Do you know the exact moment you were saved? Saul of Tarsus did. As did the great Augustine. Many in church history have testified to dramatic, unmistakable experiences of the new birth, when God touched their dead hearts and gave them new spiritual life by his Holy Spirit.

But this is not the experience of most. Count Tullian Tchividjian among us.

Tullian is the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He grew up in a Christian home — his grandfather is Billy Graham — yet he rebelled defiantly for a season, and was born again in God’s good timing, with dramatic change in his life trajectory. But even the effects of his regeneration being as radical as they ar…

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Mother’s Day is a sweet opportunity for Christians to celebrate one of God’s most significant means of his common and redeeming grace.

For most, there’s some bitter flavor somewhere. We live in a fallen world. All mothers are sinful — even Jesus’s own mother knew well her need for a Savior (Luke 1:47) and for God’s mercy (Luke 1:50). Whether your own mother monumentally failed you, or you’re a mother who’s all too aware of how you’ve failed your children, there is goodness and grace to acknowledge and appreciate in almost every situation, even when deeply tarnished by sin.

But for many of us, our hearts soar in thanksgiving when God brings to mind our mothers and grandmothers, or our wife …

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Today is Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter Sunday. For centuries the Christian church has marked this day (also called Ascension Thursday) in remembrance of Jesus’s bodily ascent to heaven.

The number forty is based on Acts 1:3: “He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Ten days later we celebrate Pentecost (Acts 2:1), fifty days (seven full weeks) after Easter, when Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:1–33) on his fledgling church.

Don’t be too surprised if you haven’t heard of Ascension Day, or even if it’s been a while since you’ve heard any reference to Jesus’s asce…

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Dancing. Sports. Caffeine. Rock and roll. Food and drink. The college campus is a kind of microcosm of the flashpoints we face “in the real world,” just with the volume turned way up. And lots of video games.

For over a decade, this has been the everyday life and ministry context for Matt Reagan, Campus Outreach director at the University of Minnesota and elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Into such potentially contrasting environments, he has sought to bring an old, old story with all its biblical textures and hues and the mind-defying life-change it boasts. It’s emphatically not an easy day-to-day parish for gospel ministry, but some love it. Matt does.

Over the years of laboring to pres…

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He was the kind of adolescent who would keep secret reading material stashed under his mattress. Long after he was supposed to be fast asleep, the teenage Joel Beeke would lay in bed with the light still on, pouring over the pages. He had stumbled across his father’s forbidden collection, and long before most youths are exposed to the adult world, Beeke was getting acclimated.

By Beeke’s own admission, he was raised in a hyper-Calvinist home, and his wandering heart found a haven for indulgence. It was the Puritans.

These old English pastors and theologians, from the second half of the 16th century and the entirety of the 17th century, informed his mind, wooed his heart, and began guiding …

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“I feel like I’m 22 again,” says the newly transitioned John Piper.

Now that his pastorate at Bethlehem Baptist Church has officially ended, Piper says he feels like a recent college grad who is free to do anything God lays on his heart. “When you have that much freedom, you’re really faced with significant ‘don’t waste your life’ choices.” He plans to seek God in a focused way in the next year as to how to invest his next 10 or 15 years, if God would give that many.

This past week Piper sat down with Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition to talk about his hopes for the future, including some reflections on his past 33 years as a pastor and how that has shaped him for what’s next.

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It was 1948, during Jackie Robinson’s second season in Major League Baseball, when some bigots in Cincinnati were really giving him the business.

Just the previous year, Robinson had been the one with the monumental courage to break the color barrier as the first African American of the modern era to play in baseball’s highest league. He had endured unthinkable cruelty and injustice for de-segregating the game, and he was succeeding on the field and off. Not only did he bat just a shade under .300 in 1947, and was named Rookie of the Year, but he was holding his tongue, and fists, and not fighting back.

But now, in his second campaign, some still weren’t convinced. Eric Metaxas tells the s…

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If you think spiritual warfare is irrelevant to you, you may already be losing the battle. At least you’re ripe for Satan’s picking.

Demons have a notorious way of acclimatizing to where they are, warns Tope Koleoso, pastor of Jubilee Church in London. And in secular Western society, this means playing right into our neglect and diminishing of the supernatural.

But Ephesians 6, and the rest of the Scriptures, would have us stay aware of the unseen realm, and remember that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against . . . the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). It is not Christian to suppress the s…

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It’s every pitcher’s worst nightmare. For the Detroit Tigers’ Darin Downs, the nightmare became a reality, and almost meant the end of his life.

On August 17, 2009, he took a 103-mile-per-hour line drive off the left side of his head. In an instant, his skull was fractured, blood began pooling, his head was swelling, and he couldn’t speak. Soon he lay terrified in an ambulance en route to the hospital. But in that moment, he had a strange peace and hope. God was at work.

His fellow Tiger Donnie Kelly tells a similar story — though not as dramatic. For Kelly, it was a mysterious injury in 2004 that sidelined him from the game he loved and threatened to end his career almost before it began.…

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Good pastors come and go, but the Great Pastor will never leave, forsake, or transition.

Pastors of all stripes, at their worst and best, are but under-shepherds of “the chief Shepherd” (1 Peter 5:4). Jesus is “the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25). He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8), “the great shepherd of the sheep” (Hebrews 13:20).

In his final sermon as a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist, John Piper commended the Great Shepherd to his people of 33 years. He rehearsed from Hebrews 13:20–21 six pillar truths about God that have been hallmarks of his ministry at Bethlehem. God is the absolutely existing, reconciling, covenant-keeping, shepherding, san…

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