Blog
God's Global Purposes
John Piper recently visited Immanuel Nashville and spoke twice for the Immanuel Theology Group and did a brief Q&A.
John Piper Session 1 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
John Piper Session 2 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
John Piper Session QA - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
John Piper Session 1 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
John Piper Session 2 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
John Piper Session QA - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.
Remember Your Leaders
Francis Schaeffer died thirty years ago today. If you are an evangelical Christian born after he died, you may know nothing about him, maybe never even heard of him. But you owe him far more than you know.For me, I know of no other modern leader in whom was so beautifully manifest the blend of thinking faith and real-time dependence on the Holy Spirit.
Grumpiness
Maybe you don't vent--you just stew. A leaking, low-level irritability is a great temptation on a journey of love. You feel you have the right to be moody--you've earned it. It is a way of exacting emotional payment from a disappointing life. Grumpiness provides momentary relief, but it always involves a splitting of the self. I commit outwardly, with my hands, but not with my heart. I go through the motions of love, but anger smolders just below the surface like a simmering rant. . . . The result? I'm split. My will has slipped off the tracks of quiet surrender to the Master, and I'm just going through the motions. Life ceases to be fun. If left unchecked, my inner moodiness begins to distort my heart, and I can slip into cynicism, which begins a downward trajectory into bitterness.--Paul E. Miller, A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships (Crossway, 2014), 109-10
Self-pity, compassion turned inward, drives this inward spiral. Instead of reflecting on the wounds of Christ, I nurse my own wounds. . . . But self-pity is just another form of self-righteousness, and like all self-righteousness it isolates and elevates. . . .
The cure for a cranky soul begins by repenting, by realizing that my moodiness is a demand that my life have a certain shape. Surrendering to the life that my Father has given me always puts me under the shelter of his wings. That leaves me whole again, and surprisingly cheerful.
Hierarchy is Edenic
Lewis:
I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don't think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. . . .--C. S. Lewis, "Equality," in Present Concerns (London: Fount, 1986), 17-19
The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. . . .
Under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive.