John Piper

Monday Musings

What is the secret to John Piper’s success at Bethlehem Baptist Church? So I was called to Bethlehem Baptist and began in June 1980.  I was thirty-four years old, and there were three hundred older people and almost no youth.  What I have done is try to preach the whole counsel of God from his …

Read more

Monday Musings

Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven is too great, hell is too horrible, eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of …

Read more

Monday Musings

Christian preachers, more than all others, should know that people are starving for God. If anyone in all the world should be able to say, “I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary, beholding thy power and glory,” it is the herald of God. Who but preachers will look out over the wasteland of secular …

Read more

Book Review: Think

For the Month of October, 2011,  Think is available as a free audio download at www.christianaudio.com. John Piper is a staple in the libraries of many Christians.  In fact, his writings have had a profound impact on the face of evangelicalism in America over the past twenty years.  It is not surprising, then, that Piper …

Read more

The Most Persistent Preacher of All Time?

Hugh Latimer was a  popular preacher of the English Reformation known for his “homely, rustic touch…he spoke from the heart and his words went…to the heart.”  His best known sermon is his “The Sermon of the Plough.”  Read a couple of excerpts below. And now I would ask you a strange question; who is the …

Read more

A Passion For God

“You who are pastors, may God inflame in you a passion for his centrality and supremacy in your ministry, so that the people you love and serve will say, when you are dead and gone, ‘This man knew God.  This man loved God.  This man lived for the glory of God.  This man showed us …

Read more

A Season For Work

“Some pastors and preachers are lazy and no good.  They do not pray; they do not read; they do not search the Scripture…The call is: watch, study, attend to reading.  In truth you cannot read too much in Scripture; and what you read cannot be read too carefully, and what you read carefully you cannot …

Read more

Knowing Our Book

“It is a sin and shame not to know our own book or to understand the speech and words of our God; it is a still greater sin and loss that we do not study languages, especially in these days when God is offering and giving us men and books and every facility and inducement …

Read more

Lessons I Am Learning

In the conclusion of his biography of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin entitled, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, John Piper offers four lessons that we can learn from the lives of flawed saints who have gone on before us.  Below they are listed along with some Scripture passages to reflect on.  Pastors, as inadequate as you …

Read more

Pastor’s Work = Book Work

“The Word of God that saves and sanctifies, from generation to generation, is preserved in a book.  And therefore at the heart of every pastor’s work is book work.  Call it reading, mediation, reflection, cogitation, study, exegesis, or whatever you will–a large and central part of our work is to wrestle God’s meaning from a …

Read more