Piper on the Sluggard

This is a 1998 article from the Desiring God website.  John Piper wrote it for the Bethlehem Star, the bulletin of his (now former) church in Minneapolis. It dovetailed nicely with some of the themes I have been exploring here at Faith Today over the last several posts, and so I wanted to link.

Perhaps one of the best lines is the following: "Doing the evil we love makes us hostile to the light of truth. In this condition the mind becomes a factory of half-truths, equivocations, sophistries, evasions and lies—anything to protect the evil desires of the heart from exposure and destruction."

I pray the Lord grants all of us discernment as we seek to know and uproot the subtle, hidden desires which influence our thinking and which blind us to the liberating Truth of God.

“We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the [flesh] and the mind…you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 2:3, 4:17-24, ESV, emphasis mine).