"...all these strange turns"

From John Piper's exquisitely titled, A Sweet and Bitter Providence:

Life is not a straight line leading from one blessing to the next and then finally to heaven. Life is a winding and troubled road. Switchback after switchback. And the point of biblical stories like Joseph and Job and Esther and Ruth is to help us feel in our bones (not just know in our heads) that God is for us in all these strange turns. God is not just showing up after the trouble and cleaning it up. He is plotting the course and managing the troubles with far-reaching purposes for our good and for the glory of Jesus Christ.

HT: Joe Thorn

The Central Strategy in the Fight for Joy

From When I Don't Desire God (p. 91), by John Piper:

Hearing the word of the cross, and preaching it to ourselves, is the central strategy for sinners in the fight for joy. Nothing works without this. Here is where we start. And here is where we stay. We never outgrow the gospel. Here we see the glory of Christ more clearly than anywhere else. Indeed the gospel is "the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God" (2 Cor. 4:4). If seeing Christ is the key to savoring Christ--and it is!--then here is where we must linger. The word of the cross is the revelation of the glory of Christ.

Clyde Kilby's Resolutions

I've been reading John Piper's The Pleasures of God, and there I came across the resolutions of Clyde Kilby, the well-knows Lewis scholar. For my post today I just wanted to share a few of those. They're quite marvelous:

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but, just as likely, ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on t he assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the Architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

Saturday Library Post 1

It's Saturday morning, and I'm in the library. Only this morning I've brought my laptop, which seems a little disloyal to all these books surrounding me.

Anyway, I think I've probably mentioned (a million times) that I love the library. I love little libraries, like the kind in which I spent so much of my childhood
9and like the one I'm in this morning), and I love big ones, like the NYPL and the BPL. When I was a boy, my best friend George Knorr (where is he now, I wonder) and I used to walk to the library on just about every fine Saturday morning, each of us coming home with an armful of books more often than not. As I think of those days, they are always sunny. Why is that, do you suppose? For I'm sure it was not always so.

This morning, walking into my local public library (on a sunny morn, by the way), browsing the new books rack, I find this: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, of which Nicholson Baker said,

"Oddly inspiring.…This is the Super Size Me of lexicography….Shea has walked the wildwood of our gnarled, ancient speech and returned singing incomprehensible sounds in a language that turns out to be our own.”

Speaking of reading, I've begun John Piper's The Pleasures of God. Just out of curiosity, I tracked down the single Amazon reviewer who gave this book a 1-star rating:

I read this for a theology class and found is crass, speculative, and self-serving. The picture of God as a pleasure-mongering hedonist was horrifying. It runs absolutely counter to the biblical data used to support it. I don't recommend this book even for a door stop - too light weight!

I will only say this: did you ever notice that people who take theology classes are always claiming books and authors are "too lightweight" for them, thus showing off their theological sophistication?

Anyway, here's a quote from the book itself:

I regard this book as a vision of God through the lens of his happiness. What the church and the world need today, more than anything else, is to know and love god--the great, glorious, sovereign, happy God of the Bible. Very few people think of God as supremely happy in the fellowship of the Trinity and in the work of creation and redemption. The volcanic exuberance of God over the worth of his Son and the work of his hands and welfare of his people is not well-known. God's delight in being God is not sung the way it should be, with wonder and passion, in the worship places of the world. And we are thepoorer and weaker for it.

I'll take Piper over aforesaid theology-student any day.

Piper on Humility

Here's something from John Piper's What Jesus Demands from the World (p. 131):

In Matthew 18:4 Jesus says, "Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." The Greek verb for "humble" did not generally describe a positive virtue in Jesus' day. It meant generally to crush, bring down, afflict, humiliate, and degrade. The word was chosen because Jesus' demand was not a romantic one, as though childlikeness was sweet and easy. For a strong, self-confident, self-sufficient, intelligent, resourceful, controlling person, Jesus' demand was devastating. Jesus knew that children were not the models for imitation in his day. The reason he chose them is because of "their powerlessness and their low social standing." His demand is that we end our love affair with power and status and self-sufficiency and rights and control."

I Repeat . . .

Good preaching often makes me weep. And it makes me sweat, and it makes me shout, and it fills me, sometimes, with a feeling as of something welling up inside of me, desiring to be birthed.

I listened again this morning to John Piper's second lecture on suffering (which he delivered at the New World Alive conference in Wales last month). And I'm going to listen to it again. And I'm going to take notes. This is not simply good preaching, not simply "deep thoughts," it is important stuff. I'm linking to it for a second time because now I've listened for a second time and it is messing me up!

Right now I would go so far as to say, this is probably some of the greatest preaching you will ever here. Start at the beginning, listen to part 1, then part 2. What Piper is talking about is something we need to understand well, for it is the stuff of life. Piper is a gift to our time in much the same way as Spurgeon was to his. Not simply eloquent, but bringing a message so deeply needed, so important to such times as these.

Piper on Suffering

These words of John Piper have the potential to shake the very foundations of contemporary Christianity:

Suffering is an essential part of the Christian life. You will suffer. You must suffer. My hope is that during our times together we’ll be prepared to suffer for the glory of Christ.

Listen to the message or read the notes here.

HT: the estimable Adrian Warnock, of course.

Listen to this!

I found this via Adrian's blog. John Piper on suffering (part 1, part 2). Here's my take: this is mighty, mighty preaching. If you haven't heard these yet, oh please do listen. It will profoundly bless you.

Oh, and btw, if you can only listen to 1 of the above, choose part 2. It's killer!

Book Recommendation

Over the past few months I've been slowly reading through a little book by John Piper called, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die. This book came out a few years ago under a different title. It was called "The Passion of Jesus Christ" . . . back when every book published by a Christian publisher was using the word "passion" in the title . . . you know, just after that phase when they were all using the word "purpose" . . . Christian publishers are not an especially creative bunch.

Anyway, the book is composed of 50 2-page meditations on the reasons--in the plan of God--that Jesus came to die. I have read the book as a devotional, one reason at a time, and have found it to be stirring, powerful, and thought provoking.

Piper does not eschew Biblical or theological language in order to be "winsome."

• Reason 1) To absorb the wrath of God.
  
• Reason 8) To become a ransom for many.

And yet he consistently brings eloquence and insight to his subject, and is able to startle his readers from the drowsy blur with which we often receive theological language. Among those that I was especially "startled" by:

• Reason 28) To free us from the futility of our ancestry
• Reason 33) To make his cross the ground of all our boasting
• Reason 35) To give marriage its deepest meaning
• Reason 43) To unleash the power of God in the Gospel
• Reason 44) To destroy the hostility between races.

But the real power of this little book is in its cumulative effect. Used as a daily devotional, again and again the reader is encouraged to turn and look "with fresh eyes" at the cross of Christ and think again of what it really means for each one of us who believe.

I am not done with this little book. I intend to read it again, and perhaps again. I give it my highest recommendation.

[BTW, you can get a pdf of the first five chapters here.]