New.Demonstration

The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this:

If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there?

And the question for Christian leaders is:

Do we preach and teach and lead in such a way that people are prepared to hear that question and answer with a resounding No? How do we understand the gospel and the love of God? Have we shifted with the world from God’s love as the gift of himself to God’s love as the gift of a mirror in which we like what we see? Have we presented the gospel in such a way that the gift of the glory of God in the face of Christ is marginal rather than central and ultimate?

If so, I pray that this book might be one way God wakens us to see the supreme value and importance of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” I pray that our ministries would have the same focal point as the ministry of John Owen, the great Puritan writer of the seventeenth century. Richard Daniels said of him:

There is one motif so important to John Owen, so often and so broadly cited by him, that the writer would go so far as to call it the focal point of Owen’s theology . . . namely, the doctrine that in the gospel we behold, by the Christ-given Holy Spirit, the glory of God “in the face of Christ” and are thereby changed into his image.^[i]

—John Piper, God is the Gospel: Meditations of God’s Love as the Gift of Himself (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005), 15.

Get this book on the supremacy of beholding the fulness of the glory of God in Christ as the only captivating beauty of the Gospel, free from the DesiringGod Resource Library.

Sometimes we just miss the point, don’t we? We lose sight of that at times. And as always, I say this first to myself before others. In times that we just get so consumed in service to God, in wants that souls be saved, we simply, subtly, miss the point—that the glory of the Gospel is the person of God Himself in the Lord Christ Jesus. That the Gospel news is indeed great and awesome is not because of the benefits of the Gospel, though they are indeed great and undeserved benefits that would add to our praise to the Giver, but infinitely more than these things, external things, the great splendor of the Gospel lies in God Himself. To have Him as our all and in all! The Lord says to us in Jeremiah 31:33, “I will be their God.” Is that not enough? Is that not enough to captivate the souls of men^[ii], the tremendous weight of this aweful privilege? The person of God Himself to us, for such as we are?

O, I can say it so many words, but let us remember where the importance must lie upon, unless we truly labor upon the centrality of this doctrine of the glory of God in the message of the Gospel, all other form of teaching, even in it’s subtleties will become a perversion of that so great a message and will be nothing but chasing after the wind.

Footnotes

1. Richard Daniels, The Christology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Reformation Heritage Books, 2004), 92. [↩]
2. That is after the preaching of law for the conviction of sin towards repentance and faith in the Lord Christ Jesus, in the message of grace. [↩]