On Saturday mornings we usually feature artwork from a talented designer. This time, we'd like to invite you to design a quote image in light of our forthcoming conference on sanctification. In this contest, three winners will walk away with a $75 Amazon gift certificate. Here are the details.

The designs will feature this sentence from John Piper (please include his name somewhere in the design):

“When it comes to killing my sin, I don’t wait for the miracle, I act the miracle.” –John Piper

Please put the emphasis on the last four words of the quote: ". . . I act the miracle."

The design format is up to you. You can sketch this quote with a pen and scan it or photograph it. Y…

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What follows is a collection of 20 quotes that caught my attention as I read Kevin DeYoung's forthcoming book The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap Between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness (Crossway; August 31, 2012):

“Not only is holiness the goal of your redemption, it is necessary for your redemption. Now before you sound the legalist alarm, tie me up by my own moral bootstraps, and feed my carcass to the Galatians, we should see what Scripture has to say. . . . It’s the consistent and frequent teaching of the Bible that those whose lives are marked by habitual ungodliness will not go to heaven. To find acquittal from God on the last day there must be evidence flowing out…

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Missionary William Carey (1761–1834) said this in a sermon on May 31, 1792:

Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.

(Design submitted by Jennifer Knight.)

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Previous quote images —

• Wimpy Theology Makes Wimpy Women (Jennifer Knight)
  
• The Essence of Christian Hedonism (Jennifer Knight)
  
• Holy Women Who Hope in God (Jennifer Knight)

Rachel Pieh Jones is a wife, mom, writer, and DG blog contributor who has lived in East Africa for the past 10 years. One of her pieces that has generated the most attention, you may remember, was published as a response to the Mommy Wars debate stirred up by a Time Magazine cover article published back in May. Rachel’s response post was titled “Are You Mom Enough?” What Rachel brings to the debate is both a helpful international perspective, and more importantly, a gospel perspective. We recently asked Rachel to share on camera her perspective of these so-called mommy wars, which she did in this 3-minute video.

You can read her original post here, and you will find an index to the en…

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From Kevin DeYoung's forthcoming book, The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap Between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness (Crossway; August 31, 2012), page 145:

Holiness is the sum of a million little things — the avoidance of little evils and little foibles, the setting aside of little bits of worldliness and little acts of compromise, the putting to death of little inconsistencies and little indiscretions, the attention to little duties and little dealings, the hard work of little self-denials and little self-restraints, the cultivation of little benevolences and little forbearances. Are you trustworthy? Are you kind? Are you patient? Are you joyful? Do you love? These qual…

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From Kevin DeYoung's forthcoming book, The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap Between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness (Crossway; August 31, 2012), page 123:

We must always remember that in seeking after holiness we are not so much seeking after a thing as we are seeking a person. The blessings of the gospel — election, justification, sanctification, glorification, and all the rest — have been deposited in no other treasury but Christ. We don’t just want holiness. We want the Holy One in whom we have been counted holy and are now being made holy. To run hard after holiness is another way of running hard after God. Just as a once-for-all, objective justification leads to a …

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What is union with Christ? And how does this union help us advance in personal holiness?

We asked J. I. Packer recently, and he answered in this rich 9-minute video:

Transcribed Excerpt

“[As a Christian] you have to face a great deal of opposition from the world, the flesh, and the devil. But as the new creatures that you are in Christ — risen with him, with the power of his resurrection mediated through the Holy Spirit into the actual living of your life — you can stand fast. You pray for power to stand fast. You set yourself to stand fast. And you find that you are standing fast. In his strength you can do it. And this is one of the secrets of sanctification, the secret which I wo…

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J. I. Packer will turn 86 on Sunday. He is a skillful writer, a fruitful author, and many of his works have become classics, none more than Knowing God. Recently in our interviews with him in Vancouver we asked him for writing advice, or more specifically, what he would say to a budding writer of Christian nonfiction.

He offered three pieces of advice:

1. Go deep in personal worship.
2. Write to hit hearts.
3. Write from a sense of calling.

He explains and expands these points in this 9-minute video clip:

Transcribed Excerpts

"There are writers who think that simply by crisp, orthodox formulations of Bible truth and wisdom, without any searching application to the reader, they are fu…

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Slate recently reported that spanking children may not be such a bad form of discipline after all. Surprisingly, the reporter pushed past a lot of the cultural anti-spanking prejudice to ask some reasonable questions about what the studies indicate. Although it appears she has not been persuaded to spank her own child, and she chooses to end the piece with a touch of doomsday, she maintains a level of clearheadedness in much of the article.

But I suspected at some point the article would get awkward, because discussions on discipline always do. There comes a point when you must define spanking, you must explain what spanking is and that can only be done by explaining what it looks like in…

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Psalm 51:4 —

Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight

Said Rick Gamache, in his sermon “Whiter Than Snow” —

I believe what David is saying in verse 4 [Psalm 51:4] is that all sin is a preference for the fleeting pleasures of the world and the flesh over the everlasting joy of God’s fellowship. This is why the Christian life is a life of repentance (like Martin Luther said), not because every time we sin we lose our status as God’s children and have to get saved all over again. Our status never changes. We are always God’s children, we are still declared to be holy even when we sin, we are still the heirs of his Kingdom.

But our sin affects our rel…

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