Now or Later?
I just got a copy of Francis Chan’s new book, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God.
My favorite phrase so far: “Your best life later.”
Yes! If that's not true, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15:19).
A Love for Missions Starts at Home
There is a relationship between the sermon series that just ended at Bethlehem concerning our vision for the next generation and the book I just finished writing on the missionary sacrifices of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton.
When Iain Murray gives an account of the “rise of the missionary spirit” in Scotland in the 1800's he comments that “a new zeal to take the gospel to the world was born out of a new experience of its power.” Then he draws attention to the connection between the renewed homelife and the missionary upsurge:
…Friends, parents, neighbors first it will embrace
Our country next, and next the human race.
4 Books from this Writing Leave
Thank you for praying for me on my four week writing leave. It's over today. It was more productive than I thought it would be. Hence my heartfelt thanks. Four projects were more or less completed.
This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence - A book on marriage that exults mainly in its meaning not its emotion. But I do hope it helps people keep their covenant and be happier and make much of Christ. There is no marriage in the resurrection, hence “This Momentary Marriage.” And marriage mainly means: Christ keeps covenant with his church, hence “The Parable of Permanence.”
Finally Alive: What Happens When We are Born Again - A book about the miracle of sovereign, regenerating…
What Does "God-Centered" Mean?
At Bethlehem Baptist Church and at Desiring God we use the term “God-centered” a lot. Here is one simple way to tell what we mean and test yourself to see if you are God-centered.
The psalmist describes the motivation of God in saving sinners like this:
Both we and our fathers have sinned... Yet he saved them for his name’s sake, that he might make known his mighty power. (Psalms 106:6, 8)
God was motivated to rescue them and us from our sin and its penalty “for his name’s sake.” What does “for his name’s sake” mean? It means “that he might make known his mighty power.”
What we mean when we say God is “God-centered” is that he acts like that. He saves for the …
A TBI Update and Announcement
Dear friends of TBI,
With trembling gratefulness in my heart, I look at the remarkable cluster of visionary ministries growing like fruit on the tree of Bethlehem Baptist Church.
- We are a kind of mission sending agency with 85 foreign missionary units (families or singles) who count Bethlehem as their main sending base.
- Campus Outreach has exploded in its four-plus years at Bethlehem with 25 staff on four campuses.
- Desiring God has been spreading resources and holding conferences for over a decade and nourishes people around the world with its Internet presence.
- Children Desiring God is transforming the way children are nurtured in over two thousand churches in the US …
It's Never Too Late to Keep Asking
One of the greatest hope-killers is that you have tried for so long to change and have not succeeded. Now you look back and think: What’s the use? Even if I could experience a breakthrough, there would be so little time left to live in my new way it wouldn’t make much difference compared to so many decades of failure.
That’s not true. Suppose you only had five years left to live with a new victory over some old way. Or suppose you only had a year, or a month, or an hour? Would it matter?
At this point stir the thief on the cross into your thinking. At first he was railing at Jesus (Matthew 27:44). Then he was broken by what he saw and repented and cried out for mercy: “Jesus, rememb…
How a Grandmother Knits
For Noël on Mother’s Day
She sits, the needles in her hands
looping and hooking her heart
into this little blue blanket,
and without any pink strands
stitches closed her wounds.
Do People Bore You?
I'm working on a book on the new birth. The final chapter is designed to give encouragements for personal evangelism. I just added a quote by C. S. Lewis that I love. Here’s the whole section to help you move toward people:
Find People Interesting
Be encouraged that simply finding people interesting and caring about them is a beautiful pathway into their heart. Evangelism gets a bad reputation when we are not really interested in people and don’t seem to care about them. People really are interesting. The person you are talking to is an amazing creation of God with a thousand interesting experiences. Remember the words of C. S. Lewis:
It is a serious thing to live in a so…
Don't Neglect Reminding
It is essential to say grand old truths again and again. There is ample evidence in the Bible that they are quickly forgotten.
Remember, there are different kinds of forgetting.
One is that great truths are gone out of the mind never to return. The other is that they are gone out of the mind for a season (a day, a year) while we languish in discouragement and sin.
Don’t follow Israel here:
“And the people of Israel did not remember the LORD their God, who had delivered them from the hand of all their enemies on every side.” (Judges 8:34)
Rather, submit to Peter:
“I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the…
The Unlikeliness of Israel
To mark the 60th anniversary of the birth of the modern State of Israel, let’s listen to a voice from 100 years before this state was born.
Who was it that said in 1867 that the existence of the Jews in the modern world was an insurmountable obstacle in the way of reasonable unbelief? It was J. C. Ryle. And who was he? J. I. Packer, quoting Richard Hobson and calling it a “just estimate,” describes Ryle like this:
He was great in stature; great in mental power; great in spirituality; great as a preacher and expositor of God’s most holy Word; great in hospitality; great as a writer of Gospel tracts; great as an author of works that will long live; great as a Bishop of the Re…
