their presentations. Both are great resources to share with others on the web.

Are you a good person? Proof that God Exists, check it out!

Finally, let me post a video clip of John Piper sharing the gospel in 6 minutes. Video clips like these are something people can easily share and promote at video sites like YouTube. You could easily put that video in the sidebar of your blog too.

Podcasting for Pastors

~ fundyreformed ~ 4 Comments

Most of my readers are aware of the myriad of helpful resources that the web offers. For Christian pastors and lay leaders this means classic Christian books and commentaries, whole Bibles with concordance/verse look up tools, Greek & Hebrew lexical helps, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and myriads of helpful Christian articles, not to mention the plethora of thoughtful and helpful blogs. [See my online study tools page, and recommended links.]

There are probably still some people out there, however, who have not yet realized the abundance of audio files available online. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sermons available for free download, with more and more each day.

And then there is the Ipod. I don’t have one yet, but I know how much this has revolutionized audio on the web. Largely due to the Ipod and other digital media devices which rely completely on digital files (i.e. they don’t play CDs or tapes, instead they play digital files you can get online), audio messages now come in podcasts which you can subscribe to. Much like subscribing to your favorite blogs, you subscribe to podcasts and receive the latest audio messages from various preachers, churches or groups.

So for pastors this means…

You have all kinds of access to great preaching which can help improve your own. And with an Ipod or just with your computer, you can easily subscribe to your favorite sources for good preaching. AND, you can create your own podcast! You can spread the influence of your church and your messages via the web. And Christian Podder is one site which will help you upload your own mp3 (audio) files and both host them and create a podcast for you—all for free.

Christian Podder also lets people easily manage subscriptions and synchronize their online list of messages they have favorited, with their computer’s software for easy access. So for pastors, this one site could host your own podcast and help you keep track of other great messages.

And what works for pastors can work for bloggers too of course. If you want to record some audio occasionally, you can then create a podcast to go with your blog. I’m sure there are other sites that do this for free, but Jason Skipper, a blogging friend of mine, recently pointed this particular site out to me.

For those looking for more info on podcasting, check out this helpful explanation from Christian Podder. And you can click here to learn how they can help you create your own podcast.

Recommended Sermon Audio

Before I go I should list some of the great sermons out there you can get for free. For a more complete (and long!) list of recommended online audio sermons and lectures check out the sidebar of Mathew Sims’ blog.

FR United

~ fundyreformed

Okay people. It’s almost time. Next Thursday football season starts.

So far we have four teams in FR United, my fantasy football league. Getting desperate for more teams (at least 4), I’ve opened it up to any of my facebook friends too.

If you’d like to join the league, just click here. If that doesn’t work, leave a comment and I can send you the info.

The league is free, and due to the lateness in our getting started, we will have an automatic draft (but you can select your ranking order if you’d like). If enough teams lobby for a live draft I can change that.

And you guys who’ve already joined, could you leave your names with team name in the comments or email them to me (or use the league message board)? I like to get names and teams connected. Plus feel free to invite any of your friends to the league too.

A final and unrelated note: anyone want to join me and win with Blingo? It’s a free search engine powered by Google that offers free prizes just for your everyday searches. I’m not sure how that relates to football. Consider it a free tip.