Month: May 2009

Report: Brett Favre to the Minnesota Vikings?

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We break into the humdrum of everyday life (abortion, life, death, world sickness) for this important news (to those who are cursed to be Minnesota Vikings fans):

The St. Paul Pioneer Press is reporting that Brett Favre will have routine surgery this week and thus put him in line to sign with the Vikings:

Free-agent quarterback Brett Favre is scheduled to meet Tuesday with noted orthopedist James Andrews in Birmingham, Ala., about surgery to repair a partially torn biceps tendon in his right shoulder, the Pioneer Press has learned.
Surgery to release the tendon is considered routine and is expected to be performed by Andrews later this week. Rehabilitation for Favre would be six to eight weeks.
If it goes well, Farve, who will turn 40 in October, is expected to sign with the Minnesota Vikings.

Free-agent quarterback Brett Favre is scheduled to meet Tuesday with noted orthopedist James Andrews in Birmingham, Ala., about surgery to repair a partially torn biceps tendon in his right shoulder, the Pioneer Press has learned.

Surgery to release the tendon is considered routine and is expected to be performed by Andrews later this week. Rehabilitation for Favre would be six to eight weeks.

If it goes well, Farve, who will turn 40 in October, is expected to sign with the Minnesota Vikings.

Taking issue with Obama’s speech at Notre Dame

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Don’t worry, this isn’t demonizing. It’s just taking issue with some of the things the president said Sunday during his commencement speech at Notre Dame. From Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke:

President Obama spoke at Notre Dame today, an invitation that created divisions within the Catholic Church that are beyond our scope or concern here. But in reading about the president’s speech, I was reminded of how adept Obama is in saying one thing while doing just the opposite; such as claiming in his speech to support a conscience clause for health professionals on the issue of abortion (which would also apply to assisted suicide, etc.). From the story:

He called for an effort to “honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women,” Obama said.

Obama plans to revise a Bush-era “conscience clause,” which would cut off federal funding for hospitals and health plans that didn’t allow doctors and other health-care workers to refuse to participate in care they believe conflicts with their personal or moral beliefs. Women’s health advocates and abortion rights supporters say it creates a major obstacle to family planning and other treatments.

No, Obama–or at least his administration (is there a difference?)plans to revoke the Bush conscience clause, not revise it. That is hardly honoring heterodox thinkers’ consciences.

And if we are going to base policies on “sound science,” how about starting with the biological fact that embryos and fetuses are living human organisms? Alas, during the campaign, then Senator Obama said such determinations are above his “pay grade.” (Not anymore, they’re not.) Pretending that human embryos and fetuses are not “human life” (what are they, Martian?) may not resolve these contentious ethical issues, but if our policies are going to reflect “sound science,” so that we can create policies based on “clear ethics,” then the biological facts should quit being fudged.

Love is the essence of God

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From Tim Keller in “The Reason For God: Belief in the Age of Skepticism“:

If there is no God, then everything in and about us is the product of blind impersonal forces. The experience of love may feel significant, but evolutionary naturalists tell us that it is merely a biochemical state in the brain.

But what if there is a God? Does love fare any better? It depends on who you think God is. If God is unipersonal, then until God created other beings there was no love, since love is something that one person has for another. This means that a unipersonal God was power, sovereignty, and greatness all from eternity, but not love. Love then is not the essence of God, nor is it at the heart of the universe. Power is primary.

However, if God is triune [Father, Son, Holy Spirit], then loving relationships in community are the “great fountain … at the center of reality.” When people say “God is love,” I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in the Christian conception, God really has love as his essence. If he was just one person he couldn’t have been loving for all eternity.

Graduation special from Desiring God

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The fine folks at Desiring God are offering significant discounts on some great material.


The Essential Piper Trilogy: Desiring God, Future Grace

and The Pleasures of God

EssentialPiper

DESIRING GOD:The message of Desiring God is that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. In this book, Piper calls this worldview “Christian Hedonism” and explains why pursuing maximum joy is essential to glorifying God. He discusses the implications of this for conversion, worship, love, Scripture, prayer, money, marriage, missions, and suffering.

