Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 3

Kindle Deals for October 31

Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:

Gather: Loving Your Church as You Celebrate Christ Together by Tony Merida – $2.99

Between Two Worlds by John Stott – $3.99

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion by Rebecca McLaughlin – $6.99

In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character by Jen Wilkin – $5.98

The Glory of the Cross: Reflections for Lent from the Gospel of John by Tim Chester – $3.99

5 Things to Pray for Your Kids: Prayers That Change Things for the Next Generation by Melissa Kruger – $2.99

Christian Beliefs, Revised Edition: Twenty Basics Every Christian Should Know by Wayne Grudem – $4.99

Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive by Thom Rainer – $4.68

Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise by Jon Tyson – $4.99

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – $2.99

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant – $2.99

MY BOOKS:

Belong: Loving Your Church by Reflecting Christ to One Another – $8.99

The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help – $8.99

Help My Unbelief: Why doubt is not the enemy of faith – $8.99

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

Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s most elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality – $8.99

These links are Amazon affiliate links.

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 31, 2024 04:56

My Favorite Quotes on Curiosity

Curiosity is a concept that can be hard to quantify or qualify and even hard to justify. Yet I wrote a whole book about it, The Curious Christian: How Discovering Wonder Enriches Every Part of Life. Quotes like the ones that follow were part of what shaped, influenced, and flavored my thinking and writing, which is why they all ended up scattered throughout the book. You’ll see scientists, journalists, theologians, politicians, CEOs, and more represented. That’s because Curiosity affects every part of thinking and life.

The ability to retain a child’s view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare – and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
― Mortimer J. Adler

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
– C.S. Lewis

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? . . . Where I formerly had one pleasure, I now have two.
– C.S. Lewis

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one’s adult enjoyment of what are called ‘children’s books.’ I think the convention a silly one. No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty – except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
– C.S. Lewis

Let our teaching be full of ideas. Hitherto it has been stuffed only with facts.
– Anatole France

Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.
– Albert Einstein

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.
– Gloria Steinem

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
– John Lennon

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
– Steve Jobs

We’re trying to leverage everything we can to be better at what we do and what God has called us to do.
– Andy Stanley

True does not mean factual (though it may be factual); true means accurately reflecting human experience.
– Daniel Taylor

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
– Leo Burnett

“Curiosity killed the cat”
– Agent Vega.
“It also cured polio.”
– Simon, The Mentalist

When you lose your curiosity you basically have started to give up on life.
– John Maxwell

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands.
– Jeremy Taylor

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
– Albert Einstein

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.
– Clay P. Bedford

A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education.
– Smiley Blanton

We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing that it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary problem is . . . learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.
– Stanley Hauerwas

Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the Word of Jesus has not yet full seized us.
– Dallas Willard

Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.
– Elbert Hubbard

I think the key to the future is curiosity. I look at the people I admire most and they’re curious people, they’re open, they’re interested, they haven’t arrived.
– Carey Nieuwhof

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
– Albert Einstein

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
– Aaron Swartz

I learn from as many people all the time, anywhere, as I can.
– Craig Groeschel

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
– Dr. Seuss

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
– Charles William Eliot

We were successful because we were curious guys.
– Paul McCartney

We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that He is full of joy. Undoubtedly He is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of His love and generosity is inseparable from His infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.
– Dallas Willard.

A lot of leaders stop in their growth because they lose their curiosity.
– John Maxwell

People say: idle curiosity. The one thing that curiosity cannot be is idle.
– Leo Rosten

You must have an enormous appetite for humanity and for life and for the world. You really have to feel like you cannot fill yourself up enough with this amazing place we live in. If you have that feeling, like sincerely have it, you’ll do ok.
– Sebastian Junger

I think curiosity is everything. It’s the underlying motivation to learn. It’s a characteristic where you acknowledge you don’t know everything and perhaps there are better ways to do things. I’m always nervous about people who aren’t curious about anything in the world.
– Simon Sinek

Curiosity has occasionally gotten me in trouble. But even when curiosity has gotten me in trouble, it has been interesting trouble.
– Brian Grazer

Everything in life conspires against our sense of wonder: age, experience, our jobs, even our church.
– Andy Stanley

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.
– James Stephens

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.
– Samuel Johnson

What made Mr. Merrill infinitely more attractive was that he was full of doubt ; he expressed our doubt in the most eloquent and sympathetic ways. In his completely lucid and convincing view, the Bible is a book with a troubling plot, but a plot that can be understood. . . Although he knew all the best— or, at least, the least boring— stories in the Bible, Mr. Merrill was most appealing because he reassured us that doubt was the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite.
– A Prayer for Owen Meany

Love is curiosity sometimes. Concentrated wondering about the other one.
– Kij Johnson

Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.
– Roy T. Bennett

The best leaders learn from anything and anybody . . . The greatest leaders are the curious ones.
– Louie Giglio

Persistently poke assumptions.
– Dan Rockwell

Church leaders have so much to learn from business leaders and business leaders have so much to learn from Christian and church leaders. We should be students of each other all the time.
– Craig Groeschel

“We will never be of much use in this life until we’ve developed a healthy obsession with the next.”
– Sam Storms

It would be very difficult to draw a line between holy wonder and real worship; for when the soul is overwhelmed with the majesty of God’s glory, though it may not express itself in song, or even utter its voice with bowed head in humble prayer, yet it silently adores.
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon

And one thing I know about curiosity: it’s democratic. Anyone, anywhere, of any age or education level, can use it.
– Brian Grazer

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

1 like · Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 30, 2024 03:55

Kindle Deals for October 30

Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:

The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis – $1.99

Jesus: A Biography from a Believer by Paul Johnson – $5.99

Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper – $4.74

Redeem Your Marriage: Hope for Husbands Who Have Hurt through Pornography by Curtis Solomon – $3.99

George MacDonald by C.S. Lewis – $1.99

The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology by Jeremy Treat – $1.99

The Second Life of Tiger Woods by Michael Bamberger – $2.99

The Elements of Style by William Struck – $1.99

Killing Rommel: A Novel by Stephen Pressfield – $6.99

Genghis: Birth of an Empire by Conn Iggulden – $1.99

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo – $1.99

MY BOOKS:

Belong: Loving Your Church by Reflecting Christ to One Another – $8.99

The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help – $8.99

Help My Unbelief: Why doubt is not the enemy of faith – $8.99

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

Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s most elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality – $8.99

These links are Amazon affiliate links.

