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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This week we released episodes 29–33 in the Ask Pastor John podcast. We began the week with an artist's question about the value of art. In episode 29 Pastor John offered a theology of art in five minutes. In part he said,

Art is basically a craft or a skill that aims at more than just keeping food on the table. What makes it Christian, I think, is that God is an artist. He made the heavens that are telling something about his glory [Psalm 19:1]. In other words, he didn’t just make the heavens to protect us from solar rays. The heavens are not just utilitarian, they are beautiful, they say something about his glory. … God is the maker, and we have the mind of the maker. We talked about …

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Rosaria Champagne Butterfield shared her unlikely conversion story with us on the previous Authors on the Line podcast. We might have expected a Pauline conversion experience — perhaps a flash of light or an audible voice from heaven — but nothing of the sort happened. Rather, her conversion came through a series of ordinary means: a caring pastor in the area, a Bible, a copy of Calvin’s Institutes, and simple hospitality.

In this episode, we explore the role hospitality played in her conversion, and why she’s now challenging Christians to rethink the missional potential of our living rooms and dining rooms.

“It does not matter that there’s cat hair on the couch,” she says in the intervi…

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In 1999, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a tenured English professor at Syracuse University, a skeptic of all things Christianity, and in a committed lesbian relationship. Her academic specialty was Queer Theory, a postmodern form of gay and lesbian studies.

Today Butterfield is a mother of four, a homemaker, and wife of a Presbyterian pastor named Kent. They live in Durham, North Carolina.

She is an unlikely convert. And in this episode of the Authors on the Line podcast, Butterfield shares the story of her conversion from a radical lesbian to a redeemed Christian. It's a story involving a pastor, a pretty ordinary local church, and a Bible.

“I tried to toss the Bible and all of its…

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This week we released episodes 24–28 in the Ask Pastor John podcast. In one of those new episodes we asked John Piper a question about personal Bible reading: must we come away from our Bible reading with a life application principle every time?

His answer was a resolute no.

Here’s part of what he said to explain why:

A godly life is lived out of a heart astonished at grace. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. We go to the Bible to be astonished. We go to the Bible to be amazed at God, and amazed at Christ, and amazed at the cross, and amazed at grace, and amazed at the gospel. And when we are stunned and amazed and humbled we walk out of our study or out…

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