Tonight for the first time in my life I wept for North Korea.

On the second night of the Third Lausanne Congress taking place in Cape Town, South Africa, an 18 year-old girl from North Korea shared her story.

She was born into a wealthy family, her father an assistant to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong II. Eventually her father’s political fortunes shifted, and after being politically persecuted by the North Korean government, he, his wife, and his daughter escaped to China.

In China a relative brought her family to church where her parents came to know Jesus Christ. A few months later, however, her pregnant mother died from Leukemia. Her father started to study the Bible with missio…

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Impatience without self-control is always bad. But there is a time when impatience can be a sweet expression of love.

Judges 10:10-16

And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD, saying, “We have sinned against you, because we have forsaken our God and have served the Baals.”

And the LORD said to the people of Israel, “Did I not save you from the Egyptians and from the Amorites, from the Ammonites and from the Philistines? The Sidonians also, and the Amalekites and the Maonites oppressed you, and you cried out to me, and I saved you out of their hand. Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods; therefore I will save you no more. Go and cry out to the gods whom you have chosen; le…

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In chapter nine of When I Don't Desire God, John Piper introduces a memorable and helpful acronym for what to pray before reading Scripture: I. O. U. S.

• Incline my heart to you, not to prideful gain or any false motive. (Psalm 119:36)
• Open my eyes to behold wonderful things in your Word. (Psalm 119:18)
• Unite my heart to fear your name. (Psalm 86:11)
• Satisfy me with you steadfast love. (Psalm 90:14)

An unfortunate side effect of repeatedly praying the same prayer is that, over a period of time, it can lose its sense of pertinence. One way to keep it fresh is to unpack the content with language that expresses what you mean in a new way.

For example, here's an amplification of the I. O…

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Jonathan Edwards had a God-entranced vision of the world. He writes in Miscellanies #119:

The things of the ceremonial law are not the only things whereby God designedly shadowed forth spiritual things, but with an eye to such a representation were all the transactions of the life of Christ ordered. And very much of the wisdom of God in the creation appears in his so ordering things natural, that they livelily represent things divine and spiritual, [such as] sun, fountain, vine; as also, much of the wisdom of God in his providence, in that the state of mankind is so ordered, that there are innumerable things in human affairs that are lively pictures of the things of the gospel, such as sh…

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Recently I picked up William P. Farley’s book, Gospel-Powered Parenting and found exactly what I needed to hear as a young father. I’m not going to write a full review, since Tim Challies already did that, but I hope this post whets your appetite a little.

Since discovering that the gospel is the fuel that drives Christians to loving, joyful obedience, I’ve had my eye out for a book that would help my wife and I apply the gospel to our children as we nurture them in the Lord. We don’t want to train up a group of thespian (fake) Christians, but joy-filled, fruitful, enduring (real) ones. As Farley points out, the devil can produce outwardly “moral” children—our goal as parents ought to be …

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. . . Or What Jesus Meant When He Said, “Whoever Feeds on My Flesh and Drinks My Blood Has Eternal Life”

The previous day Jesus had fed 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish. Then that night he walked miles across the Sea of Galilee before catching up with his disciples in their boat.

The crowd he had fed followed him to Capernaum. And they knew something amazing must have happened. Last evening they had seen Jesus send his disciples away in the only boat available. Now here he was! Only a miracle could have gotten him there that fast. Another reason he should be king!

But just as the momentum was building, Jesus squashed it. To his adoring fans he said,

Truly, truly, I say to you,

…

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It was October 14, 1979—31 years ago today—when John Piper first felt “irretrievably called” to enter the pastoral and preaching ministry. Justin Taylor told the story well a year ago on the 30th anniversary.

Here’s how John remembered October, 1979, in his 2002 sermon “The Absolute Sovereignty of God” on Romans 9 (quoted on page 33 of For the Fame of God’s Name:

[It was] the fall of 1979. I was on sabbatical from teaching at Bethel College. My one aim on this leave was to study Romans 9 and write a book on it that would settle, in my own mind, the meaning of these verses. After six years of teaching and finding many students in every class ready to discount my interpretation of this ch…

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We commended Darrin Patrick’s new book Church Planterbefore, but here’s a particular word for the preface, titled “Why Focus on Men?” It may be one of the best short articles on biblical manhood now available.

Below are a couple paragraphs that give the flavor of Patrick’s even-handed perspective—an approach that critiques both the left and the right, and thus steers clear of both the liberal and conservative errors.

These sentences won’t sit well with the left:

The persons of the Trinity are equal, but there is, nevertheless, submission within the Godhead by the Son and by the Spirit to the Father. My interpretation of this divine deference is that submission is a characteristic of a

…

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For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:33).

As I explained in my previous post, hope is what energizes the soul, and promises are what we feed our soul in order to get hope—just like we energize our bodies by eating food.

Human beings are specifically designed to eat a particular kind of soul food: God’s Word. That’s why in both the Old and New Testaments, God emphasized that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Deuteronomy 8:3, Matthew 4:4).

When God speaks, it is much different than when you and I speak. When we speak, we describe or defend our perceptions of reality. When God spea…

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A great quote from T. F. Torrance in his article, "The Hypostatic Union" (36, paragraphing mine) —

It is important to see that if the Deity of Christ is denied, then the Cross becomes a terrible monstrosity.

If Jesus Christ is man only and not also God, then we lose faith in God and man.

We lose faith in God because we could not believe in a God who allows the best man that ever lived to be hounded to death on the Cross—is that all that God cares about our humanity and its search after God, after truth and righteousness and peace?

Put Jesus Christ a man on the Cross, and put God in heaven, like some Mohammedan deity imprisoned in His own lonely abstract Deity—and you cannot …

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