Don’t Get Too Comfortable July 28, 2007
Posted by Eddie in : John Piper, Blog, Modern Christianity, American Christianity , 2commentsMy new vocabulary word is “Posh”…
I don’t know why you are clapping… I am talking about you! July 27, 2007
Posted by brian in : Paul Washer, American Christianity , 3commentsJohn Piper On TV (Returning to Vomit Part 2) July 26, 2007
Posted by Eddie in : Uncategorized, John Piper, Blog, Holiness, Self Examination, Righteousness, Lusts, Avoiding Deceit , add a comment
John Piper’s on TV! Well…kinda sorta. I don’t mean that he is on a particular channel at the moment, but rather, below are some quotes that he has made during the years where he shares some of his thoughts about TV regarding the relationship between television and spiritual growth. I thought this would be a good follow up to the first part. Reflect on what is being said below and feel free to go to www.desiringGOD.org to listen to these messages which will help enrich your faith. (The names of the sermons from which the quotes came are listed beneath the quote.)
“It is not heavenly-mindedness that hinders love. It is worldly-mindedness that hinders love, even when it is disguised by a religious routine on the weekend. Where is the person whose heart is so passionately in love with the promised glory of heaven that he feels like an exile and a sojourner on the earth? Where is the person who has so tasted the beauty of the age to come that the diamonds of the world look like baubles, and the entertainment of the world is empty, and the moral causes of the world are too small because they have no view to eternity? Where is this person?
He is not in bondage to TV-watching or eating or sleeping or drinking or partying or fishing or sailing or putzing around. He is a free man in a foreign land. And his one question is this: How can I maximize my enjoyment of God for all eternity while I am an exile on this earth? And his answer is always the same: by doing the labors of love.
Only one thing satisfies the heart whose treasure is in heaven: doing the works of heaven.”
-Taken from: The Fruit of Hope: Love“I close every series of pre-marital counseling sessions with these words: Your devotional life together as a couple is the soul and heartbeat of your marriage. If it weakens, disease will occur in a dozen other areas with no apparent connection to the heart. You cannot be growing spiritually as a couple or a family without daily prayer and meditation together. And if you are not growing, you are dying. And, men, it is your responsibility. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden and God came to call them to account, it didn’t matter that Eve had eaten first; God said, “Adam, where are you?” That’s God’s word to your family this morning: Adam, husband, father, where are you? He will seek an accounting from you first, not your wife, if the family has neglected prayer and put TV before the living God.”
-Taken from: Adam, Where Are You?“God has gone the extra mile in the Bible to warn us mercifully that the idolatry of covetousness is a no win situation. It’s a dead end street in the worst sense of the word. It’s a trick and a trap. So my word to you is the word of 1 Timothy 6:11: Flee from it. When you see it coming (in a TV ad, or a Christmas catalog, or a neighbor’s purchase), run from it the way you would run from a roaring lion escaped from the zoo and starving.”
-Taken from: Battling the Unbelief of Covetousness“The other secondary command in 1 Peter 1:13 is, “Keep sober in spirit.” Literally, it simply says, “being sober, hope fully.” Sobriety—mental, spiritual sobriety—is a means to hoping in grace. What does that mean in real life?
It means, if you really want to obey the command to hope fully in God’s grace, don’t let your mind drink in things that numb the mind (and heart) to the value of God’s grace. The great problem with drunkenness is that it distorts reality by making the mind insensitive to what is true and real and valuable.
When choosing a place to vacation, my wife, Noël, will more often choose the ocean and I will more often choose the mountains. One of the reasons I incline away from the ocean comes from this text, believe it or not. Beaches are by the ocean and people wear bathing suits while at the beach and the designers of women’s bathing suits, it seems, are constantly finding creative ways to arouse the sexual desires of men.
