Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.
Interpretation
Obedience to God leads to true happiness as it reflects our love for Him.
This quote by John Piper emphasizes that genuine obedience to God's commandments stems from recognizing Him as our ultimate treasure. It suggests that the challenges of obedience are directly related to our understanding and belief in God's promises and beauty; thus, if we truly cherish and value God, obedience becomes a joyful response rather than a burdensome task.
In practice
Use this quote in a sermon to illustrate the joy of following God's will.
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.
Mi fe no descansa en lo que soy, o lo que seré, o como me siento, o lo que sé, sino en lo que Cristo és, en lo que él ha hecho, y en lo que él está haciendo en mí - My faith rests not in what I am, or shall be, or feel, or know, but in what Christ is, in what He has done, and in what He is now doing for me.
Has Jesus saved me? I dare not speak with any hesitation here; I know He has. His Word is true; therefore, I am saved.
When you can't do nothing but pray-you've done a whole lot.
The province of faith begins where probabilities cease and sight and sense fail.
I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.
It is seldom we have the heart to throw ourselves, if I may so speak, on the Divine Arm; we dare not trust ourselves on the waters, though Christ bids us. We have not St. Peter's love to ask leave to come to him upon the sea. When we once are filled with that heavenly charity, we can do all things, because we attempt all things - for to attempt is to do.
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