Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 33
February 19, 2021
E-Book Sale – Hoping for Happiness
This week my most recent book, Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s Most Elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality, is $4.99 for Kindle. After 2020 and the difficult start to 2021 we’ve all experienced, I hope this book is timely and helpful for you!
Here is a brief summary and a short video trailer:
Hoping for Happiness:Everyone wants to be happy, and we all pursue happiness in different ways. Some people are thrill-seekers; others are homebodies. Some people are loners; others love big families or communities. Some people express things creatively; others consume what is created. Some sing; others listen to music. Whatever we find happiness in, we are united by our desire for work that matters and relationships that fulfill.
As Christians, we often fall into the trap of basing our hopes on earthly things, even when we know they only make us happy for a short time. But how are we to experience happiness in this life? How do we avoid expecting too much of earthly things and being disappointed, or expecting too little and becoming cynics?
In this book, recovering cynic Barnabas Piper helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun. He shows how having a clear view of the reality of the fall and the promise of redemption frees us to live a life that’s grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy.
February 18, 2021
New Happy Rant: When Christian Leaders Fall
In this episode of The Happy Rant Podcast Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas wander to and fro through a single topic this time:
Why Christian leaders fallWhy other leaders lastThe importance of the local church for leadersThe good and bad of aspiring to leadershipAspiring to power instead of leadershipIs fame bad for us?Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by the Christian Standard Bible. The goal of the CSB is to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity, all the while maintaining both accuracy and readability. With hundreds of Bibles to choose from, everyone can find a CSB Bible that they enjoy for personal study, teaching, and discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com.
Get 50% off the Ancient Faith Study Bible during the month of February.
Get 50% off Christian Standard Commentaries’s or CSB Scripture Notebooks for the month of Feb. Just use the code CSBFEBHAPPY21
Get 40% off any CSB Bible on Lifeway.com for the month of Feb (limited to 1 CSB Bible). Just use the code CSBFEB2021.
Get Your Coffee
We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
Episode #334
February 15, 2021
Happy Rant Bonus Episode: John Piper Joins the Podcast (to do some reading)
In this bonus Happy Rant episode, you get to hear John Piper read the foreword he wrote for Barnabas’ s book The Pastor’s Kid. Then Barnabas reads the first chapter of the book.
Book Description
Pastors’ kids are often burdened by others’ expectations, but there is a wonderful solution, both at home and in the church: grace.
In this revised, refreshed version of Barnabas Piper’s best-known book, the author candidly shares his own experiences as son of pastor and bestselling author John Piper, offering a challenge to our churches and to the families at their very heart: how to care for pastors’ kids and allow them to find their own faith and identity.
We are grateful to OneAudio for allowing us to use these selections from the audio book!
And this week the Kindle edition of The Pastor’s Kid is only $2.99!
Get Your CoffeeWe’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
BONUS EPISODE
February 12, 2021
Ebook Sale – The Pastor’s Kid and Help My Unbelief
This week my first two books, The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help and Help My Unbelief: Why Doubt is Not the Enemy of Faith are both $2.99 for Kindle. (Print copies can be ordered HERE.)
Here is a brief summary of both:
The Pastor’s KidPastors’ kids are often burdened by others’ expectations, but there is a wonderful solution, both at home and in the church: grace.
In this revised, refreshed version of Barnabas Piper’s best-known book, the author candidly shares his own experiences as son of pastor and bestselling author John Piper, offering a challenge to our churches and to the families at their very heart: how to care for pastors’ kids and allow them to find their own faith and identity.
Foreword by John Piper.
Help My Unbelief
Barnabas Piper unpacks what faith really means. He shows how embracing doubts and questions can help us to get to know God, and encourages us to risk trusting God in our everyday lives, even when we don’t understand everything about him.
This book will encourage Christians seeking to ask questions in a godly way and will give them confidence to trust God, even when some questions remain.
Includes testimonies from John Piper and Afshin Ziafat.
February 11, 2021
New Happy Rant: Book Covers and Christian Celebrity Product Pitches
In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics.
Which book covers of ours are our favorites?Focus off the Family and FanifestosWhat products would various celebrity Christians pitch – leadership webinars, yogurt, historical tours, and moreSponsor
This episode is brought to you by the Christian Standard Bible. The goal of the CSB is to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity, all the while maintaining both accuracy and readability. With hundreds of Bibles to choose from, everyone can find a CSB Bible that they enjoy for personal study, teaching, and discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com.
Get 50% off Christian Standard Commentaries’s or CSB Scripture Notebooks for the month of Feb. Just use the code CSBFEBHAPPY21
Get 40% off any CSB Bible on Lifeway.com for the month of Feb (limited to 1 CSB Bible). Just use the code CSBFEB2021.
Get Your CoffeeWe’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
Episode #333
February 10, 2021
What Goldilocks Got Right
What should we do with our expectations? We need to look no further than the story of Goldilocks and the three bears.
In this timeless children’s tale, a carefree little girl stumbles upon a house in the woods while its occupants, three bears, are away. Being curious, and obnoxiously nosey, she decides to have a look around.
In the living room she tests out their chairs and finds one to be too small, one to be too large, and the third to be just right. Then she gets hungry and makes her way to the kitchen where she finds three bowls of porridge (a word to make oatmeal sound less nasty). The first is too cold, the second is too hot, but the third is just right. After all her exploring and snacking, Goldilocks is getting sleepy so off she goes to find a place to nap. In the bedroom she tests one bed and finds it too soft, the second bed she finds too hard, but the third is just right. We’ll leave the story here because there is some debate as to whether, when the bears get home, they eat Goldilocks, or she escapes having learned a valuable lesson about snooping and personal property.