Now my concern with this is not that I might be tempted by one of these women to commit adultery. My concern is way before that. My concern is how to maximize hope in the grace of God in my heart. That’s what this text says I am to be concerned with. “Hope fully in grace!” But I know from about 34 years of experience and from biblical warnings that titillating sexual input to this mind is spiritually inebriating. That’s my biggest concern. If I allow myself to drink it in through my eyes for long or to return to it often, my passion for the truth and the intensity and fullness of my hope in the glory of God’s grace diminishes. That’s the issue for me. And here’s a spin off. If you make that your issue—hoping fully in the grace of God and letting nothing come into your mind for long that desensitizes you to the glory of spiritual things or diminishes your passion for God—if that’s your battlefield, then you may never have to fight the immediate temptation of adultery or fornication.
Sex, of course, is not the only drug that intoxicates and numbs the mind to spiritual reality; the same can be true of money and career and power and romance novels and soap operas and TV advertisements and fishing and coin collecting and computers and rehabbing and gardening. The point is: know what numbs your mind to God and avoid it. Stay sober for the sake of full and passionate hope in God’s grace.”
-Taken from: Girding the Mind to Guard Your Hope“”Be sober for the sake of your prayers,” Peter says. But whoever sobered up by coasting? Nobody coasts into sobriety. Not physical sobriety, and not spiritual sobriety. Sobriety happens when we begin to use sound judgment about our lives. Sound judgment about how we spend our time. Sound judgment about the spiritual climate of our homes. Sound judgment about the worldliness of our leisure. Sound judgment about the music we listen to, the movies we attend, the TV we watch.
Nobody sobers up without intentional steps to get the bottles of worldliness off the shelves, out of the cabinet, and out of the house. When that happens, then the spiritual breath begins to clear up and the kiss of prayer is not hindered.”
-Taken from: That Your Prayers May Not Be Hindered“I have reports on all hands that this issue is huge, and that the easy access to internet pornography andcable TV is capturing many men and women and making slaves out of them.
-Taken from: This is the Will of God for You: That You Abstain from Sexual Immorality“Everyone knows that in a large church to build and maintain friendships requires effort. A healthy network of relationships does not happen without some intention. Is God pressing us to work harder at this? For example, if you do not have Sunday School on Sunday morning, what will you do with the extra time? God forbid that you will go home and watch TV! What about families doing something creative together that would be as good as Sunday School? What about couples and singles (and couples with singles!) doing brunch together in a “sermon-discussion-setting” and praying for each other. What about bringing an unbeliever to worship service and then going out to lunch? What about calling your own family together before worship and having a time of prayer for the service before you come?”
-Taken from: What Wonderful and Wild Thing Might God Be Up To?“Put this verse on your TV: “Turn thou away my sight and eyes from viewing vanity.”
If you and your people spend 15 minutes a day reading good books, you will read 20 good books a year, 1,000 in your lifetime.”
-Taken from: Words for the World: Rejoicing in God’s Global Use of Christian Literature“Third, even though Scripture is inspired, it is not all easy to understand. Verse 16: “There are some things in them hard to understand.” I would love to preach an hour on the implications of that sentence; but since I don’t have time, here is an outline of that sermon. Point 1: Being inspired, the Scriptures reveal the mind of God. Point 2: The mind of God is vastly greater than our mind and will often be perceived by us as strange and complex, not familiar and simple. Point 3: Therefore, the Scriptures will sometimes be strange and complex and hard to understand. Point 4: The continued selection only of what is simple in the Bible would be a sin in the regular preaching of the church, because Hebrews 5:13 says, “Everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness; for he is a child.” Point 5: Therefore, preaching which aims to deliver the whole counsel of God in Scripture (and which does not presume to be wiser than the apostles) will sometimes be complex and will demand from God’s people the utmost in humility and mental effort.
I know that in my preaching I am addressing a visually oriented and TV influenced people. I know that 98% of you have televisions, and in 1971 the average adult in America watched 23 hours a week. I believe John Stott is right in his new book on preaching when he says that lengthy exposure to television tends to produce physical laziness, intellectual flabbiness, emotional exhaustion, psychological confusion, and moral disorientation. What this means for us preachers (especially me) is that we must improve our ability to communicate effectively and hold attention with no antics, no stringed orchestras, no violence, and no sex. But it does not mean that we can abandon our calling to preach the whole counsel of God. And therefore it should be expected that preaching will sometimes be the most demanding thing you hear all week. I can’t see how it would be otherwise, unless I make easy what the apostles couldn’t.”“So if verse 2 is likely a realistic explanation of the symbolic picture of verse 1, let’s look at it for a moment. There is a negative command and a positive one: negatively, don’t be conformed to this world; positively, be transformed. Not conformed, transformed. Devote your life as a Christian to being changed. Don’t settle in at the level of transformation you now have. O how many Christians throw away their birthright by coasting.
