Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find an example of what we would call a “healthy family” in the Bible? It’s a lot easier to find families with a lot of sin and a lot of pain than to find families with a lot of harmony. For example, here’s just a sampling from Genesis:

• The first recorded husband and wife calamitously disobey God (Genesis 3).

• Their firstborn commits fratricide (Genesis 4:8).

• Sarah’s grief over infertility moves her to give her servant, Hagar, to Abraham as a concubine to bear a surrogate child (Genesis 16). When it happens Sarah abuses Hagar in jealous anger. Abraham is passive in the whole affair.

• Lot, reluctant to leave sexually perverse Sodom, his home, has to be d…

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It’s a beautiful thing when a single sentence reorients a soul for good. When one proposition proves potent enough to be life-changing for the better. Especially when it’s a short one.

For me, it was the spring of 2000 — perhaps you have your own story about being rocked by this shorty from Lewis. An older student, who was leading a Bible study on my freshman hall, picked Desiring God as our semester focus. I emphatically did not enjoy reading and had made my way through high school and my first year of college leaning heavily on Cliff’s Notes.

It was only a few pages into the book — if it hadn’t been near the front, I may never have found it — when John Piper uncorked this revolutionary l…

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Monday night, in the wake of the devastating tornado in Oklahoma, John Piper posted two tweets at 11:00pm (CST). Both tweets quoted the first chapter of Job. He first cited Job 1:19, and then Job 1:20, and they were posted together consecutively:

• @JohnPiper: “Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead.” Job 1:19
• @JohnPiper: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” Job 1:20
  

Later he decided to take down both tweets.

Many of you may be unaware these tweets appeared online, but some have made what we think is unfair criticism based on misinformation worth briefly addr…

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How does the Bible hold together into a single, cohesive story?

It’s an important (and intimidating) question reserved for the discipline of biblical theology, an angle of scholarship that focuses on sections of Scripture, sometimes the whole of the Bible, to show how the texts fits together within the unfolding drama of redemption and consummation in Jesus Christ.

Edmund Clowney, the noteworthy theologian and preacher who passed away in 2005, said the lessons most easily transferable from seminary life to pulpit ministry was what he learned in biblical theology. There seems to be a direct line between advances in careful biblical theology and robust preaching and discipleship.

One new…

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If you’re struggling with legalism, don’t fight it by quitting your quiet times. That’s the good advice I remember once hearing from a pastor.

In other words, there’s a temptation to presumably fight legalism by running away from good things, whether Bible reading or acts of love, because we mistake them to be part of the problem.

We women are susceptible to this temptation. We are bombarded with choices. Between schooling options, birthing styles, what we should wear, and even what we should or shouldn’t eat, it is easy to confuse principle and practice. A confusion can set in on whether we are really living for God’s glory, or if we’re shackled to legalism. But I think where the confusio…

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