by John Piper | November 8, 2012
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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
How Not to Commit Idolatry in Giving Thanks ...
Jonathan Edwards on True Thanksgiving
Jonathan Edwards has a word for our time that could hardly be more pointed if he were living today. It has to do with the foundation of gratitude.
True gratitude or thankfulness to God for His kindness to us, arises from a foundation laid before, of love to God for what He is in Himself; whereas a natural gratitude has no such antecedent foundation.
The gracious stirrings of grateful affection to God, for kindness received, always are from a stock of love already in the heart, established in the first place on other grounds, viz. God's own excellency.
In other words, gratitude that is pleasing to God is not first a delight in the benefits God gives (though that is part of it).
True gratitude must be rooted in something else that comes first, namely, a delight in the beauty and excellency of God's character.
If this is not the foundation of our gratitude, then it is not above what the "natural man," apart from the Spirit and the new nature in Christ, experiences.
In that case "gratitude" to God is no more pleasing to God than all the other emotions which unbelievers have without delighting in Him.
You would not be honored if I thanked you often for your gifts to me, but had no deep and spontaneous regard for you as a person. You would feel insulted, no matter how much I thanked you for your gifts.
If your character and personality do not attract me or give me joy in being around you, then you will just feel used, like a tool or a machine to produce the things I really love.
So it is with God. If we are not captured by His personality and character, then all our declarations of thanksgiving are like the gratitude of a wife to a husband for the money she gets from Him to use in her affair with another man.
This is exactly the picture in James 4:3-4. James criticizes the motives of prayer that treats God like a cuckold: "You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?"
Why does he call these praying people "adulteresses"? Because, even though praying, they are forsaking their husband (God) and going after a paramour (the world). And to make matters worse, they are asking their husband (in prayer) to fund the adultery.
Amazingly, this same flawed spiritual dynamic is sometimes true when people thank God for sending Christ to die for them.
Perhaps you have heard people say how thankful we should be for the death of Christ because it shows how much value God puts upon us. What is the foundation of this gratitude?
Jonathan Edwards calls it the gratitude of hypocrites. Why? Because, they first rejoice, and are elevated with the fact that they are made much of by God; and then on that ground, He seems in a sort, lovely to them. . . .
They are pleased in the highest degree, in hearing how much God and Christ make of them. So that their joy is really a joy in themselves, and not in God.
It is a shocking thing to learn that one of today's most common descriptions of how to respond to the cross may well be a description of natural self-love with no spiritual value.
We do well to listen to Jonathan Edwards. Does he not simply spell out for us the Biblical truth that we should do all things - including giving thanks - to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31)?
And God is not glorified if the foundation of our gratitude is the worth of the gift and not the excellency of the Giver.
If gratitude is not rooted in the beauty of God before the gift, it is probably disguised idolatry.
May God grant us a heart to delight in Him for who He is so that all our gratitude for His gifts will be the echo of our joy in the excellency of the Giver!
Excerpted from John Piper, A Godward Life (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 1997), 213-214.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Eagerly Awaiting, Part 1
“Why eagerly await the return of Christ? What will be so good about it?"
Published by: Sam Crabtree
I recently asked all the staff for their help. I asked them to send me at least one answer to the questions, “Why eagerly await the return of Christ? What will be so good about it? What difference(s) will it make? What will improve at that time?”
Over the next few days we’ll post a few dozen of their replies here.
Jon Nowlin: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17).
Amanda Knoke: We will see our Very Best Friend face to face.
Matthew Schildroth: Freedom from my sin nature.
Bud Burk: It’s His face, Sam—we will see God’s face, and for the first time in our lives we will behold pure power, wisdom, goodness, peace, love, truth, righteousness, and beauty. We will wait with eagerness because by God’s grace we have become Psalm 27:4 people: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.”
Or, as the song says, I will glory in my Redeemer, who waits for me at gates of gold. And when He calls me, it will be paradise; His face forever to behold. His face forever to behold.
Krista Coronado: No more pain!
Amy Katterson: Oh, what a day that will be … Sin finished. Heart free to love Jesus fully. No more good-byes.
Ben Collins: We as broken image-bearers will be transformed through seeing the full-fledged glory of the exact Image-bearer (1 John 3:2, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:3), and our senses will—by God's incredible grace—be revamped/rewired to handle and synthesize the Glory-Lumens of our Savior, and in this synthesizing, our hearts will likewise be revamped to desire perfectly and ultimately forevermore. Hope in that day when your desires feel impaired today, knowing it is not forever.
Cody Sandidge: Why eagerly await the return to Christ? Christ is the only reason I live. If the resurrection (and I would add, the Second Coming) is a fabrication, we Christians are to be pitied above all others. I await his return because I want to be with my Savior. There is nothing dull or unimpressive about Christ ... everything about him causes me to eagerly await his return.
What will be so good about it? Christ will give me true freedom. What I want to do will be in accordance with his will.
What difference(s) will it make? I won't sin anymore; I will only pursue Christ and I will only desire holiness.
What will improve at that time? Everything.
What will be so good about it? Christ will give me true freedom. What I want to do will be in accordance with his will.
What difference(s) will it make? I won't sin anymore; I will only pursue Christ and I will only desire holiness.
What will improve at that time? Everything.
Pastor Sam Crabtree is Bethlehem Baptist Church's Executive Pastor and Lead Pastor for Life Training (Minneapolis, Minnesota).
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sports in the Age to Come
My 17-year old daughter has been into dancing Hip-Hop for several years now, and just started on Free Running and Breakdance a few weeks ago. Now this article exactly expresses what I have been musing about my daughter´s ardent battle between agility and gravity:
Will there be touchdowns in the new creation? Grand-slam homeruns? Three-pointers at the buzzer? When heaven comes down to earth (Revelation 21:1–2), we shouldn’t expect anything less.
Or, to really bring it down out of the clouds, here’s one way a pastor might go about recruiting for the church’s men’s retreat: Make a brief but winsome case for sports and recreation in the age to come.
In October of 1991, John Piper wrote this to rally the men of Bethlehem Baptist to a retreat that would include its fair share of athletic competition:
One reason I think there will be sports in the age to come is that there are crippled and paralyzed men in this age who never knew the joy of agility and physical freedom. It would be like God to make this up to them. Not because he owes anybody anything, but because he is so good. When God restores the fortunes of his people what will we do with all our time?
Zechariah 8:5 says, “The streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.” I cannot imagine that those of us who love to run and kick and throw and dodge and jump and bat and hit and whack will be told that we cannot join the children. In fact, we are commanded to be like children in order to get into the kingdom. Shall we get there and be told to grow up? (“For Men Only: Playing, Planning, and Paradise”)
We do well to expect that the new heavens and new earth will not disappoint in holding out to us the kind of multifaceted joys we experience now through sport and athletics and play. And in the age to come, our appropriation of sports will finally be gloriously dialed in to its perfectly Jesus-exalting place, free from our sinful tendencies to either make sports an idol or downplay their goodness as God’s gifts.
Enjoy the games — as a foretaste of heaven.
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