Infinitely more important than what matters to any Secretary of State is what matters to God.

For decades, John Piper has traveled the country, and written book after book, saying that what matters most to God is God — and what difference it makes.

Granted, this doesn’t typically land on the first-time hearers as good news. It feels threatening initially — threatening to our inherently man-centered view of the world and threatening to the way we’ve always understood God as having us at his center.

But what sounds uncomfortable at first can soon become a cause for great rejoicing. Quickly we realize the foundation on which we were standing was much shakier than we thought, and the new foun…

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Kicking off the first episode this year, we talk Passion, podcasts, and prayer.

Earlier this month John Piper spoke to over 60,000 college students in Atlanta. He recently talked with Tony about what the experience was like on the newly revitalized podcast, Ask Pastor John (forthcoming on iTunes).

Other podcasts to probe include John Piper Sermons, Theology Refresh, Authors on the Line, and Behind the Blog, all of which we sort out in this episode, not to mention our short discussion on intercession, excorism, and why “today” matters, from John Piper's Friday devotional for the DG Staff.

Stream or download this 16-minute podcast.

Mention…

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The Christian ministry is irreducibly supernatural. Even centrally supernatural.

Desiring God’s 2013 Pastors Conference is fast approaching. On February 4–6, we’ll gather in downtown Minneapolis under the banner “Brothers, We Are Still Not Professionals.” Subtitle: “Reclaiming the Centrality of the Supernatural in Ministry.”

So with the supernatural in mind, we sat down with John Piper to ask the hot-button questions. We started with speaking in tongues and with new-covenant prophecy, and asked Piper to draw from his thirty-plus years of pastoral ministry to get us oriented. Here’s what he said:

What Is Speaking in Tongues? (7 minutes)

What Is the Gift of Prophecy in the New Coven…

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For all eternity, God’s people will marvel at the splendor of his grace. Ephesians 1 tells us three times, in one long sentence, that God does all he does “to the praise of his glory” (verses 6, 12, and 14) — and that this glory is “the glory of his grace” (verse 6).

Bob Glenn, pastor of Redeemer Bible Church here in the Twin Cities, loves to celebrate God’s compelling and costly grace. When we had Glenn in the studio recently to record an episode of Theology Refresh, he insisted we not give him the topic ahead of time, but on the fly. We obliged, but served him up a theme in his wheelhouse. We think you’ll be helped by what Glenn has to say about God’s amazing grace.

To listen to this 1…

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Communication is important, and it's not easy. In this video, Tim Witmer, author of The Shepherd Leader at Home, gives some practical advice to men on how we communicate. For starters, he says, turn off the phone and be there.

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Recent video clips with Tim Witmer:

• Men, Know Your Family

Leading the charge against human slavery (enditmovement.com), Louie Giglio is the founder of the Passion Movement and serves as pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta. But what's his story?

A couple years ago, leading us to our National Conference on missions, John Piper sat down with Louie Giglio to talk about the history of the Passion Movement and its global cause. Part 1 of the interview details the background of Passion and its influence on college students around the world:

(Download the audio and video)

In Part 2 of the interview Pastor John and Louie talk about the global dimension of God's glory and Passion's role to mobilize students for the advance of the gospel among the …

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Men should know their families. Who would disagree with that statement? It seems so obvious that husbands and dads should know what's going on in the lives of their wife and children. But Tim Witmer, author of The Shepherd Leader at Home, explains that this is too easily overlooked.

In this video, Tim talks with Jon Bloom more about how men should know and pray for their families on the deepest levels:

What the world needs from the church is indomitable joy in Jesus in the very midst of suffering and sorrow.

This was not only the theme of John Piper’s last sermon as senior pastor (“Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing”), but also has been the profound life-experience of Passion worship-leader Christy Nockels.

Christy and her husband Nathan walked through the pain of back-to-back miscarriages. It was in this suffering and sorrow that they learned that Jesus is the greatest and deepest joy, and that God entrusts his children with suffering that they might learn this sweet lesson and be able to share it with others.

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More recent videos with Christy Nockels:

• Hopes for Passion 2013
• Pipe…

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At Desiring God, we love creating resources and telling stories that encourage, challenge, equip, and inspire the saints to live lives supremely glorifying to God. Video has become a powerful and easily shareable medium on the Web. With this is mind, Desiring God has invested in producing videos that attempt to tell stories of hope, unfold Scripture, cast vision, and spread a passion for Jesus. Here are the twelve videos from Desiring God that were viewed most in 2012.

In them, you’ll find a wide variety of persons and topics, from John Calvin to Brad Pitt, from the mystery of the manger to the mystery of marriage, from the gospel through hip hop to sanctification through exercise.

Wheth…

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Here at the outset of 2013, in the midst of so many vain resolutions, perhaps God would be pleased to do a fresh work of grace in your life. Maybe he would give you some “resolve for good” (2 Thessalonians 1:11) that he would be pleased to empower and sustain and use as a means for continued flourishing, or some new spiritual thriving, in your life.

To that end, we enlisted none other than Jerry Bridges. Just last month he joined us at the Desiring God offices, and we had the opportunity to talk briefly about the Christian spiritual disciplines — or means of grace, as Jerry prefers. This conversation is especially relevant here at the beginning of 2013 with so many new Bible-reading and pr…

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