I really appreciate John Piper, perhaps most of all because his material is so freely available online.
As a subscriber to Preaching Today, I recently received a Piper sermon called, “How to Kill Your Sin.” It’s an excellent exhortation toward holiness presented in a biblical and passionate manner. Although I paid for the sermon, as a subscriber to Preaching Today, you can listen to and read it for free.
I highly recommend it.
~Steve
The child born in the night among the beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of the beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. . . .
For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that.
~Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, pp. 13-14.
The worse thing a pastor can do is allow himself to be up on a pedestal where he’s this perfect guy nobody can relate to. People relate to us at our point of weakness, not our point of strength.
~Ken Sande in Pastor to Pastor: Conflict, 2007