FUTURE GRACE: What is future grace? It is all that God promises to be for us from this second on. Saving faith means being confident and satisfied in this ever- arriving future grace. This is why saving faith is also sanctifying faith. The power of sin’s promise is broken by the power of a superior satisfaction; namely, faith in future grace. Gratitude for past grace was never meant to empower future obedience. Tomorrow’s crisis demands tomorrow’s grace. And faith that future grace will be there is the victory that overcomes the world. Future Grace contains 31 chapters – one for each day of the month – including practical chapters on how faith in future grace defeats anxiety, pride, shame, lust, despondency and more.

THE PLEASURES OF GOD: One way to see the glory of God is to meditate upon the object of his delight. In this reissued version with a new cover design, John Piper unfolds for us a vision of God through the lens of his happiness. What most delights the happiest Being in the universe? God’s gladness in being God. If God’s excellencies can be admired in his pleasures, and if we tend to become like what we admire and enjoy, then focusing on these pleasures can help us to be gradually conformed to his likeness. In other words, we will be most satisfied in God when we know why God is most satisfied in God.

Don’t Waste Your Life Book and DVD Set

DWasteYLife

DON’T WASTE YOUR LIFE STUDY EDITION: In this book John Piper describes his journey toward one great, single passion—endless joy in the crucified Christ—and challenges the reader to the same pursuit. The cost is great. But the joy is worth any cost.

DON’T WASTE YOUR LIFE 3-DVD SET: In this 3-DVD set, John Piper challenges viewers to wake up from the American dream to the soul-saving reality that “to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

* Disc 1: Book Study Edition DVD with ten 15-minute teaching sessions. These lessons are designed for smaller groups and work in tandem with the Don’t Waste Your Life group study materials (book, study guide).

* Discs 2-3: Conference Edition DVDs with four new, hour-long messages. These messages enable you to conduct your own Don’t Waste Your Life event or class.

The Complete Romans Series

Romansseries

After 18 years of preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper felt the time had come to preach through Paul’s letter to the Romans. “The glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4), seems more glorious to me now than it ever has. And there is no greater exposition of the Gospel of God than the book of Romans… I have a deep confidence that the best way to be lastingly relevant is to stand on rock-solid, durable old truths, than jumping from one pragmatic bandwagon to another. Romans is as solid and durable and reliable and unshakable as truth can get.” Come and worship through the Book of Romans with us!

Note on the format: MP3 DVDs can be played in computers with DVD drives and some DVD players. For best results put this DVD in the computer’s DVD drive and copy the MP3 files to your computer’s media player. They will not play in standard CD players.

As it says at the Desiring God site, there is always more to learn, always more to be excited about and more to love God for. As young men and women go off to school next fall, these resources can help them grow even more. Go here to see more information.


In this book John Piper describes his journey toward one great, single passion—endless joy in the crucified Christ—and challenges the reader to the same pursuit. The cost is great. But the joy is worth any cost.

More fun stuff on Pixar’s Up movie

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You can see lots of neat stuff (yes, I really talk that way!) about Pixar’s new movie Up, which opens on May 29 at the official Web site. I’m looking forward to it, since I’m just at big kid at heart.

MoreUpMovie

Clayton’s Story: A young man at the end of his life

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Clayton McDonald was taken from the earth to eternal glory on March 16 at age 18. These videos are powerful because they show a young man who saw life more clearly than most people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97gSR19pOcc

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” — James 4:13-15

A Guy’s Guide to Marrying Well

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MarryWellThanks to the folks at Boundless and Focus on the Family for providing A Guy’s Guide To Marrying Well. The 32-page booklet (a free download at the link) is a collection from several really good books and sources. This is what the folks at Focus on the Family  hope the guide will do for young men:

The simple purpose of this booklet is to present a path that is as Biblical as possible in order to help you marry well. But not just so that you can experience all the happiness, health and wealth that guys who marry well enjoy, but so that your marriage can point to God’s glory and His greater purposes.

This guide is based on a few timeless concepts — intentionality, purity, Christian compatibility and community — that we rarely encounter in popular culture but are a proven path to marrying well.

In a world where we get garbage like The Bachelor, it’s good to know that young men can have something more trustworthy when it comes to giving clear, sound advice.

No, Mr. President. Killing is killing

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As the president comes out today to tell us that we need comprehensive health care reform in our nation, I think this is something we should think on. Who will make reforms for the most defenseless in our country?

