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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It was another full week in the Ask Pastor John podcast series, and we covered a few of the more difficult questions of Christian Hedonism.

First, we asked Pastor John whether there are times in the Christian life when — for whatever reason — God chooses to withhold his presence from us, thus nullifying our hope of experiencing Godward affections. The Puritans seemed to operate from this assumption (“God desertions,” they called it). And if this is the case — if God withdraws from the Christian at times, thus making joy in God impossible — doesn’t the plea of Christian Hedonism (the call to be happy in God) just heap more guilt on such a person? Pastor John answered in episode 19.

In epi…

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Recently Pastor John released his short book Risk Is Right, a significantly expanded version of a chapter originally published in Don't Waste Your Life. In Risk Is Right, Pastor John claims the so-called safety we seek to preserve in our lives is really a myth.

We asked him to explain “safety is a myth” in a recent Ask Pastor John podcast (episode 10). In part he explained it this way:

You can’t put enough padlocks on your door and enough bars on your window to keep a heart attack from happening. There is no guarantee that anybody is going to live another breath. And therefore all the efforts that we make to keep ourselves safe are ultimately an illusion in terms of absolute securi…

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“How good is God,” wrote Jonathan Edwards, “that he has created man for this very end, to make him happy in the enjoyment of himself, the Almighty, who was happy from the days of eternity in himself … that he might make them blessed in the beholding of his excellency, and might this way glorify himself.”

A more profound sentence can hardly be found outside of the Bible. We were created to enjoy God now and for all eternity. The only profound discovery that tops this is that, from eternity past to eternity future, God delights in himself.

Wading into these deep waters is Jonathan Edwards scholar Kyle Strobel. In his new book Jonathan Edwards’s Theology: A Reinterpretation (T&T Clark, 201…

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We released eight new episodes of the newly relaunched Ask Pastor John (APJ) podcast this week. And in episode 13 — “The Essential Warfare for Holiness” — we talked with Pastor John about the connection between happiness and holiness.

There Pastor John said this:

When we say God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, we are saying the essential warfare of holiness, or sanctification, is the warfare to be satisfied in God. It is a fight to see him as beautiful and to savor him as beautiful. That is the number one fight. Take pornography or theft or the desire for applause, any of those sins, the fundamental way that you sever the root of those sins is by strivin…

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Christian marriage has been caught up into the cosmic drama of the gospel.

In this first Authors on the Line podcast of 2013 we talk with Bible scholar G. K. Beale, the Professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. His research on Ephesians sheds light on how Christian marriage is shaped by the finished work of Christ in the inauguration of the New Creation. The patient reader will eventually encounter this material in his book A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker Academic, 2011), around pages 880–884.

There Dr. Beale writes this summary statement:

As husbands unconditionally love their wives and as wives respond to this love in a faithf…

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How easy is it to detach our marriages from the finished work of Christ?

Very easy.

Tragically easy.

This may be due to living in a society where marriage is ever pressed into molds defined by the increasing unbelief around us, rather than biblical revelation. The very definition of marriage in our day has increasingly taken the feel of Play-Doh, all squishy and moldable in political debates and water-cooler conversations.

But no redefinition of marriage can touch the ultimate reality of God’s design. God has chosen to weave marriages — our marriages — into the most profound theological realities this universe has ever seen. To enter into a Christian marriage is to enter into the d…

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