We should seek to stigmatize abortion by associating it with racism as closely as the truth warrants.

People today don’t oppose the enslavement of blacks merely because they think it's wrong. They oppose it because otherwise they would be viewed as Neanderthals. It's easy to oppose it because to do so is fashionable.

That’s a good thing. It always helps when the right thing happens to be P.C.

So let’s be wise in showing the way abortion is closer to racism and slavery than people see.

The Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case of 1857 held that black slaves were property without rights as persons, yet today we view that as unthinkable. So the Supreme Court in the case of Roe v. Wade (…

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In Romans 12:13, Paul points out that one effect of God’s mercy on his people is that they “seek to show hospitality.”

Seek. Pursue. Chase after.

They are not merely willing to be hospitablewhen someone comes to the door or asks for a favor. But they seek to show hospitality. They’re looking for and creating opportunities to be hospitable, not just answering the doorbell.

That Paul would point to seeking, not merely being willing to be hospitable, makes sense. After all, it’s an implication he’s drawing from the gospel—a gospel that says God was not merely hospitable to us when we asked him, but he sought to show hospitality.

He took initiative toward us before we showed up at hi…

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Mark 8:34-36:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

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On April 14th at Georgetown University there were "Remarks by the President on the Economy".

Now, there's a parable at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that tells the story of two men. The first built his house on a pile of sand, and it was soon destroyed when a storm hit. But the second is known as the wise man, for when "the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock."

It was founded upon a rock. We cannot rebuild this economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity -- a foundation that will move us from a

…

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The week after Easter the pastoral staff got away for our annual pastors and wives retreat for two-and-a-half days in southern Minnesota. The aim is to deepen and strengthen our marriages and our unified vision for ministry at Bethlehem.

My happy job is to serve that goal in ministering the word on our first afternoon together. What I chose to talk about was being “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3).

The reason for this focus was, negatively, that if this pastoral staff disintegrates in disunity, the damage to the church will be great; and, positively, if God would keep us unified around our mission, the Christ-exalting scope of the impa…

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This is an advertisement for Piper Construction Company, and a public celebration of God’s goodness to us as a family.

Our kitchen got a makeover with Benjamin Piper’s eye for craftsmanship and beauty. If you live in or near the Twin Cities and need any kind of remodeling—from decks to attics to basements to kitchens to bathrooms—I am sold on this fellow’s workmanship. A wise (and skillful) son makes a glad father.

Here is where he started:

Here is where he finished:

He’s more than a contractor to two grateful parents. God is kind to us.

A guest post by Karsten Piper

With “Descending Theology: The Resurrection,” Mary Karr offers us a poem on an over-familiar yet hyper-daring topic: Jesus rising from the dead.

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now

it’s your limb…

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The book featured in our homepage banner today, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die, has an introduction that might be interesting to your Jewish friends. In answering why Jesus came to die, I tried to connect Calvary with the concentration camps. It’s risky. But I tried to be very sensitive.

I would like this introduction to be winsome for Jewish people who wonder what Christians believe about the death of Jesus. Here’s a quote from the Introduction.

I am not the first to link Calvary and the concentration camps—the suffering of Jesus Christ and the suffering of Jewish people. In his heart-wrenching, innocence-shattering, mouth-shutting book Night, Elie Wiesel tells of hi…

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One puzzle in the passion story is, Who’s the young man running through the garden without his clothes on?

Mark 14:51–52 says,

And a young man followed [Jesus], with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

There are several options for who this is. But the best may be that it's the Gospel-writer Mark himself, who was in the city and an eyewitness to the Passion week proceedings. William Lane explains:

Several Fathers of the Church conjectured that the young man was Mark himself, who is known to have been a resident in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12) and in whose house, it was held by traditi…

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CHRISTIAN:

Hello, Death, my old enemy. My old slave-master. Have you come to talk to me again? To frighten me?

I am not the person you think I am. I am not the one you used to talk to. Something has happened. Let me ask you a question, Death.

Where is your sting?

DEATH, sneeringly:

My sting is your sin.

CHRISTIAN:

I know that, Death. But that’s not what I asked you. I asked, where is your sting? I know what it is. But tell me where it is.

Why are you fidgeting, Death? Why are you looking away? Why are you turning to go? Wait, Death, you have not answered my question. Where is your sting?

W…

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