Starving for the Greatness of God
From John Piper’s Book The Supremacy of God in Preaching:
The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. People are starving for God. So I am persuaded that the vision of a great God is the lynchpin in the life of the church, both in pastoral care and missionary outreach. Our people need to hear God-entranced preaching. They need someone, at least once a week, to lift up his voice and magnify the supremacy of God. They need to behold the whole panorama of his excellencies.
January 7th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Great quote, thanks!
January 9th, 2007 at 1:15 am
The problem is, we’re so out of touch with God, we have no mental or theological vocabularies to even begin offering God-entranced preaching.
For ministers who will start exploring why Christianity is so out of touch with God, they may have the one-day hope of showing/telling how Great that God truly is. And Piper is right, that’s what everyone longs to hear and know–whether they realize it or not. We need a God that is much, MUCH bigger than the One we too often are presented with, even in the best of our churches.
“The evangelical movement in our country is characterized by an arrogance that is beyond belief. As God has been degraded to a being scarcely a half inch bigger than us humans, we have assumed gigantic proportions in our own eyes. In consequence of this, professed Christians have felt a liberty to neglect major portions of scripture and be virtually untaught in and unaffected by the long history of the Christian church.” Richard Roberts, quoted by Sunder Krishnan, Rexdale Alliance, Jan 6,2007