Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 19
August 1, 2024
Kindle Deals for August 1
Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:
The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends by Harry Lee Poe – $1.99
Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been by Jackie Hill Perry – $4.99
The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush by Mark Updegrove – $2.99
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig – $2.99
Conversations with McCartney by Paul Du Moyer – $2.99
Stan the Man: The Life and Times of Stan Musial by Wayne Stewart – $1.99
Paterno by Joe Posnanski – $2.99
The Chosen Few: A Company of Paratroopers and Its Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan by Gregg Zoroya – $1.99
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen W. Sears – $2.99
This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach – $2.99
Tombstone: The Earp Brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Vendetta Ride from Hell by Tom Clavin – $2.99
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
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
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
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.
July 30, 2024
Kindle Deals for July 30
Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:
The Expulsive Power of a New Affection by Thomas Chalmers – $2.99
After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters by N.T. Wright – $1.99
The Crucified Life: How to Live Out a Deeper Christian Experience by A.W. Tozer – $1.99
Colossians: A Short Exegetical and Pastoral Commentary by Anthony Thiselton – $2.99
Ecclesiastes (The Bible in God’s World Commentary Series) by John Goldingay – $2.99
The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction by Peter Marshall – $3.99
Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri – $2.99
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat – $2.99
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg – $2.99
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
July 29, 2024
Kindle Deals for July 29
Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:
What Christians Believe by C.S. Lewis – $.99
Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem by Kevin DeYoung – $3.99
Glory Hunger: God, the Gospel, and Our Quest for Something More by J.R. Vassar – $3.99
Rethinking Retirement: Finishing Life for the Glory of Christ by John Piper – $1.99
The Purity Principle: God’s Safeguards for Life’s Dangerous Trails by Randy Alcorn – $4.99
What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton – $1.99
Poems by C.S. Lewis – $1.99
Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last by Wright Thompson – $2.99
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music: A Memoir of Dreams, Music and Legendary Collaborations by Dave Grohl – $2.99
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
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!
July 26, 2024
Kindle Deals for July 26
Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:
12 Faithful Women: Portraits of Steadfast Endurance by Melissa B. Kruger – $5.49
Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin – $2.99
Leadership by James MacGregor Burns – $3.99
Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink by Anthony McCarten – $2.99
Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt – $3.99
Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter by Tom Clavin – $2.99
Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River by John Maclean – $2.99
Teacher Man: A Memoir by Frank McCourt – $3.99
The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream \by Tom Clavin – $2.99
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
3 Things I Like This Week – July 26
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. Precious Memories Collection by Alan Jackson
I am not what most people would consider nostalgic, but I do hold dear things from my childhood. Old hymns are one of those things. The older I get the more I appreciate the simple clarity and poetic beauty of them. This collection is from my favorite country artist, Alan Jackson, and he’s singing the songs he grew up on in church in Central Georgia. As it happens, I grew up attending church many summers in central Georgia while visiting my grandparents. I didn’t love these songs at the time, but the seeds were planted. And I love them now. Jackson’s renditions are simple and clean with minimal instrumentation. They are the rich in nostalgia and tradition.
2. Hughes: Everyman Pocket Poets by Langston Hughes
Poetry is intended to evoke more than describe, to move more than argue, and to paint a picture without clean lines. And Langston Hughes did it as well or better than anyone. He wrote throughout the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement, and his poems reflect the full cultural reality of the time. They are powerful and poignant and painful. I especially love the tactile, sensory aspects of his poems, drawing readers into lives and times and places and experiences. I have yet to read a poet who I appreciate or enjoy more than Hughes.
3. ESV.org Annual Membership
Most, if not all, of my readers are familiar with the ESV Bible translation. But did you know that you can get digital access to all Crossway’s commentaries and study Bible notes along side the text for only $39.99 a year? This includes the ESV Expository Commentary, the Preaching the Word commentary series, and the Crossway Classic Commentaries alongside multiple Study Bibles. It is an absolutely incredible set of resources for anyone seeking to study the Bible better. These resources have been invaluable to me in both seminary work and in sermon or teaching preparation. And they would be equally as valuable in devotional use or personal study. It is amazing that the folks at Crossway have made this wealth of Biblical study materials available at such an accessible price.