Be transformed! It’s present tense, on-going, continual growth in un-conforming yourself to the world.
But how does this happen? What is involved? Does it mean we should just study what the world wears and watches and listens to and buys and plays, and then do the opposite? Well there will be a difference at most of those levels probably, but that’s not what the text focuses on, is it? It says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The focus is not first on getting the outside of the cup cleaned up, but on getting the inside cleaned up. In other words, transformation and non-conformity on the outside must flow from a new mind. Be transformed in the renewing of your mind.
So you might say, OK that means we must learn to think differently than the world thinks, and that will transform us from the inside out. Well, that is true. But there is a word in verse 2 to show us that it is not the whole truth, and may not even be the main truth - depending on what you mean by “thinking.”
What is the function of the mind according to verse 2? What is the goal of a renewed mind? Right thinking is surely essential. If you think illogically, you will probably live badly. For example, you might think something like this: “Premise 1: Most TV ads entice me to want things that I don’t need. Premise 2: Watching more TV causes me to see more such TV ads. Conclusion: Therefore the more TV I watch the less I will be enticed to want things I don’t need.” That is simply illogical thinking and it will cause you to live badly if you don’t think better than that.”
-Taken from: Grow in Grace and in the Knowledge of Our Lord“We want to be a God-besotted people. We want our youth to be more entranced by God than by any musical group or any sporting event or any TV or movie hit. We want to be a church where children and youth and adults - single, married, male, female, rich, poor, thinkers, feelers, doers - know God and love God and are filled with all the fullness of God - for who he really is.”
-Taken from: I Am the Lord, and Besides Me There Is No Savior“I can hardly read the newspaper or look at a TV ad or a billboard without feeling the burden that God is missing.
When God is the main reality in the universe and is treated as a non-reality, I tremble at the wrath that is being stored up. I am able to be shocked. So many Christians are sedated with the same drug as the world. But these teachings are a great antidote.
And I pray for awakening and revival. And I try to preach to create a people that are so God-saturated that they will show and tell God everywhere and all the time. We exist to reassert the reality of God and the supremacy of God in all of life.”
-Taken from: Ten Effects of Believing in the Five Points of Calvinism“James 12:1, “Putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls.” It astonishes me how many Christians watch the same banal, empty, silly, trivial, titillating, suggestive, immodest TV shows that most unbelievers watch. This makes us small and weak and worldly and inauthentic in worship. Instead, turn off the television on Saturday night and read something true and great and beautiful and pure and honorable and excellent and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8). Your heart will unshrivel and be able to feel greatness again.”
-Taken from: Take Heed How You Hear! Ten Practical Preparations for Hearing the Word of God on Sunday Morning“I close with an earnest exhortation. Unless I’m badly mistaken, one of the main reasons so many of God’s children don’t have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don’t want to, but that we don’t plan to. If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don’t just get up one summer morning and say, “Hey, let’s go today!” You won’t have anything ready. You won’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be a part of our life, but nothing’s ever ready. We don’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time. No place. No procedure. And you know as well as I that the opposite of planning is not a contagious flow of deep, spontaneous experiences in prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut. If you don’t plan a vacation, you will probably stay home and watch TV. The natural, unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer, you must plan to see it.”
-Taken from: Prayer: The Power of Christian Hedonism“Now this is amazing. Don’t miss it. It could save you years of wasted living. What verse 14 is saying is that if you want to become mature and understand the more solid teachings of the Word, then the rich, nutritional, precious milk of God’s gospel promises must transform your moral senses—your spiritual mind—so that you can discern between good and evil. Or let me put it another way. Getting ready to feast on all God’s Word is not first an intellectual challenge; it is first a moral challenge. If you want to eat the solid food of the Word, you must exercise your spiritual senses so as to develop a mind that discerns between good and evil.
