You Don't Have to Be Productive
(Author: David Mathis) What is the most important principle for productivity? Our Director of Strategy Matt Perman answers, I would actually say: realize that you don't have to be productive. By this I mean: your significance does not come from your productivity. It comes from Christ, who obeyed God perfectly on our behalf such that our significance and standing before God comes from him, not anything we do. Then, on that basis, we pursue good works (which is what productivity is) and do so eagerly, as it says in Titus 2:14. Read the ful

Who Should We Invite to Thanksgiving Dinner?
(Author: Abraham Piper) There's a little while left to invite people over for tomorrow's feast. Listen to John Piper talk about who to have over. (And if your table is already full, you can listen to the clip just because it's funny to hear how high his voice was in 1980.) Originally posted last year.

By How Many Doors Must You Enter Paradise?
(Author: John Piper) Here's an unusual wake up call about the wonders of marriage. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed not an exaggerated sensibility to sex but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it's like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. (G. K. Chesterton,

Behold, Believe, Be Raised
(Author: David Mathis) This week's sermon: "Behold, Believe, Be Raised" The crowds ate Jesus' multiplied bread and were filled. But the next day, their stomachs were again empty, and their query to Jesus made it plain that they had missed the point of the loaves—that Jesus is the Bread of Life. Jesus answered their request, which alluded to Moses and wilderness manna, with a double denial and an amazing offer. Denials: It was not Moses who gave the manna but God; and the ultimate point of the manna was not full tummies but something bigg

C.S. Lewis on Why to Seek an Author's Intention
(Author: John Piper) In answering the question why we should care about an author's intention, C. S. Lewis gives two answers in his book An Experiment in Criticism. "Why," they ask, "should I turn from a real present experience—what the poem means to me, what happens to me when I read it—to inquire about the poet's intentions or reconstructions, always uncertain of what it may have meant to his contemporaries?" There seem to be two an