Tunes for Tuesday

Easily Pleased

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more about “Easily Pleased :: Desiring God“, posted with vodpod

The script comes straight from C. S. Lewis:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. (The Weight of Glory, 26)

Problems? What Problems?

Tunes for Tuesday

Matt Chandler on MSNBC.com

Matt Chandler is spreading the gospel through his experience with brain cancer. The AP picked up the story and it is being featured on MSNBC.com. Read the entire article. Here is an excerpt:

Chandler’s hands are crossed over his chest. He wears a mask with white webbing that keeps his head still when metal fingers slide into place on the radiation machine, delivering the highest possible dose to what is considered to be fatal and incurable brain cancer.

This is Matt Chandler’s new normal. Each weekday, he spends two hours in the car — driven from his suburban home to downtown Dallas — for eight minutes of radiation and Scripture.

At the hospital, Chandler sees other patients in gowns who get chemotherapy through catheters in their chests and is thankful he gets his in pills before going to sleep at home next to his wife.

Chandler is trying to suffer well. He would never ask for such a trial, but in some ways he welcomes this cancer. He says he feels grateful that God has counted him worthy to endure it. He has always preached that God will bring both joy and suffering but is only recently learning to experience the latter.

Since all this began on Thanksgiving morning, Chandler says he has asked “why me?” just once, in a moment of weakness.

He is praying that God will heal him. He wants to grow old, to walk his two daughters down the aisle and see his son become a better athlete than he ever was.

Whatever happens, he says, is God’s will, and God has his reasons. For Chandler, that does not mean waiting for his fate. It means fighting for his life.

A Week Late but Still Relevant

Last week was the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. I had planned on posting this then, but forgot. This is an excerpt from a powerful message given by John Piper to his congregation last year. It still rings true.

Tunes for Tuesday

Mark Driscoll in Haiti

 Upon learning of the tragedy in Haiti, Mark Driscoll took off to see how he and his church could help. USA Today did a short piece on their trip.

Rev. Mark Driscoll, the pastor of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church who is known nationwide for his blunt talking sermons and in-your-face evangelism, has seen the sex trade revving up amid the rubble.

Driscoll and James MacDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago raced down to Haiti to assess the damages to the church infra-structure and launch a drive to rebuild places of worship, churcheshelpingchurches.org. Faith groups offer the fundamental social network for education, welfare and health in a nation with virtually no government — and that was true before the quake.

 Driscoll’s reports on quake deaths of church choirs, pastors who have lost families flocks and buildings included two particularly chilling experiences, posted to his PastorMark Twitter page and Facebook accounts. Driscoll described those experiences to me in his first interview back in the states last night.

“They were standing at the near the entrance to the Evangelical Theological Seminary, a 75-year-old school on a hill that is now sheltering 5,000 homeless Haitians, when they heard, “Pop! Pop!” They looked just a few feet outside of the refuge and there they found a teenage boy has been murdered “for no apparent reason. He was just shot in the head and left in the street.”

Driscoll and Macdonald also saw a glimpse of what lies ahead for many young girls. His posting on line:

 If u want a phone, cigarettes or a teenage girl you can get them here in Port au Prince. Like the American who said he’s on a relief mission and bought a hungry girl despite our confrontation…

Read more

Why I Love Piper

My favorite quote: ” Why are we putting water in this? The container costs more than the water!…”

Tunes For Tuesday