About 6 weeks ago, Crossway came out with their new ESV Study Bible.  We’ve been looking forward to it for a while now.  With the help of Desiring God (where I worked this summer) and a Cornell alum, we were able to give out 80 study Bibles to all of the students in Campus Crusade at Cornell’s Bible studies!  

This does several things:

• Every student has the same translation – the English Standard Version – which we’ve been encouraging for years now.
• Every student has a solid study Bible for use in personal Bible study and devotions – they can learn how to use and benefit from all the different reference systems – footnotes, study notes, crossreferences, concordance, charts, maps, book intros, etc.
• Each Bible has dozens of helpful articles about Christian ethics, theology, how to read the Bible, etc.  At a conference we just went to, the speaker (a prof from Gordon Conwell) said something to the extent of “if you read and learn all the extra articles in the ESV Study Bible, you’ll get the equivalent of a Bible College education.”  

The top of the stack of boxes (14 of them!):

One of our Bible studies getting their Bibles:

When you have 80 of the same Bible floating around, marking up the outside is helpful…

-Ben

1. Go to desiringGod.org.

2. See how the arrow next to the Google Search Box is blue?  That means you can add a search function…

3. Click it and you’ll see the option.

4. Click “Add ‘DesiringGod.org Search’”.

5. Don’t try it out just yet… right now it’s set to open in the same tab.  To configure it to open in a different tab, go to about:config, click through the confirmation, and enter “browser.search.openintab” into the Filter.

6. Double-click on the line so that the “Value” (the right-most column) says “true”.

7. Try out your new search box.  Important keyboard shortcut: ctrl-k. This will focus the search box by putting the cursor there.  You’re now only a ctrl-k away from searching DG!

Bonus Step:  If you install Google Desktop Search, you can use the keyboard shortcut ctrl-ctrl (tap ctrl twice) to bring up a Google search box from within anywhere on your computer.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems.

-Ben

1. I get to go to Bethlehem Baptist Church and hear John Piper preach every Sunday.
2. My walk to church is shorter than the walk down Ho Plaza.
3. I get to hang out in the BBC book store, which is basically what I’m always secretly hoping Borders will be every time I walk in.  Imagine (almost) every good Christian book, in one room.  (Not too many very dead guys, though there is a good number.)  I will probably come home with ~$500 of new books.
4. I get to go to real old-people Sunday School, which is something I’ve never gotten to do before in my life.
5. I get to go to BBC’s prayer meetings and evangelism times.  Last Tuesday we went street-EV’ing downtown, and we think a handful of people got saved!
6. I get to work at Desiring God.
7. I get to work at Desiring God whenever I want to, since they gave me keys .
8. DG gives us free Mountain Dew.
9. I get to work doing web programming, which is basically what I do with my free time during the summers anyway.
10. Job == Hobby => amazingness
11. I get to work with a team of godly Reformed Christian Hedonistic men and women wiser and more mature than I who treasure Jesus and the Bible and are working tirelessly for your joy and mine for the sake of the Gospel.
12. I get to work with Daniel and hang out with Joe and Liang, who are also here with me.
13. I get to meet and hang out with and learn from people who are doing things I want to be doing eventually, like going to TBI, planting churches, doing campus ministry, etc.

The project I’m working on is simultaneously very exciting and very daunting.  Objectively, it’s very clearly one of those “if this succeeds at all, it’s completely by God’s grace” things.  It can consume whatever time I’m able to throw at it, which so far has been a lot.  Like I said above, they’ve given us keys to the building, so we’ve been going home later and later each day.  Soon we’ll be keeping I-Banker hours.  Pray that the work would be done in active reliance on Jesus for wisdom and strength, and hope and joy in Jesus, not simply pretty code or solved problems.

There is one project that I can talk about – our accountability web application.  I’ll talk more about it in a later post.  Daniel’s been hard at work for the last few days writing it while I’ve been learning Ruby On Rails (he already knew it) and working on some administrative/environment stuff.  I thank God for him, the heart God’s given him, and his willingness and ability to serve the Body of Christ in building this tool.

I’ll give a more subjective analysis later.  Maybe I’ll get back into the habit of blogging often.  We’ll see…

-Ben

Each year Christmas night finds members of my family feeling some melancholy. After weeks of anticipation, the Christmas celebrations have flashed by us and are suddenly gone. And we’re left standing, watching the Christmas taillights and music fade into the night.

