Here are links to a couple sermons I recently preached:
- “Pray For Those In Authority (1 Tim 2:1-8)” (6-22-08)
MP3 (48:13) | outline
- “Does God Have Two Wills? Does He Want All People To Be Saved In One Sense And Not Want All People To Be Saved In Another Sense? (1 Tim 2:4)” (6-29-08)
MP3 (45:26) | outline
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 »
See here. Piper’s attitude is commendable.
On a related note, I enjoyed observing him and interacting a bit last week at the annual pastor’s colloquium for The Gospel Coalition. The man is passionate about guarding and advancing the gospel, and for that I gratefully thank God!
All of the MP3s for the general sessions and panel discussions are now available for free downloads. Brief bios of the speakers are available here.
I’d recommend listening to these in order:
- Ligon Duncan: Sound Doctrine: Essential to Faithful Pastoral Ministry
- Panel Discussion 1: Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, Mohler
- Thabiti Anyabwile: Bearing the Image: Identity, the Work of Christ, and the Church
- Panel Discussion 2: Anyabwile, Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, Mohler
- John MacArthur: The Sinner Neither Able Nor Willing: The Doctrine of Absolute Inability
- Mark Dever: Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology
- Panel Discussion 3: Dever, Duncan, MacArthur, Mahaney, Mohler
- R.C. Sproul: The Curse Motif of the Atonement
- Panel Discussion 4: Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, Mohler, Sproul
- Albert Mohler: Why Do They Hate It So? The Doctrine of Substitution
- Panel Discussion 5: Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, Mohler
- John Piper: How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice
- Panel Discussion 6: Dever, Duncan, Mahaney, Mohler, Piper
- C.J. Mahaney: Sustaining a Pastor’s Soul
Related:
Mark Dever posed his eighth “T4Free question” on the T4G blog earlier this week, and I was surprised that my answer was selected. (Perhaps mine had the least misspelled words and the most Piper-like hyphenated ones! Regardless, I’m grateful for this happy providence and eager for edification along with about 5,000 other people at T4G in mid-April 2008.) Here’s Mark’s question followed by the 100-words-or-less answer I submitted:
Q: “What Christian book (other than the Bible) do you think has been read by the most people attending T4G 2008, and why?”
A: “John Piper’s Desiring God
“This richly theological and warmly devotional best-seller has been the means for sending countless Christians on a trajectory towards theology that is increasingly joyful, robust, God-centered, Christ-exalting, and gospel-treasuring.
“My testimony is not unusual. I read it as a freshman in college and again during my first year of seminary, and it had a revolutionary effect on my Christian life. It shaped my attitude towards Reformed soteriology and convinced me that God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him.”
In addition to selling the print book for just $9.50, Desiring God Ministries offers the following free resources:
I thank God for John Piper. He is a gift to the church.
On a related note, D. A. Carson pays Piper no small compliment in the preface to Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson by mentioning him parallel to three other giants of the faith:
“But my aim is much more modest: to convey enough of his [i.e., Tom Carson's] ministry and his own thought that ordinary ministers are encouraged, not least by the thought that the God of Augustine, Calvin, Spurgeon, and Piper is no less the God of Tom Carson, and of you and me” (p. 11).
Last summer I published a blog post entitled “Planet Earth: A Theological Documentary.”
Yesterday morning during a painfully freezing (!) early morning run, I was listening to an MP3 from John Piper’s 2007 regional conference on “The Pleasures of God.” In part 2 (MP3 | video), Piper describes the pleasure of God in His creation, and he enthusiastically endorses the above “Planet Earth” DVDs.
In the MP3, start at 38:08 to get the context (“God loves the world that He made”) and listen until 42:43. Here are a few highlights:
- 39:30: “There are many aspects of nature that no human ever sees.” And then some BBC cameraman comes by and captures it!
- 40:54: This is where the “Blue Planet” and “Planet Earth” endorsement begins.
- “My wife and I and little girl have worshipped for eight hours watching these unbelievable works of God! There are all these pagans producing this worship DVD!”
- While they were watching the DVDs, Piper kept saying to his daughter, “That can’t be happening! That can’t be happening!”
- “I hate evolution. It is so worship destroying! I mean that. Secular, atheistic evolution is worship destroying.”
- “I get so much pleasure talking about what God has done in creation. It’s way better than talking about movies, but that’s another story.”
