It Doesn’t Matter What Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh Was
The thorn’s purpose is to deflate the certainty that Paul would quietly become puffed up over his indescribable experience of heaven. And who wouldn’t, without a thorn to burst that bubble?
Articles by Dane Ortlund
67 results found
What Is Distinct about the Theology of 2 Corinthians?
If otherwise vital Pauline notions such as “grace” and “law” are nowhere near the heart of Paul’s concerns in 2 Corinthians, what is the heart or center or core burden of this letter?
Growth in Christ Is Not Just Personal Improvement
Jesus is not a concept. Not an ideal. Not a force. Growing in Christ is a relational, not a formulaic, experience. Who then is this person?
What Does Perfect Anger Look Like?
Christ got angry and still gets angry, for he is the perfect human, who loves too much to remain indifferent. And this righteous anger reflects his heart, his tender compassion.
The crass references to hell we hear in everyday conversation shouldn’t dull the agonizing awareness all believers should have of the pains of hell.
Why It Matters That Jesus Was and Still Is Human
The impression often seems to be that the Son of God came down from heaven in incarnate form, spent three decades or so as a human, and then returned to heaven to revert back to his preincarnate state.
What Was Paul's Thorn in the Flesh? (2 Corinthians 12)
This passage gives every indication that the thorn in Paul's flesh is still a present reality and thus represents a prolonged, sustained pain. But what was the thorn?
What the Puritans Understood about the Human Heart
The genius of the Puritans was that they knew how to build bridges between Scripture and the human heart.
The psalms are poems that reflect the beauty of God himself and how he wants to enchant, allure, woo, and draw us up into him.
The Most Accessible Person in the Universe
Jesus is lowly, he's accessible. You don't have to go through security to get to him. You just have to humble yourself.
9 Wrong Ways to Read the Bible (And One Better Way)
The Bible is good news for us. Here are nine common but wrong ways to read the Bible, followed by the right way.
We need to look to Christ. We need to draw our strength from him. The way we grow is simply by looking to Christ.
How Christ Has Changed Our Destiny
What does it mean to be united to Christ? It’s a little bit mysterious and elusive.
Understanding the Role of Justification
Theologically understood, justification is the moment—the event—that God declares a sinner righteous in his sight.
You Need Christ to Put Your Sin to Death
Christian salvation is fundamentally a matter of grace, rescue, help, deliverance—it is God invading our miserable little lives and triumphing gloriously and persistently over all the sin and self he finds.
Why You Must Leverage Your Self-Despair
There is a strange though consistent message throughout the Bible. We are told time and again that the way forward will feel like we’re going backward.
Do This Breathing Exercise for Healthy Christian Living
Think of Scripture and prayer as inhaling and exhaling because that shows the two necessarily go together.
God gave his own Son as the final sacrifice so that your brokenness could be the only prerequisite to receiving God’s abundant mercy.
Advice for a New Christian Reading the Psalms
We want to read the Scripture, inhale it, and then exhale it out to God in whatever way makes sense for our own life.
Christ’s Heart on Full Display
Jesus proves that he is gentle and lowly through his actions throughout his life and the pages of the Gospels.
We tend to project our natural expectations about who God is onto him instead of fighting to let the Bible surprise us into what God himself says.
For the Joy before Him, Christ Came
When you come to Christ for mercy and love and help in your anguish and perplexity and sinfulness, you are going with the flow of his own deepest wishes, not against them.
6 Questions about Christ’s Heart for Sinners
We cannot present a reason for Christ to finally close off his heart to his own sheep. No such reason exists.
For all his resplendent glory and dazzling holiness, his supreme uniqueness and otherness, no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ.
If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condemnation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.
The Reason We Don't Feel the Weight of Our Sin
Just as we can hardly fathom the divine ferocity awaiting those out of Christ, it is equally true that we can hardly fathom the divine tenderness already resting now on those in Christ.
Jesus isn’t like you. Even the most intense of human love is but the faintest echo of heaven’s cascading abundance.
It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.”
All our human friendships have a limit to what they can withstand. But what if there were a friend with no limit?
The Hidden Value of Pastoral Gentleness
As leaders of God’s people, we all long to make a difference for Christ. We don’t want to be unfruitful. The main reason to nurture gentleness is neither pragmatic nor historical, but biblical.