Do you long for happiness?

1. The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.

2. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.

3. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God.

4. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it expands to meet the needs of others in the manifold ways of love.

5. To the extent we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue.

John Piper
Excerpted from the Desiring God Seminar, Part 1.

Railroad Track or Ladder?

On Galatians 2:15-21:

"God gave the law originally as a railroad track to guide Israel's obedience. The engine that was supposed to pull a person along the track was God's grace, the power of the Spirit. And the coupling between our car and the engine was faith, so that in the Old Testament, like the New Testament, salvation was by grace, through faith, along the track of obedience (or sanctification).

But this way of salvation is so uncomplimentary to the human ego (since God is having to do everything for us) it has never been very popular. The Pharisees, and many other Jews with them (as well as many people today), did an amazing thing. They took the railroad track—rails, ties, nails, and all—lifted it up on end, leaned it against the door of heaven, and turned it into a ladder to climb. This is the essence of legalism: Making the law into a long list of steps which we use to demonstrate our moral fitness to attain heaven. While the track is on the ground, some of the ceremonials ties could be pulled out from under the rails without ruining the track. But as a ladder, every rung is crucial, or you may not be able to climb the next.

This ladder is what Paul tore down. He tore down the legalistic misuse of the law. And he says (v. 18), "If I build up again those things which I tore down, then I prove myself a transgressor." You transgress the law of God when you try to erect the law as a ladder to heaven on which you will demonstrate your moral fitness for salvation. So the connection between verses 17 and 18 is this: When Christ leads us to trust him for justification instead of trusting our own legal (climbing) efforts, he is not an agent of sin, for what really makes a person a true transgressor of the law is not the neglect of its ceremonial statutes, but the horrible prostitution of the law of God which turns it from a railroad track of grace into a ladder of works. The transgression against God is to presume that you can climb your way up a ladder of morality into his favor."

John Piper
from I Do Not Nullify the Grace of God
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Eternal Significance

"Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Want this! Don't coast through life without a passion."

John Piper

from Don't Waste Your Life

Real Love

"What makes the good deed an act of love is not the raw act, but the passion and the sacrifice to make God himself known as glorious. Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need most deeply. And to have all else without him is to perish in the end. The Bible says that you can give away all that you have and deliver your body to be burned and have not love (1 Corinthians 13:3). If you don't point people to God for everlasting joy, you don't love. You waste your life."

John Piper
from Don't Waste Your Life

Cultivating a Child-like Imagination

"If any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema." Galatians 1:9 (ASV)

"Oh how we need to meditate on the horror of rejecting the Gospel! We will not skim quickly over these verses onto something positive for only positive helps. That's not true. Satan has done an amazing trick in America and in the Western world with television and radio. He has used television and radio, especially the entertainment dimension, to create in our mind a mindset that is so trivial, banal, petty, earthly. We do not have the capacity to feel horror at the word 'anathema'. We don't have the capacity to believe it because we are so numbed by earthiness, by this world. We need, oh how we need, to guard ourselves against the barrage of eternity-denying entertainment and information. And I say that to you who are in the Church, not just to the worldly worldlings. The Church, it seems sometimes, is just as set on getting as much maximum entertainment, day in and day out, as everybody else. And it simply deadens the mind to ultimate reality that ought to stun us with its horror, like the word 'anathema'. We need to try to cultivate a child-like imagination...so that when a reality like 'Let him be accursed' hits us, we experience something like what a little child experiences the first time he hears a peal of thunder that cracks against the lime in his back yard and sends him running. "

John Piper
from When Not to Believe an Angel (Audio Message)

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