Pierce Taylor Hibbs's Blog, page 5

The Prodigal God by Tim Keller

Summary Everyone needs the gospel. That’s probably the most basic Christian sentence you can utter. It’s so basic that we forget what it means. In Keller’s The Prodigal God, he reminds us with one of Jesus’s parables, the parable of the prodigal son. In this parable, Jesus confronts us with a striking truth: The two […]

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The Gospel according to Satan by Jared Wilson

Summary Several books have come out recently that deal with Satan and his lies (see my review of John Mark Comer’s Live No Lies). There should be even more, since that’s the devil’s main strategy for assaulting God’s people. So, I was happy to work through Jared Wilson’s The Gospel according to Satan. As usual, […]

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Advent Reading 3: White as Snow

Do you remember the words of Isaiah, words from the mouth of God? “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:18). From scarlet to snow . . . quite the transformation. How could one become the other? How can […]

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Advent Reading 2: A Deeper Magic

Evil hardly ever works out the way we think it will. Evil enters the labyrinth of God’s providence like a blind man, feeling his way around the high cinder-block walls and unexpected turns. It exits when God wills, after it’s already served his purposes. But we don’t often see evil this way, or even believe […]

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Advent Reading 1: What Eyes Can See

[image error]My eyes are getting worse. I remember it every year when I look at our Christmas tree, gleaming gold with little amber stars, singing its quiet anthem into the dark of the room. I stare at the tree every year without my glasses on as a reminder that the world is blurring with time. My […]

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Deceit: The Devil’s Native Language

One of the passages I loved in John Mark Comer’s Live No Lies is where he reinforces Jesus’s description of Satan in John 8. When the devil lies, he’s speaking “his native language” (p. 18). In the Greek, it says he speaks “of his own” or “of himself.” The idea is that deceit isn’t just […]

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Men, Know Yourselves and Speak

In honor of mens’ mental health month (November) I have been writing about my anxiety and my mental health battles for around 15 years now. Sometimes people ask me if I feel comfortable doing that or if it’s helped me at all. My answer is clear and direct: Writing about my mental health battles has […]

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Billions of Unnoticed Gifts

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 17 As I spoke recently with The Laymen’s Lounge about The Book of Giving, one point that kept coming up in our conversation was God’s prodigality (his being excessively lavish) in the good […]

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What If Thoughts Can Be Evil?

One of the many telling lines in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is this one, from one devil to another, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping them out” (Letter 4). Keeping what out of our minds, exactly? […]

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More: What God Wants for You

Our dreams are fiddling and fickle. They’re also small, like gains of dusty sand on a vast shore. No offense. I’m not trying to belittle you (or myself, for that matter). You may have some “respectable” dreams in the world’s eyes, maybe even some respectable dreams in the eyes of the church. But they’re probably […]

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