David Mathis works for both Desiring God and Bethlehem Baptist Church as the Executive Pastoral Assistant for John Piper.

This week's sermon: "The All-Providing King Who Would Not Be King"

Bread exists to point us to Jesus. Its goodness and nourishment beckon us beyond the bread itself to the One who is "the Bread of Life."

But the large crowd in John 6 doesn't yet see beyond the bread to Jesus. They see him as the Prophet, but they don't see that he is God and not simply like Moses. They see him as king, but they don't see that his power is not military conquest but the power of the cross and of radical new desires.

Jesus didn't come into the world to lend his power to already existing appetites. That's the kind of claim that Jesus walks away from, not the gospel.

This week's sermon: "The Legacy of Antioch"

The term Global South refers to the astonishing growth of the Christian church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia while the formerly dominant centers of Christian influence in Europe and North America are weakening.

"In a word," Mark Noll says, "the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history."

So does this mean that day of European and North American missionaries is done? That would be a tragic misunderstanding of the situation. Partnership in mission with the Global South does not mean that all the unreached peoples of the world can be reached by people who are in the Global South because 1) in pioneer missions, there are no local churches to do the work and 2) proximity to an unreached people doesn't necessarily mean more effectiveness in learning their language, entering their culture, and loving them, and teaching the truth.

The story of Antioch in Acts 11:19­26 leads us to at least 8 implications that will help us see how to partner with the Global South:

1. Someone must cross the cultural barriers that separate unreached peoples from the gospel (Acts 11:19­20).
2. Don't wait to be forced out by persecution (Acts 11:19).
3. The hand of the Lord will be with you, when you follow him into his mission (Acts 11:21).
4. Be willing to serve a work that God has already begun (Acts 11:22­23).
5. The main prerequisite for this work is not great gifts but great grace (Acts 11:23­24).
6. When you sense God's leading, recruit others to go with you (Acts 11:24­25).
7. In all your evangelism and church planting, don't neglect to teach the converts and to take them deep into the gospel and build them up so they are stable and strong (Acts 11:23).
8. Be open to a significant change in your life (Acts 13:1­3).

The Legacy of Antioch is that it was a mission church that became a sending church through the partnership of Barnabas and Saul, who in the end were sent out by the church to which they were sent. And how many Antiochs are there around the world yet to be created and yet to be strengthened, where we can send our men and women who are willing to cross cultural chasms to reach the lost? Will you be one of them? Will you rededicate yourself to support those who go with rock-solid faithfulness?

John Piper’s final message in Bonn, titled “Preach Christ,” called pastors to…

1. Preach the truth that God’s highest goal in history is the display of his own glory.
2. Preach that it is loving for God to do what he has to do to open our eyes to see his glory.
3. Preach the cross from its eternal foundation in the past to its eternal consummation in the future.
4. Preach conversion as the Holy Spirit's act of opening blind eyes to see the glory of Christ in the gospel (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
5. Preach sanctification as the effect of seeing the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18).

John Piper said that 1 Corinthians 15:3 may be the clearest definition of the gospel in the Bible. It shows us 6 aspects of the gospel:

1. The cross was planned (“in accordance with the Scriptures”).
2. The gospel is a historical event (“Christ died”).
3. The death of Christ achieved something (“for our sins”).
   
4. That achievement is freely offered to everyone for faith alone. If that achievement were offered on the basis of my performance in any measure, there would be no gospel.
5. When I do believe in Jesus, the achievement is applied to me.
   
6. The end of the gospel is to see and enjoy the glory of God. God is our highest treasure; we are reconciled and forgiven and justified and given eternal life to enjoy God (1 Peter 3:18).

When we are fully and finally purchased and converted and sanctified in this way, then we will be fully satisfied in God and God will be fully glorified in us. And that’s why the universe was created and exists.

Right thinking about God exists for the sake of right feeling for God. This was the main point of John Piper’s Friday night message, “Think Christ,” at the Hirten Konferenz in Bonn, Germany.

Expanding upon Thursday night’s message, “Feel Christ,” Piper said that being satisfied in God will not glorify God if our satisfaction in God is not based on right thinking.

