Mark Talbot is a gift to Christ’s church. He uses his massive intellectual gifts for the sake of the church, and God has shaped those gifts through Dr. Talbot’s disability. I pray you’ll get to know him better in 2012:
I have come to realize that God is protecting me from idolatrous self-sufficiency by taking various goods away from me so that I am not tempted to rest satisfied in them. Each morning as I get up, my disability prompts me to trust God rather than to rely on my own strength. And so, in this second stage of my coming to understand how God works in and through our difficulties, I came to realize that some things that are really evil – Christians are not Christian Scientists who say that evil is illusory – are also really good and that, as such, these evils are actually ordained by God.
What does it mean to say that God ordains something? It means that he has eternally willed it to come about.
Mark Talbot, “True Freedom: The Liberty that Scripture Portrays as Worth Having” in Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, edited by John Piper, Justin Taylor and Paul Kjoss Helseth, p. 88.
The Works of God 
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