Category Archives: Piper

The New Birth is Unsettling

Posted on by
Reply

“You must be born again,” said Jesus (John 3). If we take Jesus’ words seriously, they will have an unsettling effect upon us. John Piper, in his book Finally Alive, describes three reasons for this…

(1) These words confront us “with our hopeless spiritual and moral and legal condition apart from God’s regenerating grace. Before the new birth happens to us, we are spiritually dead; we are morally selfish and rebellious; and we are legally guilty before God’s law and under His wrath.”

(2) These words “refer to something that is done to us, not something we do. …God causes the new birth; we don’t.” See 1st Peter 1:3.

“We do not cause the new birth. God causes the new birth. Any spiritually good thing that we do is a result of the new birth, not a cause of the new birth. This means that the new birth is taken out of our hands. It is not in our control. And so it confronts us with our helplessness and our absolute dependence on Someone outside ourselves. This is unsettling.” ~ John Piper

(3) These words of Jesus, ‘You must be born again,’ confront us with “the absolute freedom of God. …if we are going to be born again, it will reply decisively and ultimately on God.”

Unsettled now? Seek the Lord while He may be found. Cry out for mercy and grace. He freely gives these to those who ask Him.

~ pdb

Read your Bibles more

Posted on by
1

“Don’t rest on past reading. Read your Bible more and more every year. Read it whether you feel like reading it or not. And pray without ceasing that the joy return and pleasures increase” said John Piper in a January blog post.

While some might feel this is arm-twisting, or hear this as mere duty, Piper goes on to give three reasons this is not legalism — and then quotes the helpful JC Ryle:

(1) You are confessing your lack of desire as sin, and pleading as a helpless child for the desire you long to have. Legalists don’t cry like that. They strut.

(2) You are reading out of desperation for the effects of this heavenly medicine. Bible-reading is not a cure for a bad conscience; it’s chemo for your cancer. Legalists feel better because the box is checked. Saints feel better when their blindness lifts, and they see Jesus in the word. Let’s get real. We are desperately sick with worldliness, and only the Holy Spirit, by the word of God, can cure this terminal disease.

(3) It is not legalism because only justified people can see the preciousness and power of the Word of God. Legalists trudge with their Bibles on the path toward justification. Saints sit down in the shade of the cross and plead for the blood-bought pleasures.

So lets give heed to Mr. Ryle and never grow weary of the slow, steady, growth that comes from the daily, disciplined, increasing, love affair with reading the Bible.

Do not think you are getting no good from the Bible, merely because you do not see that good day by day. The greatest effects are by no means those which make the most noise, and are most easily observed. The greatest effects are often silent, quiet, and hard to detect at the time they are being produced.

Think of the influence of the moon upon the earth, and of the air upon the human lungs. Remember how silently the dew falls, and how imperceptibly the grass grows. There may be far more doing than you think in your soul by your Bible-reading.
(J. C. Ryle, Practical Religion, 136)