Piper gave 10 arguments for the indispensible role of right thinking and right knowing in the life of the Christian:

1. It is possible to have strong feelings and be lost if the feelings are not based on knowledge (Romans 10:1-2).
2. God has planned that thinking about the Bible is the means he uses to give understanding (2 Timothy 2:7).
3. Paul is given as an example of reasoning with the Bible (Acts 17:2-3).
4. Jesus assumes and requires that we will use logic in understanding both what is natural and what is spiritual (Luke 12:54-57).
5. Jesus refuses to deal with people who use their reason to conceal truth (Matthew 21:23-27).
6. Thirteen times in Paul’s letters, he asks the question, “Do you not know?” Paul assumes that if his readers knew something, they would see things differently, feel differently, and act differently.
7. The Bible tells us that Christ has given pastors and teachers to the church and tells us that they should be apt to teach—because God intends that the Bible be explained to ordinary folks who don’t have the time or ability to go as deep as God wants them to go. Christ would not have given teachers to the church if he thought they were not needed.
8. The Bible declares that we should proclaim the whole council of God (Acts 20:27). That implies that there is a coherent unified whole, a body of doctrine, that should be given to the church. It is not easy to find this whole council in a book with 1,500 pages! It’s mainly mental labor. Finding the unified biblical theology that the people need to know takes hard thinking.
9. The Bible is a book, which means that it must be read.
10. An example of how thinking and valuing and acting relate to each other is Matthew 7:7-12.

On the final point, John Piper said that thinking is necessary to get meaning from a text and to then present it to others. In particular he pointed to the first word in verse 12.

I read Matthew 7:12 for 25 years before I asked how it relates to the previous verse. Why does verse 12 begin with "so"? Because confidence that God will meet our needs is what frees us to take radical risks in loving other people. "Do unto others . . ." because you know God is going to answer your prayers and take care of you.

God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. But that satisfaction in God does not glorify him unless it is based on right thinking and right knowing. God is all-satisfying because he’s a Father who gives us everything we truly need. And that kind of deep unshakeable satisfaction in our Father causes us to value things differently than the world. Therefore, we will love our neighbors. Right thinking with right feeling changes our behavior.

Saturday morning is Piper’s final message in Bonn, titled “Preach Christ.”

John Piper is back in Germany for the first time since he finished his doctoral studies in Munich. Yesterday, he opened his 3-part series at the Hirten Konferenz (Shepherds Conference) with a message titled “Feel Christ.”

The Konferenz began in 2001 and has been in Berlin until this year. The organizers moved the event to Bonn to be further West where most of the attendees live and minister.

Last night's message is to be followed by “Think Christ” this evening and “Preach Christ” tomorrow morning.

John Piper gave his opening remarks in German, then gave 4 clarifications on feelings:

1. The emotions we’re talking about are internal, not various physical manifestations.
2. We are emphasizing feeling over thinking because right thinking is a means to right feeling.
3. Right behavior without right feeling is not really right behavior.
4. How emphasizing feeling relates to God: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

After showing from the Bible that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, he looked at the implications this has on a pastors' people, work, and preaching.

He concluded with a discussion of some of the challenges in the wider evangelical world.

You can listen to the audio for more.

John Piper will speak again this evening on what right doctrine is and why it matters.

This week's sermon: "If You Believed Moses, You Would Believe Me—For He Wrote of Me"

How did Jesus and his apostles view the Hebrew Scriptures? As pervasively pointing to the Messiah who would be both the earthly son of David and the eternal Son of God. In their minds, the entire Bible was a revelation of Jesus.

In John 5, Jesus himself makes clear that the Old Testament witnesses to him. It witnesses to him because from all eternity, God the Father saw the perfections and accomplishments of his Son and witnessed to them in his inspired Scriptures before his Son came to earth, lived among us, died for believers, and rose again.

Jesus and his apostles saw that wherever God is revealed in the Old Testament, Jesus is revealed. The whole Old Testament is a revelation of Christ—not only in particular prophecies but pervasively about Jesus.

The world-changing implication is that what we make of Jesus is what we make of God. Jesus is the test for whether we know God, whether we truly honor God, and whether we really love him.

