MattPerman.com

Advice on Prayer from Tim Keller

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Tim Keller’s new book on prayer comes out next week, and it looks excellent. When I was at Catalyst a few weeks ago, I saw him doing an interview on the book and he made a very insightful point. In talking about how to become better at making time for prayer, he said this: “If […]

The Pastor's Kid

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Last July, Barnabas Piper came out with his fantastic book The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity. Barnabas writes, obviously, as a pastor’s kid. Unique to any other book on the subject is that the foreword is by his dad, pastor John Piper. He is not writing this book as a memoir or some sort […]

Teach Us to Want

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Jen Pollock Michel’s book Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition, and the Life of Faith is one of the most well-written books I’ve read in the last year. Jen writes for Christianity Today’s her.meneutics blog. You may remember her from last spring when she wrote a review of my book that pointed out that I didn’t do […]

Real Christian

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I am very excited about Todd Wilson’s excellent new book, Real Christian: Bearing the Marks of Authentic Faith.  Todd and I go way back, having studied together under John Piper at The Bethlehem Institute back in our early days of seminary. Todd has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is now senior pastor at […]

The True Nature of Elder Authority in the Church

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Note: I originally wrote this post a few weeks ago, in partial response to everything that was going on at Mars Hill. I didn’t post it, however, because I was hesitant to speak up about issues at a church where I don’t attend. However, the issues at Mars Hill pertain to many crucial biblical principles that are […]

Radical? Yes!

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I’m looking forward to reading Michael Horton’s book Ordinary. There is no missing the allusion in the title to a book like David Platt’s Radical, though — which is another book I’ve found to be very helpful.  I like Horton a lot, and I assume that rather than disagreeing with what Jonathan Edwards called “the necessity of engaging in […]

John Stott on the Motive for the Great Commission

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I think this is well said by John Stott. Love for our neighbor is a critical motivation. But when the sacrifices become so great, and people begin to say “missions is not actually loving — go away,” it can be easy to say “are we sure it is really worth this?” That’s why it is […]

Jesus > Religion

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An incredibly insightful observation by Jefferson Bethke in Jesus > Religion: I think the more focused Christians are on external behavior, the greater the possibility they are trying to make up for what they lack in their hearts. When we have no real transforming power of Jesus in our hearts, we hold up a list of external […]

Mercy is a Test

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Tim Keller, in Ministries of Mercy (his least well known — but perhaps most important — book): Both James and John use the ministry of mercy as a test. The apostle John writes his first epistle to set forth the test by which a genuine Christian can be known. One of the tests of Christian love is […]

The Gospel and Money

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The Gospel And Money from mattperman This is my presentation on “The Gospel and Money” from the workshop I did at The Gospel Coalition 2008 national conference. In this presentation, I answer three questions: How should we understand prosperity in light of the biblical texts that seem to take a wealth-negative view? Is maximizing our financial giving […]