You Will Suffer

I've watched this twice. Reduced to tears both times. I'm tired of killing myself every day trying to justify myself in not living as Christ has called me to live.

Jesus is good. Jesus is very good, and He deserves far more than I have been giving Him for quite some time. I've been showing up. I haven't been truly believing, I haven't been truly worshiping, and I haven't been truly loving God or others. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, and help my unbelief. May I be given the grace to move forward with joy and contentment in the midst of any circumstance.

"Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead." - Philippians 3:8-11

John Piper Confused by Laughing Audience While He Confesses Sin

Just read this and thought I would pass it along. I've noticed something similar happening during normal times of fellowship as well (ie. small groups, etc).

Lesson I learned from the stuff below: Just because people get uncomfortable talking/hearing about intense things, does not mean that I need to insert a joke as some sort of relief. Uncomfortable can be life changing. I don't want to train people to handle their sin by blowing it off with laughter.

A few weeks ago John Piper spoke at a conference for the American Association of Christian Counselors. You should listen to the first five minutes. Piper decided to be as transparent as possible, given the audience, and to discuss some of the prevailing sins that he has struggled with his entire life. And the audience laughed uproariously. Piper was obviously perplexed and commented on how strange their reaction was.

If you didn’t know Piper, some of it could probably come across–at least initially–as unintentionally funny. But it is quite clear soon after that Piper was not cracking jokes but was being deadly serious about sin.

Greg Gilbert, calling it “one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard,” sees in this an “incredibly important and massively undervalued lesson”:

"Do you see, at root, what had happened at that conference? Over the course of a couple of days, those conferees had been trained to expect humor from the speakers and therefore to react to the speakers with laughter–all the way to the point that they were incapable of seeing that John Piper was being serious in his confession of sin to them. You can quibble with whether the first couple of Piper’s statements were (unintentionally, it seems) kind of funny. I happen to think they were. By the time he gets to about the 3-minute mark, though, there’s nothing funny left, and he’s moved into very serious stuff. Yet the atmosphere of humor and levity at that conference was so thick–the training so complete–that the people were incapable of seeing it. So they laughed at Piper’s confession of his sin.

Apparently the conditioning of that audience to think everything is funny took no more than a couple of days.

How deep do you think that conditioning would be for a church who sat under a funny-man pastor every Sunday for fifteen years?"

HT: JT

John Piper Joins the World of Twitter

I'm not as Twitter crazy as some people, but I do enjoy seeing what other people are learning and experiencing whenever I get the chance. However, I never quite pegged John Piper to join the Twitter community, until I read this on his website:

Now what about Twitter? I find Twitter to be a kind of taunt: “Okay, truth-lover, see what you can do with 140 characters! You say your mission is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things! Well, this is one of those ‘all things.’ Can you magnify Christ with this thimble-full of letters?”

To which I respond:

The sovereign Lord of the earth and sky
Puts camels through a needle’s eye.
And if his wisdom see it mete,
He will put worlds inside a tweet.

So I am not inclined to tweet that at 10AM the cat pulled the curtains down. But it might remind me that the Lion of Judah will roll up the heavens like a garment, and blow out the sun like a candle, because he just turned the light on. That tweet might distract someone from pornography and make them look up.

I’ve been tweeting anonymously for a month mainly to test its spiritual and family effects on me. In spite of all the dangers, it seems like a risk worth taking. “All things were created through Christ and for Christ” (Colossians 1:16). The world does not know it, but that is why Twitter exists and that’s why I Tweet.

This doesn't make me want to tweet more or less, but it does give a little more guidance as to how to think about Twitter and the benefits it could have.

I wonder how long it took for John Piper to come up with a word that rhymed with "tweet". Brilliant.

Read the entire pose here.

John Piper on Preaching

This is a worthwhile six minutes. I'm not a preacher, however I still can appreciate and learn from what Piper is saying. I was especially struck by the part about the devil. I wish I had half as much passion for Jesus as Piper does. Yikes...

Church or Club?

John Piper Goes Gangsta'

One of my first blog posts contained a picture of John Piper the Mercenary. Well, looks like he is at it again...


I'm starting to think he is faking the whole conservative Baptist thing. Get the whole story here.

God is Enough

This Is How You Preach About Joy...

I know what you are thinking...And no John Piper is not a terrorist. As I was taking in my daily Desiring God fix, I noticed that they were offering video clips of various sermons that John Piper had done in Brazil in the early '90s. After about five minutes into my first clip I witnessed something I've never seen in a John Piper sermon before...A gun and a knife. We aren't talking about just any knife either! This thing has Crocodile Dundee written all over it. All humor aside, it is quite fascinating to see John Piper preach a sentence, and then wait for it to be translated, and then preach another sentence, and so on. While I don't speak Portuguese, the translator did a great job of relaying the power behind Piper's preaching. I would suggest that if any of you have time, please take a gander at these videos. You get to see a few things you may never see elsewhere....

1. Young John Piper
2. Sentence by Sentence Translation Preaching
3. Gun Toting, Knife Wielding John Piper
4. God Exalting, Joy Infused Preaching

Ok, the last one you see in basically every one of his sermons, but you get the point. Check these out before they fade into the archives of Desiring God.

Portuguese Preaching