This week's sermon: "The Love of Human Praise as the Root of Unbelief"

Jesus' refrain in John 5:30-47 is "not me, but God." He baffles the expectations and confronts the comforts of fallen humanity by being a Messiah who comes not in his own name, seeking his own praise, but by coming in his Father's name and pursuing his Father's praise.

In verses 37-47, Jesus issues a seemingly relentless string of indictments against self-seeking humans:

• Verse 38: You don't have God's word in you. You don't believe the one whom he has sent.
• Verse 40: You don't want to come to me.
• Verse 42: You don't have the love of God in you.
• Verse 43: You don't believe me.
• Verse 44: You cannot believe.
• Verse 45: You don't believe Moses, and you don't believe me.

How did Jesus' kinsmen, who knew their Scriptures so well, not believe in their Messiah? Almost at bottom is that they did not want to. They had other desires. But the bottom-line answer is that they were seeking human approval. Their craving for human praise was so strong that it closed their hearts to pursuing divine praise and closed their eyes to such a Messiah.

Love of human approval is at odds with faith because…

1. …true faith in Jesus gives all glory to God and none to ourselves (Romans 4:20), and…
2. …true faith is a drinking of living water for the satisfaction of our souls—and the well of that water is the glory of Christ.

When we are satisfied in Jesus, the enslaving power of the craving for human glory is broken. Broken by the power of a superior satisfaction.

A sinner can’t over-drink at God’s oasis—the fountain of life in the cross of his Son. Calvin explains:

[In the Bible] we read not of any having been blamed for drinking too much of the fountain of living water; on the contrary, those are severely reprimanded who ‘have hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water’ (Jeremiah 2:13).

Again, what more agreeable to faith

• than to feel assured that God is a propitious Father when Christ is acknowledged as a brother and propitiator,
• than confidently to expect all prosperity and gladness from Him, whose ineffable love toward us was such that He ‘spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all’ (Romans 8:32),
• than to rest in the sure hope of salvation and eternal life whenever Christ, in whom such treasures are hid, is conceived to have been given by the Father?

(From Calvin’s “Prefatory Address” to the Institutes, pp. 6-7 in the Beveridge translation, paragraphing altered)

John Piper, Collin Hansen, and Carolyn James discussed “the New Calvinists” on September 11 at the Religious Newswriters Association’s annual convention. The panel was hosted by Julia Duin of the Washington Times.

We now have footage of that panel in 4 parts: 3 sets of introductory remarks (one from each panelist) and the Q&A time with reporters that followed.

Last night John Piper addressed the American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC) at their world conference in Nashville on the topic "Beholding Glory and Becoming Whole: Seeing and Savoring God as the Heart of Mental Health." John's manuscript is now available. We hope to have the audio available shortly.

Bethlehem College and Seminary announces a special post-conference event on Sunday night, September 27, following the Desiring God National Conference.

Conference speakers Sam Storms and Doug Wilson have graciously agreed to stay with us for an extra evening, and Jim Hamilton from Southern Seminary will be joining us (and lecturing to BCS the following day), as John Piper hosts “An Evening on Eschatology.” Piper will interview the panel; Storms will represent the amillennial position, Wilson the postmillennial, and Hamilton the historic premillennial view.

The event is scheduled for Bethlehem’s Downtown Campus at 6:30pm.

This announcement is mainly for those in the Twin Cities area, and for others coming to the conference and already planning to stay through Monday. Don’t fret if you’re coming to the conference but you leave town Sunday—the Desiring God video team is planning to make a recording of the event which will be available at the Desiring God website.

Update: The audio and video are posted.

This week's sermon: "The Life-Giving Voice of the Son of God"

Let's talk about your resurrection from the dead. If Jesus doesn't come back before your die, then you will be raised someday—believer or non-believer—by Jesus from the dead, either to eternal joy or to eternal misery.

At least six observations about the final judgment can be made from John 5:25-29:

1. Jesus raises all the dead. Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy will be raised from the dead. And Julius Caesar, Judas Iscariot, Isaiah the prophet, Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, and Princess Diana. All the dead who have ever lived will be raised from the dead by Jesus. Millions of Chinese and Nigerians and Indonesians and Germans. And you too.

