Healthy churches are no happy place for lone wolves. Especially in leadership. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus’s apostles assume and instruct that his undershepherds do the work of Christian leadership together.

In Acts 20:17, it is the plural elders of the Ephesian church that Paul calls to come to him on the beach at Miletus and whom he calls overseers (plural). It’s the plural overseers whom he addresses, along with the deacons, as he begins his letter to the young church at Philippi (Philippians 1:1). The apostle summons respect from the Thessalonians not for a single leader, but for “those (plural) who labor among you and are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12), and he men…

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The tension in the air can feel thick enough to cut with a knife. It escalates to all-out war in some churches — the battle between living local and going global.

With limited time and resources and energy in any given context, it can feel like local mission and global missions are constantly vying for attention, competing articles rather than one seamless garment.

On one side, we see the needs around us in our city and feel deeply that proximity implies responsibility. God has called us to live on mission right here in our locale, “reached” as it may be, but still very needy. So many are lost in this city. On the other side, we ache over the world’s 7,000 unreached peoples and feel deep…

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Jesus absorbed God’s wrath for us.

Among the many other happenings during the most important hours in the history of the world — as the Son of God was crucified outside Jerusalem at a place called Golgotha (Mark 15:22) — this accomplishment is the center and foundation and heart.

Jesus had no sin of his own. It was not his own penalty that he bore, but he was a substitute for others, for those who would be joined to him by faith. This we call penal substitutionary atonement — Jesus reconciled sinners to God by being their substitute punishment. He absorbed in his person God’s righteous wrath against us, because of our sin, that we might be free from sin and its penalty and liberated to enj…

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Alright, husbands, here we go. Today’s the big day. It’s time to muster our level best and not drop the ball on Valentine’s Day.

It’s not too late to make plans, or give them an upgrade — though it might be hard work scrambling at the last minute.

Even so, sometimes our best of Valentine’s intentions go awry. And when we botch it, at least we should try to learn something from it.

Here’s what John Piper learned (perhaps among other things) from botching a Valentine’s dinner. He told the story one Easter Sunday in the sermon “Irrevocable Joy.” (The Scripture text is the words of Jesus in John 16:22: “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one…

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What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “biblical counseling”?

No doubt, many think of a movement that takes sin seriously. A growing number may call to mind a movement that is increasingly taking suffering seriously as well.

But ask the question to one of the movement’s key leaders, Ed Welch. You may be pleasantly surprised how illuminating and practical his simple and straightforward answer is.

Biblical counseling, in its best conception, gets at how the entirety of the church — not just trained professionals — can be mobilized to love others well. It’s about ordinary people being used by God to help the lives of others. At one level, it’s even as simple as learning enough about som…

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The doctrine of the Christian life — also known as ethics — is about Christian wisdom.

It is not about merely having the proper answers to a list of tricky moral questions, but discerning between good and evil in a changing and complicated world. Whether it’s in-vitro fertilization, stem-cell research, or human cloning — just to name a few — today’s challenges simply are not the same issues as yesteryear, and tomorrow’s moral dilemmas won’t be the precise set we face today.

It won’t do to memorize the answers to the last generation’s flashpoints. We must become the kind of people who deeply know biblical revelation, what it says about God and man and the world, and how to apply it to every…

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The bread and butter of Christian ministry is supernatural.

It’s been a decade since John Piper made his plea to fellow pastors, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. Ten years later, he stands by that message as much as ever, and has updated and expanded the book — which officially becomes available today.

Here’s how Piper puts it in the new preface:

Nothing has happened in the last ten years to make me think this book is less needed. In fact, instead of going away, the pressure to “professionalize” the pastorate has morphed and strengthened. Among younger pastors, the talk is less about therapeutic and managerial professionalization, and more about communication or contextualization. T…

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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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