New.Demonstration

Since Edwards, American evangelicals have not thought about life from the ground up as Christians because their entire culture has ceased to do so. Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world-view or his profoundly theological philosophy. The disappearance of Edwards’s perspective in American Christian history has been a tragedy. (Mark Noll, Quoted in “Jonathan Edwards, Moral Philosophy, and the Secularization of American Christian Thought,” Reformed Journal (February 1983):26. Emphasis mine.)

…frankly I wish I could recreate for everyone of you what it has meant for me to find my way, little by little, into that God-entranced worldview.

I am so deeply convinced that what our people need is God.

I preached on the reign of Christ two weeks ago on Easter Sunday from 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 It says at the end that someday the Son himself will be subjected to the Father, that God might be all in all. I argued that the necessity of the reign of Christ (expressed in the words, “He must reign, until he has put all his enemies under his feet”) is rooted in the very demands of God the Father’s well-spring of deity – that to be God in all the fullness of his glory, the image and reflection of his glory, the Son, must turn and bow and draw all attention through himself to the Father.

Six verses later, Paul cries out to the Corinthians, who were questioning the resurrection of Christ, “Come to your right mind, and sin no more. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.” What they needed, and what our people need is a true vision of the greatness of God. They need to see the whole panorama of his excellencies.

They need to see a God-entranced man on Sunday morning and at the deacon’s meeting. Robert Murray M’Cheyne said, “What my people need most is my personal holiness. That’s right. But human holiness is nothing other than a God-besotted life.“

And our people need to hear God-entranced preaching.

God himself needs to be the subject matter of our preaching, in his majesty and holiness and righteousness and faithfulness and sovereignty and grace. And by that I don’t mean we shouldn’t preach about nitty-gritty practical things like parenthood, and divorce and AIDS and gluttony and television and sex. We should indeed! What I mean is that everyone of those things should be swept right up into the holy presence of God and laid bare to the roots of its Godwardness or godlessness.

What our people need is not nice little moral, or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the world. They need to see that everything, absolutely everything – from garage sales and garbage recycling to death and demons have to do with God in all his infinite greatness. Most of our people have no one, no one in the world to placard the majesty of God for them. Therefore most of them are starved for the infinite God-entranced vision of Jonathan Edwards and they don’t even know it.

They are like people who have grown up in a room with an 8-foot flat white plaster ceiling and no windows. They have never seen the broad blue sky, or the sun blazing in midday glory, or the million stars of a clear country night or some trillion-ton mountain. And so they can’t explain the sense of littleness and triviality and pettiness and insignificance in their souls. But it’s because there is no grandeur. What our people need is the God-entranced vision of reality that Jonathan Edwards saw.

—The Pastor as Theologian: Reflections on the Life and Ministry of Jonathan Edwards, a sermon delivered on April 15, 1988 by John Piper at the 1988 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

Full Sermon Preview:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the whole of this most Christ exalting sermon on the apprehension of a greater and more glorious vision of God in our own personal lives, in ministry and in Christian living in general off the life of Jonathan Edwards, here. This sermon on Mr. Edwards’ life, divinity, and ministry has been a great rebuke and help to me. It is my hope and prayer that you would be far more blessed than I have in your reading or listening to this sermon. You can download it here also in mp3.