I keep thinking about this statement that John Piper posted three days ago:
God never does only one thing. In everything he does he is doing thousands of things. Of these we know perhaps half a dozen.
This paragraph from my favorite Piper book is much more meaningful now that I see my little daughter’s eyes light up every time she sees something new:
What a wonderful experience it is when God grants us a moment in which we don’t take anything for granted, but see the world as though it was invented yesterday. How we would marvel at the wisdom of God. We should pray for the eyes of children again, when they saw everything for the first time. William Quayle reminded me of this recently in his lively book, The Pastor-Preacher. He said, “A cow has pretty eyes, as quiet as a pool of quiet water, but uneventful eyes. There is no touch of wonder in their dreamless depths. The eyes are therefore soulless. A child’s eyes are fairly lightning. They are to see things: they are the windows of the brain, and bewilder like a play of swords of fire.” These are the eyes we need to see the unending wisdom of God running through all the world. There will be no exhausting the understanding of God. We will be making new discoveries for all eternity.
—John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (2d ed.; Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2000), 92 (emphasis added).
Related:
Three more DVD series and corresponding study guides are now available in the John Piper Small Group Series.
1. TULIP: The Pursuit of God’s Glory in Salvation (DVD | Study Guide)
2. Why We Believe the Bible (DVD | Study Guide)
3. What’s the Difference? Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible (DVD | Study Guide)
I recently watched almost all of TULIP and most of Why We Believe the Bible with my parents and siblings, and we thoroughly enjoyed them. The professionally filmed DVDs are superb. Piper teaches from an overhead using transparencies and engagingly interacts with the text of Scripture. Very effective. Great resources.
John Piper: “Boasting is the response of pride to success. Self-pity is the response of pride to failure.”
Update: Here’s a follow-up: ”BOASTING: ‘I deserve praise because I’ve achieved so much.’ SELF-PITY: ‘I deserve praise because I’ve endured so much.’”
Related: If you’re not on Twitter, you can follow John Piper on Twitter in your blog reader via his RSS feed.
This two-minute clip from The Princess Bride is my favorite light-hearted illustration of the Arminian view of human depravity (an issue integrally related to prevenient grace):
This is the notable part of the exchange:
“Well it just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. . . . Now mostly dead is slightly alive. All dead—well, with all dead, there’s only usually one thing that you can do.”
“What’s that?”
“Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”
Recommended resources:
John Piper commends Kevin Bauder’s “A Time to Speak Up“:
I would like to encourage all fundamentalists and former fundamentalists to feel a good breeze from the fevered landscape of controversy.
I mentioned previously that I live-blogged this event.
Audio and video is now avaiable on DG’s site:
Two illustrations from John Piper’s four-part series on Ruth (September 2008) are noteworthy:
In part 2, Piper gives a six-minute autobiographical sketch (10:20–16:45 in the MP3). It includes how he met his wife, went to seminary, and became a professor and then a pastor. The author of Don’t Waste Your Life here underscores another theme: Don’t plan your life because God already has! One could add qualifications to this (e.g., don’t inflexibly plan your life), but I think the main point is sound. (Indeed, Piper qualifies this in part 3.)
In part 3, Piper recounts in 4.5-minutes (2:20-6:50) a dark cloud in the pilgrimage of Bethlehem Baptist Church. In 1993, Piper heard a romantic recorded message from one of the BBC staff members to another on staff. After a “hellish” six weeks, the male staff member finally confessed to seven years of adultery. The upshot was that 230 people left the church, which merely survived and didn’t grow for three years. “It was horrible, and the Lord’s hand was on us for good.”
On December 17, 2008, John Piper warmly recommended Leif Enger’s novel Peace Like a River. Jenni and I read it together over the last month and finished it last night.
Enger is a gifted writer who crafts words like an artist, and his novel has several redeeming qualities. The problem, however, is that the story’s plot is far too thin. It starts well but then fizzles. We kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. Perhaps this says more about us than it does about Enger—sort of like how the only thing being evaluated at fancy art museums is the people looking at the paintings, not the paintings themselves!
Should you read Peace Like a River? A cheeky side of me wants to answer, “No, don’t waste your life.” :-)
I just listened to Justin Taylor’s Sunday morning sermon on abortion that he preached at his church on January 18, 2009. Three words come to mind:
After listening to Justin’s sermon, I have the kind of feeling that I might have felt if I could have watched Schindler’s List while living near Nazi concentration camps while WWII was still in progress. How can this unspeakably horrific evil legally be happening all around me? What am I doing about it?
