Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?
Interpretation
The quote explores the nature of love and empowerment from God, questioning the basis of feeling loved by Him.
John Piper's quote presents a thought-provoking reflection on the basis of oneβs relationship with God. It prompts individuals to consider whether they perceive God's love as stemming from His admiration for them or from His role in granting them the freedom and strength to contribute to His glory. This distinction reveals deeper insights into humility, purpose, and the nature of faith, encouraging a shift from self-centeredness to a greater focus on Godβs transcendence.
In practice
In a sermon addressing the congregation's understanding of divine love.
God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.
You donβt have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.
Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.
Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.
The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.
The way to truth lies through ahimsa (nonviolence).
In True Meditation, we're in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself.
I don't think you can measure wealth in dollars and cents. I really don't believe that at all because there are some things that money cannot buy. One of them is health. And the other is security in your relationships and friends.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.
There is no peace more wonderful than the peace we enjoy when faith shows us God in all created things.
The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress.
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