2. Jesus raises all the dead by his mighty voice. He upholds the universe by his mere word and one day will raise the dead just by speaking.

3. In a sense, the hour of the resurrection has come. Jesus raised Lazarus as a foretaste of the resurrection he will bring about in its fullness someday.

4. The power of the Son of God to raise the dead originates in himself as God. It's not that the Father is a source and the Son is a channel. The Son has life in himself just like the Father has life in himself. Life comes from the Son, not just through the Son.

5. Nevertheless, it is crucial that this Son of God also be human<a son of man<in order to be qualified for his role in the judgment. God deems it fitting that human beings be judged by one who knows what it's like to be human. And not just human, but one who suffered to deliver the rest of us from judgment. There is something suitable that the one who sentences men to heaven or to hell will be a suffering Savior. The judge of all men will be able to look into every eye and say, "I too was tempted. I too suffered."

6. Finally, eternal life and eternal judgment at the last day will be in accord with our deeds—good or evil. Not 'based on' our deeds but 'in accord with' our deeds. If we are justified by faith, our faith will produce good works. And our good deeds will be the evidence, the confirmation, the verification at the judgment that we were justified by faith alone.

Someday we all will be raised.

Tremper Longman has produced another beneficial resource for reading and rightly appropriating the Old Testament. This time it’s How to Read Exodus.

Tremper is particularly gifted at engaging with an impressive breadth of Old Testament scholarship. And he does this with an authentic and relentlessly Christ-centered bent, solidly evangelical convictions, and the ability to distill and articulate his findings in such a way that scholars, pastors, and laymen alike get real help.

There are 3 other titles in the “How to Read” series:

• How to Read Genesis
• How to Read the Psalms
• How to Read Proverbs

For introductory help for every Old Testament book, I highly recommend Tremper’s Introduction to Old Testament (co-authored with the late Ray Dillard).

He also has writtern a remarkable (and growing) list of Old Testament commentaries:

• Proverbs
• Song of Songs
• Ecclesiastes
• Jeremiah/Lamentations
• Daniel

This week's sermon: "Jesus: Equal with God"

John 5:1-24 has at least 3 extraordinary things to teach us about Jesus.

First, when he heals a lame man and later exhorts him away from sin, we see that Jesus' purpose in healing is to lead the man—and us—to holiness.

Second, we see how Jesus relates to the Father. The Father and the Son are equal so that when one is acting, the other is acting. Two implications of this are that 1) if we don¹t honor the Son, we don¹t honor the Father, and 2) if we believe on the Father through the word of Jesus, we have already passed from death to life and are on the other side of condemnation.

Third, we see Jesus' relation to the Sabbath. Jesus and his Father perfectly created the heavens and the earth and rested after six days. And since sin's entry into the world, Jesus and his Father have been working again to conquer sin and death and one day again bring perfect rest in the new heavens and new earth.

When Jesus heals a man, and intentionally does it on the Sabbath, he is showing us something about himself. What was happening in the healing was that Jesus and his Father were revealing the world that is coming. It is a world in which there will be no sickness and a world in which there will be no sin. "My Father is working until now, and I am working."

Watch John Piper explain the paradox and power of the God-centered theology of John Calvin and the other Protestant reformers: Deep, humble dependence on God doesn’t produce laziness but energy, creativity, industry, and world-changing achievement.

This week's sermon: "Greatness, Humility, Servanthood"

Astounding humility marked Jesus' life. Yet even as the most humble man who has ever lived, he was accused of arrogance and put to death for truthfully and lovingly disclosing his divinity.

We who follow Jesus should long to be marked by humility as well. And with Jesus as our guide, our aim should not be to avoid the accusation of arrogance (That's out of our control.) but to avoid the reality of arrogance in our own lives.

Let's look at several key texts to get a sense of what humility is and does.