Cf. these posts on abortion by Justin Taylor and John Piper this month:
See also John Piper’s resources on abortion.
John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2003) includes this convicting paragraph (pp. 45–46):
An American Tragedy: How Not to Finish Your One Life
I will tell you what a tragedy is. I will show you how to waste your life. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who “took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. See my shells.” That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.
(Don’t Waste Your Life and the study guide are available for free as PDFs.)
I just became aware of a related 32-page booklet:
John Piper. Rethinking Retirement: Finishing Life for the Glory of Christ. Wheaton: Crossway, 2009.
Rethinking Retirement is already available for free as a PDF. (I must have missed it when Desiring God highlighted this on October 7, 2008.)
I just downloaded about 250 “Ask Pastor John” MP3s by John Piper. Desiring God posts these short Q&As three times a week.
I must have missed these because I don’t use the podcast feature. I didn’t realize that they have their own RSS feed.
Justin Taylor’s gentle, respectful response to John Piper notes this:
(1) The fact that God ordains all things (i.e., his secret will) has a limited effect on our decision making. It can’t prescribe how we act, but it can prevent us from having the wrong perspective (e.g., anxiety, fear, despair, misplaced trust, etc.). But in terms of interpreting events, the main way to read providence is backwards (as John Flavel wrote: “Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backward”).
(2) The fact that God ordains means ensures that our actions have significance. The ordained outcome can never be seen as an excuse for complacency or fatalism.
Calvinists believe in God-ordained means. This is not merely a platitude. John M. Frame says it well in Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1994):
The relation of divine sovereignty to human responsibility is one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. It is plain from Scripture in any case that both are real and that both are important. Calvinistic theology is known for its emphasis on divine sovereignty—for its view that God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:11). But in Calvinism there is at least an equal emphasis upon human responsibility.
An equal emphasis? Many would not be willing to say that about Calvinism. . . . God’s sovereignty does not exclude, but engages, human responsibility. Indeed, it is God’s sovereignty that grants human responsibility, that gives freedom and significance to human choices and actions, that ordains an important human role within God’s plan for history (pp. 14-15, emphasis added).
Jenni and I finally got around to watching Mark Driscoll interview John Piper on his parents, wife, and children. This 50-minute interview is unusually personal and transparent. Piper displays humility and wisdom, and we found it convicting and edifying.
On November 20, 1998 in Orlando, Florida at the annual meeting and fiftieth anniversary of the Evangelical Theological Society, D. A. Carson and John Piper gave back-to-back hour-long plenary addresses to about 1,000 ETS members (mostly college and seminary professors):
James A. Borland reported this in the next issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society:
On Friday afternoon, two plenary sessions were held. In Don Carson’s message, “Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Scholars,” he painted the landscape of the future for Christian higher academics. John Piper then addressed the subject of “Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Pastors and Missionaries.” He pointed out that one may learn much, but if the main thing is ignored or missing, all is lost. That one thing is to know God and to delight in him above everything else. Several questions succeeded Carson’s speech, but a holy hush of meditation followed Piper’s challenge before the large audience began to sing “Fairest Lord Jesus,” a capella (JETS 42 [1999]: 175).
On April 23, 2009 (over ten years later), D. A. Carson and John Piper will once again give back-to-back hour-long addresses on the same topic, only more focused: “The Pastor as Scholar, and the Scholar as Pastor: Reflections on Life and Ministry with John Piper and D.A. Carson.”
Update: Mike Bird reflects on DAC’s lecture.
In “Preaching as Worship: Meditations on Expository Exultation” (Trinity Journal 16 [1995]: 29–45), Piper ends with six pointed applications, including this one (p. 44):
2. Turn off the television.
It is not necessary for relevance. And it is a deadly place to rest the mind. Its pervasive banality, sexual innuendo, and God-ignoring values have no ennobling effects on the preacher’s soul. It kills the spirit. It drives God away. It quenches prayer. It blanks out the Bible. It cheapens the soul. It destroys spiritual power. It defiles almost everything. I have taught and preached for twenty years now and never owned a television. It is unnecessary for most of you, and it is spiritually deadly for all of you.
Here are links to a couple sermons I recently preached:
The first is expositional, the second more theological (and heavily indebted to John Frame’s The Doctrine of God and John Piper’s “Are There Two Wills in God?”).
Here’s a convicting excerpt (pp. 173–74) from John Piper’s “Faith in Future Grace vs. Impatience” (chapter 13 in Future Grace): Continue Reading »
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