"God feeds the birds, but He doesn't throw the food into their nests."

- author unknown

A free pdf version of Piper's 'When I Don't Desire God'

CLICK HERE to read or download the book.

feeling like a failure

i met with a girl who was struggling with a heavy sense of condemnation. old, nagging, condemning voices were on replay in her mind. someone telling her she was a failure. feelings of guilt for past, confessed sin. fear of never being able to live up to people's expectations. so i sent her this email after our meeting and the verses are so powerful that i figured i'd share them.

I’d encourage you to get behind these passages to understand them in context and then to really make this a part of your regular meditation. Your identity is in Christ, not from your accomplishments or failures, not from people’s affirmation of you or criticism of you. You are a daughter of the Most High, the Almighty God, Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. He redeemed you with His love and demonstrated His love for you by dying on the cross. He bore your sin, shame, failure, humiliation, and inadequacy. So, as those past hurts resurface, fight against them with the truth of who you are in Christ! Beautiful, free, holy, blameless, accepted.

• “the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.” (psalm 147:11) – God is pleased with you, not because of your performance, simply because you trust in Him
• “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” (Zephaniah 3:17) – this was God’s promise to Judah, even in these midst of their sin, that he would redeem them and rejoice over them
• “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Rom 8:1) – As a believer in Christ, God never condemns you, not for sin, failure, anything. People may condemn you and judge you as insufficient, but Christ makes you perfectly sufficient before God.
• “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation…” (Col.1:21-22)

These are just a few and there are tons more. But put these on index cards, tape them on your mirror, on your steering wheel, whatever. Memorize them. Pray regularly that the Spirit would make these come alive to you and help you to really see yourself the way He sees you.

helpful commentary on psalms

I picked up this book for one my Old Testament classes. It can be a bit technical at points, but it's pretty understandable for the serious Bible student and has been very helpful to me in understanding the Psalms.

Interpreting the Psalms: An Exegetical Handbook by Mark D. Futato

why are you in ministry?

this is an amazing sermon from Matt Chandler. I watch it every once in a while as a way of living out Psalm 139:23-24:

“Apply yourself wholly to the text; apply the text wholly to yourself.” Johann Albrecht Bengel

preach with a definite action in mind

A friend of mine sent me this quote from W. A. Criswell:

“Preaching is for a holy and heavenly purpose: to win the lost, to edify the saints, and to move a whole community and city and nation God-ward. Every time the preacher stands up to preach, he ought to have before him some definite thing he prays the congregation will do.”

The benefit of being a preacher is that you get to eat before dinner.

Think about it...there you go. You get what I'm saying now. Preachers get to taste the food before it's served.

how you know you understand it

Such a great principle for preachers:

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein

i was afraid of the text

I was talking to a friend today, sharing my hesitancy to preach a pretty challenging message from a particular text of Scripture. The problem is that I originally thought the sermon was going to be about one thing, which would have been a pretty comfortable message for me to preach; but as I sat with the text for a while, I realized that its application was a bit more "in your face."

So I shared my anxiety with him and his response (via text) convicted me to the core and then immediately filled my heart with faith. He said:

Your objective is faithfulness to the text and to find the application that is coming out of it...Don't strip the word of its power.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Immediately, I realized that my focus was in the wrong place. I realized that my heart was being gripped by "the fear of man" (Prov. 29:25).

My job is to lay the text out as clearly as possible, trusting God with the results.

So here's a lesson learned: God's transforming power is unleashed as preachers are faithful to say whatever the text says.

great bible commentaries

Here's a great online resource that lists the best commentaries for each book of the Bible:

www.bestcommentaries.com

You can filter the list according to three types of commentaries:

• Technical (T) - more academic; harder to understand if you don't have a working knowledge of Greek or Hebrew
• Pastoral (P) - helpful for preparing to preach a sermon or teach a Bible study; a little easier to understand the the technical commentaries
• Devotional (D) - for individuals simply looking to glean spiritual depth and insight
  

4 Components to Making Ministry Paradigm Shifts

I found such amazing wisdom in a book I'm reading for class on student ministry. The book is arguing for a radical shift in the way American churches approach youth ministry. But, here is an incredibly wise caution the author offers the reader:

"For some of you, the first three chapters may have convinced you. Now you are ready to jump in, add a bunch of new stuff on the calendar, and get parents on your team. That is admirable but rushed. Most of the student pastors I talk to want the bottom line - programs, practices, ideas and the outward expressions of ministry...We must be principle driven in all we do, or we return to looking for the latest fads and gimmicks." (Steve Wright in his book, reThink)