1. Humility is glad that God gets all the credit for choosing us so that we boast only in him and not man. (1 Corinthians 1:26-31).
2. Humility happily admits that everything we have is a free gift from God, so that we can't boast in it. (1 Corinthians 4:6-7)
3. Humility is glad to affirm that God sovereignly governs our heartbeats and safe arrivals, or non-arrivals. (James 4:13-17)
4. Humility is rooted in the good news that Jesus died for our sins. That's how sinful we were. That's how dependent we are. (Colossians 3:12 -3)
5. Humility gives itself away in serving everyone rather than seeking to be served. (Philippians 2:5-8)
6. And humility is glad to affirm that this service is true greatness. (Mark 10:42-45)

The effects of humility are pervasive in the Christian life. Faith, worship, obedience, and love all grow in the soil of humility.

And despite the world's objections, those who are humble in the gospel of Jesus are freed to be the most joyful, courageous, and industrious people imaginable.

The Hebrew Scriptures point to Jesus in a myriad of ways. One way is narrative patterns, like the one in Esther 9:1:

On the very day when the enemies of the Jews hoped to gain the mastery over them, the reverse occurred: the Jews gained mastery over those who hated them.

And so it happened at the cross. At the very moment when the Enemy of the True Jew hoped to gain the mastery over Jesus, the reverse occurred: Jesus gained mastery over the one who hated him.

God has innumerable ways of pointing us to his Son—after all, according to Colossians 1:16-17, all the universe is in Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus.

If all the universe, then how much more the Scriptures.

This week's sermon: "Healed for the Sake of Holiness"

Jesus moves with intentionality. First it was to Jacob's well to engage the Samaritan woman. Then it was to his own unbelieving hometown. Now he arrives at the pool in Jerusalem, surrounded by a crowd of sick and disabled.

In compassion, Jesus chooses one to heal, an invalid of 38 years, then slips away to avoid the hoopla from the crowd. But it's not a random miracle. Jesus means to heal more than the man's body.

Later Jesus finds him in the temple and moves beyond the miracle, warning him away from sin and toward Jesus, the only one who can save the man's soul.

This week's sermon: "Go, Your Son Will Live"

After surprising fruit among the Samaritans, Jesus heads home to Galilee. He knows it will be a disappointing reception, but he moves forward into opposition and difficulty.

On the surface, it looks like he receives a warm welcome, but there is more going on than meets the eye. His own town welcomes him as a miracle-worker, but not for what his miracles are pointing to. You can believe all the miracles and still dishonor Jesus. They used him instead of loving him.

The story shifts to a man who gets it right—an official from Capernaum. Jesus tests him like he did the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7. The official passes the test.

The main point is seeing Jesus' greatness through this astonishing miracle, rather than dishonoring him by believing the wrong thing—namely, that Jesus is mainly a miracle-worker and not a soul-saver.

Being Jesus' homeboy can mess things up. The impulses at work in Nazareth are still at work today:

1. The pride of attachment to someone special,
2. A sense of entitlement when knowing someone influential, and
3. Over-familiarity with Jesus that won't let him break out of the little box we've put him in.

But for those with eyes to see, Jesus is gracious and powerful. Grace: He did the miracle amidst hostility. Power: He healed immmediately, with a mere word, at a distance.

Fellow complementarians, try framing the gender debate in three categories instead of two.

Feminists and egalitarians love it when everything to their right is cast as one monolithic "complementarianism." But authentic complementarians need to highlight that there is not only sin to the left, but to the right as well. True biblical complementarity is neither feminism nor misogyny. It’s neither egalitarian nor patriarchal. Jesus plotted another course altogether, a third way that viewed gender “in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14).

Jesus had a different flavor of complementarity than many who try to pass under that sometimes unhelpful label. He didn’t cloak male chauvinism in the guise of complementarity, but had a different way of treating women than his first-century contemporaries.

Watch John Piper reflect on John 4:27 (“They marveled that he was talking with a woman”) and how Jesus treated women:

Desiring God will provide a special screening of the film Collision, featuring Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens, on Friday evening, September 25, at our national conference in Minneapolis.

Christopher Hitchens is one of the most popular new atheists. He wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Collision is an 80-minute, documentary that follows him and Wilson on a 4-stop tour as they debate whether Christianity is good for the world.

