Filmed at the Worship God ’09 Conference.

If you’d like to hear more, you can download the whole sermon from Resolved.org — look for ‘God is the Gospel’ in 2007.

…And as an fitting conclusion to what Piper said at Resolved, hear him describe what we are called to.

Crazy Love by Francis Chan

The God of the universe is crazy about you! His love is the most powerful thing in the world and He wants to give it to you, so you can live for Him. If you have made a commitment to follow Christ, then listen to Crazy Love to be reminded and challenged in your walk. Sharing from his own life struggles and sacrifices, author Francis Chan issues a call for selfless, Christ-like living. Let the love you have received from God impact your life like never before. Foreword by Chris Tomlin.

Simply add the download format of Crazy Love to your cart and enter the coupon code JUL2009 when prompted during checkout.

Discount Price for July: $0.00
Download List Price: $13.99
Coupon Code: JUL2009

• Josh Harris wrote a helpful article on why Twitter in church is distracting
• John Piper has decided to come out of the Twitter closet (@johnpiper) – he did it for 30 days anonymously
• Chris Mueller decided to join Twitter (@ccmueller) right before leaving for Australia

Sometime this week, Chris and my twitter (@faithbible) feeds will also become part of the church website – we’re currently having a little difficulty showing multiple accounts at once…

How should we feel about such cases?  On the one hand, as Christians, we have a concern for the removal of our freedom to practice our faith.  On the flip side, the lack of concern by the parents for the well-being of their children is entirely disturbing.

Al Mohler has written an excellent article about what happens ‘When Medicine and Faith Collide.’  For a summary conclusion, read below, but know that it’s worth reading the whole thing.

As a Christian theologian, my concern is also directed to those who oppose medical treatment on what are claimed as biblical grounds.  The Bible never commands any refusal of legitimate medical treatment.  I am unspeakably thankful for modern medicine, for antibiotics and anesthesia and chemotherapy and dialysis and diagnostics.  The list goes on and on.  There is no Christian prohibition against legitimate medical treatment.  I believe that God heals, that we should pray for healing in Christ’s name, and that our lives are in God’s hands.  I believe that all healing comes ultimately from God, but that He has given us the blessings of medicine for the alleviation of much suffering and the treatment of disease.  There is no conflict here.

There are serious issues of medical ethics in the case of some treatments, even as there are excruciating dilemmas that confront physicians, patients, and parents.  Those must be acknowledged, but they are not the issues at stake in these cases.

In these cases I advise what the great Reformer Martin Luther advised — take your medicine and put your trust in God. For parents, this means to give your child the best care that modern medicine can offer, and to entrust your precious child to God and to God alone.

Mother’s Day is a bad idea because it subverts the reality of faithful mothering and robs faithful mothers of their true glory.  Mothers deserving of honor are handed cards and taken to lunch, when songs of praise should instead be offered to the glory of God.  Undeserving mothers, who abdicate their true responsibility, are honored just because they are mothers.  Children, young and old, who ignore and dishonor their mothers by word and by life throughout the year, assuage their guilt by making a big deal of Mother’s Day.

Erick

I want to say a word today about watchblogs or discernment blogs or whatever you want to call them. I am referring to blogs that specialize in sharing bad news. They share stories and videos and anecdotes about Christians and churches and supposed Christians and supposed churches. Day after day they offer examples of all that is wrong in the church. They may vary what they offer a little bit, but what is true of them is that they offer a steady diet of negative content related to the church in general or perhaps related to just one person or one ministry. You know of some of these sites, I am sure.

I was thinking about such blogs a few days ago and arrived at a conclusion about them that actually rather surprised me. This is what I realized: these blogs are really little more than entertainment. And once I had these blogs filed in that way in my mind, their popularity and their draw began to make much more sense to me. They are really just a spiritualized form of YouTube or any other site that entertains by sharing what is gross and base and negative and that does so for the sake of entertainment. There is really no value in watching boys do stupid things on skateboards and laughing when they crack their ankle bones in half; there is really no value in watching the worst pastors in America preach to the worst churches in America. Such sites offer evil as entertainment.

Here’s the conclusion:

Filling our minds, our hearts, our computer screens, our blogs with all that is wrong in the church will do little to conform us into the image of the Savior. It can do little. My encouragement to you, whether you are a regular visitor to one of these sites or whether you simply visit them occasionally, is to examine your heart and to examine your motives. Do you visit such sites because they have information that you truly need to know? Or do you visit as a means of entertainment? Are you delighting in what is good and true and pure and lovely, or are you finding a strange, sick delight in all that is evil and ugly?

From: Between Two Worlds