Desiring God 2.18.13 – reprint

The Day Luther Died

By Jonathan Parnell | Feb 18, 2013 12:00 am

Original In Germany 467 years ago, in a small, backwater town called Eisleben, the shaking hand of a dying man scribbled this simple line: We are beggars. This is true.

Martin Luther died on February 18, 1546. These last words of weakness echoed the life-changing truth he’d unearthed in the Scriptures: we don’t bring anything to the table of our justification. Jesus truly died for the ungodly.

Luther came to understand that if we are to be accepted by God, we need a perfect righteousness we can’t produce — we need an alien righteousness given to us by Another.

But this discovery didn’t just happen. It came after hours of the painstaking study of Scripture. Luther gave himself to the Book, which he later explained as the primary actor in the Protestant Reformation. And a great movement of God in our day won’t happen apart from that same ingredient. Pastors and Christian leaders must be devoted to God’s word.

So we have much to learn from Luther, says John Piper.

Luther was the subject of Piper’s biographical message at the 1995 Conference for Pastors. We’ve since reformatted that message into a five-chapter ebook, which presents a sketch of Luther’s life and distills relevant lessons for not only pastors and leaders, but all Christians.

Get a free download of Martin Luther: Lessons from His Life and Labor (available in PDF, MOBI, or EPUB).

The Truth (About Abortion) Will Set You Free

By John Piper | Feb 17, 2013 12:00 am

Facts help us grasp abortion in our communities. With the internet no one is innocently ignorant. Here are some facts from the Twin Cities to San Antonio. There are no grizzly pictures here. But there are some miracles. I won’t show you what the babies look like after they are killed, but before.

Start with the on-the-ground facts. There are five places to get elective abortions in the Twin Cities, Planned Parenthood (671 Vandalia St.,  St. Paul), Robbinsdale Clinic (3819 West Broadway, Minneapolis), Mildred Hanson (710 East 24th St., Minneapolis) and two locations of the Whole Woman’s Health (33 South 5th St, Minneapolis, and 825 S. 8th St. #1018 Minneapolis). I encourage you to visit them and pray, or perhaps see if any of the workers will talk with you.

All of them do abortions up to 13 weeks gestation. Here is what the baby looks like at 13 weeks.

Mildred Hanson advertises that she does abortions to twenty weeks. Two pictures show the babies she is willing to dismember.

Whole Woman’s Health advertises that they do abortions to 22 weeks. This little fellow, at 22 weeks, is ready to fight for his life.

In addition, Whole Woman’s Health advertises that their San Antonio facility will do surgical abortions through 24 weeks.

But at 24 weeks babies are being born and thriving. Here are a few examples. (If you want to see the 23 week babies when born and then years later go here.) If you want names and ages check out the L’il Aussie Prems Foundation.

These pictures are of babies born at the age when they are being legally killed. The irrationality of our legal system is that we are expected to believe that a seven inch movement down the birth canal transforms a child from one with no right to life into a person under law with full rights of protection. This is the kind of reasoning that creates Gulags and death camps. Whatever else may be said of these children, if they had been dismembered and evacuated one hour before they were born at 24 weeks, it would not have been tissue that was lost.