PIPER FRIDAY - John Piper on Being Born Again
“YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN”
I have today decided I want to work through a series of sermons John Piper recently finished giving at his church. I would encourage you to join me. There can be nothing more important than to get ourselves clear about being born again, being regenerated. Are YOU sure that you have experienced the new birth? Are you sure you are on your way to heaven? What exactly happens when someone is born again? What changes? What are the results?
Allow John Piper to teach us together about this most critical subject. We must understand well for the sake of our own souls, and for the souls of those we love. So please, join me. The sermons are available in written, video, and audio forms.
I encourage you to watch as many as you can for maximum spiritual impact short of being in the same room. We are looking for a miraculous work of the Spirit to quicken God's words to our hearts and enlighten us. It is not just an intellectual exercise. Don't let's rush this. If you have a blog, consider yourself tagged. Write about this series on your own blog. What else could be more important?
The sermons are available from the Desiring God website, and the series is entitled You Must Be Born Again.
"Another reason I am eager to focus on the new birth is to help you know what really happened to you when you were born again. It is far more glorious than you think it is. It is also more glorious than I think it is. It is wonderful beyond all human comprehension. But that mystery is not because there is little about it in the Bible. There is much about it in the Bible. It’s because when all is comprehended there is still more. So I hope that you will know more and know better what happened to you when you were born again . . .
And the reason I want you to know what happened to you in your new birth and others to know what must yet happen to them is threefold. 1) When you are truly born again and grow in the grace and knowledge of what the Lord has done for you, your fellowship with God will be sweet, and your assurance that he is your Father will be deep. I want that for you. 2) If God would be pleased to bring this kind of awakening to his church, then the world will get the real deal of radical love and sacrifice and courage from the church and not all these fake Christians that live just like the world. 3) If you know what really happened to you in your new birth, you will treasure God and his Spirit and his Son and his word more highly than you ever have. And he will be glorified."— John Piper, You Must Be Born Again
Labels: Gospel, John Piper













Many of the opponents of the doctrine of justification and penal substitution criticize us for not being as interested in the resurrection as the cross. I increasingly think that it is not so fair to accuse most evangelical theologians of not having a place for the resurrection in our system of beliefs. I do feel, however, that we perhaps under-emphasize the resurrection at times.-762464.jpg)
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This connection between self-righteousness and exclusivism is one of the points of Jesus’ parable that begins, “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous [dikaioi], and treated others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). A deep root of “treating others with contempt” (whether the others are ethnically similar publicans or ethnically different Gentiles) is: “[They] trusted in themselves that they were righteous. . . . In other words, the exclusivistic treatment of others is one manifestation of the self-righteousness that trusts in its own law-keeping. Legalism and ethnocentrism have the same root. They are not separate conditions of the soul. Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector also shows that the branches of this root of exclusivistic self-righteousness can, amazingly, make protests and prayers to the effect that all is of grace. Thus, the Pharisee prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).
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