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 30, 2024 01:50

Kindle Deals for October 29

Some Kindle deals worth your mind and money today:

Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations by Isaac Adams – $2.99

Spiritual Gifts: What They Are and Why They Matter by Tom Schreiner – $4.99

Brothers, We Are Not Professionals: A Plea to Pastors for Radical Ministry by John Piper – $4.99

Recovering Our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears that Divide Us by Michael Horton – $5.99

Justification, Volume 1 (New Studies in Dogmatics) by Michael Horton – $6.99

Justification, Volume 2 (New Studies in Dogmatics) by Michael Horton – $6.99

Sanctification (New Studies in Dogmatics Book 2) by Michael Allen – $6.99

For Calvinism by Michael Horton – $3.99

Grace Alone—Salvation as a Gift of God: What the Reformers Taughts…and Why It Still Matters by Carl Trueman – $4.99

Faith Alone—The Doctrine of Justification: What the Reformers Taught…and Why It Still Matters by Tom Schreiner – $4.99

Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior: What the Reformers Taught…and Why It Still Matters by Stephen Wellum – $4.99

God’s Word Alone—The Authority of Scripture: What the Reformers Taught…and Why It Still Matters by Matthew Barrett – $4.99

God’s Glory Alone—The Majestic Heart of Christian Faith and Life: What the Reformers Taught…and Why It Still Matters by David Vandrunen – $4.99

Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples by Michael Horton – $5.99

Rediscovering the Holy Spirit: God’s Perfecting Presence in Creation, Redemption, and Everyday Life by Michael Horton – $3.99

Epic: An Around-the-World Journey through Christian History by Tim Challies – $3.99

Know How We Got Our Bible by Ryan Reeves – $3.99

Why I Trust the Bible: Answers to Real Questions and Doubts People Have about the Bible by William Mounce – $1.99

MY BOOKS:

Belong: Loving Your Church by Reflecting Christ to One Another – $8.99

The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help – $8.99

Help My Unbelief: Why doubt is not the enemy of faith – $8.99

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

Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s most elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality – $8.99

These links are Amazon affiliate links.

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 29, 2024 05:28

As Far as the East is From the West

Psalm 103:12 – “. . .as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

When I was little my older brother and I didn’t always (or ever) get along very well. We were always getting on each other’s nerves and causing a ruckus. This meant that in situations when we needed to be calm and quiet–like church–my mom usually had to separate us by sitting between us, one on her right and one on her left.

For a long time that’s what I pictured when I read this verse. God put us on one side (east) and our sin on the other (west). “As far as the east from the west” sounded like “within reach to grab an ear and give it a twist.” I didn’t understand the image of this passage.

God doesn’t just separate us from our sins, he does so completely and irreversibly. Our sins are not within arms reach or accusation’s reach. East and west aren’t adjacent; they are infinitely opposite. When Christ paid for our sins on the cross he sent our sins completely and eternally in one direction and He is taking us eternally in the other.

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.

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

1 like · Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 28, 2024 03:06

3 Things I Like – October 25

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. Moleskine Notebooks

I love Moleskine notebooks. I use one for jotting down notes for writing projects, one for meeting notes at work, and one for journaling. Why these slightly more expensive ones instead of any old bound notebook? Why these instead of some other high end German engineered writing receptacle? I could argue their quality; they are nicer than most other notebooks. The paper is of just the right weight not to bleed through and just absorbent enough not to let ink smear. Really, though, it’s psychological. One wears a suit to dress for success. New shoes make one feel faster. So a Moleskine makes users feel like a writer or a creator a journaler. You don’t get that from spiral bound or composition notebooks. You don’t get that from legal pads. Those feel like homework or meeting notes, and they feel disposable. Moleskines feel like you’re writing in an artifact worth keeping and revisiting.

2. Baleaf Workout Clothes

I’m 41 years old and would like to live several more decades in relatively good health. As such, I try to stay active and workout with some regularity. I do not, however, like spending money on high end fitness gear. I want comfort, a good fit, and the ability to absorb/wick sweat. I have tried any number of inexpensive brands and generally find them to be exemplary of the adage “you get what you pay for.” A few years ago I found Baleaf, and it checks all the boxes–budget friendly, light weight, good quality, good fit. You can tell it’s not high end, but the clothes are dramatically better than the cheap stuff.

3. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

My favorite book on writing is Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, but Zinsser’s book might be the best in terms of instruction to helping a writer get better. King’s is a rolicking good time and generally captivating. Zinsser’s is the work of a professor who wants to see his students excel at the craft of writing and expects them to do so. As a prolific writer of many genres and styles and on many subjects, Zinsser brings all his considerable knowledge and effort to bear in this book. It is practical, pointed, and lays out clear examples of both excellent and poor writing. It is the kind of book that is enjoyable to read for people who love the craft of writing but is helpful to read for anyone who has to do any writing. It is excellent and should be revisited