John Piper’s response to President Obama on abortion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O68MByaMVdM&feature=player_embedded

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he released this statement,
We are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters.
To which I say:
* No, Mr. President, you are not protecting women; you are authorizing the destruction of 500,000 little women every year.
* No, Mr. President, you are not protecting reproductive freedom; you are authorizing the destruction of freedom for one million little human beings every year.
* No, Mr. President, killing our children is killing our children no matter how many times you call it a private family matter. You may say it is a private family matter over and over and over, and still they are dead. And we killed them. And you, would have it remain legal.
Mr. President, some of us wept for joy at your inauguration. And we pledge that we will pray for you.
We have hope in our sovereign God.

From the transcript:

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, [President Obama] released this statement,

We are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters.

To which I say:

* No, Mr. President, you are not protecting women; you are authorizing the destruction of 500,000 little women every year.

* No, Mr. President, you are not protecting reproductive freedom; you are authorizing the destruction of freedom for one million little human beings every year.

* No, Mr. President, killing our children is killing our children no matter how many times you call it a private family matter. You may say it is a private family matter over and over and over, and still they are dead. And we killed them. And you, would have it remain legal.

Mr. President, some of us wept for joy at your inauguration. And we pledge that we will pray for you.

We have hope in our sovereign God.

What makes a Calvinist a Calvinist?

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Kevin DeYoung wrote this for Christian Research Journal, which you can subscribe to or find at your local Christian bookstore. It’s about the rise of the New Calvinism:

The influence of Calvinism is growing because its God is transcendent and its theology is true. In a day when “be better” moralism passes for preaching, self-help banality passes for counseling, and “Jesus is my boyfriend” music passes for worship in some churches, more and more people are finding comfort in a God who is anything but comfortable. The paradox of Calvinism is that we feel better by feeling worse about ourselves, we do more for God by seeing how He’s done everything for us, and we give love away more freely when we discover that we have been saved by free grace.

I’d like to think that we are Calvinists because of what we see in the Bible. We see a God who is holy, independent, and unlike us. We glory in God’s goodness, that He should save miserable offenders, bent toward evil in all our faculties, objects of His just wrath. We rejoice in God’s electing love, which He purposed for us before the ages began. We are grateful for God’s power by which He caused us, without our cooperation, to be born again and enabled us to believe His promises. We take comfort in God’s all-encompassing providence, whereby nothing happens according to chance, but all things—prosperity or poverty, health or sickness, giving or taking away—are sent to us by our loving heavenly Father.

As Calvinists and Christians, we praise God for His mercy, shown to us chiefly on the cross where His Son died, not just to make a way for us to come to Him, but effectually for us such that our sins, our guilt, and our punishment all died in the death of Christ. We find assurance in God’s preserving grace, believing with all our might that nothing—not even ourselves—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We delight in the glory of God and in God’s delight for His own glory, which brings us, on our best days, unspeakable joy, and on all other days, still gives purpose and order to an otherwise confusing and seemingly random world.

What draws people to Reformed theology is the belief that God is the center of the universe and we are not, that we are worse sinners than we imagine and God is a greater Savior than we ever thought possible, that the Lord is our righteousness and the Lord alone is our boast.

Speak the truth with your life

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John Piper addresses the question whether it’s OK for a Christian couple to live together if they aren’t married. His answer, in part:

It’s not primarily, “You’re going to be tempted, and you’re going to give in, and you’re going to have more sex. That’s why.” That’s not the main reason.

The main reason is that when a man and a woman live together it says crystal clear to the world that having sex together without marriage is okay. That’s what it says.

Now, you say you’re a Christian. Do you want to say that sex before marriage is okay? And if you want to say that, then something is profoundly wrong!

And if you say, “That’s their problem,” you’re not loving people. It’s not their problem. It is your problem. You should take steps to communicate truth, and the sanctity of sex in marriage is a glorious truth, and you should want to hallow it and cherish it. 

Now, you say you’re a Christian. Do you want to say that sex before marriage is okay? And if you want to say that, then something is profoundly wrong!
And if you say, “That’s their problem,” you’re not loving people. It’s not their problem. It is your problem. You should take steps to communicate truth, and the sanctity of sex in marriage is a glorious truth, and you should want to hallow it and cherish it.