I would enjoy knowing your thoughts on Tim Keller's lecture at Covenant Seminary in 2004 on Preaching to Believers and Unbelievers (mp3 format). I found it rather compelling. What think ye?

(I posted this on my blog, but wanted to share it with this readership as well. --- MRP)

As many of the RU readership know, I will be going to Trinidad and Tobago in January to lead a conference with pastors and lay Christians in the area of marriage and family. God has placed a passion in my heart for the pastors in Trinidad — they have little formal theological and ministerial education and I believe God desires to use me to help in this.

I would like to take some books down there to put in their hands. You can help in this endeavor. I have set up an Amazon.com wishlist (click here) where you can log on and buy a book that will be shipped here, and then we shall take it on to Trinidad to give as a gift. It is a small way that you can help strengthen and advance the kingdom of Christ amongst these pastors, who in turn will help strengthen the Christians of Trinidad and Tobago.

Thabiti Anyabwile, who pastors a church in the Cayman Islands and who formerly interned at Capitol Hill Baptist Church where Mark Dever pastors, posts a terrific and telling entry on his Pure Church blog.

I sometimes talk too much. I could benefit from hearing and heeding the words of James 1:19: "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry." I'm not there yet.

But from time to time, I am silenced. It's not that I don't have things to say. That's a rarity. It's that the words I have seem so inadequate. I'm forced to recognize that there are situations that exceed my verbal prowess. Hospital visitations is where it happens most often.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Any thoughts?

Note: I published this on my blog, but thought it appropriate here, too. Please forgive the redundancy.



The older I get, the more I witness the heartache of sin. The more I see its results, the more I hate sin.

God has been doing a work in my heart and my life in the past several months. He has been forcing me to face what lies on the other side of the "pleasures of sin for a season." Adrian Rogers used to say, "Sin fascinates, then it assassinates. It thrills, then it kills. It will take you farther than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you more than you were willing to pay." I am seeing that firsthand in my ministry.

I see children who suddenly have their world turned upside down because one or both parents cannot be sexually faithful, or financially responsible, or simply trustworthy. I see grandparents forced to become parents because their adult children won't accept responsibility for their own progeny. I see forty-somethings who look sixty because of the effects of sin on their bodies. Every week I am forced to help people pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and try to fit them together, only to discover that some pieces are lost forever.

Sin cuts with a wide swath. Its effects are not only visited on the guilty parties.

And while I am speaking with the child whose father is in jail, or praying with the wife whose husband is in the arms of another woman, or trying to raise some financial assistance for the family whose father drank all their grocery money, my mind inevitably turns to the grief my sin has caused others. My sins may have been different, but they have not been safer. Sins are like handgrenades; one can't control which way the shrapnel flies. I can control my decisions, but I can't control the consequences of those decisions once I have made them.

I am striving for holiness in my life, but the nearer I draw to Jesus, the more sensitive to sin I become. I am learning that at the heart of all my sin is the suspicion that God is not good, that He has denied me something wonderful. The more contented I become with what God has given me, the less sin entices.

I want to satisfy myself in Christ, because He has given me everything I need for life and godliness. If I am to spend my life binding the wounds that sin has inflicted, at the very least I do not want to be their cause. May I see sin for the lie that it is and hate it with all that is in me, finding contentment in Christ alone.

Sometimes I worry that my students at Southern forget that ministry is not all about finer points of theology, but about people and their need of Christ. Students at Southern are usually brilliant, dedicated, and passionate, though sometimes that passion is misdirected to things not as important as they might think.

I do everything I can think of to keep them rooted in reality. For that reason last week I invited a man from Buck Run to share his testimony with them. In complete candor he spoke with my preaching students about his gambling addiction, how it led to criminal activities and even to thoughts of suicide. He shared with them how he came before the church and confessed his sin and how the church is now holding him accountable and helping his family. I sat in the back of the room and watched my students' spellbound faces as he unfolded his story with brutal honesty. Eventually he told them, "You can debate theology all you want, but you better remember that you are preaching to idiots like me and you need to say it so we can understand it."

In the seminary we can and should properly discuss and debate church polity (elders or pastor led?), Calvinism (three, four, or five points?), eschatology (pre, mid, or post trib; pre, post, or a mil), and denominational matters (just how significant are the bloggers? what about the no-alcohol resolution?). That is an important part of seminary. Whatever our opinions on those matters, however, let's resolve to hate sin, to satisfy ourselves in Christ, and to care more about the victims of our enemy who have fallen prey to his lies. High on my list of theological priorities I place two great foundational truths: that I am satisfied with Christ and a hater of sin.