God and his word are the most important things you can share with anyone, including someone who is suffering because of disability. And not far behind are testimonies of God’s extraordinary goodness, even amid the most difficult circumstances.

Greg Lucas was one of the first people considered when the idea of a conference related to disability and the Bible started to come together. He clearly articulates God’s goodness in all things, seeing his disabled son through the lens of the Bible, not the perceptions of the culture or even his own.

His book, Wrestling with an Angel, sets a high standard for how to talk about one’s own experience of suffering while pointing to our all-sufficient …

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This conference is not solely about comfort; it is also about conquest

If you think a conference about God and disability is going to be mostly about comforting those who are hurting, you are only seeing half of the potential. It is certainly about providing hope from God’s word. And it is also about fighting a war:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

Who will the cosmic powers hate more than those God has called indispensible (1 Corinthians 12:22)? Who are they most likely to seek out to destroy,…

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"This is a very weighty, very painful, and very necessary topic," explains John Piper. In this short video he extends his invitation to Desiring God's November conference on disability, "The Works of God: God's Good Design in Disability."

Speakers at this conference include Nancy Guthrie, Greg Lucas, Mark Talbot, and John Piper. Visit the event page to learn more and register.

"That book has been a lifeline."

A young man just said this to me last week as he and his wife face indescribable suffering — his youngest son will likely die in the next few months.

If you’ve never experienced that kind of suffering yourself or in your church, you will.  If you have, you know that God uses the testimonies of suffering people to provide comfort, encouragement, and hope in these inconceivable circumstances.

The book this young dad found so helpful is Holding on to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God by Nancy Guthrie. It is the story of a family who faced a similar loss when two precious children died because of genetic anomalies. 

God proved tru…

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Ed Welch is a biblical counselor and the author of several books including Running Scared: Fear, Worry & the God of Rest. He serves on the faculty of the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) in Philadelphia, where we recently connected. We asked him how fear, anxiety, and worry short-circuit the Christian life, and how we can gauge growth in these struggles. He answered in this brief 2-minute video:

 

Ed Welch is a speaker at our upcoming National Conference, September 28–30. Register for the conference before this Friday, 11:59 PM (CDT) for the discounted rate of $175. The final price increase begins on September 1.

Recent posts related to our National Conf…

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The clock is ticking. If you're faithfully "preaching the gospel" to your own soul, day in and day out, but distancing yourself from regular Bible intake, your freshness is fading. There's an expiration date on this fruit once it's off the vine.

Don't think I'm down on preaching the gospel to ourselves. I love it. I commend it. It's one of my main conscious sources for sanctification, an indispensable weapon for fighting the fight of faith. I'm eating this fruit daily. Warning you about the "shelf life" on gospel self-preaching is in hope of guarding and preserving this precious reality in the Christian life.

Gospel and Scripture — Together

The concern is that those of us convinced of …

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It's such a long word — sanctification. And it has such a churchy ring to it. No one uses this language outside the church.

So why not adopt a simpler term from the secular world and freight it afresh with Christian content?

While expositing Romans 6:23, John Piper went off script (it's in the audio, but not the manuscript) to tackle this question and also provide a short but substantive definition of what Christian theology means by the term "sanctification."

Now I know sanctification is a church word. I don't think I've ever seen the word sanctification in the Minneapolis StarTribune. It's a church word. 

So someone might say, "Why don't you choose a non-church word?" There a…

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Speaking of our upcoming National Conference, John Piper explains,

What we're really after is to know God better, and love him more, and serve him more fully, not just to get away and hear some more talk.

To this end, he offers four ways to maximize the effectiveness of a conference in your life:

Four ways to maximize the effectiveness of a conference:

1. Read the Bible and other books related to the conference theme, then form questions.
2. Ask God to help you see new things and feel new affections.
3. Fellowship with other conference attenders.
4. Nurture a message's impact by having a time of quiet solitude.

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Recent posts related to our National Conference:

• What It Means to "Act the…

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God's grace is catalytic. To truly experience it is to be changed for the better.

The Christian gospel floods our life with God's gracious provision, both outside of us and inside. Sins forgiven. Perfect righteousness provided for us in Jesus. Adopted into God's family. All wonderful. And the grace of God keeps going, freeing us from ongoing sin, making us holy in practice, and humble, and loving toward others.

The grace of God is not only a pardon we receive, but a power we experience. As Jonathan Edwards says, God's grace comes to us passively and makes us active.

In efficacious grace we are not merely passive, nor yet does God do some and we do the rest. But God does all, and we …

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Exercise, sleep, and diet — how do they relate to our sanctification?

Over 40 years ago John Piper was confronted with this issue after realizing the relationship between patience and sleep. Basically, it is easier to be patient after a good night of sleep. So then, as he puts it, "Is patience a fruit of sleep or a fruit of the Spirit?"

In this eight-minute video Piper and R W Glenn discuss this important (and fascinating) aspect of being human.

Read Piper's past series on physical exercise (Part 1; Part 2).

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John Piper and Bob Glenn are both speakers at our upcoming National Conference. Visit the event page to learn more and register.

Recent posts related to our National Confer…

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