Greetings from Minneapolis!

Hey all! Greetings from Minneapolis...I'm here for the week on my last training trip of the year. I'll try to post all the stats later, but it looks like I'll end up with 140 nights in hotels and 68,000+ flight miles. Phew! Almost certainly my last full year doing this.

This morning, I went to Bethlehem Baptist Church...which may sound familiar to some of you. That's right...it's John Piper's church! I HEARD JOHN PIPER SPEAK IN PERSON!! Sorry...I'm just a bit giddy :-) :-). He's in the middle of a series of being born again...the last couple of weeks were on what being born again means, and today was the first day of why it's necessary. He started by quoting Calvin's opening sentence of Institutes of the Christian Religion: "Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom,consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." Piper then argued that knowledge of ourselves is harder than knowledge of God, which surprised me a bit. Here's his argument:

1. True knowledge of ourselves can only come when we have true knowledge of God.
2. We think we know ourselves, but we don't (Jer 17:9--the classic "The heart is deceitful above all things" passage.)

Thinking about it, I do agree with him. And only by being born again, can we have any hope of truly knowing ourselves. He then went on to Ephesians 4:18 and talked about the four layers of having one's understanding darkened. I could go on, but I won't. But it was really really good...it's been so long since I've heard such a deep, solid, and balanced message (and that's nothing against any of the churches I've been to in the last couple of years.)

Then afterward, I shopped in the bookstore, and bought a bunch of books, including one called Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, adapted from a conference with Piper and others. Should be good!

Later!