The Book of Psalms is an amazing gift to the church. Says John Piper, “The Psalms, more intentionally than any other book of the Bible, is designed to carry, express, and shape our emotions, to give vent to them — all of them, and shape them, to reign them in, and to free them up, to explode them, and to kill them when they should be killed.”

The Psalms are useful for shaping our emotions, and rich devotional fuel for the soul, but how are these ancient Psalms to function in the life of the gathered church in weekend worship? Most of us don’t sing from the Psalter, or even recite from the Psalms on a typical Sunday, although such a practice seems to be assumed by the early church (Ephesians…

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John Piper’s preaching gestures are quickly becoming legendary. There’s now a whole website dedicated to animated clips of his best preaching gestures. So this week we asked Pastor John two gesture questions.

In episode 49, we asked him about when he started using them in the pulpit.

It is possible to leap and wave and holler and entertain and say nothing and be useless. And I don’t want to do that. Therefore gestures in my mind are not of the essence of the demonstration of the Spirit and power. That is just not what they are, because people can listen to sheer audio of messages and have their lives changed. They can’t see you at all when that is happening. …

Whatever I do in the p…

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How did C. S. Lewis bungle The Chronicles of Narnia?

For some critics, a major flaw is the way he interrupts the flow of the story by butting into the story as the narrator. You may remember it is Lewis who tells us (twice!) that no sensible person ever shut oneself up in a wardrobe. It’s a simple line, but Lewis breaks into the story to speak a direct lesson for young readers.

Or you may remember the dizzying scene in The Silver Chair when Jill steps up to a cliff edge far above the clouds. She grows faint and wobbly, and readers wonder if Jill is about to plunge to her death. Here's how Lewis describes it: “She was too frightened and dizzy to know quite what she was doing, but two th…

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Five years ago this month journalist Collin Hansen published his first book: Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Crossway, 2008). True to its title, the book is a travelogue of Collin’s journey across the country documenting a surging movement called New Calvinism by some, and Young, Restless and Reformed (YRR) by others, a title he coined himself. Collin’s hunches about the new movement were confirmed in 2009 when Time Magazine named “New Calvinism” as one of its “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.”

But it’s been five years since the release of his book, and YRR has undergone quite a lot of change in those years. What have been the biggest change…

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I know God disciplines me, because the Bible tells me so, but how do I know when I am personally experiencing God’s discipline for my sin?

This question surfaced this week on the Ask Pastor John podcast. In part of his answer, Pastor John said this:

Here is one of the most remarkable things about God’s ordaining hard things in our lives in a disciplinary way. Jesus was disciplined and he never sinned. Hebrews 5:8 says Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered.” Now a lot of people read that and they say, “Whoa! Learned obedience? You mean he stopped being disobedient, and became obedient, and thus he sinned?” No. That is not what it says; that is not what it means.

When it…

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Today we launch a new devotional eBook, Love to the Uttermost: Devotional Readings for Holy Week. Beginning Palm Sunday (March 24) through Easter Sunday (March 31), we invite you to join us in focusing on the self-giving love of our Savior.

Comprised of eight excerpts (plus one prologue reading) selected from John Piper’s extensive writing and preaching ministry, this new devotional was compiled and shaped for use in personal devotions or family and group settings.

As Pastor John explains, this one term — uttermost — is loaded with significance. When used of Jesus’s willing death for his friends, it means he endured unimaginable degrees of suffering to do so (John 13:1, NAS).

To love t…

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Pastor John recently tweeted, “Christian relationships have this as their goal: to help each other stay satisfied in God.” To learn more about how this gets worked out in practice, we asked him. In part, he said this:

It comes down to whether we taste and see that the Lord is good. I have said this to the church and I have said to pastors, and I have said to my wife. What I want from you, Noël, what I want from my staff, is for them to be happy in Jesus. The greatest ministry you can have to me is for you to enjoy Christ. And so I think when we turn that around and say, “Now how can I be the greatest blessing to the people around me?” The answer is: Get up in the morning. Go to the Word…

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In the fall of 1782, a 57-year-old man walked the docks of Deptford, a South London port on the Thames river. Thirty miles inland from the sea, the port was the home of the Royal Navy Dockyards, and the man looked out over the war ships and merchant vessels as he reflected on his own seafaring past. It’s not possible to know all the memories passing through his mind, but he was likely reminded of his time spent aboard a Navy ship, a few merchant ships, and even African slave trading ships. His mind certainly reflected on the brutal and uncertain life of seafaring.

The man was John Newton, and he was now a pastor, though a very unlikely one.

Newton’s life on the wine dark sea was long ove…

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Of the five Ask Pastor John podcasts released this week, none was more played than episode 37 — “A Theology of Prayer in 3 Minutes.” Pastor John set personal prayer into the context of God’s unfolding redemptive plan and the final victory of God.

He was responding to one man who had lost confidence in the power of prayer and was asking, Do my personal prayers make any difference?

Pastor John responded to the question with a short theology of prayer by explaining the significance of the golden censers (bowls) which hold the prayers of the saints (see Revelation 5:8, 8:3–4). In part, Pastor John explained the meaning of the passages like this —

Those bowls have two functions. They are…

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Why is our first inclination to run our sins into the dark shadows and hide like Adam tucked up against a tree trunk?

We find it natural to hide our sins, even as Christians, but such an act contradicts our Savior’s death. “The gospel frees us to be authentic, to admit that our struggles and strengths have not been fully sanctified, and to allow others to apply the grace of God to areas of our lives that desperately need it" (55). Matt Chandler makes this observation in his new book, Creature of the Word: The Jesus-Centered Church (B&H, October 1, 2012). It's a book he co-authored with Josh Patterson and Eric Geiger, and it’s a book dedicated to pressing the church to think about a pattern…

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