The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple. Psalm 119:130 Unfolding…unpacking….brings to mind an image of a suitcase full of stuff. Now a suitcase full of stuff does not have much practical use until you unpack it. Your toothbrush and toothpaste can’t be used until you take them out of … More Unpack your BIble
John Piper on Philippians 1:21 ….the inner essence of worship is cherishing Christ as gain – indeed as more gain than all that life can offer – family, career, retirement, fame, food, friends. The essence of worship is experiencing Christ as gain. Or to use words that we love to use around here: it is … More Piper: Go hard after God
John Piper, in a message “Don’t Waste Your Life,” The great passion of the unwasted life is to magnify Christ. Here is the text that, perhaps more than any other, governs what life is really about: Philippians 1:20-21. Paul says, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, … More Don’t Waste Your Life
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. —Philippians 1:16 Tom Stellar, a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN, said this about the verse above, in a sermon, “God Finishes What He Starts”: This makes … More God Finishes What He Starts
John Piper on Ephesians 6, “The Weapon Serves the Wielding Power”-: …I have been impressed more than ever before that God has given us prayer not as an intercom for increased convenience in our secluded cottages, but as a walkie-talkie connecting the general’s headquarters with the transportation line and the field hospital and the front … More Prayer: wartime walkie-talkie or civilian intercom?
Pastor Coty Pinckney in a sermon, “The King and His Kingdom” comments: Jesus enters the synagogue on a Sabbath, takes the Isaiah scroll, and unrolls it to what we call chapter 61. Note that this section of Isaiah is about the Kingdom of God. Consider the verses that immediately precede what Jesus read: Violence shall … More Already…not yet. Not now…later.
John Piper, in a sermon, “Marriage: A Matrix of Christian Hedonism”- Christ died for the church in order that he might present to himself a beautiful bride. He endured the cross for the joy of marriage that was set before him. But what is the ultimate joy of the church? Is it not to be presented as … More Where do we find ultimate joy?
Coty Pinckney makes this very interesting observation regarding Luke 3 and 4: Most written accounts of a person’s life would put the genealogy right at the beginning – like the Gospel of Matthew. Again like Matthew, most often the genealogy will start with the ancestor and work forward to the subject of the account. But … More Intentional Contrast
ELIJAH PART 2, An Advent Poem by John Piper King Ahab called out from the rocks, “Do you think that a fire-tailed fox Can scorch the fields of Jezebel, And starve the stock, and dry the well, And mock the Baals, and scorn Jezreel, And not be crushed beneath the wheel Of Ahab’s chariot? Beware … More John Piper Poetry-Elijah
John Piper says, One way to describe the Christian life is to say that it is made up of paradoxes. That means that there are things in our lives that don’t seem to make sense, don’t seem to fit with other things in our lives. And yet we Christians have seen enough of God’s power … More Piper: The paradoxes of our lives really do fit together in God’s mind
