Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Early on John Piper challenged us to Not Waste the MLK Weekend. Piper also quoted at length from King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. MLK's full I Have A Dream speech is accessible at the bottom of this post. It is such an amazing speech. Only 1600 words but riveting. (HT: JT) Said at Southern has numerous links today on Racism, Christianity, and America.

Last day of Challies blog tour. Today he visits Sharper Iron. They asks, "How does Scripture tell us to view discernment as a step of rational thought guided by the Holy Spirit, rather than a supra-rational sixth sense?" Find the answer here.

Over the weekend Justin Taylor interviewed Tim Keller. If you are not familiar with Keller you should be.

Phil Johnson continues his series on Total Depravity. Today he considers In What Sense is Depravity Total. A great summation is this statement: "Human depravity is "total" in the same sense death is total. You can't be partly dead. You can be really, really sick or critically injured and on life support, but you're either dead or alive. There are no degrees of death." The Weekly Does of Spurgeon is centered upon the point of depravity as well. In this excerpt Spurgeon discusses How Depravity Necessitates Election.

Fred from Of First Importance shares this excellent quote by Alfred Poirier: “In light of God’s judgment and justification of the sinner in the cross of Christ, we can begin to discover how to deal with any and all criticism. By agreeing with God’s criticism of me in Christ’s cross, I can face any criticism man may lay against me. In other words, no one can criticize me more than the cross has. If you thus know yourself as having been crucified with Christ, then you can respond to any criticism, even mistaken or hostile criticism, without bitterness, defensiveness, or blame shifting. Such responses typically exacerbate and intensify conflict, and lead to the rupture of relationships. You can learn to hear criticism as constructive and not condemnatory because God has justified you.”

J.D. Hatfield discusses Moving On sometimes in evangelism.

Here is the "I Have a Dream Speech":

The first thing to point your attention to this morning is Mark Dever's post on The 5 Points of Criticism. His 5 points are as follows:

1. Directly, not indirectly
2. Seriously, not humorously
3. As if its important, not casually
4. Privately, not publicly
5. Out of love for them, not to express your feelings or frustration

In my experience we usually fail to "restore our brothers" in two ways. Either we do not attempt it at all, or when we attempt to do so we do it incorrectly. Hopefully, Dever's tips will help to curb our faults on the latter. HT: Between Two Worlds

You are also encouraged to join us in Reading the Classics Together over at Challies. Today we are looking at Chapter Four of John Owen's Classic work Overcoming Sin and Temptation. As noted earlier you can easily read this work online. It's not too late to join us. Here are the links to each chapter: one, two, three, four.