The startling truth is that, if you stumble over Melchizedek, it may be because you watch questionable TV programs.”
-Taken from: By This Time You Ought to Be Teachers“Avoid a trite, flippant, superficial, frivolous atmosphere, but in stead set an example of reverence and passion and wonder.
We are very serious about being happy in God.
Jokes are rarely fitting. Levity makes true worship harder.
There is a difference between natural life-humor and contrived communication-humor.
Heaven and hell are stupendous realities that deserve a certain demeanor.
People are hungry for something different from the glib, chipper, silly fare of TV.”
-Taken from: Gravity and Gladness on Sunday Morning, Part 1a“A group of people learning how to love each other in the power of the Gospel and in the power of the Spirit glorifies God more than single individuals relating to Christ in isolation. That’s not hard to understand. It’s easier to stay at home and watch TV than to get together with people different from you and carry their burdens in prayer and minister to them with your gifts and strategize with them to reach the lost. But God doesn’t get more glory when you just do the easy thing. He gets more glory when you depend on him to help you do the hard thing - and especially when you do it with the joy of hope.”
-Taken from: Measures of Faith, Gifts of Grace, Ministry in Small Groups“…what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed. A critical spirit can be changed. Alcoholism can be changed. Irritability can be changed. Harshness and ingratitude can be changed. Laziness and overeating and masturbation and nagging can be changed. The habits of not tithing and excessive TV watching and gambling can be changed. The fear of talking to others and of having guests over to your house can be changed. The lack of appreciation for great music and great books can be changed. Indifference to beauty can be changed. And your disposition to remind somebody else to take this sermon to heart can be changed. Christ Jesus came into the world to save us from fatalism. He came to stop people from saying, “That’s just the way I am.”"
-Taken from: Christ Jesus Came into the World to Save Sinners“The Spirit is not working this transformation in us without reference to Jesus. Not while we watch endless hours of empty, trifling TV; not while we dribble our hours away aimlessly exploring the World Wide Web; not while we set our minds on things that ignore Christ. No. The Spirit moves and works and frees in a very definite atmosphere, namely, where we are “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord Jesus” (v. 18). The Spirit exalts Christ. The Spirit opens the eyes to Christ. The Spirit applies the image of Christ to or soul. If we choose not to focus on Christ, if we go our own way and preoccupy ourselves with other focuses in life, then let us not say, “Where is God?” when we bear the painful fruit of our bondage to sin; and experience the law of God as a burden rather than a joy. He has told us the path of freedom. If we spend our days and evenings looking elsewhere, we will probably stay bound up in all our enslavements.”
-Taken from: Summer Is for Seeing and Showing Christ“Everywhere you turn your discernment is being tested—are you a babe being carried along by politicians who manipulate Scripture? Are you a babe being shaped by posters that subtly endorse an immoral agenda? Are you a babe being formed and guided by TV advertisers that plant assumptions and desires in your mind? Or are you growing up with the body of Christ into the maturity and discernment and stability of Christ in the truth?”
-Taken from: How the Saints Minister to the Body“Set standards for your wife and children. Work them through with your wife. Remember the path of leadership here is primary responsibility, not sole responsibility. Wives are eager to help here, but what frustrates them is when we don’t take any initiative and they are left to try to determine and enforce the standards alone. Take the initiative in thinking through what will be allowed on TV. What movies you and the children will go to.”
-Taken from: Lionhearted and Lamblike: The Christian Husband as Head, Part 2“So 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Cast your anxiety on God by trusting that he cares for you.”… When it says that he cares, it means he will not stand by and let things develop without his influence. It means he will act. He will work. Not always the way we would. He’s God. He sees a thousand connections we don’t see. The lost credit card might result in an evening of searching and take you away from a TV program that unbeknownst to you would have put a lustful desire in your mind and made prayer unappealing so that you failed to seek God’s power and missed a golden opportunity to speak of Christ to a ready colleague the next day, which because of that lost credit card you did not miss. God sees a thousand connections we do not see.”
