Jonathan Parnell (@jonathanparnell) is a content strategist at Desiring God. He lives in the Twin Cities with his wife, Melissa, and their three children: Elizabeth, Hannah, and Micah.
"All of us are born slaves to our sin," Trip Lee explains, "but the good news is that because we've been redeemed by Jesus, we are set free."
Two-minute video on the bondage of the will and the freedom of Christ:
________
More videos from Trip Lee:
"How we listen reveals who we are," Tony explains, is at the heart of the new eBook, Take Care How You Listen. This resource is the first wave of a new eBook initiative at Desiring God that repackages unedited sermons from John Piper on particular themes and makes them available for mobile devices.
And there's a little more on marriage, hip hop, and rafting down the Colorado River, all on this episode of Behind the Blog.
You can also listen here.
Mentioned in this episode:
A marriage counselor in Minnesota is encouraging couples to spend time together, the StarTribune reports. Findings are that spending at least 5 1/2 hours a week interacting with your spouse can strengthen your marriage.
Now this is interesting. Spending time together strengthens a relationship. That is vague and positive enough to be in a fortune cookie. And maybe it seems so intuitive that it's unworthy for print. But here's the catch: there's more to this spouse-interaction than mere time. The counselor explains, "I mean talking to each other, really paying attention to each other, the way you did when you were dating."
The way you did when you were dating.
It's the same observa…
In 1742 Yale College expelled David Brainerd.
He had made some prohibited comments about some of the faculty and, though at the top of his class academically, Yale booted him. Add to this that in order to be an established minister in Connecticut you had to be a graduate of Yale, Harvard, or a European university. Brainerd's dreams (and obedience!) to become a pastor came crashing down. It was very difficult, as John Piper explains, "Brained felt cut off from his life calling."
This is a hard fact to swallow. Tragic, it might seem, considering that David Brainerd died at the young age of 29. But here we are looking at his life, admitting there's a good story to be told, and retold. One…
We recently sat down with Justin Buzzard, lead pastor of Garden City Church in Silicon Valley, to discuss his newest book, Date Your Wife. We diced up the interview into a handful of segments that we'll be featuring over the next few weeks. In today's portion, Justin shares about why he wrote the book and its biblical undercurrent.
Read 20 quotes, watch the trailer, and get the book from Amazon or WTS Books.
Trip Lee explained in an interview this Spring how hip hop is a genre of music uniquely suited to wield the Word in our fight against sin. So it's no surprise that his new album is saturated with Scripture. And on a more personal level, he shared about how Romans 8:31–39 helps him daily keep his eyes on Jesus.
________
More videos from Trip Lee:
In this five-minute video John Piper shares about some expected and unexpected ways that aging has worked in his experience of sanctification.
John Piper, along with Kevin DeYoung, Jarvis Williams, Russell Moore, and Ed Welch, will be the plenary speakers at our National Conference this September. Visit the event page to learn more and register.
________
Recent posts related to our National Conference:
I would not write it this way today.
That is one of John Piper’s reflections almost forty years later on his 1974 dissertation, Love Your Enemies, just republished by Crossway. It has to do with how he approached the topic in the Bible.
In the "thicket" of world-class scholarship, Piper employed a "history-of-traditions" method to his study which requires a great deal of research "behind" the biblical text. The point is to discover different sources outside the New Testament that are responsible for what's there. And the reason he'd write it differently now is because there's another approach to biblical studies he thinks has a greater payoff. He writes in the new preface of Love Your E…
One addition to Crossway's republication of Love Your Enemies is a new preface from John Piper in which he explains why this book is a monument to God's mercy and faithfulness. He writes,
Monuments are usually built much later than the event celebrated, in this case, the years 1971–1974 in Munich, Germany. Monuments are not about themselves. They remind. They point. In this case, to the mercy and faithfulness of God. Monuments are often made of plain, lifeless stone while representing something utterly vital and beautiful. In this case, a mere book representing the shining face of God and his mighty hand on my life in those days — and before. . .
To read the entire preface, or the e…
For those reading from the States, today is Independence Day, the peak of America's summer. So in the midst of cookouts and fireworks, let's do a quick dial back to the founders.
America and its founders. Now that's a conversation folks can get passionate about, whether in political rhetoric or some Christian circles. However, beyond any dispute on the role Christianity played in those early days, we can say undoubtedly that public opinion in 1776 considered Christians beneficial to the American republic. In short, the consensus was that Christians bring a lot of societal good in a representative democracy.
The man who led the way in articulating this benefit was John Witherspoon, f…
