Doug Wilson, speaker at our 2012 Conference for Pastors:
We'd love for you to join us in Minneapolis from January 30 to February 1. Register for just $145, or bring a group of five or more from your church for just $100 (per person).
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Recent posts for the 2012 Conference for Pastors —
Charles Spurgeon:
Many prayers fail of their errand because there is no faith in them. Prayers which are filled with doubt are requests for refusal. Imagine that you wrote to a friend and said, “Dear Friend, I am in great trouble and I, therefore, tell you, and ask for your help because it seems right to do so. But though I thus write, I have no belief that you will send me any help. Indeed, I should be mightily surprised if you did and should speak of it as a great wonder.”
Will you get the help, do you think? I should say your friend would be sensible enough to observe the little confidence which you have in him and he would reply that, as you did not expect anything, he would not ast…
Pastor John, during prayer week at Bethlehem in 1987:
One of the values of praying together, in fact, is that it can cut the root of pride by exposing us to the humility and heart-searching longings that get expressed in the prayers of others. My own prayers have often been reproved and corrected and deepened just by being in a group of godly people of prayer.
In fact, I wonder if we should expect our private prayer life to advance in maturity and depth and intensity if we never pray with others who can lift us higher and take us deeper. Wouldn't that be like expecting a young person to become a gifted conversationalist, but always sending him away to play by himself whenever there was …
The foundation to our joy in God is God's own joy in himself. Christian Hedonism only makes sense when we understand God's supremacy in all things. He really is sovereign and he really is good.
And the five points of Calvinism are where we see these truths come together. The doctrines of grace articulate how God saves us in Jesus, for his glory and our joy.
This is why I'm excited about a forthcoming book from Crossway: Greg Forster's The Joy of Calvinism: Knowing God's Personal, Unconditional, Irresistible, Unbreakable Love (preorder from Amazon).
Forster has written this book to show that "real Calvinism is all about joy" . . .
I want to tell you what Calvinism says, especially…
Part of my message to Passion 2012 defined true Christian freedom. Here is a fuller statement of what that is taken from a sermon on John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
There are at least four kinds of freedom. And each one adds a crucial dimension of freedom to the last until we get to the full Christian freedom — "free indeed." Let me try to sum up these four kinds of freedom in one definition of full and complete freedom:
You are fully free — completely free, free indeed — when you have the (1) desire, (2) the ability, (3) and the opportunity to do (4) what will make you happy in a thousand years.
Or we could say, You are fully free when you have …
John Piper and Darrin Patrick recently discussed the Bible's teaching on biblical manhood and womanhood. In this 15-minute video they get to the heart of our cultural epidemic and chart the way forward for how the church can help:
Time-markers:
00:42 — The absence of men and its implications.
03:01 — Definitions for manhood and womanhood.
07:47 — What can the church do to help this situation?
10: 00 — How does biblical complementarity aid evangelism?
12: 51 — How does manhood and womanhood get completed in Jesus?
Stream or download the interview.
Darrin's topic at the 2012 Conference for Pastors is on how to build men for the mission of the local church. The conference is just a few weeks …
According to folk history, the…
…English word sincere comes from two Latin words: sine (without) and cera (wax). In the ancient world, dishonest merchants would use wax to hide defects, such as cracks, in their pottery so that they could sell their merchandise at a higher price. More reputable merchants would hang a sign over their pottery — sine cera (without wax) — to inform customers that their merchandise was genuine.1
I’m no etymological expert. But I have witnessed plenty of misleading marketing by mendacious merchants in my time. So the explanation seems plausible to me. I mean, is there not a lot of “wax” hiding a lot of defects all around us?
But in all sincerity, I know t…
Psalm 1:1–2,
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
Psalm 1 presents two (and only two) ways to live: the way of the world or the way of the Word. Those who “walk in the way of the wicked, stand in the way of sinners, and sit in the seat of scoffers” are simply people oriented around the world’s values. This is the wide and easy gate leading to destruction (Matthew 7:13).
“The wicked” of Psalm 1 are those who seek independence from God, those who have only a human or earthly per…
John Piper read G. K. Chesterton at the advice of Clyde Kilby, one of his professors of English Literature at Wheaton College back in the day. And this book recommendation from Kilby didn't come in a vacuum. Piper writes about how Kilby himself was amazed at the world, and that, with a pastoral heart and a poet's eye, he influenced his students to really believe Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God."
In a 1976 lecture, Kilby gave ten steps on how to stay alive to the beauty of God's world:
- At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things a…
When I read the works of men like James P. Boyce and Jonathan Edwards, I am amazed at the depth of their biblical knowledge and the keenness of their personal application. At the same time, I am astounded that these theological giants could justify the owning of slaves, support slavery as a system, and conform to the racial prejudice common in their day.
John Piper is right: “One of the central cadences of the gospel walk is the breaking down of ethnic hostilities and suspicions, and the impulse of unity and harmony” (Bloodlines, 175). So how is it possible to believe the gospel and articulate so clearly the doctrine of justification by faith alone, yet miss how this doctrine severs t…
