In Germany 467 years ago, in a small, backwater town called Eisleben, the shaking hand of a dying man scribbled this simple line: We are beggars. This is true.

Martin Luther died on February 18, 1546. These last words of weakness echoed the life-changing truth he’d unearthed in the Scriptures: we don’t bring anything to the table of our justification. Jesus truly died for the ungodly.

Luther came to understand that if we are to be accepted by God, we need a perfect righteousness we can’t produce — we need an alien righteousness given to us by Another.

But this discovery didn’t just happen. It came after hours of the painstaking study of Scripture. Luther gave himself to the Book, which he…

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We recently sat down with Lecrae to talk about his latest album, Gravity, which just won Best Gospel Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. Here he raps the gospel in one minute:

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More on the gospel from Desiring God:

• The Gospel in Six Minutes (John Piper)

• The Gospel in Two Minutes (Trip Lee)

• What Makes the Good News Good (John Piper)

Our fundamental problem is that we’re sinners. But our fundamental problem doesn’t mean it is our most severe.

In John 4, Jesus and his disciples traveled through Samaria. They came to a town called Sychar and decided to stop for a break. It was around noon. The disciples went into the market to buy food, leaving Jesus sitting beside the well of a nearby field. Soon after a Samaritan woman arrived there to draw water.

She is a person like you and me, a person whose fundamental problem is sin.

“Give me a drink,” Jesus says to her. Now she is confused that he would ask this. He is Jewish and she is Samaritan and this type of request is uncommon, as John explains (John 4:9). “Why would you a…

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The Bible is amazing. God has spoken to us in a book — a glorious story about his glory and grace centered on the God-man, Jesus Christ. But the life he saves us to — our life in Christ — plays out in this world beyond the pages of his word. What we learn about him is meant to serve how we live for him.

And Paul Tripp says this is dangerous for pastors and Christian leaders.

The temptation is, as Tripp aptly describes it, “to become more excited about the world of ideas [in the Bible] ... than the loving worship of Almighty God and self-sacrificing love for the people of his church.”

Are you all about studying, but not serving? All lesson and no love? Paul Tripp helps us:

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Get Pau…

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My oldest daughter isn’t sleeping well. It’s the dark. From fear of what might be under her bed, to who might be looking through her window, she has her reasons for preferring the lights on.

In fact, she has started a new nightly routine. After the house is settled and her parents are quiet, presumably asleep, she secretly slips out of her room to flip on the nearby hallway light and then returns to bed. Somehow she finds a measure of comfort from the crease of light between the floor and the bottom of her door.

But she shouldn’t be doing this. The rule is to stay in bed. And a few nights ago I caught her red-handed.

I was standing quietly in the dark hall and heard her scurrying around b…

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Minnesota is not the first place most people would choose to visit in February. But you wouldn’t have guessed it this past Monday to Wednesday in the warm confines of the Minneapolis Convention Center. Gathering for the 26th time, the Desiring God Conference for Pastors took up the theme of the supernatural in pastoral ministry.

We’d like to thank those who joined us onsite and helped make this such a memorable event — especially our eight plenary and seminar speakers. Also, we are grateful for nearly 5,000 of you who tuned in through the live-stream and hope you were blessed.

The audio and video of each talk is now available for free streaming and download.

Centrality of the Church in Di…

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In rural America, off a country road, on the soft soil of a weathered field, stands a sobering message for every passer-by: Go to church or the devil will get you!

The words are neatly strewn across a homemade billboard adorned with flood lights and a painted silhouette of a red figure, apparently Satan, holding a sling-blade. Go to church, the warning hisses, or be his victim.

As hokey as it sounds, the warning is right, you know, at least in a sense.

Now to be clear, if the sign means (and it likely does) that you’d better attend a weekly meeting or else Lucifer will eat your lunch, then no, that’s not right. That would be Anglo folk religion — more akin to African animism than anythin…

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Our heads learn faster than our hearts, and that means danger.

Just because you can communicate an idea does not mean you have submitted yourself to it. And if we are not careful, we will mistake the communication part as the barometer of our maturity.

Paul Tripp calls it “academizing” the faith — when we define our spiritual growth by our biblical literacy. But as he warns, “You can be theologically astute and be dramatically spiritually immature.”

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Get Paul’s book, Dangerous Calling (Crossway, 2012).

More videos:

• Where Is Your Identity?

We are not, in ourselves, the vehicle of God’s grace and kingdom-building. Making this mistake will eventually lead us to fatigue, even despair, says Russell Moore.

Commemorating the release of John Piper’s revised edition of Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, we recently asked Dr. Moore for an exhortation to pastors and church leaders under the “Brothers” theme. In short, witchdoctors can’t do Christian ministry, so stop acting like one. He explains:

Get John Piper’s Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry (Updated and Expanded Edition, 2013), now available.

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[Video transcript]

Brothers, we are not witchdoctors. I say that because several years…

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Stop looking at yourself in carnival mirrors. This is one plea from Paul Tripp’s new book, Dangerous Calling. Carnival mirrors give us a distortion of who we really are, and they’re everywhere we look.

This is especially true of the pastor or ministry leader who is tempted to stay locked in on the horizontal level. The danger is to mistake our work to be what defines us — to be so fixed on the “carnival mirror of ministry” that we buy as our true identity the twisted depiction it reflects. Paul Tripp explains:

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[Full transcript]

You mention in your book, Dangerous Calling, that there are some leading indicators that spiritual blindness might be happening in the life of the pastor o…

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