Here are the free download links:

On Being Prepared for Suffering and Evil: Part 1

On Being Prepared for Suffering and Evil: Part 2

In addition, Dr. Carson has published an extensive treatment on the subject in his book How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil. I’m only a few chapters in, but it is off to a fantastic start—I highly recommend it for any thoughtful Christian seeking a Biblical understanding of how God’s sovereignty interacts with human pain and suffering.

As a thoughtful Christian, I have to be able to make sense of that most difficult of questions: how do you reconcile the reality of suffering and evil with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God? … As the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell famously asked, “what are you going to say as you kneel next to a dying child?”

Bringing logic to bear on that situation is, for most people, simply a case study in using the wrong tool for the job. Instead, comfort comes from understanding that God is familiar with suffering through first-hand experience of the real thing.

Jesus was not just a man, he was God. And he was not just God, he was a man. This is the most mind-boggling mystery of the Christian faith to me. Everything that is true about mankind is true about Jesus. And everything that is true about God is true about Jesus. But in his humanity, he didn’t “cheat” by playing his “God card” whenever things got tough. People suffered and died all around him. He lost people close to him. And eventually, when it was his turn to suffer and die, he didn’t rage against it as though something disruptive to the whole universe were happening.

Ladies… don’t make Mary Jo Sharp beg.

I first came across Mary Jo’s Confident Christianity ministry last July when she was interviewed on Stand to Reason. She earned her MA in Christian Apologetics from Biola University, and she’s also a Certified Apologetics Instructor with the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board (NAMB). She deserves your attention!

You can find her on Facebook here.

The new world of status updates has its pros and cons. Brevity wins readers, but it’s hard to be concise and precise at the same time. Like Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

But have you figured out how to gossip the Gospel 140 characters at a time? Consider:

We “need to write even more clearly and simply for the new media than for the old media.” How much more important is this when our subject matter is the gospel?

Combining brevity with gravity and levity with wit on Twitter and Facebook has been a challenge I’ve really enjoyed lately. Grace Fellowship is there too (follow us at @forgodsfame and become a fan on Facebook to keep up).

You can also find serious folks like John Piper and C. S. Lewis (sort of), and not-so-serious folks like Fake John Piper and the must-follow @XIANITY.

What do you think? Is this all just a colossal waste of time? Or is it one of the most important ways to communicate in the 21st century?

I have indeed inveighed sharply against impious doctrines, and I have not been slack to censure my adversaries on account, not of their bad morals, but of their impiety. And for this I am so far from being sorry that I have brought my mind to despise the judgments of men and to persevere in this vehement zeal, according to the example of Christ, who, in His zeal, calls His adversaries a generation of vipers, blind, hypocrites, and children of the devil. Paul, too, charges the sorcerer with being a child of the devil, full of all subtlety and all malice; and defames certain persons as evil workers, dogs, and deceivers. In the opinion of those delicate-eared persons, nothing could be more bitter or intemperate than Paul’s language. What can be more bitter than the words of the prophets? The ears of our generation have been made so delicate by the senseless multitude of flatterers that, as soon as we perceive that anything of ours is not approved of, we cry out that we are being bitterly assailed; and when we can repel the truth by no other pretence, we escape by attributing bitterness, impatience, intemperance, to our adversaries. What would be the use of salt if it were not pungent, or of the edge of the sword if it did not slay? Accursed is the man who does the work of the Lord deceitfully.

source: Letter of Martin Luther to Pope Leo X, Concerning Christian Liberty, September 6, 1520