-Taken from: Anxieties: To Be Cast Not Carried“We must cultivate the mindset of exiles. What this does mainly is sober us up and wake us up so that we don’t drift with the world and take for granted that the way the world thinks and acts is the best way. We don’t assume that what is on TV is helpful to the soul; we don’t assume that the priorities of advertisers are helpful to the soul; we don’t assume that the strategies and values of business and industry are helpful to the soul. We don’t assume that any of this glorifies God. We stop and we think and we consult the Wisdom of our own country, heaven, and we don’t assume that the conventional wisdom of this age is God’s wisdom. We get our bearings from God in his Word.”
-Taken from: The War Against the Soul and the Glory of God“This is a thrilling thing to do: to be able to think the very thoughts of an inspired Biblical writer. Some of you have discovered how exciting it can be to think the thoughts of a great writer, say, Augustine or Anselm or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther or Descartes or Pascal or Locke or Kant or Milton or Shakespeare - to sense that you have actually entered his thought world and seen what he saw and made it your own through the amazing act of understanding. But all of you can experience something even more thrilling, and that is to enter the thought world not just of a great writer, but of a divinely inspired writer, who is not writing out of mere natural genius, but out of supernatural revelation. To get inside that kind of head and follow those thoughts and see that reality is a thrill unparalleled in the reading of all literature and the watching of all TV and all videos and all movies. And I covet it for all of you.”
-Taken from: There Is No Partiality With God, Part 1“While things look rosy in our lives, we think we can get along with a few casual friends, a boom box and a few TV programs each evening. But that’s a dream world. The preciousness of close Christian relationships becomes obvious when we recognize what Paul says in Ephesians 5:16—that “the days are evil.” The preciousness of comforting, encouraging believers in our lives is felt most when the price of faith is high.”
-Taken from: The Fullness of Hope and the Fellowship of Love“Finally, we must ask about this delight. The deepest mark of this happy person in Psalm 1 is that he delights in the Word of God (verse 2). Bible reading and Bible memory and meditation are not a burden to him, but a pleasure. This is what we want. What a sadness when Bible reading is just a drudgery. Something is wrong.What shall we do? Well, we will say more next week, but let’s close considering this. We struggle with Bible reading and memory and meditation because we don’t find pleasure in it. We have other things we want to get to more. TV or breakfast or work or newspaper or computer. Our hearts incline to other things and do not incline to the Word. And so it is not a delight.”
-Taken from: Meditate on the Word of the Lord Day and Night
Boast only in the cross July 26, 2007
Posted by brian in : John Piper , add a commentJohn Piper:
“Three weeks ago we got word at our church that Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards had both been killed in Cameroon. Ruby was over 80. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: To make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing 80 years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over the cliff, and they were both killed instantly. And I asked my people: was that a tragedy? Two lives, driven by one great vision, spent in unheralded service to the perishing poor for the glory of Jesus Christ—two decades after almost all their American counterparts have retired to throw their lives away on trifles in Florida or New Mexico. No. That is not a tragedy. That is a glory.
I tell you what a tragedy is. I’ll read to you from Reader’s Digest (Feb. 2000, p. 98) what a tragedy is: “Bob and Penny… took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.” The American Dream: come to the end of your life - your one and only life - and let the last great work before you give an account to your Creator, be “I collected shells. See my shells.” THAT is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. And I get forty minutes to plead with you: don’t buy it. ”
“Aren’t You Thankful For The Honesty Of The Word Of God?” July 25, 2007
Posted by Eddie in : Uncategorized, Blog, Preaching , add a comment
Even months later, I am still wrestling with the profound truths of Psalm 73:25-26. I recall how Paul Washer said in a recent sermon that he could literally spend the rest of his life on just 1 verse of scripture. For me, this could be one of those verses. Listen to Joshua Harris preach the text of Psalm 73 in the sermon entitled: “Is God Enough?”. I pray that it will encourage you to fix your eyes upon Jesus.