What has this fable to do with the pursuit of happiness? Our instinct is to expect too much. Our defense mechanism is to expect too little. What we need is the option that is just right. It does exist, and we can find it (without breaking and entering).
As we seek to find right expectations we need to understand where our expectations go wrong. The problem is not simply that we expect too much or too little. It is not just a matter of quantity—how much we expect—but what we expect too much of.
Sometimes we place our expectations on wrong things, like when we expect any happiness to be delivered by things that are sinful. Take, for example, pornography, gossip, workaholism, and greed. We might look to them to deliver happiness, but we will always be left disappointed. Yes, sin stimulates senses and offers immediate pleasure, but it eventually leaves us feeling diminished as people and further from God. Consider your own heart, desires, and motivations for a moment. What aspects of your life you are counting on for happiness that are against God’s expressed will?
Other times we place wrong expectations on right things. This is when we expect things to deliver one kind of happiness, when God actually designed them to give us a different aspect of happiness. So, for example, we look to significant others for spiritual fulfillment. We look to friends to make us feel whole. We look to food and drink to ease anxiety or depression. God gave us these and so many other wonderful gifts to make us happy—profoundly happy—but when we demand of them things God did not intend, we are left empty. This is a subtle, quiet misplacement of expectations that so often starts out right but then goes wrong. So we must consider what good things in our lives have taken too high a place. What would we be enraged at God if we lost? What do we instinctively turn to when we need to numb the pain?
The real crux of our problem is that we expect temporal things to deliver lasting happiness. The issue is not that we expect any happiness from temporal things—God created countless wonderful things, people, places, and experiences to give us genuine happiness. It is that we expect lasting happiness from these things. Even the good things God gives us will not last forever; everything has a lifespan, everything decays. No created thing can fill the void in our lives forever, or even for long.
When we consider how this looks in our lives it can be scary because it is tangential to death. Are we so afraid of the reality of our own death that we refuse to face it in other circumstances: the death of a pet, a car, or a career? If so, we have inflated our expectations of what those things can offer us beyond what God intended.
Finally, we can even expect too much of God. Or rather we expect too much of the wrong things from God—things he never promised to do or give or be. We expect him to work on our preferred time frame. We expect him to give us whatever we ask for. We expect him to be merciful but not wrathful. We expect him to keep us from all difficulty and pain and trial. We expect him to reveal the mysterious and the confusing. Then we find ourselves disappointed when he fails to deliver on our expectations, as if he is beholden to us.
Goldilocks understood something that we often miss: happiness is found in the sweet spot between too much and too little. Happiness is found in expecting the right things of the right things. She tried the extremes but found contentment in the third option. So must we.
This is an excerpt from Hoping for Happiness. A biblical framework for living a grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy life, this book gets far beyond the topic of work and helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun.
February 5, 2021
New Happy Rant Sports: The All-NBA Corpse Team
In this episode of the Happy Rant Sports podcast Ted and Barnabas talk NBA and the Super Bowl:
Our All-NBA Corpse team (players who are still going, but not really)Our favorite bad NBA team of all timeSuper Bowl predictionGet Your CoffeeWe’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.Episode #48
New Happy Rant: Little Debbie, Good Conferences, and Speciesism
In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics:
A wealth of oatmeal creme piesHappy Cakes and snack mogulsRonnie, Jared C., and male feminismWhat is a good conference and what is the best we have been to?Speciesism is so offensiveThe one book of course we would recommend mostSponsorThis episode is brought to you by the Christian Standard Bible. The goal of the CSB is to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity, all the while maintaining both accuracy and readability. With hundreds of Bibles to choose from, everyone can find a CSB Bible that they enjoy for personal study, teaching, and discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com.
Get 50% off Christian Standard Commentaries’s or CSB Scripture Notebooks for the month of Feb. Just use the code CSBFEBHAPPY21
Get 40% off any CSB Bible on Lifeway.com for the month of Feb (limited to 1 CSB Bible). Just use the code CSBFEB2021.
Get Your CoffeeWe’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
Episode #332
New Happy Rant: Little Debby, Good Conferences, and Speciesism
In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics:
A wealth of oatmeal creme piesHappy Cakes and snack mogulsRonnie, Jared C., and male feminismWhat is a good conference and what is the best we have been to?Speciesism is so offensiveThe one book of course we would recommend mostSponsorThis episode is brought to you by the Christian Standard Bible. The goal of the CSB is to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity, all the while maintaining both accuracy and readability. With hundreds of Bibles to choose from, everyone can find a CSB Bible that they enjoy for personal study, teaching, and discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com.
Get 50% off Christian Standard Commentaries’s or CSB Scripture Notebooks for the month of Feb. Just use the code CSBFEBHAPPY21
Get 40% off any CSB Bible on Lifeway.com for the month of Feb (limited to 1 CSB Bible). Just use the code CSBFEB2021.
Get Your CoffeeWe’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
Episode #332
January 28, 2021
New Happy Rant: How It Started, How It’s Going
In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics by answering how it started and how it’s going about:
This showWritingTed on social mediaSponsor
This episode is brought to you by the Christian Standard Bible. The goal of the CSB is to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity, all the while maintaining both accuracy and readability. With hundreds of Bibles to choose from, everyone can find a CSB Bible that they enjoy for personal study, teaching, and discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com. Get 40% off any CSB Bible on Lifeway.com for the month of Feb (limited to 1 CSB Bible). Just use the code CSBFEB2021.
We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.
To listen you can:
Subscribe in iTunes.Listen on Google PlayListen on StitcherListen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out thereLeave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).Listen using the player below.
Episode #331
