From Michael Mckinley’s blog post on Michael Lawrence’s helpful advice on how busy church planters can work theological development into their schedules.

1. Build it into the things you’re already doing. (QT, sermon prep, discipling, etc.)
2. Stop wasting so much time on the internet. (pick just 2 or 3 blogs to read, and look at them once a week; stop wasting time updating your Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpcae pages, etc.)
3. Always have a book nearby. (capture the spare moments)
4. Build time for reading and reflection into your schedule. (you’ll be amazed how much time is freed up if you do #2! But beware, a pastor’s schedule abhors a vacuum, so if you don’t block out the time, something else will fill it in.)
5. Have a plan. (if you aim at nothing you’re sure to hit it.)
6. Read primary sources, not commentary. (you don’t have time to waste on the commentators. Read the Bible and the people who have written important theology. You can do it. You don’t need a PhD to read Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Edwards, Grudem, Frame, etc)
7. Don’t do it alone. (cultivate a theological conversation among your leaders. They will correct your idiosyncrasies and keep you accountable. It will also create a culture of theological seriousness in your church, which will benefit everyone.)
8. Let the Scriptures, not our culture, set the agenda. (Trying to keep up with our culture’s agenda is a chasing after the wind. On the other hand, if the Scriptures set the agenda, you’ll be ready for anything the cultures blows at you.)
9. Church History and Historical Theology are the pastors Cliff Notes to theology. (Other people, smarter than me, have already faced the stuff I face and have figured a lot of things out. I can stand on their shoulders and look like a genius! The cultural package may have changed, but there’s nothing new under the sun.)

From John Piper’s The Godward Focus of Faithfulness :: Desiring God

One of my long-standing dissatisfactions with the focus of biblical theology is the habit of tracing God’s faithfulness only as far back as his covenant-keeping. Righteousness (tsedeqa) is portrayed as covenant-keeping. Love (hesed) is portrayed as covenant-keeping. Faithfulness (emet) is portrayed as covenant-keeping.

This has an ill-effect. It skews biblical revelation by making God’s relation with man seem more ultimate than God himself. There is always something more ultimate than God’s faithfulness to his covenant, namely, God’s faithfulness to God.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself. (2Timothy 2:13)

Here is how Jeremiah pleads for God’s covenant-keeping mercy:

“Do not spurn us, for your name’s sake;
do not dishonor your glorious throne;
remember and do not break your covenant with us.” (Jeremiah 14:21)

Beneath covenant-keeping there is a more ultimate foundation: God’s allegiance to his name—God’s jealousy for the honor of the glory of his throne.

This emphasis on God’s allegiance to his own name and glory behind his allegiance to his covenant and his people, is desperately needed in a day when we are spring-loaded by nature and culture to make ourselves ultimate: “Of course, God will keep his covenant, he made it with us!”

There is a great biblical antidote for our pride. God keeps covenant for his name’s sake:

“Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name” (Ezekiel 36:22).