Paul Baloche
Desperation Band
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Desiring God
The Practice of the Presence of God 
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Desiring God is the website that covers the ministry of John Piper. John Piper is the Pastor for Preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is perhaps best known for his book “Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist”. It is a superb book, and if you have not read it I strongly recommend you do. If you are thinking that Christian Hedonism may not be for you, you probably need to know what John Piper means. He terms Christian Hedonism as follows:
“The particular aspect of the gospel that we feel called to emphasize in our preaching and teaching is the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. “Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil” (Desiring God, p. 18). Therefore loving (treasuring) him supremely is not optional but essential as fruit of being born again.”
This website has an immense amount of high quality resources in it, as he has decided to provide all of his twenty five years of ministry free on line!
Main content
- Sermons (generally weekly)
- Radio podcasts (daily)
- Blog
- Online books
- Various other items
Sermons
The sermons published on this site span back to 1980, which as you can imagine means a lot of sermons! The sermons are sorted by date, topic, series, scripture, occasion and title. This really helps to make it simple to find what you may be after.
Many of the sermons also have the option of reading them, or hearing excerpts. This can be really handy if you want to get a flavour of what the preach is on, especially if you are looking into certain topics. As a general guide, the further back into the mists of time you go the less likely it is you get the excerpts, but most do have the sermons written. Also, many of the more recent ones can also be viewed with online video.
All this content, but is it any good? Does it deserve to be recommended on free Christian resources? I’ll leave that for you to decide, but personally I enjoy his style and he has a real gift for making some tricky areas easy to understand.
Radio podcasts
Every day you can get a podcast “radio” broadcast. They are bitesized studies that tend to last about 25 minutes. Normally a message will be given over a few days, and there is often a Q&A section with John Piper and the presenter at the beginning. In reality, the only difference between the type of content in the sermons and the podcasts is this introduction. The great thing about the podcasts though is you can easily listen to them if you don’t have much time (especially if you fast forward past the intro)
Blog
This is a fantastic way to keep up to date with the latest entries and older sermons and resources that have been added. It also has a few other articles and is certainly one of the best Christian blogs around.
Online books
John Piper once again comes up trumps by offering all his books free online, some are in pdf format whilst others you have to read ‘live’. This even includes Desiring God and The Pleasures of God, his two most popular books (I am assuming). If you’ve not read either of these books then I suggest that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. These are seriously spiritually enriching books.
Various other items
One new addition is YouTube videos. These were added after this initial post, but I have written an article on it.
There is plenty of other stuff including study guides. However, I’ll leave these for you to find yourselves or this review will never end.
Ease of use etc.
Navigating the site is breeze, and many sites (including this one!) would do well to take a leaf out of their book. Within a couple of minutes of looking around, you should be pretty confident about finding anything on the site. Sometimes such a large choice as the number of sermons held can be overwhelming but the searches are logically and clearly laid out.
Presentation
This is a well designed site. It is very professional, simple and easy on the eye.
Summary
This website is well worth visiting. It has an amazing array of easily accessible high quality resources that are added to on an almost daily basis.
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Strengths
- Vast content
- Continually updated
- Easy to use and navigate
Weaknesses
- You’ll never get through it all!
Links
Website: http://www.desiringgod.org/
Tags: audio-sermon, audio-sermons, bible study, books, christian, desiring-God, free, John-Piper, resources, review, sermon, sermons
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July 10th, 2007 at 2:52 am
Excellent review. I’ve actually used his site to research predestination and I’ve learned a lot from him. I plan on reading “Desiring God” but I’m finishing up two more books right now.
I didn’t know the entire “Desiring God” book was online. Perhaps I’ll search through it instead of buying it since I’m mostly interested in the problem of Evil and Predestination so I can read that online.
Thanks for the review and keep up the good work.
EI
July 10th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Hi El,
Thanks for the feedback. I was rather surprised to find the entire book online too! Obviously it is not that easy to read a whole book online, but for dipping into it for study it would be perfect.
Cheers,
David