Few occasions are more anticipated than graduation. We invite our loved ones, wear clothes we never wear anywhere else, and take lots and lots of pictures.

It was such a memorable occasion this past Friday evening, as John Piper addressed the graduates of Bethlehem College and Seminary with this stunning message from 1 Corinthians 3:21–23: In Christ, all things are yours.

While it may seem like there is plenty to boast about in graduation, good grades, completed papers, accumulated knowledge, years of hard work, and even future ministry possibilities are pitifully dwarfed by the riches of what Christ has purchased and secured for us. Paul is yours. Apollos is yours. Cephas is yours. The wo…

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It’s a new start for an old tradition in American Journalism, says Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine. The news poem. Says Olasky,

Hardly a vile murder or a military victory went by without colonial poets bemoaning or celebrating the occasion in verse, with the work then published on a single page “broadside” and sold for a penny. Happily, my favorite pastor/theologian, John Piper, is also a poet, and below are his thoughts on justice in regard to Connecticut’s school shooting and Boston’s Marathon bombing.

Worldmag.com has posted Piper’s news poem “Grace Forfeited: Adam, Tamerlan, and the Lady” with the short introduction by Olasky.

Also, here at Desiring God, you can read …

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A month ago today the bombs went off in Boston. Through the surge of media, many of us were left on the edge of our seats for a week. There was shock and confusion and deep questions. In this latest episode of Behind the Blog we talk about how we responded to this tragedy on the blog, including our personal wrestling with how to process events like this.

Other topics in this episode include an update on John Piper’s upcoming speaking schedule and wider ministry. We talk about our latest publications now available and our newest ebook, Doctrine Matters. We also introduce our National Conference this fall, “The Romantic Rationalist: God, Work, & Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis.”

St…

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It’s road construction season in Minneapolis. That means orange signs with massive blinking arrows — the ones that signal that your commute is about to take twice as long. And then the dreaded concrete barriers that make half of the lanes on the busiest freeway in the city totally inaccessible.

Now picture the road construction completed: extra lanes added, new interchanges built, and all the workers and equipment gone. But imagine the barriers are left in place. A week. . . a month. . . a year goes by and still those barriers continue to make the new road and interchanges inaccessible.

Here at Desiring God we want to help people everywhere understand and embrace the truth that God is m…

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Dancing. Sports. Caffeine. Rock and roll. Food and drink. The college campus is a kind of microcosm of the flashpoints we face “in the real world,” just with the volume turned way up. And lots of video games.

For over a decade, this has been the everyday life and ministry context for Matt Reagan, Campus Outreach director at the University of Minnesota and elder at Bethlehem Baptist Church. Into such potentially contrasting environments, he has sought to bring an old, old story with all its biblical textures and hues and the mind-defying life-change it boasts. It’s emphatically not an easy day-to-day parish for gospel ministry, but some love it. Matt does.

Over the years of laboring to pres…

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As we look out at the church today, there is so much that encourages us and fills us with gratitude. There is renewed zeal among God’s people for the spread of God’s glory across the earth. Like never before we hear brothers and sisters in different circles and different streams of contemporary Christianity talking about the gospel and mission, about transforming cities and reaching unreached people groups. These conversations are essential, and we hope they will continue with even greater intensity and intentionality in the days ahead.

But sometimes what we are not hearing can be as illuminating as what we do hear. It reminds us of an exchange in an old Sherlock Holmes mystery, where Holme…

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Jesus is king. He is the ascended, seated, reigning Lord over everything. Now what does this mean for how we think? How does his preeminence affect our intellectual pursuits?

Last fall Mark Noll and John Piper converged to discuss this topic. In an event hosted by Bethlehem College and Seminary and the MacLaurin Institute, Noll and Piper, authors of Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind and Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God respectively, each presented a lecture and interacted with questions related to the mind and Christian scholarship.

Noll’s lecture, starting at the 1:30 mark, examined two questions: first, why is the person and work of Christ the framework for the…

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He was the kind of adolescent who would keep secret reading material stashed under his mattress. Long after he was supposed to be fast asleep, the teenage Joel Beeke would lay in bed with the light still on, pouring over the pages. He had stumbled across his father’s forbidden collection, and long before most youths are exposed to the adult world, Beeke was getting acclimated.

By Beeke’s own admission, he was raised in a hyper-Calvinist home, and his wandering heart found a haven for indulgence. It was the Puritans.

These old English pastors and theologians, from the second half of the 16th century and the entirety of the 17th century, informed his mind, wooed his heart, and began guiding …

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We’ve taken Solid Joys to a new level.

As of today, we are happy to announce that our daily devotional app is no longer restricted to Apple and Android mobile devices, but is now a fully functional website. We’re hoping many will find this to be a tremendous blessing.

The new Solid Joys site is simple, and easy to use, and features 365 of the best devotional excerpts from John Piper's online writings and from his “trilogy” of books with Multnomah (Desiring God, The Pleasures of God, and Future Grace). The devotional of the day automatically comes up when you visit the site at http://solidjoys.desiringGod.org, and you can click easily to the preceeding or following day’s reading.

We have a…

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Barnabas Piper has put some thinking into sports. Actually, he has put a lot of Christian thinking into sports. Writing weekly for WorldMag.com, Barnabas has had a steady voice on what we can learn about God in America’s favorite entertainment.

So when Barnabas was recently in Minneapolis, we were eager to pull up a chair and pick his brain a little more. He starts by explaining that if Christians engage the culture through the arts, sports shouldn’t be excluded. It is more than “caveman entertainment” and there are precious truths to mine.

Get this 34-minute audio and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

For more from Barnabas, visit his blog and tune into the podcast he leads, What Did T…

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