But it’s possible that this moment of melancholy may be the best teaching moment of the whole season. Because as long as the beautiful gifts remain unopened around the tree and the events are still ahead of us, they can appear to be the hope we are waiting for. But when the tree is empty and events are past, we realize we are longing for a lasting hope.

So last night, as Pam and I tucked our kids into bed, we talked about a few things with them:

• Gifts and events can’t fill the soul. God gives us such things to enjoy. They are expressions of his generosity as well as ours, but gifts and celebrations themselves are not designed to satisfy. They’re designed to point us to the Giver. Gifts are like sunbeams. We are not meant to love sunbeams but the Sun.
• Putting our hope in gifts will leave us empty. Many people live their lives looking for the right sunbeam to make them happy. But if we depend on anything in the world to satisfy our soul’s deepest desire, it will eventually leave us with that post-Christmas soul-ache. We will ask, “Is that all?” because we know deep down that’s not all there is. We are designed to treasure a Person, not his things.
• It is more blessed to give than receive. What kind of happiness this Christmas felt richer, getting the presents that you wanted or making someone else happy with something that you gave to them? Receiving is a blessing, but Jesus is right—giving is a greater blessing. A greedy soul lives in a small, lonely world. A generous soul lives in a wide world of love.

It’s just like God to let the glitter and flash of the celebrations (even in his honor) to pass and then to come to us in the quiet, even melancholic void they leave. Because often that’s when we are most likely to understand the hope he intends for us to have at Christmas.

-Ben

This morning my assistant, Bryan DeWire, found out his father, who 24 hours ago seemed in fine health, didn’t make it through emergency heart surgery. This afternoon, my wife called me in tears to update me on a very difficult day trying to raise and teach 5 young children. Very different, yet real and painful experiences of God’s providential reign in lives of Christians I love.

Also this morning I read this sentence in a pamphlet titled, “Honey Out of the Rock,” by Puritan Thomas Wilcox,

“Judge not Christ’s love by providences, but by promises.”

Experiences are very powerful. They often feel more powerful than promises. So it’s tempting to interpret prosperity and ease as God’s blessing and tribulation as God’s displeasure. And sometimes they are. But often they are not.

Actually, what we see all the way through the Bible is the Lord training his disciples to trust his promises more than providences. Think of Abraham and Sarah waiting for Isaac, or Jacob losing Rachel, or Joseph in slavery and prison, or Job’s suffering, or David running from Saul. Think of Lazarus and the heartbreak of his death and the constant tribulations of Paul. And of course Jesus set the ultimate example by looking to the joy set before him as he endured the cross (Heb 12:2).

Strange, isn’t it? In the Bible pain is often the path to unspeakable joy and prosperity is often an obstacle to it. What’s going on?

Simply, God wants us to treasure what we can’t see more than what we can.

“For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Cor. 4:18).

And we find out that it’s pain more than prosperity that makes us look for what our eyes can’t see, and long for a satisfaction that doesn’t exist in this world.

So Thomas Wilcox’s advice is worth heeding. For those of us who are experiencing a bitter providence, Wilcox goes on to say,

Bless God for shaking off false foundations, for any way whereby He keeps the soul awakened and looking after Christ; better sickness and temptations, than security and superficiality.

First, let me commend to you this post by Piper on Desiring God’s blog and give you the following snippet:

Have you ever wondered how you will do in the hour of final trial? The gunman has you in his sights and asks, “Are you a Christian?” Here is a strong word to give you hope that you may do better than you think.

“If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Peter 4:14).

This encouragement from Peter says that in the hour of unusual threat (whether insult or death) there will be “a Spirit of glory and of God resting on us.” Doesn’t that mean that God gives special help in the hour of crisis to those who suffer because they are Christians? I don’t mean he is absent from our other sufferings. I just mean that Peter went out of his way to say to those who suffer “for the name of Christ” will experience a special “resting” on them of “the Spirit of glory and of God.”

This may account for some of the astonishing testimonies of martyrs.

Second, look at where that link he has points.  To Google Book Search.  More specifically, to a complete version of a book by a dead guy (Baxter) on Google Book Search.  And it has a downloadable PDF to go with it.

So yeah… go play with it.  I just found:

• The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
• Selections from the Unpublished Writings by Jonathan Edwards

-Ben