John Piper just posted an article entitled “A Birthday Gift to My Father on His 89th Birthday.” The second section of this brief article—which quotes his father quoting Bob Jones Sr.—opens with this:
“My father was a card-carrying fundamentalist, with a twist. He was irrepressibly happy in the grace of God. I suspect there are a lot of fundamentalists out there like that. For all I know, I may be one. So here is a taste of what I grew up with, which may be why abstaining from dancing, smoking, drinking, movie-going, and card-playing never felt like big sacrifice.”
On a similar note, Piper dedicates The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright to his father:
“This is the year (2007) that my father died. Who can estimate the debt we owe our fathers? Bill Piper preached the gospel of grace for over seventy years, if you count the songs and testimonies at the nursing home. He was an evangelist—the old southern, independent, fundamentalist sort, without the attitude. He remains in my memory the happiest man I ever knew” (p. 9).
David Mathis, John Piper’s “Executive Pastoral Assistant,” just posted “The Future of Justification for the Rest of Us” on the Desiring God blog.
My favorite part of Mathis’s post was learning that Piper’s book is available for free as a PDF!
This is a wise post. Mathis explains why “not everyone should read John Piper’s new book on justification,” but he also suggests how to profit from the book without reading it from cover to cover. He concludes,
“Don’t feel out of the loop or way behind if you haven’t heard of Wright and the NPP. You shouldn’t necessarily feel the need to familiarize yourself with them. But reading some of these key sections and chapters may help strengthen your theology of justification and ward off attacks on this precious doctrine when they come.”
John Piper just posted an article on his blog entitled “Praise God for Fundamentalists.” He responds to the 2005 FBF resolution “On the Ministry of John Piper.” He concludes,
“What I want to say about Fundamentalism is that its great gift to the church is precisely the backbone to resist compromise and to make standing for truth and principle a means of love rather than an alternative to it. I am helped by the call for biblical separation, because almost no evangelicals even think about the doctrine.
“So I thank God for fundamentalism, and I think that some of the whining about its ill effects would have to also be directed against the black-and-white bluntness of Jesus.”
Update:
- Mike Riley, “On the Ministry of John Piper” (published on the FBF site). Riley wrote this for the FBF.
- Mike Riley, “Piper and the FBF Resolution” (published on Riley’s blog). Riley wrote this today in response to Piper’s blog post referenced above.
- Michael Bird, “Praise God for Fundamentalists?” Bird lists six reasons that he “cannot praise God for them.”
- Will Pareja, “John Piper on Fundamentalism.” Pareja begins, “Dr. Piper: You have no idea how far words like these go, my brother.”
I’ve heard dozens of John Piper’s sermons on MP3, but yesterday at the The Gospel Coalition conference, I had the privilege of hearing Piper preach in person for the first time.
- It was the most moving sermon I’ve ever heard Piper preach. It compelled me to worship my sovereign God, long to be with Him, and hate what He hates.
- The Gospel Coalition’s site will have audio and video from the conference available for free in about three weeks, but Desiring God has already posted the manuscript and MP3 of Piper’s sermon entitled “The Triumph of God in the New Heavens and the New Earth,” an exposition of Romans 8:18-25.
- The MP3 does not include D. A. Carson’s introduction in which he gave an anecdote about D. Martyn Lloyd Jones‘ powerful preaching and then described John Piper as the modern-day Lloyd Jones.
I read this article this morning:
I found these two quotations particularly convicting and challenging:
- “Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them, ‘. . . 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 that 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.’”
- “One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is a terrible hardening of the spiritual life.”
Why not celebrate by reading the below transcript or listening to the MP3?
Martin Luther: Lessons from His Life and Labor
by John Piper
This week I’ve had the opportunity to listen to the following MP3s while grading some tests and quizzes:
Steve Lawson on Romans 11:36:
Parts 1 and 2 available here.
Riveting. Refreshing.
Thomas Schreiner on TULIP from a conference in March 2006:
- Radical depravity
- Sovereign election
- Particular/single/definite redemption
- Overcoming grace
- Perseverance of the saints
I’ve enjoyed reading Schreiner’s works (e.g., commentary on Romans, Pauline theology), but this was my first time hearing him speak. These MP3s are well worth your time, especially if you disagree with his conclusions. He is a reliable representative for this aspect of Calvinism. (11 other MP3s by Schreiner available here.)
John Piper’s most recent MP3 from his annual biographical messages: William Tyndale. Moving. Convicting. (as usual)
