In order to fulfill the Great Commission, we need to know whom Jesus wants us to invite to our Thanksgiving dinner.

John Piper said these words in 1980 when the fourth Thursday of November was right around the corner. As a new pastor wanting to lead his people to obey all of Jesus's commands, he opened to Luke 14:12–14.

[Jesus] said also to the man who had invited him, "When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you…

Continue Reading →

Gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture. The doctrines of grace create a culture of grace, a social environment of acceptance and hope and freedom and joy. Jesus himself touches us through his truths to create a new kind of community. Without the doctrines, the culture alone is fragile. Without the culture, the doctrines alone appear pointless.

Isn’t the doctrine-creating-culture dynamic what we find in the New Testament? For example, the doctrine of regeneration creates a culture of humility (Ephesians 2:1–9). The doctrine of justification creates a culture of inclusion (Galatians 2:11­–16). The doctrine of reconciliation creates a culture of peace (Ephesians 2:14–16). The doctrine of sa…

Continue Reading →

In 1962 Don and Carol Richardson came into contact with a remote tribe in West New Guinea known as the Sawi people. They were cannabilistic headhunters without a written language, nor any clue about Jesus.

The Richardsons, along with their three children, preached the gospel to the Sawi people and witnessed a remarkable movement of God. The story is told in the best-selling book Peace Child and has inspired many to take the gospel to the furthest ends of the earth.

Just recently — fifty years after they first met the Sawi — the Richardsons returned to the village they once called home. This short 15-minute film from Pioneers documents that experience. It is one of the most amazing thing…

Continue Reading →

Timothy Keller's newest book releases tomorrow — Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work. It's a clear and thoughtful treatment of vocation and calling.

We put Dr. Keller on the line to ask him about the 9 to 5 labors into which we invest so much of our lives. So what is the purpose of our work? What if we get stuck in a job we don’t enjoy? And why does it seem the church has such a hard time getting its arms around vocation in the first place?

Click below to download or listen to Dr. Keller explain:

God’s Work and Ours: An Interview with Timothy Keller (17 minutes)

Subscribe to the Authors on the Line podcast in iTunes here.

---

Previous Authors on the Line episodes…

Continue Reading →

A reality we don't deserve (eternally enjoying God) affords a price we're not able to pay (appeasing God's just wrath against our sin). But then there's Jesus.

As John Piper explains, "The gospel is the good news that God in Christ paid the price of suffering, so that we could have the prize of enjoying him forever."

Jesus died for us sinners to remove every barrier between us and the highest, fullest, deepest good, which is God himself. This truth is profoundly biblical and has characterized the theology of Bethlehem Baptist Church these past thirty years.

Considering two Scripture texts and a snapshot from church history, Piper shows that the "gospel-love of God" is the gift of himse…

Continue Reading →

To say that one thing is not another thing is not to register a complaint against either.

To say that the sun is not the moon is not to criticize the moon, and to say that the land is not the sea is not to file a complaint against the sea. God establishes differences in the world with the intention of them complementing one another, and not so that his variegated world would try to melt itself down into one great indistinguishable mass. A pine cone is not a cheesecake is not a covered bridge. A man is not a woman, but God bless them both.

And so to exhort my brothers in the ministry to remember that they are not sisters is in no way a form of disdain, either open or disguised, toward t…

Continue Reading →

His plans were frustrated again by a lousy generator. No matter how many times he pulled the rope, it would not start up. He was used to his rented generators stopping intermittently during his itinerant work in these remote parts of Nigeria, but tonight was the first time a generator wouldn't even start.

There was no time to find a new one. The open field was swelling with more than one thousand Nigerian villagers. Word of his coming had clearly spread, as natives walked some distance to gather together and fill up an open area of dusty common land that spread out from between the mud huts, a plot of land and a village so desolate it has not yet been photographed in any detail by Google …

Continue Reading →

We don’t often talk about our daily enjoyment of God with our friends — a deficiency J. I. Packer picked up some years ago when he compared this trend to the Puritan age:

Communion with God was a great thing; to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology — but rarely of their daily experience of God. (215)

This seems accurate. And to combat this current t…

Continue Reading →

From Rob Lister’s forthcoming book, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Crossway; Nov. 30), pages 255–256:

In the aftermath of the fall, we do not hate sin as we ought, nor do we pursue righteousness as we should. Instead, we dabble with sin. Given a moment’s reflection, we recognize how foolish it is to dabble with sin. But because of the weakness of our affections, sin dabbling is what we love to pursue, apart from the grace of God (cf. 2 Thess. 2:9–10).

God’s ethical transcendence, then, is not one of dispassion, but of perfect passion. . . . God is eternally, transcendently, and unshakably loving in the intra-Trinitarian fellowship. The intra-Tr…

Continue Reading →

Are you struggling with doubts in the middle of painful circumstances? So did John the Baptist. As he sat in Herod Antipas’s prison waiting likely execution, he was afflicted with doubts about Jesus.

---

“Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

This was a surprising question coming from John the Baptist.

It’s unclear exactly when John first consciously knew that Jesus was the Son of God, whose way he had come to prepare. The Apostle John quotes him as saying, “I myself did not know him” (John 1:31) around the time he baptized Jesus.

This is remarkable because John’s mother, Elizabeth, had known. She knew because John announced it to her in utero by leapin…

Continue Reading →