Over the years there have been a handful of sermons that I continually return to.  They have significant meaning for me because in these handful of sermons, God met me and radically altered the course of my life.

And the single sermon that I have returned to more than any other is John Piper’s Thankful for the Love of God! Why? I first listened to this sermon when I was a freshman, 6 ½ years ago.  Since that time I have listened to it dozens upon dozens of times — even a dozen times in one month on occasion.

The reason I return to this sermon is because it’s one of the clearest places I know of to hear something I often need to be reminded:  God’s love is greater than you ever dreamed.  And if you like being loved by God because being loved makes you feel good, you have no idea how much God loves you, because he loves you way more than that.  At great cost to himself, he has given you what you need most — himself.

God’s love is his doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever cost, so that we will see and be satisfied with the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Let me say it again. The love of God is his doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever cost to himself or to us, so that we will see and be satisfied by the love of God in Christ forever and ever (Piper).

I really needed to listen to it again tonight.

Thank you, Dad, for loving me enough not to give me what I think will make me happy, but what will make me eternally happy.  You are true beauty and grace.  I love you.

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Today is the anniversary of Saint Augustine’s birth.  It is a particularly special day for me because no man — with the exception of Jesus — has had as much impact on my life as Augustine.  I have said this before, and I think it is true, that, when I die, Augustine’s feet will be the 2nd I get in line to kiss — that is only after I have spent a day or two wiping tears from the feet of the Lord himself.

About 4 years ago, I picked up a copy of Augustine’s City of God.  Shortly thereafter I began reading the Confessions.  In each of these books I saw for the first time something I had never seen before.  I saw a man desperately, unashamedly in love with God, and he made no attempts to downplay it out of a fear of looking silly or weak.  Augustine was a lover of God, who has only been rivaled in his lavish, penned expression of love for God by King David.

As I read Augustine’s account of his own depraved and sinful life — a story that was routinely interrupted by affectionate praise for the Savior he loved — I was amazed.  I’d never seen anything like it.  His language was so full and overflowing with emotion that it made my own heart “throb with a bewildering passion.”

And at the center of it was one sentence that changed my life:

He loves You too little who loves anything together with You which he loves not for Your sake.

Anything, Augustine? I asked.  Anything, he replied through the pages he’d left me.

I loved a lot of things and a lot of people, and most of them I didn’t love for God’s sake.  Was it for God’s glory that I watched TV, listened to music, or posted on my blog?  Was it with God in mind that I spoke when around my friends?  Was it love for God motivating my love for my family?  Was it for God’s sake that I ate and drank, slept and got out of bed, put on my clothes and breathed?

It wasn’t.  And I was terrified.  More than that, I saw something Augustine had that I wanted.  God became more glorious to me than he had ever been before.  I wanted to know this great God who brought Augustine to his knees before him, tearing his hair and beating his breast.  I found myself on my own knees, mourning over my sin and weeping in joy.  My experience was like that of Augustine 16 centuries earlier:

I began to search for a means of gaining the strength I needed to enjoy You, but I could not find this means until I embraced the mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ.

I thank God for Augustine, for his providence in bringing him to me, and for the sentence that changed my life.

The following is from Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian:

That is the idea–that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.  It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked.  You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.  In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progess in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.  I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. . . .

It has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all.  ”What has human happiness to do with morals?  The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

The rest of the book continues in a similar vein.  The most disheartening part of all of it is the thing he’s criticizing isn’t Christianity at all.  What he attacks stands in stark contrast to the example set by Jesus who endured the cross for the joy set before him.

Professor Russell, human happiness has everything to do with morals.  But, as Piper put it, I want a joy as deep as it can be and as wide as it can be, and it better last 80 thousand years or I’m not interested.

Let us not despise human happiness.

Q. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever (Westminster Shorter Catechism).

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How Our Suffering Glorifies the Greatness of the Grace of God

Not in reveling in drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites (Romans 13:13-14).