Life is wasted if we do not grasp the glory of the cross, cherish it for the treasure that it is, and cleave to it as the highest price of every pleasure and the deepest comfort in every pain. What was once foolishness to us—a crucified God—must become our wisdom and our power and our only boast in this world.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of valuing the spiritual significance of the cross as a source of wisdom and comfort.
John Piper's quote encourages us to recognize the profound importance of the cross in our lives. It suggests that understanding and cherishing the value of sacrifice and suffering, represented by the crucified Christ, transforms our perspective on pleasure and pain. What may initially seem foolish can become a source of great strength and insight, guiding us in our daily struggles and joys.
In practice
During a church sermon focusing on finding strength in suffering.
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 don’t 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.
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.
It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.
For the butterfly, mating and propagation involve the sacrifice of life, for the human being, the sacrifice of beauty.
We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.
A man should be upright, not kept upright.
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