He offers these four key components to consider when making major ministry paradigm shifts:

1. Prayer - asking God to give us direction, burden our hearts, and empower our efforts
2. Principles - What are the biblical principles that should frame this new ministry paradigm?
3. Prerequisites - What info is needed/what things need to happen before moving forward?
4. Practices - Implementation
   

preachers beware

I had this thought today:

It's easier to live heresy than to preach it. It's easier to preach holiness than to live it.

dual authorship of scripture

Wayne Grudem:

In cases where the ordinary human personality and writing style of the author were prominently involved, as seems the case with the major part of Scripture, all that we are able to say is that God’s providential oversight and direction of the life of each author was such that their personalities, their backgrounds and training, their abilities to evaluate events in the world around them, their access to historical data, their judgment with regard to the accuracy of information, and their individual circumstances when they wrote, were all exactly what God wanted them to be, so that when they actually came to the point of putting pen to paper, the words were fully their own words but also fully the words that God wanted them to write, words that God would also claim as his own.

Norman Geisler:

Judging by the various vocabulary, grammar, styles, figures of speech, and human interests of the various authors, God did not disregard the personality and culture of the biblical writers when He providentially guided them to be the vehicles through which He revealed His written Word to humankind. On the contrary, the Bible is a thoroughly human book in every respect, except that it is without error. Regardless of the mystery surrounding how God was able to make His word certain without the destroying the freedom and personality of the authors, several things are clear. The human authors of Scripture were not mere secretaries taking dictation; their freedom was not suspended or negated, and they were not automatons. What they wrote is what they desired to write in the style that they were accustomed to using. God in His providence engaged in a divine concurrence between their words and His so that what they said, He said.

John MacArthur:

God formed the personality of the writer. God made [him] into the man He wanted him to be. God controlled his heredity and his environment. When the writer reached the point that God intended, God directed and controlled the free choice of the man so that he wrote down the very words of God. God literally selected the words of each author’s own life, out of his personality, his vocabulary, and his emotions. The words were man’s words, but that man’s life had been so framed by God that they were God’s words as well.

reposted from expositorythoughts.wordpress.com

preacher or leader?

here is an interesting article about the "false dichotomy" between preaching and leading. the writer, Jeff Purswell, argues that for a pastor, preaching is the most effective form of leadership. he writes:

"There is no more powerful or fundamental expression of a pastor’s leadership than the preaching of the Word. At its core, that’s what biblical leadership is: setting forth for our people a biblical vision of God and his purposes, and then calling them to give their lives to it and live in light of it (and outside the pulpit, modeling for them what it looks like)."

i think that's spot on. the question though for every multi-site church that uses video teaching is what then is the role of the campus pastor? i think he answers that in his address to pastors who have "a specialized sphere of ministry" i.e. non-teaching. he says we should be "thinking about how the Sunday preaching can be applied in the life of the church in your sphere."

[click here] to read the full article.

power in preaching

"Power in preaching comes from intimacy with God not from trying to impress people with how much you know about the text."

- Rick Warren

leading and leaving

"Success without a successor is net failure."

- author unknown

credibility

a great quote from Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church:

"credibility is NOT a byproduct of perfection. credibility is a byproduct of authenticity."

Expectation and Preaching

Here's an amazing thought from Alistair Begg about the role of prayerful expectation in preaching. He says this in the context of explaining that effectiveness in preaching comes from the Word itself in the power of the Holy Spirit rather than from the preacher's delivery.

"Do you understand that I can preach the same sermons if you would pray harder and they will be ten times more effective? Because for a meaningful preaching event, you need an expectant praying preacher and you need an expectant praying congregation and when the expectations meet at the throne of grace whereby both preacher and listeners are looking to God rather than to one another then suddenly there's a divine chemistry that takes place there."

- Alistair Begg, sermon called "Four Marks of a Healthy Church"

a call to faithfulness

A thought from Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

The uniqueness of the call to Christian ministry is bound up in the fact that ministers will not finish what they started because they are laying the foundation upon which God is constructing his church. The call to ministry is not one of completing a task, but of faithful gospel proclamation that God grows and finishes. The biblical conception of the Christian ministry is, as we should not be surprised to find, radically at odds with worldly wisdom. Every minister must take care to build faithfully upon the foundation. The one who plants and the who waters are nothing in themselves. The agent of all true Gospel ministry is God himself. As 1 Corinthians 3 makes clear, the worthiness of our work will be fully disclosed on the day of judgment and tested by fire.