RootsRain

Okay, sure, the title’s a bit intimidating. But even if you’re not a preacher, and have no aims to do expositional preaching, I think this is an amazing sermon to listen to. (I’ve listened to it at least 5 times.) This message was preached two years ago at Together for the Gospel 2006 and it absolutely shook the conference (as testified to by the other speakers’ comments, comments from my friends who were at the conference, and bloggers who were covering the conference). Piper lays out his burden for exultant, expositional preaching from pastors who earnestly sense the weight of the glory of God.

I’ve posted some good quotes below. But when you read Piper, you have to read it slowly and with gripping emphasis on the key words. This is a man who is very serious about what he’s saying.

Packer said upon hearing Martin Lloyd-Jones: “I had never heard such preaching.” And that is why today people say such foolish and minimizing things about preaching: they have never heard it… Packer said, ‘It came to me with the force of electric shock, bringing more of a sense of God than any other man I had ever known.’

John Piper

God did not ordain the cross of Christ or create the Lake of Fire in order to communicate the insignificance of belittling His glory. The death of the Son of God and the damnation of unrepentant human beings are the loudest shouts conceivable that God is infinitely holy, that sin is infinitely offensive, that wrath is infinitely just, and that grace is infinitely precious, and that the brief little life that you and I live and that everybody in our churches lives, will issue very quickly into everlasting joy or everlasting pain. This has got to grip us! There is a weight to this office. Where, brothers, is this weight going to be felt if not from you? Veggie Tales? Not in a million years! Radio? Television? Discussion groups? Emergent conversations? If not from you, in this pulpit, where?! God planned for His Son to be crucified and for Hell to be terrible so that we would have the clearest witnesses possible to what is at stake when we preach. What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of preaching is soaked in the blood of Jesus and singed with the fires of Hell.

John Piper

The MP3 begins with an introduction of John Piper by C.J. Mahaney.

I’m also posting a clip of some comments made in the panel discussion after Piper’s message because I found them very insightful and encouraging.

Too often we come to the cross asking ‘What does it mean for me?’ This is a message about what it meant to Him.

C.J. Mahaney

Since I’ve been listening to so many sermons (because of my long commute), I figured I’d start a tradition on this blog of giving a weekly (or close to it) recommendation of an MP3 sermon. Here goes…

C.J. Mahaney is a Charismatic Reformed pastor and head of Sovereign Grace Ministries. I’ve derived immeasurable benefit from his sermons and books and I’ve recently listened to his sermon series Christ, and Him Crucified (all Sovereign Grace audio sets are free if you download individual sermons). I’m recommending the entire set, but the most powerful of the set is C.J.’s message about Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s called, simply, “The Cup.” Here are a few quotes:

His death wasn’t a surprise to Him. He had foretold it. He said it was the reason He came into the world. And there was no indication of distress in the upper room. They ate; He talked; they sung a hymn… So why now? Why this shuddering terror? Shuddering terror and deep distress were his experience at this moment because here the Holy One experiences a foretaste of what it means to be the bearer of our sin and the recipient of God’s full and furious wrath for our sin.

The cup is dominating His heart and His mind… This cup… contains within it the full fury and fierceness of God’s holy wrath against all sin. And as the Savior gazes into this cup, he is brought face to face with this horrific reality: the reality of bearing our sins, and the reality of becoming the object—the object—of the Father’s righteous and furious wrath. And that prospect is so horrific to the Savior at this moment, that he couldn’t even physically remain standing… ‘He fell to the ground.’

C.J. Mahaney

Gethsemane prepares us for Calvary. Gethsemane informs and interprets Calvary for us…. Christ begs for an alternative to the cup. But if an alternative had existed, the Father would have provided it. But that prayer for an alternative… it was met with silence. Why?… Listen to this verse again for the first time: ‘For God so loved the world…’ that He was silent—at this moment—when His own Son appealed for an alternative.

C.J. Mahaney

Illustrations can be a valuable aid to comprehension and application. But there’s no way to illustrate this. No way… When I prepared this on Saturday night… I slept a total of 90 minutes. I couldn’t escape the effect of this passage. I just found myself all throughout the night wanting to get as close to this mystery as possible. I just kept circling the perimeter of Gethsemane, trying to observe, listen, hear, understand… trying to think of an illustration that would be helpful, crying out to God for an illustration, searching my files for an illustration, until I realized: There is no illustration. I can’t give you one. If I gave you one, you might be tempted to say ‘Okay, I get it.’ But we cannot ‘get’ this.

C.J. Mahaney

In the design world, site pirating is when some unscrupulous designer decides to steal your code and/or design elements and/or entire design and repurpose it as his own work. Site pirating has always been a kind of backhanded compliment I’ve never been (un)fortunate enough to get.

Until now. Apparently the Kolkata Knight Riders, an Indian F-1 Racing group cricket team, liked PGA.com’s look. Or, rather, their designer, MediaFont did. Examine for yourself:

I shouldn’t be surprised, though, that MediaFont is into ripping off other site designs. Their own website is a rip-off of MediaTemple.net, the beloved hosting company. See for yourself:

Of course, who knows what copyright laws allow in India. International law isn’t my specialty.

Since Turner’s taking over management of all of the NBA’s digital properties (web, video, etc.), they’re doing a lot of hiring of creative-types. If you’re interested in working on high-profile sports content with a company with great salaries and benefits, head on over to TimeWarner’s U.S. job site and look around for the creative-type jobs. (There are currently 52 positions open at Turner in Atlanta for job types: “creative,” “graphics design,” and “internet/online/new media.”) If you’re more interested in account management and marketing jobs, I’m sure there are a bunch listed on there as well.

Bon chance!

I’m slow. Really slow.

Comments kept getting turned off in my last blog post. Dave Lohnes told me there was some weird formatting going on in my post, yet I couldn’t find it. Josh McCarnan sent me a Facebook note and told me there seemed to be porn links in my latest blog post. I told him it might be his RSS reader adding advertising links.

So Dave called me this morning and told me he found the hidden porn links in my site in the source code. Sure enough, I checked in the source, and they’re there. That’s +2 for Dave, +1 for Josh, -4 for Jeff.

Apparently someone hacked my site and embedded links with style=display:none in them to make sure no one saw them (except anyone using Google Reader). They then made those links redirect to some other site which auto-redirected to a porn site. Gracious. The lengths these people will go to to get their garbage a little higher in the rankings on Google. It just goes to show what the most hotly contested keywords are on the internet. They have to resort to hacking to even have a chance in the rankings.

So, my apologies to any and all who may have come across those links. I’ve made sure my site is updated to a newer version of WordPress (I was a slacker there, yet again), so hopefully this won’t happen again.

I wrote a while back about how sometimes everything in your life starts converging—like everything is an ingredient in what you suddenly realize is the same recipe. That’s sort of been happening over the past few months in a seemingly odd area: I think I’m beginning to understand the point of the Old Testament (not just the book, but the history behind it).

Here’s a rough ingredient list for this recipe:

• Consistently reading through the Bible this year.
• Listening to a sermon where John MacArthur described an experience in seminary where he was assigned to preach from II Samuel 7. He preached his sermon about not being upset when God says no to our good plans. He got terrible marks from his professors and one professor (a former Rabbi) took him into his office and, in tears but shaking with rage, said “You missed the whole point of that chapter! That’s the Davidic Covenant! The whole promise of the Messiah! How could you? How could you?! There are plenty of other places from which to preach some silly sermon about God spoiling your plans, but don’t preach that from here! How could you?! John, you missed the whole point. Never—ever—do that again.”

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