As you board the spiritual-gifts roller coaster, you know that some are committed to having their hands in the air, while others very intentionally keep them tucked away under the safety harness. But before this train pulls away from the station, perhaps there’s no better voice to hear over the loudspeaker than that of self-proclaimed “charismatic Calvinist” Sam Storms.

Storms is the lead pastor of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City and author of The Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Gifts (due out in a new version in March, now available for pre-order).

In this new episode of Theology Refresh, we asked Storms to give us some general orientation on the Christian spiritual gifts, and in particul…

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Infinitely more important than what matters to any Secretary of State is what matters to God.

For decades, John Piper has traveled the country, and written book after book, saying that what matters most to God is God — and what difference it makes.

Granted, this doesn’t typically land on the first-time hearers as good news. It feels threatening initially — threatening to our inherently man-centered view of the world and threatening to the way we’ve always understood God as having us at his center.

But what sounds uncomfortable at first can soon become a cause for great rejoicing. Quickly we realize the foundation on which we were standing was much shakier than we thought, and the new foun…

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Black genocide.

That’s Clenard Childress’s term for abortion in America and its pervasive effects in the last generation, especially in the Black community. The statistics are outrageous. One in four African Americans conceived in the last forty years have been cut down by the “black genocide” of legal abortion.

A decade ago Childress founded a website by and for African Americans (blackgenocide.org) “to expose the disproportionate amount of Black babies destroyed by the abortion industry. For every two African American women that get pregnant, one will choose to abort.”

The site laments that “a Black baby is 5 times more likely to be killed in the womb than a White Baby.” Childress sa…

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The Christian ministry is irreducibly supernatural. Even centrally supernatural.

Desiring God’s 2013 Pastors Conference is fast approaching. On February 4–6, we’ll gather in downtown Minneapolis under the banner “Brothers, We Are Still Not Professionals.” Subtitle: “Reclaiming the Centrality of the Supernatural in Ministry.”

So with the supernatural in mind, we sat down with John Piper to ask the hot-button questions. We started with speaking in tongues and with new-covenant prophecy, and asked Piper to draw from his thirty-plus years of pastoral ministry to get us oriented. Here’s what he said:

What Is Speaking in Tongues? (7 minutes)

What Is the Gift of Prophecy in the New Coven…

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God is big enough to make our most menial of tasks into something meaningful. He’s transcendent enough — and draws near enough to us — to make the mundane in our lives significant for his glory.

As a worship-leader for the Passion conferences, Christy Nockels knows what it’s like to enjoy God in the midst of a massive assembly for Jesus, and as a mother of three, she’s learning what it’s like to enjoy God in the middle of life’s many seemingly menial moments. Her most recent album, called Into the Glorious, is built around this newfound lesson and theme.

In this 5-minute clip, Christy talks about discovering the glory of God in the mundane of everyday life.

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Other resources from our recent …

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For all eternity, God’s people will marvel at the splendor of his grace. Ephesians 1 tells us three times, in one long sentence, that God does all he does “to the praise of his glory” (verses 6, 12, and 14) — and that this glory is “the glory of his grace” (verse 6).

Bob Glenn, pastor of Redeemer Bible Church here in the Twin Cities, loves to celebrate God’s compelling and costly grace. When we had Glenn in the studio recently to record an episode of Theology Refresh, he insisted we not give him the topic ahead of time, but on the fly. We obliged, but served him up a theme in his wheelhouse. We think you’ll be helped by what Glenn has to say about God’s amazing grace.

To listen to this 1…

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January 6 has long been the date the Western church has observed the Feast of the Epiphany. From the Greek for “appearance” or “manifestation” (epiphaneia), Epiphany celebrates the appearance of the Son of God among us as one of us — both fully divine and fully human — and marks the end of “the twelve days of Christmas” that begin December 25.

In particular, Epiphany has become identified with the arrival of the magi, those pagan astrologers who make their surprising appearance in Matthew 2 to worship baby Jesus.

It is not only striking in Matthew 2 that the religiously uncouth magi are seeking to worship the newborn Jewish king, but that the religious leaders of the day are not. The pag…

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What the world needs from the church is indomitable joy in Jesus in the very midst of suffering and sorrow.

This was not only the theme of John Piper’s last sermon as senior pastor (“Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing”), but also has been the profound life-experience of Passion worship-leader Christy Nockels.

Christy and her husband Nathan walked through the pain of back-to-back miscarriages. It was in this suffering and sorrow that they learned that Jesus is the greatest and deepest joy, and that God entrusts his children with suffering that they might learn this sweet lesson and be able to share it with others.

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More recent videos with Christy Nockels:

• Hopes for Passion 2013
• Pipe…

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Here at the outset of 2013, in the midst of so many vain resolutions, perhaps God would be pleased to do a fresh work of grace in your life. Maybe he would give you some “resolve for good” (2 Thessalonians 1:11) that he would be pleased to empower and sustain and use as a means for continued flourishing, or some new spiritual thriving, in your life.

To that end, we enlisted none other than Jerry Bridges. Just last month he joined us at the Desiring God offices, and we had the opportunity to talk briefly about the Christian spiritual disciplines — or means of grace, as Jerry prefers. This conversation is especially relevant here at the beginning of 2013 with so many new Bible-reading and pr…

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The Georgia Dome in downtown Atlanta was rocking for last night’s major college bowl game that came down to the last snap, but anticipations are that it will be even louder the next three nights — with praise for Jesus.

Well over 50,000 college students ascend on the Dome today as Passion 2013 begins this evening and goes through Friday morning. While Clemson’s game-winning field goal, with no time left on the clock, signaled the night’s end for players and fans, it was just the beginning for a small army of staff and volunteers who traded sleep to turn a football stadium into a massive worship gathering for a large army to celebrate the beauty and grace and supremacy of Jesus.

The first…

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