Today is Langston Hughes's Birthday (1902-1967). He was one of the 20th century’s most notable African-American poets.

These two poems seem to catch the pilgrimage that has led to the White House. If he could have lived to see what the line would mean: “I too am America”!

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --

Bare.

But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So …

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John Piper's new book Finally Aliveis scheduled to release next week. We hope to have it available at the Desiring God Conference for Pastors on Monday, February 2.

This is the first of 6 posts introducing this book. This first one is a Q&A with John Piper about why he wrote the book. The last 5 will provide 5 of my favorite quotes from Finally Alive and some endorsements.

Q: Finally Alive is a whole book dedicated to the theme of the new birth. Why take up this doctrine?

A: In December 2006, I finished preaching through Romans with a joyful thankfulness for the great truth of justification that looms so large in that book. It seemed to me that what was needed was to head o…

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Here are 15 pro-life truths that help clarify the issue of abortion and give you brief talking points with those you would like to persuade.

In addition I include the links to the main abortion providers in the Twin Cities.

Jason French has created a beautiful celebration of God’s gift of life. He wrote the song and put together the video. It’s called “I’m Holding A Miracle.” We will show it as part of our sanctity of life focus this Sunday. I commend it to you for your joy.

On January 12, 2009 Samantha Heiges, age 23, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for drowning her newborn in Burnsville, Minnesota. If she had arranged for a doctor to kill the child a few weeks earlier she would be a free woman.

What are the differences between this child before and after birth that would justify its protection just after birth but not just before? There are none. This is why Abraham Lincoln’s reasoning about slavery is relevant in ways he could not foresee. He wrote:

You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a f…

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Sometimes we are so overwhelmed at being treated better than we deserve that we must exult in the all-sovereign God—the God of birds' flight and Obama’s rise. When King David pondered how many were God’s “wondrous deeds,” he said, “I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told” (Psalm 40:5). That’s the way I feel watching God’s public mercies in the last few days...

Read the rest of the article.

That is the title of a sermon I preached January 17, 1993, three days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated president. It is just as relevant—or more—today.

The text was 1 Peter 2:17, “Honor the king.” I closed with eight ways to honor a pro-choice president. The seventh was this:

We will honor you by expecting from you straightforward answers to straightforward questions. We would not expect this from a con-man, but we do expect it from an honorable man.

For example,

1. Are you willing to explain why a baby's right not to be killed is less important than a woman's right not to be pregnant?
2. Or are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals,…

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Yesterday I said I’d share Mark Noll’s explanation of America’s successes and failures in the matter of race. Here is his summary which penetrates to the bottom of the “both-and” nature of the God-loved, God-cursed world we live in.

To explain the simultaneous manifestation of superlative good and pervasive malevolence in the history of race and religion, neither simple trust in human nature nor simple cynicism about American hypocrisy is adequate.... [Something else must explain the pervasive commingling of opposites.]

That commingling has included domination with liberation, false consciousness with genuine idealism, altruism with greed, self-seeking with self-s…

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Mark Noll attempts a theological explanation of the “conundrum” of America’s successes and failures in regard to race in his book God and Race in American Politics. To set the stage for the explanation he quotes Walker Percy’s book Love in Ruins.

Noll says Percy “got it right”:

What a bad joke: God saying: here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye, because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers.

But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greec…

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At Barack Obama’s request, tomorrow in the Lincoln Memorial, Gene Robinson, the first openly non-celibate homosexual bishop in the Episcopal Church, will deliver the invocation for the inauguration kick-off.

This is tragic not mainly because Obama is willing to hold up the legitimacy of homosexual intercourse, but because he is willing to get behind the church endorsement of sexual intercourse between men.

It is one thing to say: Two men may legally have sex. It is another to say: The Christian church acted acceptably in blessing Robinson’s sex with men.

The implications of this are serious.

It means that Barack Obama is willing, not just to tolerate, but to feature a perso…

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