Doug Wilson is a winsome defender of the faith and has proven immensely helpful to many in his engagements with Hitchens. Since Wilson is a speaker at our conference, we thought many attendees would be eager to view the film with us.

The screening will happen in the main auditorium at 9pm, following the opening session of the conference. Immediately following, John Piper will ask Wilson several follow-up questions about the film and his collision with Hitchens.

The aim of our conference is to look at the majesty of Jesus and his purposes for the world through the lens of Scripture, with John Calvin’s life and theology adjusting the focus. We think John Calvin would like the way God is exalted in this film, and we trust it will strengthen your faith.
  
Here’s the trailer to whet your appetite. We look forward to seeing you in Minneapolis this September!

This week's sermon: "The Food of Christ Is to Give Eternal Life"

Four lines in John 2-4 conspire to remind us of our stupidity apart from grace. In 2:19; 3:3; 4:10; and 4:31, the responses of the Jews, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and the disciples show us our own dullness and hardness of heart to Jesus and his spiritual reality:

• "I will raise this temple in three days." It took 46 years to build this temple.
• "You must be born again." How can a man enter into his mother's womb?
• "I will give you living water." You don¹t have a bucket.
• "I have food to eat you do not know about." Who brought him a sandwich?

Between Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well (which the disciples found amazing) and his reception of the townspeople who flocked to him because of her witness, Jesus explains to his disciples what's going on. He is fulfilling Amos 9:13 by collapsing sowing and reaping. He is the Messiah, and now in his coming he is sowing and reaping all at once. He's not bound to the natural ways of doing things. And he invites the disciples in to join him in reaping the fruit his word, and the woman's word, has sown.

The upshot for us is that:

1. Jesus himself is life-giving food,
2. his coming begins the promised messianic age, and
3. all our labor is important, and we're all building on the work of another—in particular, Jesus' fully finished work at the cross.

Calvin fell deathly ill in the winter of 1558 at age 49. He thought he was at death’s doorstep and so turned his few remaining energies to the final revision of his Institutes. Until this time, he hadn’t been fully pleased with the shape and content of his often-revised magnum opus. Wanting to leave the church with a definitive edition, he worked feverishly, despite the fever, to finish.

His health returned in the Spring of 1559, and he soon returned to the pulpit. It was at this time that Denis Raguenier began taking extended shorthand notes on Calvin’s sermons, since he didn’t use manuscripts but preached extemporaneously. The sermon manuscripts of Calvin we have today are largely owing to Raguenier’s unflagging and far-sighted labors.

Also in 1559, Calvin and his sidekick Theodore Beza founded the Academy of Geneva. Under Beza's day-in, day-out leadership, this school would become famous across Europe and produce lasting effects long after Calvin’s death.

In his final five years, he translated the final edition of the Institutes into French, wrote a large commentary on the Pentateuch, and preached almost tirelessly. Almost. At barely fifty years old he was battling increasing illness and frailty, but his labors continued unceasing. There were seasons of sickness followed by renewed strength.

The great reformer began slowing for the final time in February of 1564. Soon it was too draining to preach and lecture. He spent his final months bedridden and died May 27, 1564, just two weeks shy of his fifty-fifth birthday.

Calvin could tell in his lifetime that he’d likely be remembered long after his death. So he took pains to fade as namelessly from this world as he could. He requested burial in an unmarked grave hoping to prevent pilgrims from coming to see his resting place and engaging in the kind of idolatry he’d spent his lifetime standing against.

In death he completed his life’s labors, not seeking to make much of Calvin, but striving with all his might to point beyond himself to the one who saved him—the one infinitely worthy of being made much of.

*               *               *

This is part 9 of our 9-part series tracing some key contours of the story of Calvin’s life.

• Part 1: Born to Gerard (1509-1523)
• Part 2: Off to Paris (1523-1532)
• Part 3: De Clementia, Conversion, and Cop (1532-33)
• Part 4: Institutes (1535-1536)
• Part 5: A Night’s Stay in Geneva (1536-1538)
• Part 6: The Golden Years (1538-1541)
• Part 7: Return to Geneva (1541-1553)
• Part 8: The Fateful Years (1553-1554)