Much has happened in the past two weeks. The Ask Pastor John podcast recently reached the 1 millionth play milestone. Pastor John and his family moved temporarily from the lakes of Minnesota to the hills of Tennessee (see episodes 111 and 112 for the details). And over the past two weeks, we have released 10 new episodes of the podcast. What follows are transcribed excerpts from these new episodes (click the hyperlinked titles to listen).

On Pastors Who Use Churches as Studios (Episode 103):

It seems to me there’s a profound inauthenticity about preaching past your people in front of you. And that inauthenticity may get a crowd in the short run, but will not be blessed by God in the w…

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Margaret Magdalen Jasper (1752–1789) doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Google her name and you’ll find almost nothing about her life. What she looked like is a mystery. She wasn’t famous in her day, and she’s still not famous in our day. Her ordinary life was filled with disappointments, the kind of life history tends to forget.

But her story is worth telling.

Margaret lived in England, and there she was acquainted with loss. Her father died when she was only two years old. Her only brother later died in war and was buried in foreign soil. And her mother died in Margaret’s 30th year, at which point she writes in her diary that she was “left an orphan in this perplexing world of sin and sor…

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Since launching the Ask Pastor John podcast in mid-January, we have released 112 episodes. And last weekend the podcast surpassed one million plays, which is a great time to hit pause and thank everyone who has been listening to the daily podcast either via Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, or through the iPhone or Android apps.

Thank you!

The stats are meaningful to us in as much as they represent a lot of real, thoughtful, inquisitive friends who are committed to living under God’s good authority in his revealed word. And while Pastor John may be perceived as something of a modern day Yoda (as one Twitter follower humorously suggested), he’s not infallible, and certainly doesn’t c…

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Our all-sufficient Savior is many things, including a perfect model of masculinity. This point is a significant theme in Eric Mason’s new book Manhood Restored: How the Gospel Makes Men Whole.

Mason joined me to talk more about his book and masculinity in the latest Authors on the Line interview. Mason is a husband, father, and church planter, who lives and ministers in the heart of Philadelphia, as the co-founder and lead pastor of Epiphany Fellowship.

In our 24-minute conversation, Mason shares the story of his father, a man who escaped the Jim Crow South to become a decorated WWII Buffalo Soldier, only to return home disillusioned by ongoing segregation. Then we talk about manhood’s h…

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Frequent DG blog contributor Gloria Furman has a new book.

Glimpses of Grace: Treasuring the Gospel in Your Home, is a book showcasing Gloria’s skill in applying the gospel to the everyday life of a wife and mother. Here’s one short excerpt, to illustrate my point.

For me, as I go about my day in my home, I can see how attempting minimalism and simplicity seems like the solution to my discontent. When I glance into my children’s room after I’ve asked them to clean up, and I see piles of books strewn all over the place, the play jewelry has been dumped onto someone’s bed, and tiny chunks of crusted Play-Doh litter the floor, I feel a tremendous lack of peace.

The clutter bothers me,…

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Over the past two weeks we released nine new Ask Pastor John episodes, including milestone episode number 100. We also released two episodes which quickly generated over 25,000 plays (each) in the last week: an episode on cussing (97), and an episode on whether a white woman can marry a black man (98). Those two new episodes quickly became the most played of all the other 102 tracks we've released to date.

What follows are brief excerpts from each of the new episodes (click the hyperlinked titles to listen).

On Cussing (Episode 97):

Paul says, “Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving” (Ephesians 5:4)…

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The celebrated preacher Charles Spurgeon (1834–92) was converted at age 15. He preached his first sermon just after his 16th birthday. By age 18, he took his first pastorate in the country. And before turning 20, Spurgeon was pastoring in London.

Spurgeon’s entire life and ministry are fascinating, but those first five years of his Christian life, between 1850–54, are years that especially interest me, and in this episode of Authors on the Line we go on the line with two Spurgeon scholars to learn more.

First, we talk with Tom Nettles, the Professor of Historical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s also the author of a forthcoming book, Liv…

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Monday night, in the wake of the devastating tornado in Oklahoma, John Piper posted two tweets at 11:00pm (CST). Both tweets quoted the first chapter of Job. He first cited Job 1:19, and then Job 1:20, and they were posted together consecutively:

• @JohnPiper: “Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead.” Job 1:19
• @JohnPiper: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” Job 1:20
  

Later he decided to take down both tweets.

Many of you may be unaware these tweets appeared online, but some have made what we think is unfair criticism based on misinformation worth briefly addr…

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How does the Bible hold together into a single, cohesive story?

It’s an important (and intimidating) question reserved for the discipline of biblical theology, an angle of scholarship that focuses on sections of Scripture, sometimes the whole of the Bible, to show how the texts fits together within the unfolding drama of redemption and consummation in Jesus Christ.

Edmund Clowney, the noteworthy theologian and preacher who passed away in 2005, said the lessons most easily transferable from seminary life to pulpit ministry was what he learned in biblical theology. There seems to be a direct line between advances in careful biblical theology and robust preaching and discipleship.

One new…

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In light of various tragedies in the news, I asked Pastor John a few weeks ago how he personally reconciles what appears to be two conflicting responses when public tragedy occurs: (1) his compassion towards those who suffer and (2) his conviction that Scripture ascribes to God the final control over all calamities and disasters wrought by both nature and man (see Exodus 4:11, Deuteronomy 32:39, 1 Samuel 2:6–7, Ecclesiastes 7:13–14, Isaiah 45:5–7, Lamentations 3:37–38, Amos 3:6, Psalm 135:6–7, Job 1:19–21, 42:11).

How a church responds to disaster will be much more complex, especially if a church is located close to a tragedy, a complexity he outlines in a 21-point chapter for pastors, “Br…

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