If you only hope for unconditional love from God, your hope is great, but too small.

Unconditional love from God is not the sweetest experience of his love. The sweetest experience is when his love says: “I have made you so much like my Son that I delight to see you and be with you. You are a pleasure to me, because you are so radiant with my glory.”

This sweetest experience is conditional on our transformation into the kind of people whose emotions and choices and actions please God.

Unconditional love is the source and foundation of the human transformation that makes the sweetness of conditional love possible. If God did not love us unconditionally, he would not penetrate our unat…

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Last night, in a special All-Church-Strategy Meeting, 792 of Bethlehem’s members gathered at 7 PM and voted 784 to 8 to confirm God’s call on Jason Meyer to take hold of the baton that I have carried for the last 32 years. I wrote a letter to be read at that meeting giving my sense of God’s leading to this point. Then I wrote a response that we sent to all our people this morning.

Below is what I wrote in my journal when I couldn’t sleep for joy.

Journal Entry (6:30 AM, May 21, 2012):

I am up early this morning. Unable and uneager to sleep. My heart is seeking ways to praise the Lord, thank the Lord, be devoted to the Lord.

What shall I render to the Lord? I will lift up the cup of sa…

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Dear [Sarah],

You asked what happens to people who live far away from the gospel and have never heard about Jesus and die without faith in him.

Here is what I think the Bible teaches. 

God always punishes people because of what they know and fail to believe. In other words, no one will be condemned for not believing in Jesus who has never heard of Jesus.

Does that mean that people will be saved and go to heaven if they have never heard of Jesus? No, that is not what God tells us in the Bible.

The main passage in the Bible that talks about this is Romans 1:18–23. Here is what it says. Then I'll make a comment or two.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unr…

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Estimados amigos,

Deseando a Dios existe para ayudar a gente de todas partes a comprender y aceptar la verdad de que Dios es más glorificado en nosotros cuando estamos más satisfechos en él. Y yo agregaría, sobre todo en el sufrimiento.

Estar satisfechos en Dios (o en cualquier otra cosa) siempre parece más fácil cuando todo va bien. Pero cuando las cosas que usted amas están siendo despojadas de sus manos, entonces la prueba es real. Si Dios sigue siendo precioso en esos momentos, entonces su valor supremo brilla más. Él es más glorificado.

Los testimonios más significativos que recibo es cuando la gente me dice que fue una visión de la soberanía y la bondad de Dios la que los s…

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Dear Friends,

Desiring God exists to help people everywhere understand and embrace the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And I would add, especially in suffering.

Being satisfied in God (or anything) always seems easier when all is going well. But when things you love are being stripped out of your hands, then the test is real. If God remains precious in those moments, then his supreme worth shines more brightly. He is most glorified.

The most meaningful testimonies I receive are when people tell me that it was a vision of the sovereignty and goodness of God that got them through the most difficult times of their life.

Here is one of …

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Doug Wilson, in a recent blog titled “Paul on Divorce and Remarriage,” says 1 Corinthians 7:28 permits a divorced man to remarry. I don’t think that’s what Paul is saying.

1 Corinthians 7:27–28 says, “Are you bound to a wife (or literally, “woman,” as in a betrothal)? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife (or “woman)? Do not seek a wife (or “woman”). But if you do marry, you have not sinned, and if a betrothed woman marries, she has not sinned.”

The question is whether “free from a woman” in verse 27 means divorced, or whether it means not yet married. If it means “divorced from a woman,” then he is saying, “If such a divorced person remarries, he does not sin.”

The best ar…

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I think that when we are sinless we will still fear God in the sense of reverential, trembling awe — as when we stand on a peak before vast stretches of unscalable cliffs. And we will also fear, I suppose, in the sense of shuddering with thankfulness that we are not among the number who still dishonor God.

But the painful fear, the guilty fear, the craven fear, the humiliating fear — all such fear will one day be taken way. But only in the way God intends. And in his time. We should not be done with it in the wrong way, or too soon.

Here is the way C. S. Lewis puts it:

Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear [1 John 4:18]. But so do several other things — ignorance, alcohol, passion,…

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I have been preparing for ministry in Romania, Switzerland and Germany. One of the messages I am to give is “What is Gospel-Centered Ministry?” I have let my mind run back over the decades of preaching about this. One message leaps out of my memory with great joy and force. The message at One Day in May, 2000.

The text was Galatians 6:14, just one verse — for One Day with one Passion.

Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Or to state it positively: Only boast in the cross of Jesus Christ. The word can be translated “exult in” or “rejoice in.” Only exult in the cross of Christ. Only rejoi…

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Today is John Stott’s first birthday in heaven.

Coming toward the end of my (32-year) ministry as Pastor for Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church, I read Alister Chapman’s new biography of John Stott with special interest. I wanted to see how he finished at All Soul’s and how he shaped the rest of his life.

Stott became Rector at All Souls in 1950 at the age of 29. Just shy of 20 years later he told the church council on September 20, 1969 that “he wanted to stand down.” The church was not prospering as it once had. He felt his calling was to “wider responsibilities.”

The council accepted the proposal and 15 months later Michael Baughen took the helm. “Within a few years …

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Dear Friends,

This has been a season of transition at both Bethlehem and Desiring God. In both cases I feel more carried along than pushing or pulling. God is manifestly moving. May the Lord give me grace to stay in step with the Spirit, as he kindly leads us through these happy days.

I am overjoyed with the elders’ choice of Jason Meyer as the candidate to eventually take my place as the Pastor for Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem. As I wrote in the transition questions and answers, there were times when I wept for joy — both at the process God designed, and the person God provided.

I thought, “God is actually doing this. God is loving Bethlehem. God is giving unity. God is an…

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