John Piper is besotted with God. What's more, he wants other people to be besotted with God too. He preaches about God. He writes about God. He lives for God. He established Desiring God Ministries to promote a fresh God-centredness amongst God's people.
The driving force behind so much of the last thirty-two years of public ministry, first at Bethel College and since 1980 at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, is his concern that even in the churches the blessings of God are valued more than God himself.
We talk so freely about the great things God has done, but do we speak as freely about how great God is?
We rejoice in the forgiveness of sins but seldom go beyond that to ask why the forgiveness of sins is such a big deal (and the answer, he would insist, is more than just escaping judgement, p. 167). God needs to be at the very centre of the Christian agenda, both in the message we proclaim and in the lives we live.
One of John Piper's latest books, God is the Gospel (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005), has been written to sound this call again as clearly and simply as possible.
In this delightfully accessible book he takes his readers step by step through the wonder of the gospel. He recounts the wonderful saving events, Jesus' death in our place and his rising again in victory to rule. He rejoices at the great blessings such as forgiveness and justification. He marvels at God's choice of rebels like us and the plans God has for us.
And yet above all these things he delights in the person and character of God himself. It is breathtaking to "Behold your God'. He summarises the argument of his book in one sentence: "What makes the gospel good news in the end is the enjoyment of the glory of God in Christ' (p. 37).
Surely Piper is right to warn how easy it is to remain self-centred, even in the way we think and live and speak as Christians. We are right to take human life and its concerns seriously. God undoubtedly invested humanity with a unique dignity not only at the moment he created the man and the woman in his own image but also when he embraced our humanity in the incarnation, resurrection and ascension of his Son.
What we think of ourselves, each other and life in general is profoundly affected by the fact that Jesus Christ was one of us, raised as one of us and that he took his human nature into heaven forty days later. We are right to rejoice with the apostle Paul that in Christ God has showered us with every spiritual blessing. Yet in doing so we must not forget that all of these things arrive at their goal as we know and enjoy God. As Jesus himself put it, "this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).
We are rightly concerned with clear and effective communication with those around us in the twenty-first century. We have heard often enough the call to understand our audience and to clear away those obstacles which prevent our contemporaries from hearing and responding to the gospel. Alongside those calls we need to hear this one from John Piper.
We cannot afford simply to baptize the aspirations of our age. We are not Christian because of the benefits we gain from Christ but because of who Jesus is. We do not simply rejoice in what God gives but in the God who gives. In Piper's words, "the gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God' (p. 47). Enjoy the read "” I did.
Other books by John Piper include Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986) and The Supremacy of God in Preaching (1990). You might also visit his website: [url=http://www.desiringgod.org/]http://www.desiringgod.org/[/url]
Mark Thompson
Mark Thomposon is Academic Dean and Lecturer in Theology at Moore College. Reading is not quite as much fun for him as spending time with his girls.
God is the Gospel Extract
Today " as in every generation " it is stunning to watch the shift away from God as the all-satisfying gift of God's love. It is stunning how seldom God himself is proclaimed as the greatest gift of the gospel. But the Bible teaches that the best and final gift of God's love is the enjoyment of his beauty. "One thing have I asked of the LoRd, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LoRd and to inquire in his temple" (Ps 24:7). The best and final gift of the gospel is that we gain Christ. "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my LoRd. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ" (Phil.3:8). This is the all encompassing gift of God's love through the gospel " to see and savour the glory of Christ forever.
In place of this, we have turned the love of God and the gospel of Christ into a divine endorsement of our delight in many lesser things, especially the delight in our being made much of. The acid test of biblical God-centeredness " and faithfulness to the gospel " is this: do you feel more loved because God makes much of you, or because, at the cost of his Son, he enables you to enjoy making much of him forever? Does your happiness hang on seeing the cross of Christ as a witness to your worth, or as a way to enjoy God's worth forever? Is God's glory in Christ the foundation of your gladness? From the first sin in the Garden of Eden to the final judgement of the great white throne, human beings will continue to embrace the love of God as the gift of everything but himself. Indeed there are ten thousand gifts that flow from the love of God. The gospel of Christ proclaims the news that he has purchased by his death ten thousand blessings for his bride. But none of these gifts will lead to final joy if they have not first led to God. And not one gospel blessing will be enjoyed by anyone for whom the gospel's greatest gift was not the Lord himself.
Is divine love the endorsement of self-admiration?
The sad thing is that a radically man-centred view of love permeates our culture and our churches. From the time they can toddle we teach our children that feeling loved means feeling made much of. We have built whole educational philosophies around this view of love " curricula, parenting skills, motivational strategies, therapeutic models, and selling techniques.
Most modern people can scarcely imagine an alternative understanding of feeling loved other than feeling made much of. If you don't make much of me you are not loving me. But when you apply this definition of love to God, it weakens his worth, undermines his goodness, and steals our final satisfaction. If the enjoyment of God himself is not the final and best gift of love, then God is not the greatest treasure, his self-giving is not the highest mercy, the gospel is not the good news that sinners may enjoy their Maker, Christ did not suffer to bring us to God, and our souls must look beyond him for satisfaction.
This distortion of divine love into an endorsement of self-admiration is subtle. It creeps into our most religious acts. We claim to be praising God because of his love for us. But if his love for us is at bottom his making much for us, who is really being praised? We are willing to be
God-centred, it seems, as long as God is man-centred. We are willing to boast in the cross as long as the cross is a witness to our worth. Who then is our pride and joy?
Great self or great splendour?
Our fatal error is believing that wanting to be happy means wanting to be made much of. It feels so good to be affirmed.
But the good feeling is finally rooted in the worth of self, not the worth of God. This path to happiness is an illusion. And there are clues. There are clues in every human heart even before conversion to Christ. One of those clues is that no one goes to the Grand Canyon or the alps to increase his self-esteem. That is not what happens in front of massive deeps and majestic heights. But we do go there, and we go for joy. How can that be, if being made much of is the centre of our health and happiness? The answer is that it is not the centre. In wonderful moments of illumination there is a witness in our hearts: soul-health and great happiness come not from beholding a great self but a great splendour.
The gospel of Jesus Christ reveals what the splendour is. Paul calls it "the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor 4:4). Two verses later he calls it "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
God is the Gospel: Meditations on God's love as the Gift of himself by John Piper, copyright 2005, pages 11-13. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187.
