BCL Online Picks — August 28, 2025
Photo Credit: Dex Ezekiel on Unsplash
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Your time is precious, and we’re here to help you find the best of the best online. Below are Beautiful Christian Life’s picks for this week:
1. God’s Roles for Husbands and Wives
As much as we may wish otherwise, it’s all too easy to make a mess of our marriages. In this Substack article, pastor, author, and scholar Campbell Markham shares from Ephesians 5:21–32 regarding what we can do right now to love our spouses well. This is just one installment from Markham’s outstanding series on marriage, which you can find on his Substack website.
2. The Most Dangerous Thing a Christian Can Do
In this article pastor and author Tim Challies warns Christians about a common life event that can cause them to stop attending church: “Every journey begins with a single step and that is true of so many of those who leave the church. They leave by inches. They leave without meaning to.” How does this happen?
3. Let Us Pray
There are lots of reasons Christians struggle to pray. Perhaps we’re tired, busy, distracted, or overwhelmed with day-to-day life. We may not want to “bother” God with our seemingly insignificant problems, or we doubt whether God is actually listening to us when we pray. Yet, prayer is essential to the spiritual health of every believer, and we marginalize it at our own peril. Let the great nineteenth-century preacher Charles H. Spurgeon encourage you to pray, and then pray some more, in this uplifting sermon on Psalm 73:23: “But it is good for me to draw near to God.”
4. When Evil Comes for Children, Where Is the Light?
This article by Gospel Coalition editor Betsy Childs Howard (published on August 13, 2025) is even more relevant as people now grapple with the recent heartbreaking news of another school shooting. The question of how a good God could allow suffering is difficult enough to answer in general, but what about the suffering of children, who are particularly weak and defenseless? Howard gives us eternal, biblical perspective on the difficult topic of when children are the victims of evil acts. (We are grateful to The Aquila Report for bringing this article to our attention.)
5. Sleeping with the Gospels
Did you know that Christians in the early church valued their Scriptural books so highly that they slept with them and even wore tiny versions around their necks? In this fascinating Canon Fodder article, theologian Michael J. Kruger provides fascinating insight into how ancient believers viewed and interacted with Scripture in daily life.
6. What Is Reformed Theology? (Part 1)
Have you ever heard the word “Reformed” used in connection with the Christian faith and wondered what it means? Over at the Heidelblog, R. Scott Clark, Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California, gives us a helpful and faithful summary of what Reformed theology actually is and what it teaches us about trusting in Christ alone for our salvation.
7. Common Christian Myths About Happiness
You may have heard someone say, “God calls us to holiness, not happiness.” Yet, is this true? Is God only concerned with our holiness and not our happiness? In this Desiring God article, author Randy Alcorn shares why “Our message to the world should not be ‘Don’t seek happiness,’ but ‘You’ll find in Jesus the happiness you have always been seeking.'”
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