There Are No Weak People Who Love The Word Of God

As I've been contemplating the gospel this week and how to live it out more biblically, I've been listening to some messages by John Piper that he preached in 1995 on the basis for the mission statement for their church. As I've listened to these, God is thrilling my soul again with how magnificent the gospel of Christ is and how practical it is in my daily life. I've paraphrased much of what he said, as well as written some of my own thoughts. His quotes are in quotation marks and I've used the Scriptures that he used. 

Psalm 1:1-3 - "How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers."

"If we are people of the One Great Book, the very essence of the Bible flows from us! There are no weak people who love God's Word." I must be willing to live by the Fountain that will strengthen and give life. Lord, work that in my life, I pray. God's Holy Spirit works in me to help me renounce the power of free time, TV, hobbies and leisure, sleep and shopping, because His mission working through me is "to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples", including my family and the elderly and children of this world who are part of families where God's glory is at stake. The reason I care is because when God’s glory is at stake in the church and family, it makes a big difference in everything! And God’s glory is at stake in the church and in families. People need to know what God in Christ looks like through my marriage, my family, and my service to others. This is only possible through our Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, "loving all whom He loves, treasuring all that He treasures, praying for all His purposes, sustained by all His grace, meditating on all His Word". This magnifies God through the supremacy of His glory. God is not content to just tag along with us in our endeavors, picking us up when we fail - He wants to be in complete charge of us. He gives us the grace, faith, strength, power, bodies, voices, minds, and everything else that's needed to glorify Him with our very lives. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, eternal, one with God the Father, came into the world and died in order that the wrath of God might be taken away from us, and that the curse might be removed, and that sins might be forgiven and the guilt of our sin might be taken away and the righteousness of Jesus might be the clothing that covers our shame."We don’t go into our neighborhoods with advice – we go in with news!!! Good news!!! That Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners!""The gospel is unintelligible without the supremacy of Christ."" Jesus Christ was demonstrated as the righteousness of God, that He might be just and the justifier of Jesus – God worked his work on God to rescue us from wrath. Of course if the wrath of God doesn’t exist in your theology, then you don’t understand the gospel."
"Christianity becomes clear when we see the main problem – that God is angry with sinners. What does it feel like to have an omnipotent being against you? The wrath of the Lamb against you? Omnipotent anger is against you. "
"How do you rescue people from it? Not with morality! God willed to rescue us from God at the cost of His Son’s life. The bomb of wrath was eaten by Jesus and it exploded in His belly and it killed Him and it will never explode for those who are in Christ. That's the gospel! There are all kinds of moral spins but they are only spin-offs of the glorious news that Jesus came into the world to avert the wrath of God!" 
Saving faith is more than a head belief; it's treasuring what God has done for us in Christ! 

Gal. 5:6 - "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love."

"And what exactly is faith? We're so used to "Christianese" that we no longer hear words like "faith", and "believe". Faith is treasuring or being satisfied with all that God is and promises to be for us in Jesus - Faith satisfies the heart; and when it does, "it severs the powerful root of the promises of sin. Sin has power in only one way – it makes promises. The only way to nullify the promises of sin is to confound those promises with a superiority of belief. We must be mastered by the expulsive power of a new affection"; we must be mastered by a superior satisfaction. "Faith is embracing a treasure such that the advertisements of sin look stupid after you’ve tasted God." Once you’ve tasted God, the temptations of sin will seem like the most stupid, idiotic, suicidal ideas, because God says, 'thou shalt not'... and tells us that the promises of sin are all terrible lies. When we understand and embrace and treasure what God treasures, when God says I hate something, we're going to hate it too. When sin's lying promises are countered with the superior treasure of faith in Jesus Christ, then other-centeredness becomes the habit of our lives, which is love. 

And how do I become other-centered? Faith reaches out and embraces all that God has treasured and suddenly I'm a free person, able to serve others. Despondency goes, and lust goes, and laziness goes, and self-righteousness goes, and self-centeredness goes, because Christ becomes our all. And when Christ is all, I become a person who exists for others. Love flows from this treasuring of what God treasures. Where do I get that kind of faith? Where does that come from? I must Pray for all His purposes and Meditate on all His Word.

Psalm 119:18 – "Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things out of your law." 

We must beg God to open our eyes. I don’t want to just read the Bible and see nothing – I want to see wonderful things! I must pray, 'Lord speak, stand forth, open these eyes, the eyes of my heart, that I might see the hope to which I’ve been called, the power that’s at work in my life.'Where does faith come from? Where does this treasuring come from? 

