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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He believed that this righteousness was the gift of God. Verse 11: “The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God,I thank you that I am not like other men.’” He gives God the credit for making him upright and devout like he is. “I thank you that I am morally upright and religiously devout.” In other words, this man is not what theologians call a Pelagian—a person who believes he can make himself righteous without God’s help. . . .

The problem is not whether the man himself has produced the righteousness he has or whether God has produced it. The problem is: He trusts in it. This is his confidence. Verse 9: “[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselvesthat they were righteous.” Now make sure you see what this is saying. It is not saying that he is trusting in himself to make himself righteous. No. He says explicitly he is thanking God for that. He is not trusting in himself to make himself righteous. He is trusting in himself that he is righteous with the righteousness that he believes God has worked in him. That is what he is trusting.

As far as we know, this Pharisee was a total advocate of the sovereignty of God. As far as we know, he would have said, “Not I but the grace of God in me has worked this righteousness.” He says, “I thank you, God, that I have this righteousness.” That was not his mistake. His mistake was that he trusted in this apparently God-produced righteousness for justification. . . .

He is not presented as a legalist—one who tries to earn his salvation. That is not the issue. One thing is the issue: This man was morally upright. He was religiously devout. He believed God had made him so. He gave thanks for it. And that is what he looked to and trusted in for his justifying righteousness before God—for his justification. And he was dead wrong to do so. . . .

Don’t trust what God has worked in you. Trust in Christ alone (John Piper, Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?).

If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings (Adoniram Judson).

From How Few There Are Who Die So Hard: The Cost of Bringing Christ to Burma.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are precious to me not because they turn my life into a string of successes but because they keep me from collapsing under my string of failures (John Piper, Radical Effects of the Resurrection).

• • •

Some professing Christians . . . are given to a grievous censorious and critical attitude toward everything and everybody. As one man I knew has said, “Some people are born in the objective case, the contrary gender and the bilious mood.”. . . For one to profess to know Christ and have real religion and at the same time to manifest a sour, critical, negative attitude is disgusting and ab­horrent even to the ungodly. Certainly anyone with such an unsavory nature could never hope to be a “savour of life unto life” (Bill Piper, Dead Men Made Alive).

I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. . . .

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. . . .

It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage. . . . I don’t regret it.

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The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are precious to me not because they turn my life into a string of successes but because they keep me from collapsing under my string of failures. . . .

I have good news for you, but it’s perhaps not the good news you thought it would be.  Your final healing is as far away as your resurrection from the dead.  However, your invincible joy of hope is as close as the risen Christ.