July 25, 2024
Kindle Deals for July 25
Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:
Pray Big: Learn to Pray Like an Apostle by Alistair Begg – $3.99
Galatians For You by Tim Keller – $4.99
Essential Christianity: The Transforming Power of the Gospel in Ten Simple Words by J.D. Greear – $4.99
Can Science Explain Everything? By John Lennox – $3.99
Broken Signposts: How Christianity Makes Sense of the World by N.T. Wright – $1.99
On the Incarnation: In Modern, Updated English by Athanasius – $.99
The Confessions by Augustine – $4.99
The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life – $4.99
These links are Amazon affiliate links.
July 24, 2024
35 of the Most Important Quotes from “Hoping for Happiness”
In October of 2020 I released my latest book, Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s Most Elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality. Releasing a book on happiness in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year was more a matter of unfortunate timing than mad genius. However, with some more time under our belts since then, maybe we’ve come to a place of reconsidering what it is to truly be happy in this messed up world. If so, this book could be a significant help. My whole aim was to help people who feel guilty for feeling happy (usually conservative Christians) find some freedom and to help those tired of the hamster wheel of chasing happiness find something grounded by offering a biblical framework for living a grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy life.
Here are 35 of the most important quotes from the book.
If happiness is so attainable why are our lives marked by such a desperate search for it? Why are we so often unsatisfied, grasping at what is next, groping for what is better, and racing after what is new and undiscovered? Why is it that even while we are in the midst of pleasure we are thinking of the next pleasure? It’s an exhausting way to live.
The grander our dreams get and the more they turn inward the less happy we seem to be. Our response to this unhappiness is to pursue harder or to pursue another version of the same dream—another job, another cause, another relationship. If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, well, we have just diagnosed ourselves.
God didn’t put us in this world to be miserable. Quite the opposite—the world is overflowing with good things, pleasurable things, things that deliver happiness. And they are created by God. He intended us for happiness.
Dreams are the wishes our hearts make, but our hearts are not reliable guides. Our hearts have taken good things from God and conjured up fever dreams of them as things in which we can find our identity and on which we can build our lives. But these objects of happiness were not created to bear that burden.
So much of maturity is learning the value of delayed gratification and realizing that greater happiness can be had by waiting and persevering.
Every disappointment is an unmet expectation.
To live a life with small expectations is to live a life with small joys and little gladness. Expectations set us up for disappointment, sure, but they give us motivation and direction too.
The real crux of our problem is that we expect temporal things to deliver lasting happiness
Happiness is found in expecting the right things of the right things.
Because we are finite beings confined to an earthly life span and limited knowledge, we seek the entirety of our happiness in things we can wrap our minds around, things that are readily available. We struggle to trust that God really will deliver a happiness that’s beyond the scope of our imaginations on the other side of the grave.
We are not strong enough hooks to hold the weight of our own happiness. Not in our own strength, at least. As in every other example of misplaced hope, the expectations we put on ourselves are often born out of what we think is best, not what God has said is best.
Adam and Eve thought they knew better than God. They put their hopes in the lies of the devil and in their own decision making ability. And we have been doing the same thing ever since.
When we follow our feelings we will be perpetually abandoning things God wants us to commit to because we hope for and expect the wrong things in the wrong timing from the wrong objects.
Reality just is. We don’t get to define it. To attempt to do so is to step right into the shoes of our father Adam and our mother Eve. They decided that the reality God had created wasn’t to their liking and sought to create a new “truth.”
Rather than trying to shape reality with our expectations, we need to shape our expectations around reality as God has revealed it. That way we’ll be saved from the misplaced expectations that lead to disappointment and profound unhappiness.
