Jesus’ “high priestly prayer” (John 17) is only about 650 words. It takes only 3 minutes and 30 seconds to read it aloud. But it will take all eternity for us to fully understand it!
I recently found it helpful to break down Jesus’ petitions and propositions into the following categories:
| The Father Gave the Son... | John 17 |
|---|---|
| authority to give eternal life | v. 2 |
| people out of this world | vv. 2, 6, 9, 24 |
| work to accomplish | v. 4 |
| words | v. 8 |
| his name | vv. 11, 12 |
Thank God for one of Desiring God's least thanked.
Matt Lund pours himself out to make the Desiring God Conference Bookstore the life-giving source of bargain-priced books it is.
Matt's been working faithfully for DG since 2002. Two years ago, he moved into his present bookstore role.
During a normal week, he stays almost invisible ordering, cataloguing, and shelving books at the Bethlehem bookstore--a mile from the DG offices and four thick floors from the Bethlehem offices where most of the weekday activity is.
Even at one of our Desiring God events, he's almost invisible--except to the trained eye who knows that this man runs the bookstore show, in the most holy …
After my first day of work at DG, Abraham and Molly had me over for dinner. I remember asking then--since Molly was already showing--what their daughter's name would be. Their reply was a gentle rejection. They had resolved to tell no one until she was born.
We have learned your name, Felicity Margaret Piper, too soon. But your life shall not have been in vain. Our hearts now mourn and hope.
Felicity
Felicity,
that happy name
was
hidden with your forming frame
next
to the heart of mom and dad
until
the day you came.
You
did not come as we presumed—
a
place upstairs at home was groomed.
Yet other plans our Sovereign had
and
took you from the womb.
Life is never ill-conce…
Nearly four years ago our friends Dustin and Kellie Shramek lost their precious son, Owen. In the book Suffering and the Sovereignty of GodDustin wrote a chapter about some of the lessons that God taught him--lessons about God, and also lessons about how and how not to minister to those in nearly unbearable grief and pain.
After the book was published, Women Today Radio did a brief interview with Dustin, that I thought might be helpful to reprint here:
If some female member of your household has influenced your life for Christ, share her story.
My wife has had a significant impact on my life for Christ. One thing I didn't mention in my chapter was what too…
When I pray that Christ may increase and Desiring God may decrease what do I mean?
I do not mean that I want God to help us have less influence in awakening a passion for the supremacy of Christ.
Rather, I mean: Lord, help us more and more to magnify Christ in such a way that by comparison to the glory of Christ the glory of Desiring God is as nothing.
And I mean: Lord, help us to delight in Christ more and more so that our joy would be in seeing him magnified NOT in being made much of because we may have helped that happen.
Or to say it another way: Lord, spare us the insidious ego deception that we love God when really we love being told that we love God. Forbid that our b…
Perhaps what we need in the baptism and church membership discussion is a bit of anecdotal evidence. Certainly a story cannot solve all the ins and outs of a theological debate, but it can add weight to it by reminding us that where we come down on this issue really does affect people.
Jeremy Archer shares the story of how being rejected from church membership is having practical and painful consequences for him and his family. The church he is excluded from is Bethlehem Baptist.
I'm a member there; almost everyone who works for DG is a member there; DG is owned by Bethlehem; we happily operate under the authority of its elders. Along with all the rest of Bethlehem's ministries an…
In her article “Down Syndrome Dangers” from this month's World, Joni Eareckson Tada writes,
…A person with Down syndrome may never understand how to keep up with the Joneses or how to get over his head in debt. He or she may never be clever enough to sneak behind his spouse’s back and look for an illicit affair (yes, men and women with Down syndrome do marry, and some of those marriages are honest-to-goodness models to neighbors and friends). They won’t be cunning enough to know how to cheat, weave lies, or how to stab a friend in the back. People with Down Syndrome may not have driver’s licenses, but then again, neither do I—and I get around quite well for a quadriplegic.
There are two ways that the soul can resist the truth of God’s sovereign governance over all evil that is implied in Genesis 50:20—“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”
#2 brings God’s patient, merciful displeasure, leading eventually to greater light.
#1 brings God’s punitive displeasure, …
This is part 4 of a 4-part series on how to talk about God's sovereignty over sin.
The following is from The Doctrine of God, Chapter 9, “The Problem of Evil,” by John Frame. The headings are added; the paragraphs are Dr. Frame’s.
I should ... say something more about the nature of God’s agency in regard to evil. Recall from [chapter 8 in The Doctrine of God] the model of the author and his story: God’s relationship to free agents is like the relationship of an author to his characters. Let us consider to what extent God’s relationship to human sin is…
This is part 3 of a 4-part series on how to talk about God's sovereignty over sin.
The following is from The Doctrine of God, Chapter 9, “The Problem of Evil,” by John Frame. The headings are added; the paragraphs are Dr. Frame’s.
Consider now the term permits. This is the preferred term in Arminian theology, in which it amounts to a denial that God causes sin. For the Arminian, God does not cause sin; he only permits it. Reformed theologians, however, have also used the term, referring to God’s relation to sin. The Reformed, however, insist contrary to the Arminians that God’s “permis…
