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Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 11

August 5, 2024

God is With Us

“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)”

When my children were little and afraid of lightning and thunder, it was no comfort to them if I said something like, “Oh, that’s just a normal electrical reaction accompanied by a loud noise. Happens all the time.” Or even worse, “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

What did comfort them? Being with them. Holding them. Showing them that they were not surviving the storm alone.

We don’t change all that much as we get older. We just get overwhelmed by different kinds of storms, storms of soul and circumstance rather than thunder and lightning. And we still aren’t comforted by explanations or platitudes. This is why Isaiah 41:10 is so beautiful.

God says those most comforting words: “I am with you.” Who, exactly, is with us? Well, he reminds us that he is our God–he is the creator, sustainer, ruler, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, holy, and the essence of love. That is who is with us. So when he says he will strengthen us, help us, and uphold us he isn’t promising to give us a hand or just be by our side. He is the source of strength and help. He isthe power that upholds.

God is the one explanation, the one logical conclusion that actually brings comfort. Why should we not be afraid? Because of God. Because of God’s presence and power, and love. And because God has promised that he is with us.

I originally wrote this post for my church, Immanuel Nashville, in our Daily Pulse email. If you want encouragement from God’s word delivered Monday thru Friday to your inbox, I encourage you to subscribe! 

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Published on August 05, 2024 04:23

August 2, 2024

3 Things I Like this Week – August 2

Each week (give or take one or two here and there) I share three things I like – It could be a book, a movie, a podcast, an album, a photo, an article, a restaurant, a food item, a beverage, or anything else I simply enjoy and think you might too. You can find a whole pile of things, especially books, I like and recommend HERE.

1. I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

Leif Enger is one of two or three living novelists who stand head and shoulders above the rest, alongside Fredrik Backman and Amor Towles. Do not make the mistake “what are his novels about,” though, because like all the best novels they are about humanity. There is a plot in each of them–this one involves a musician/handyman seeking solace after tragedy while trying to escape sinister pursuers by sailing a rickety, hand0me-down boat on the waters of Lake Superior in a post apocalyptic world. If all that seems too weird or too much, it’s not. It’s just the palette, the ingredients Enger uses to tell a deeply human, deeply hopeful, beautifully written story of loss and grief and friendship and life. It is a delightfully disorienting book with characters who capture you. And, like his previous wonderful novels, it is riddled with sentences that demand to be read and re-read for their sheer artfulness, beauty, and truth.

 

2. Costco

My wife and I bought our house in early 2022. Shortly thereafter we learned that a Costco would be going in less than a mile away. At the time we had a Sam’s Club membership out of necessity. It was a lesser of two evils situation–either have no membership anywhere or have a Sam’s club membership. But as we all know from recent presidential elections, choosing the lesser of two evils still feels evil. So when the Costo finally opened up this past November we repented, spurned evil, and turned to the righteous way of Kirkland. And it has been spectacular. The employees are nicer. The selection is better. The Kirkland brand is quality. And I am dressing better too. On top of all that, if you spring for the executive membership you get 2% on your purchases which, if you shop there as much as we do, more than pays for itself and leaves you with store credit left over. I’m not going to say a Costco membership will change your life. But I’m not going to deny it either . . .

 

3. “Beautiful Stranger” by Marcus King

Marcus King is a brilliant guitar player with the kind of rich, soulful voice that makes you go, “wait, he sings like that??” when you see him. If you like blues or soul music, check him out. This song is especially wonderful.

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Published on August 02, 2024 05:46

August 1, 2024

July 31, 2024

Kindle Deals for July 31

Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:

God, Technology, and the Christian Life by Tony Reinke – $2.99

Life in the Wild: Fighting For Faith in a Fallen World by Dan Dewitt – $2.99

Living in the Light: Money, Sex and Power by John Piper – $4.49 (and $4.99 in hardcover)

Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis – $2.99

Trafalgar by Nicholas Best – $3.99

George Marshall: A Biography by Debi & Irwin Unger – $1.99

Mark Twain: The Complete Novels – $1.99

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection by Arthur Conan Doyle – $.99

Father Brown Complete Murder Mysteries by G.K. Chesterton – $.99

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe – $.99

MY BOOKS:

The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99

These links are Amazon affiliate links.

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Published on July 31, 2024 04:40

The Best Quotes from Eugene Peterson’s “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction”

I love Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It is a balm, a kick, a nudge, a lesson, counsel, conversation, realistic, hopeful, and profoundly biblical and beautiful. As he walks through the Psalms of ascent the reader is drawn into worship and closer to God. Here are 40 of the best quotes from it.

The world is no friend to grace.

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by the tourist mindset. Religion is understood as a visit to an attractive site to be made when we have adequate leisure.

A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.

Rescue me from the one who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit..

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision . . . Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.

Any hurt is worth it that puts us on the path of peace, setting us free for the pursuit, in Christ, of eternal life.

[Repentance] is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.

No literature is more realistic and honest in facing the harsh facts of life than the Bible. At no time is there the faintest suggestion that the life of faith exempts us from difficulties.