To have healthy expectations means disposing of “my truth” and living according to the truth that God has revealed in his word.
Sin corrupted the good, but the world still has God’s fingerprints all over it and tendrils of Eden woven through it. Nothing is completely as it should be, but neither is the world utterly corrupt. The good that once defined all of creation still shines throughout it.
To glorify God in my eating and drinking (or whatever I do) doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be serious. It means I need to be purposeful. It means that I need to pay attention to the goodness in this world, because “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it”. It means eating “with thankfulness” and embracing joy, which glorifies God.
Evangeliguilt is the bane of some of us, but idolatry is the bane of all of us. We have a tendency to take temporal things and elevate them to objects of worship and hope.
Many of us who feel that sense of suspicion at enjoyment do so precisely because we know our propensity for idolatry. We know we can turn good things into objects of worship, so we are skeptical of enjoying the good things. But this is the wrong response. It’s true that God is not honored by us idolizing his gifts—but nor is he honored by our ignoring them.
There is no room for idolatry if we constantly come back to the giver—acknowledging that God gives life, gives food, gives enjoyment—and to eternity. These good gifts are for our pleasure now, but we’re fools if we depend on them to fulfill our eternal hopes.
The victory of Jesus matters for a Tuesday afternoon when the baby won’t sleep, a Friday night of anxious insomnia, a Sunday service crushed by the tonnage of shame, or a holiday when the absence of a loved one feels like an amputation. When it feels like everything else is spiraling out of control, we trust that Christ is on his throne, weaving the threads of our lives into the pattern he sees fit.
The Bible reframes happiness for us by complexifying it. We tend to think of being happy or sad, but Scripture depicts a sort of happiness in the midst of sadness.
Death is the set of borders that contains our lives. Sometimes borders feel like captivity, like a prison wall. Sometimes borders are for our own good, like lane lines on the road. And sometimes borders are just the rules of the game, like a Monopoly or Scrabble board. Death defines the rules of the game of life.
When we live in light of death, especially with an eye toward eternity, we see life as something given to us, not as something to use. In this way death actually increases our gratitude, and gratitude increases our enjoyment.
Our lot in life—what we’ve received, what we’ve become, what direction our life is going—is not the hands of time or fate or bad luck but in the hands of a personal and sovereign God.
A brief definition of holiness is: growing in Christ-likeness through the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives so that we pursue the things of God. So, if it’s true that God wants us to be happy, then pursuing the things of God cannot be in opposition to happiness.
The only way happiness and holiness can be put at odds is to misdefine them both.
Once we reduce happiness to something that is opposed to godliness, we end up seeing holiness as a dry husk; a matter of suppressing our desire for the sake of what is right. . .If we remove happiness from holiness, pursuing the things of God is drudgery.
Pursuing holiness is the pursuit of happiness, in this life and the next. Nobody should be happier than a follower of Jesus.
God never has to repent because he never sins or fails. He doesn’t have good days and bad days. He never changes or goes back on his word. And that means that every word God says about himself carries a promise in it.
God’s promises define reality. They draw the lines of hope and happiness. So we must ask ourselves whether our expectations, our pursuits, our definition of happiness aligns with what God has said.
You can have a version of happiness without joy, but you cannot have genuine joy without happiness. . .A professed joy that lacks happiness is nothing but an articulated belief system, and it is hypocrisy.
Appreciate good gifts as God intended. Savor the delicious things. Laugh at the humorous things. Thrill at the exhilarating things. Enjoy the entertaining things. Cheer at the joyous things. Ponder the deep things. Rest in the peaceful things. Reflect on the somber things. Wonder at the beautiful things. Cherish the precious things. And share them all, for happiness is multiplied when gifts are experienced together.
Repent often and eagerly. . . .We can either let our sins drive us from God, or we can remember the work of Christ and take our sins to God, our good Father, who stands ready to forgive and is generous with good gifts.
