A few years back, in a sermon titled, “I’m Sending You to Open Their Eyes,” John Piper said,

Be a lavish giver. Be known as a generous person, not a stingy person. Jesus said, “Lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). Combine this reputation with giving books, if you know someone is a reader. Give a Christian book that cost you seven or ten or fifteen dollars. Tell them what it meant to you and that you would love to talk about it sometime. If you don’t know the person, ask for their permission to give them a book that meant a lot to you.

This is what I regularly do on the plane. Sometimes conversations are easy to get into about Christ because I am a pastor. Other times they’re not…

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Healthy churches are no happy place for lone wolves. Especially in leadership. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus’s apostles assume and instruct that his undershepherds do the work of Christian leadership together.

In Acts 20:17, it is the plural elders of the Ephesian church that Paul calls to come to him on the beach at Miletus and whom he calls overseers (plural). It’s the plural overseers whom he addresses, along with the deacons, as he begins his letter to the young church at Philippi (Philippians 1:1). The apostle summons respect from the Thessalonians not for a single leader, but for “those (plural) who labor among you and are over you in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 5:12), and he men…

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The antichrist is coming. In fact, many deceivers have already gone out into the world. The moral landscape darkens around us. Christians are increasingly marginalized. How then should we live?

We should love one another.

We should love one another in the face of Satan’s final cataclysmic assault against the church. That’s the call in 2 John, and the main point of John Piper’s most recent message at Bethlehem Baptist.

Stream or download the sermon, “Life Together at the End of the Age.”

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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There’s lots of activity this week at the desiringGod.org offices, even with the single-digit temperatures in Minneapolis. With a team of web designers here to work on a site redesign, the content team sat down to talk about recent articles on the blog, the latest podcast episodes, and a new app under construction, among other things.

Listen to this 20-minute podcast.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Audio and Video from the 2013 Conference for Pastors
• From Radical Lesbian to Redeemed Christian (interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield)
• Hospitality on Mission (interview with Butterfield)
• Hospitality and the Great Commission by David Mathis
• Authors …

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Jesus absorbed God’s wrath for us.

Among the many other happenings during the most important hours in the history of the world — as the Son of God was crucified outside Jerusalem at a place called Golgotha (Mark 15:22) — this accomplishment is the center and foundation and heart.

Jesus had no sin of his own. It was not his own penalty that he bore, but he was a substitute for others, for those who would be joined to him by faith. This we call penal substitutionary atonement — Jesus reconciled sinners to God by being their substitute punishment. He absorbed in his person God’s righteous wrath against us, because of our sin, that we might be free from sin and its penalty and liberated to enj…

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In Germany 467 years ago, in a small, backwater town called Eisleben, the shaking hand of a dying man scribbled this simple line: We are beggars. This is true.

Martin Luther died on February 18, 1546. These last words of weakness echoed the life-changing truth he’d unearthed in the Scriptures: we don’t bring anything to the table of our justification. Jesus truly died for the ungodly.

Luther came to understand that if we are to be accepted by God, we need a perfect righteousness we can’t produce — we need an alien righteousness given to us by Another.

But this discovery didn’t just happen. It came after hours of the painstaking study of Scripture. Luther gave himself to the Book, which he…

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What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “biblical counseling”?

No doubt, many think of a movement that takes sin seriously. A growing number may call to mind a movement that is increasingly taking suffering seriously as well.

But ask the question to one of the movement’s key leaders, Ed Welch. You may be pleasantly surprised how illuminating and practical his simple and straightforward answer is.

Biblical counseling, in its best conception, gets at how the entirety of the church — not just trained professionals — can be mobilized to love others well. It’s about ordinary people being used by God to help the lives of others. At one level, it’s even as simple as learning enough about som…

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Years ago John Piper said something about reading that I have found to be spot on:

It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don't begrudge the 99%. And that life-changing insight usually comes in a moment, a moment whose value is all out of proportion to its little size. That's why I call it an “immeasurable moment.”¹

This is the reason we read books — for life-changing moments. And it…

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Minnesota is not the first place most people would choose to visit in February. But you wouldn’t have guessed it this past Monday to Wednesday in the warm confines of the Minneapolis Convention Center. Gathering for the 26th time, the Desiring God Conference for Pastors took up the theme of the supernatural in pastoral ministry.

We’d like to thank those who joined us onsite and helped make this such a memorable event — especially our eight plenary and seminar speakers. Also, we are grateful for nearly 5,000 of you who tuned in through the live-stream and hope you were blessed.

The audio and video of each talk is now available for free streaming and download.

Centrality of the Church in Di…

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