Faith is not a precarious affair of chance escape from satanic assaults. It is the solid, massive, secure experience of God, who keeps evil from getting inside us, who guards our life, who guards us when we leave and when we return, who guards us now, who guards us always.

Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith . . . We live in what one writer s has called the “age of sensation. We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting.

Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens. It overflows the hour and permeates the week.

We would very soon become contemptuous of a god whom we could figure out like a puzzle or learn to use like a tool.

The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan.

Every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive.

God doesn’t need me to defend him. He doesn’t need me for a press secretary . . .The proper work of a Christian is witness, not apology.

The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.

The psalms are great poetry and have lasted not because they appeal to our fantasies and our wishes but because they are affirmed in the intensities of honest and hazardous living.

We speak our words of praise in a world that is hellish; we sing our songs of victory in a world where things get messy; we live our joy among people who neither understand nor encourage us. But the content of our lives is God, not humanity.

Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors.

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.

The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.

One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed.

Joy is what God gives, not what we work up. Laughter is the delight that things are working together for good to those who love God, not the giggles that betray the nervousness of a precarious defense system.

Our work goes wrong when we lose touch with the God who works “his salvation in the midst of the earth.” It goes wrong both when we work anxiously and when we don’t work at all, when we become frantic and compulsive in our work (Babel) and when we become indolent and lethargic in our work (Thessalonica). The foundational truth is that work is good. If God does it, it must be all right. Work has dignity: there can be nothing degrading about work if God works. Work has purpose: there can be nothing futile about work if God works.

Relentless, compulsive work habits (“work your worried fingers to the bone”) which our society rewards and admires are seen by the psalmist as a sign of weak faith and assertive pride, as if God could not be trusted to accomplish his will, as if we could rearrange the universe by our own effort.

To guard against all such blasphemous chumminess with the Almighty, the Bible talks of the fear of the Lord—not to scare us but to bring us to awesome attention before the overwhelming grandeur of God, to shut up our whining and chattering and stop our running and fidgeting so that we can really see him as he is and listen to him as he speaks his merciful, life-changing words of forgiveness.

The way of the world is marked by proud, God-defying purposes, unharnessed from eternity and therefore worthless and futile.

For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness—that is the person to be wary of. For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there is not much use in making any effort to stick to it.

For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength.

The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us.

Wait and watch add up to hope.

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions. It is not compelled to work away at keeping up appearances with a bogus spirituality. It is the opposite of desperate and panicky manipulation, of scurrying and worrying.

And hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom and our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is imagination put in the harness of faith. It is a willingness to let God do it his way in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God.

When an ancient temptation or trial becomes a feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognize for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights.

 It is difficult to recognize pride as a sin when it is held up on every side as a virtue, urged as profitable, and rewarded as an achievement.

 Our lives are lived well only when they are lived on the terms of their creation, with God loving and us being loved, with God making and us being made, with God revealing and us understanding, with God commanding and us responding.

A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, and starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations, and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam.

Scripture knows nothing of a solitary Christian. People of faith are always members of a community.

Everything we learn about God through Scripture and in Christ tells us that he knows what it is like to change a diaper for the thirteenth time in the day, to see a report over which we have worked so long and carefully gather dust on somebody’s desk for weeks and weeks, to find our teaching treated with scorn and indifference by children and youth, to discover that the integrity and excellence of our work has been overlooked and the shoddy duplicity of another’s rewarded with a promotion.

You can lift up your hands regardless of how you feel; It is a simple motor movement. You may not be able to command your heart, but you can command your arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated. Go through the motion of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along.

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Published on July 31, 2024 04:37

July 30, 2024

July 29, 2024

God’s Unity and Ours

“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).

Seven times in these verses, we read the word one. Paul is very clearly making a point, drawing our attention to something. He wants us to see the unity in God so that we live in the unity that comes from God.

What do I mean that there is “unity in God? We see that there is one Lord (that’s Jesus), one Spirit, one God, and Father of all. Paul is pointing us to the unity within the Godhead, the oneness of the Trinity. These three persons are ONE, and there is only one of each. And he is showing us that all believers worship and follow this ONE God. We all look to the same savior. We are all animated, enlivened, and empowered by the same Spirit. And we all share a single heavenly Father who is God over all and through all and in all. So it is from this Godhead, this three-in-one, that the church is ONE:

We are one body–a single spiritual organism, the body of Christ, brought together and given life by the Holy Spirit.We have one hope–in the good news of Jesus Christ, sent by the Father as our savior, our atoning sacrifice, the one who intercedes on our behalf, and the one who now sits at the right hand of God the Father until he will return, make all things new, and rule in righteousness forever.We share one faith–the truth of the words, promises, and doctrines handed down to us from the Scriptures and by the prophets and apostles.That we have one baptism is not a commentary on method or form but a declaration that we are baptized into the people of God, the family of God.

Because God is one, therefore we are to be one. Or rather, because God has worked from his oneness, we have been made into one new man.

I originally wrote this post for my church, Immanuel Nashville, in our Daily Pulse email. If you want encouragement from God’s word delivered Monday thru Friday to your inbox, I encourage you to subscribe! 

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Published on July 29, 2024 04:12