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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Spectacular glory awaits those who are joined to Jesus.

Not only will we see him in all his glory — which might be thrilling enough — but we will share in his glory as he transforms “our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Rightly did C. S. Lewis observe that “the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship” (The Weight of Glory, 45).

This is the stunning doctrine of glorification. It’s almost too good to be true. Almost.

If the Bible didn’t make it plain, most of us would insist such a wonderful destiny could never be ours. But text after text tells the story of…

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A kid in Colorado with male genitals is prohibited from using the girls’ bathroom.

That’s the straightforward backstory on a recent piece from Donna Rose, a transsexual journalist writing her opinion for CNN. A Colorado school district has decided that a six-year-old child with male anatomy should use the boys’ bathroom at school, or a private one, Rose reports. Rose decries the school’s decision as discrimination because the child apparently has a deep sense of being a girl.

This six-year-old child, Rose writes,

knows she’s a girl. She dresses as a girl. Her legal documents recognize her as a girl. Her parents accept her as a girl. On the playground, you would have difficulty identifying…

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Demas and Mark are contrasts in failure. One provides us a word of warning, the other a word of hope. And as people who stumble in many ways (James 3:2), we need both.

Demas

What happened to Demas? We don’t know. All we know is that some of the last words the Apostle Paul wrote before his Roman execution expressed a heartbreak:

Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica. (2 Timothy 4:10)

Maybe Demas feared being executed with Paul and fled to safety. Maybe he escaped to a place where he could let himself succumb to the siren song of immoral seduction. Or maybe he simply caved in to the allure of a comfortable, prosperous life in the urbane, cosmopoli…

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We call it accountability. Beginning in 2001 I had the privilege each and every Friday afternoon to meet with two women for mutual encouragement and prayer. We did this for several years and remain accountable to each other to this day. The reasons we started meeting were simple: we were young Christians wanting encouragement in our walk with God. We wanted to build a deeper, more meaningful friendship with a few women. And we were girls and loved any excuse to hang out and eat together.

It was a real friendship. The purpose of our meeting was simple but the benefits were endless and life-changing.

For Our Protection

We know that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. When I …

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Achilles was a vicious warrior with a complicated history. In Homer’s Iliad we see him rise to the top as the preeminent player at the end of the Trojan War. His full backstory is melodramatic enough to make Downton Abbey blush, but suffice it to say that no one was quite like him. Achilles was simultaneously drunk in rage and meticulous in skill as he led the Greeks in battle. But most of us probably only know him because of his heel.

Achilles doesn’t die in Homer’s story but Greek legend says that he later suffered a mortal wound to the back of his foot. The “Achilles’ heel,” as it’s called today, has become one of the most popular idioms in Western culture. It refers to a person’s point …

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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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The Anglican Church designates February 27 as the Feast Day in commemoration of the pastor and poet George Herbert. So I am glad to wave again my little flag of love for Herbert’s poetry.

For depth of biblical insight, penetration of the human psyche, candor with his own wrestling soul, plundering of human language, surprising turns of phrase, technically unique versification, and musical much-making of the gospel, his poetry is unsurpassed.

• For the most thorough and helpful (and expensive) critical edition, see Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

• Jim Scott Orrick gives us one poem a week with his helpful comments in A Year with George Herb…

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Perhaps most of you are accustomed to saying that the kingdom of God is “not yet” here and is “already” here. Not yet here in its consummation, but already here in significant fulfillments.

In fact, “fulfillment without consummation” was the scandal of Jesus’s ministry. He claimed that the kingdom of God “is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21), and yet Jesus was not overthrowing the Roman regime. Even John the Baptist was perplexed and asked, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3).

This was the “secret of the kingdom” revealed only to a few. “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables” (Mark …

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In my sermon last Sunday I argued from 2 John 1:5–7 that love among Christians is a great protection against deception. John wrote, “Love one another. . . . For many deceivers have gone out into the world.” So I take it that love helps protect us from these deceivers.

I said that I saw four reasons in 2 John that love functions this way. But I only had time to describe two of them in the sermon. So here are the other two.

1. Love takes seriously all the commandments of God.

Verse 6: “This is love, that we walk according to his commandments.” John had said this in 1 John 5:2, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.”

This doesn’t mean …

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