Last week at a lunch for pastors, I gave a message you can listen to called "Some Sweet Blessings of Masculine Christianity." I drew out eleven benefits of valuing biblical manhood. Here is my outline:

By “masculine Christianity,” I mean (though words are inadequate):

The theology and the church and the mission are marked by over-arching male leadership and an ethos of tender-hearted strength and contrite courage and risk-taking decisiveness and readiness to sacrifice to protect and provide for the community—the feel of a great, majestic God making the men lovingly strong and the women intelligently secure.

In this ethos…

1. Men are freed to have feminine traits w…

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The October issue of Christianity Today carried an astonishing article on divorce and remarriage by David Instone-Brewer. What makes it especially amazing is that CT simply published it as if it were faithful to Scripture, with no counterpoint, and used the phrase on the cover “when to separate,” not “whether to separate”—even though Jesus said, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Mark 10:9).

To put it bluntly, the implication of this article is that every marriage I am aware of could already have legitimately ended in divorce. I knew I disagreed with Instone-Brewer’s position. I wrote three chapters on marriage and divorce and remarriage in What Jesus Demand…

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Today, October 10, 2007, is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. As I write this on October 9, 2007, the book is ranked 237 at Amazon. That is phenomenal for a 1,200-page novel that contains philosophical speeches, one of which stretches to 90 uninterrupted pages. The book has sold over six million copies. In one survey from 16 years ago, Atlas Shrugged was ranked second only to the Bible as the book that influenced people most.

My Ayn Rand craze was in the late seventies when I was a professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel College. I read most of what she wrote both fiction and non-fiction. I was attracted and repulsed. I admired and cri…

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I have asked the question in public, “When does God become 100% for us?” And I have given an answer that rightly troubles thoughtful, biblical people. So this article is an effort to answer their question.

In my message to the Desiring God National Conference on Sunday, September 30, I answered the question like this:

What the Bible teaches is that God becomes 100% irrevocably for us at the moment of justification, that is, the moment when we see Christ as a beautiful Savior and receive him as our substitute punishment and our substitute perfection. All of God’s wrath, all of the condemnation we deserve, was poured out on Jesus. All of God’s demands f…

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I had the privilege of sitting with my family while Tom Steller and Sam Crabtree ministered to us at the funeral of Felicity Margaret Piper who was stillborn at full term on September 22, 2007. Her father Abraham asked me to speak for five minutes on “A Granddaddy’s Thoughts.” Here is what I said.

I didn’t know Felicity Margaret. My experience of her life was entirely through other people for nine months. And my experience of her death, even though it was physically immediate and touchable, has been emotionally experienced almost entirely through other people.

So at this moment, what it means for me to be Felicity’s grandfather is that I am living this …

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In the hopes that you will pray for us, I’ll give you the news about Abraham’s daughter. Abraham is my son who serves as the Web Content Manager for Desiring God. He and Molly were expecting their second child on Sunday, September 23. Molly was big and healthy. Everyone was happy and excited about Orison’s little sister.

There had been no movement since Thursday. Molly had read this was nothing unusual, but the doctor said she could come for a check-up if she wished. Saturday morning (September 22) they went to Hennepin County Medical Center. No heart beat. Ultrasound confirms: the baby is dead.

The phone call came to me first. It was Abraham through sobs, “We lost the baby.”

…

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When I pray that Christ may increase and Desiring God may decrease what do I mean?

I do not mean that I want God to help us have less influence in awakening a passion for the supremacy of Christ.

Rather, I mean: Lord, help us more and more to magnify Christ in such a way that by comparison to the glory of Christ the glory of Desiring God is as nothing.

And I mean: Lord, help us to delight in Christ more and more so that our joy would be in seeing him magnified NOT in being made much of because we may have helped that happen.

Or to say it another way: Lord, spare us the insidious ego deception that we love God when really we love being told that we love God. Forbid that our b…

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In her article “Down Syndrome Dangers” from this month's World, Joni Eareckson Tada writes,

A person with Down syndrome may never understand how to keep up with the Joneses or how to get over his head in debt. He or she may never be clever enough to sneak behind his spouse’s back and look for an illicit affair (yes, men and women with Down syndrome do marry, and some of those marriages are honest-to-goodness models to neighbors and friends). They won’t be cunning enough to know how to cheat, weave lies, or how to stab a friend in the back. People with Down Syndrome may not have driver’s licenses, but then again, neither do I—and I get around quite well for a quadriplegic.

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Ross and Barbara Anderson have a wide and deep network of friends who love them and continue to bear with them the weight of losing their son Luke Kenneth Anderson on August 27, 2007. Many have asked that we work with Ross and Barbie to make the “Service of Worship and Thanksgiving for the Life Of Luke Kenneth Anderson” available online to those friends and any others who might be helped through this witness to the mercy and power of Jesus Christ. We are eager to do this.

The service includes the hymns that we sang, the testimonies from family and friends and counselors, and a message of hope from God’s word in John 11. If you listen, keep in mind how agonizingly real this loss is to so…

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The death of James Kennedy on September 5 is marked by Al Mohler with more than the usual recollections about a leader's great achievements. There is the personal touch on Dr. Mohler’s life that adds the kind of thing we love to hear about a great leader:

My indebtedness to Dr. Kennedy is very personal.  I was a young Southern Baptist who as a teenager had serious questions about the big issues of the Christian faith.  Dr. Kennedy's ministry at Coral Ridge addressed those big questions.  He was unafraid to take on the intellectual challenges of the faith.  He was kind to a Baptist teenager, introducing me to Francis Schaeffer and dignifying my questions.  He clearly enjoyed talking the

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