Romans 10:14-17 – "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? Even as it is written, 'How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings of good things!' But they did not all hearken to the glad tidings. For Isaiah says, 'Lord, who has believed our report?' So belief comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ."

Where does treasuring all that God is, come from? It comes from meditating on all His Word or hearing the Word of God. It’s crucial! I understand His Word to mean the literal 66 books of the Bible, from cover to cover. And the question we’ve got to ask is, "Is this literally the Word of God?" Did He really say all these Words, and does He ask me to read, meditate on and teach these Words? If I'm going to think on and spend most of my waking hours every day thinking on this book, then it had better be God's Words that I'm thinking about. It's not enough to be a Christian because I grew up in a Christian home - That brings terrible dishonor upon the name of the Lord. "Here is the center of all valid conviction about the Bible being the Word of God. Jesus Christ as he’s presented in the New Testament has won our trust and we have embraced his view of the Bible; and in embracing His view of the Bible, we also embrace His view of everything else that's a part of our lives.  Jesus is such a powerful historical person that nothing has been able to conceal him in his true glory.  He has broken through every human limitation and he has revealed himself as authentic; so loving, so penetratingly wise, so uniquely authoritative, there is none like him, so we embrace what He teaches about the Bible. 

You’ve got to decide whether what comes through in that testimony is true or not. Is the portrait of Jesus the result of a fanatical deluded zealot who hallucinated, and is this just the foam of hallucinating minds of a glorious trustworthy Christ, more humble, more self-denying, more powerful than anybody else? Is this just the foam of the beer of hallucination? Is the portrait of Christ that we have of Him in the Bible an intentional deception, a fraud, foisted on the world, a Passover plot that we’ve all been duped with? These fraudulent witnesses then gave their lives? Does that work? Is that true? Were they whipped to pieces for a fraud? Do you believe that?" "Maybe the way it happened was that He just gave a kernel of truth and he really did a little bit of teaching, but over the decades, it’s become so overgrown and we’ve magnified our imaginations of the community of Christ which had no better historical foundation than a person like you or me? How do you account for this man who stands forth from the New Testament and beckons you to a relationship, this Man who has authority and power in word and deed – what am I going to do with Him?""I am not impressed with the reconstruction of ...Jesus... but with Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Jude, and the writer of Hebews. I’m impressed by these men. I do see some lunatics and frauds in the halls of scholarship. Every generation produces a Jesus that fits their presuppositions.""I’m impressed with the man Christ Jesus and His witnesses who laid down their lives to give us the message of the Bible, that cry out from the gospels a thousand times more powerfully than anything I’ve ever read in any scholarly book. What am I going to hang my whole soul on – how will I meet the Judge?"I don't believe that the Bible is a book of hallucination! There is such authenticity and power that it illumines all of reality. Once you do say 'Yes' to Jesus, He is worth believing, and He is worth obeying. He streams His Light into our souls and illumines our politics and our checkbooks, our marriages and our families, and all our choices and circumstances in life - they are all put into the context of relationship with God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Paul preached only God's Words, and people believed God's Words

1 Thess. 2:13 – "For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe."

"There's a gigantic event that happens when we’re confronted with the Word of God. We believe it and then obey it! Paul constantly thanks God. Why? Why did they say 'yes! that’s Christ, the Son of God and this is the Word of God?" I thank God they did! God did it! God opened their eyes. I am the most thankful person to God because I do believe God's Word, because when I pick up the Bible I don't hate it, but I exist to love God's Word and hear it! " The bottom line answer to why we believe that the Bible is the Word of God, is God Himself! God has come by the power of the Holy Spirit and done a work in our hearts. Every need I have He will meet. The character of His person, his receiving of women and little children, his loving prostitutes and tax collectors, his touching of lepers - this guy is real! Thank you , thank you, thank you Precious Savior that you opened my heart and dug out enough of my pleasures and comforts and selfishness to make room for You, through Your Word, to fit!" So, what am I going to do with this Word of God? I must value daily personal Bible reading and meditation and study. I must value the role of keeping the main thing the main thing. I must be humble and teachable before the Word of God. I must value Biblical self-denial. I must be willing to structure every part of my life around the truths contained in God's Word, from the look on my face, to the way I speak to my husband and children, to the way I talk to the check-out clerk at the grocery store when the line is too slow. It’s clear to me that I must be a Bible-saturated person. The very essence of the Bible flows from me – a person of One Great Book! "There are no weak people who love the word of God" – Lord work that love in your people I pray."But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night." "We must decide what’s truth. And we must keep our eyes opened and gazing upon Truth. We don't have the luxury of closing our eyes, or letting 'scholars' do this thing. My authenticity is at stake - I must decide today whether I'm going to obey or not."