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An Invitation from John Piper
Dear Friends,
If you have just stopped by the website or come often, I am writing this to tell you why I am excited about the Desiring God National Conference, September 25-27, 2009, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. I thought my excitement might rub off on you.
So why do I think ordinary Christians should consider coming to the Desiring God National Conference? I can give my answer in five words: Kim, Wilson, Olasky, Talbot, and Storms. They are the reason I want to be there.
Whenever students ask me how to choose a school or how to choose classes, I almost always answer the same: Don’t choose locations, campuses, buildings, libraries, or even courses; choose teachers. That is the…
John Calvin’s Four Laws and His Christian Hedonism
The Gospel of John Calvin in Four Laws:
- That since God by his Law prescribes what we ought to do, failure in any one respect subjects us to the dreadful judgment of eternal death.
- Because it is not only difficult, but altogether beyond our strength and ability, to fulfill the demands of the Law, if we look only to ourselves and consider what is due to our merits, no ground of hope remains, but we lie forsaken of God under eternal death.
- That there is only one method of deliverance which can rescue us from this miserable calamity, viz., when Christ the Redeemer appears, by whose hand our heavenly Father, out of his infinite goodness and mercy, has been pleased to succor us… …
Clarifying the Tornado
Three years ago God sent the tornado of cancer into my life. It split the steeple of my health and shredded the tents of my sexual life. I wrote an article to myself: Don’t Waste Your Cancer. It could have been titled: Don’t waste your tornado. God’s message to me in my tornado was essentially the same as to the ELCA in theirs. My tornado was
a gentle but firm warning to me and all of us: Turn from every approval of sin in your life. Turn from the justification and promotion of any behaviors in your life that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great biblical heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from your inveterate bent to distort the grace o…
The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality
I saw the fast-moving, misshapen, unusually-wide funnel over downtown Minneapolis from Seven Corners. I said to Kevin Dau, “That looks serious.”
It was. Serious in more ways than one. A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,
On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected...a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.
The tornado happens on a Wednesday...during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America's national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has s…
What Does It Mean to Seek the Lord?
Seeking the Lord means seeking his presence. “Presence” is a common translation of the Hebrew word “face.” Literally, we are to seek his “face.” But this is the Hebraic way of having access to God. To be before his face is to be in his presence.
But aren't his children always in his presence? Yes and no. Yes in two senses: First, in the sense that God is omnipresent and therefore always near everything and everyone. He holds everything in being. His power is ever-present in sustaining and governing all things.
And second, yes, he is always present with his children in the sense of his covenant commitment to always stand by us and work for us and turn everything for our good. “Beho…
Lewis and Edwards on the Layers of Self-Admiration
As a new Christian in 1930, C. S. Lewis was learning terrible things about his heart—the unfathomable layers of pride. It is astonishing how similar his description of his own heart was to the description Jonathan Edwards gave of our inscrutable strata of self-admiration.
Here is Lewis writing to his friend Arthur, amazingly within a year after his conversion:
During my afternoon “meditations,”—which I at least attempt quite regularly now—I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. Sitting by, watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to know the sort of thoughts that do come.
And, will you believe…
God’s Word, Good Exposition, Great Joy, Much Strength
Here’s another reason I am joyfully committed to expository exultation, that is, preaching.
Look at this amazing statement of what biblical exposition is like when it’s done well—in the power of God’s Spirit and riveted on biblical texts.
Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people.... [T]he Levites helped the people to understand the Law.... They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.... And all the people went their way...to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them. (Nehemiah 8:5-8,12)
First, there was a reader of the word of God. T…
Jesus Treated Women Differently
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 chauvini…
Let’s Make Some Autumn Resolutions
God approves of New Year’s resolutions. And mid-year, and three-quarters-year, and monthly, and weekly, and daily resolutions. Any and all resolutions for good have God’s approval—if we resolve by faith in Jesus.
I would like to encourage you to make some autumn resolutions. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Well, the examined life is not worth living either if the examination produces no resolutions. What examination and experience teach us is that the unplanned life settles into fruitless routine. The drifting life—the coasting, que-sera-sera, unreflective life—tends to be a wasted life...
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