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 …

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Jesus’ person and his gospel-work for sinners have been joined together by God himself. And what God has joined together, let no man separate.

Assault on Christ’s person is an assault on the gospel. A compromised Christology inevitably will wreck the salvation of sinners.

Stephen Nichols gets this connection with crystal clarity. His just-published For Us and For Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church (Crossway, 2007) points time and again to the vital union between Christ’s person and the gospel. Jesus is one person with two natures. And the reason he took on the second nature was “for us and for our salvation” (in the words of Athanisus).¹

Not only doe…

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I had the privilege of sitting with my family while Tom Steller and Sam Crabtree ministered to us at the funeral of Felicity Margaret Piper who was stillborn at full term on September 22, 2007. Her father Abraham asked me to speak for five minutes on “A Granddaddy’s Thoughts.” Here is what I said.

I didn’t know Felicity Margaret. My experience of her life was entirely through other people for nine months. And my experience of her death, even though it was physically immediate and touchable, has been emotionally experienced almost entirely through other people.

So at this moment, what it means for me to be Felicity’s grandfather is that I am living this …

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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…

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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…

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In the hopes that you will pray for us, I’ll give you the news about Abraham’s daughter. Abraham is my son who serves as the Web Content Manager for Desiring God. He and Molly were expecting their second child on Sunday, September 23. Molly was big and healthy. Everyone was happy and excited about Orison’s little sister.

There had been no movement since Thursday. Molly had read this was nothing unusual, but the doctor said she could come for a check-up if she wished. Saturday morning (September 22) they went to Hennepin County Medical Center. No heart beat. Ultrasound confirms: the baby is dead.

The phone call came to me first. It was Abraham through sobs, “We lost the baby.”

…

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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…

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This week I’ve been indexing the forthcoming book, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, and have been significantly blessed. What an especially excellent book! Piper on joy. Carson on love. Driscoll on the church. Now I’m to Keller on the gospel, and I found his section on “gospel humiliation” so helpful and so complementary to John Piper's messages at Wheaton and his recent sermon on Joseph, I asked Crossway for permission to give our Desiring God blogees a foretaste of the book to come. (It's due out November 12.) Thanks to Crossway for giving this the go-ahead.

[The following is from Tim Keller's chapter, “The Gospel and the Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World.”]

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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…

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Andy Jackson is beginning a study of Christian Hedonism. He offers a reminder that all of us who have been around this theology awhile need to hear:

The purpose ... is not to simply swallow or memorize what Edwards, Piper, and Storms publicly declare, but to renew my strength, focus my teaching, and formulate my own convicitions and communication....

Pursue seriously your happiness in God! Remember, a static belief in Christian Hedonism can easily become dead orthodoxy, it must be sought after, renewed, and experienced again and again.