God is the Gospel - Part 1 — John Piper

Let's pray together. Father, we've been praying for a long time now, about this moment and these hours together, and the prayer has grown to a crescendo in the last couple of hours. And I just want to ask one more time that you would help me to be faithful to your Word and that you would do what I cannot do.

God as the Ultimate Good of the Gospel

I planted, Apollos watered, Paul said, but God gave the growth. And so it is. I'll sow some seeds here, I'll scatter on the ground, and oh how I pray that the devil would not pluck it up, and that the cares of this world would not choke it out, and that the heat of hard times would not burn it up, but that it would find good soil.

You can make the soil good. And so, for those in this room, I pray, make the soil good. Would you open hearts to hear whatever's true, and would you protect all of us from anything I say that would be amiss or imbalanced?

We want you to be exalted as the ultimate and highest good of the gospel. So come and do that, not just intellectually in the way we say it, but in our hearts. May we experience that and know it in our affections and not just in our thinking.

I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. So let me begin with a definition of this term, God is the gospel. The theme over the conference is God is the gospel. And I would like to take three hours with you to try to unpack it as well as I can.

And I'll give you a definition, comes from page 13 in the book, more or less, paraphrased. And then we're going to go at this in a kind of autobiographical way tonight, and then move into something more, perhaps, systematic and expository tomorrow.

God is the gospel. Here's what I mean. The highest, best, final, decisive good of the gospel, of the good news. The highest, best, final, decisive good in the good news, without which all the other parts of the good news would not be good news, and to which all the other parts of the good news are leading is the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ revealed to you for your everlasting enjoyment.

The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that's a phrase from 2 Corinthians 4 .6, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ revealed to you for your everlasting enjoyment. All the other things in the gospel are going there.

Nothing in the gospel that you've ever heard would be good news if that were not the goal of them all. That's the thesis. If you get that, you can just go home and do something else right now, because I don't have much more to say except to put more Bible underneath it and flesh it out in its implications.

So the way I thought might be helpful, I sat down this afternoon, actually most of the day, and reviewed all the things that I've thought about this for the last five years or so, and made 33 bullet points.

And then I looked at them and thought, okay, now, how shall I arrange this for this particular conference? And I chose about 11 or 12 of them for tonight, and they're the ones of how I got here. Why am I talking about this from about 38 years ago until now?

So that's where we're going. I don't know that I'll get through all 12 of them. That's okay, because we'll just pick it up where we left off in the morning if I don't. So I'll just bullet these. They don't necessarily hang together, but that's the way life is sometimes.

Jesus as the Treasure of Heaven

So number one, my son, Carsten, the oldest of four sons, I have a little girl who's 11. Carsten's, I think, now 34. My wife is here with me. I'm checking facts with her. Was doing a year's worth of master's degree study in poetry writing at the University of St. Andrews last year, and his wife's grandmother died while they were there.

And hoping that they could get home in time, she and our little granddaughter, Millie, who was five at the time, got on a plane and came. And they got here and said their goodbyes. They wanted to be here for the funeral, but be there for the funeral, but it didn't work out that way.

But here's the point. On the plane coming from London, I guess, to Minneapolis, they were coming in, and they looked out. Of course, grandmama's dying, great-grandmama's dying, and so the tone is set for heartwork.

And they looked out the window, and it was just a magnificent cloud formation. And Shelley, the mom, says to Millie, look, she told us this subsequently, look, Millie, isn't that beautiful? Sort of like heaven will be where grandmama's going.

And Millie, five years old, looked out the window and said, but Jesus isn't there. Now, if you understand that, you get everything I have to say. And I love to ask my church and other churches, if you could go to heaven, have spectacular sunsets, no more disease, no more depression, all the friends that have gone before you, all the toys that you've ever wanted, and Jesus not be there, would that be okay?

And my fear is that many in our churches are saved on that basis. They love what Jesus has to offer. Hell is hot, nobody wants to go there. Guilt is a bummer of an experience, and so I would like not to have guilt feelings, so if you can help me with that, fine.

Marriage, I'd like marriage to go better, I'd like the kids not to act out. If Christianity can do that for me, bring it on. And you don't have to be born again to want that. You just have to be born again to want Jesus.

So that's bullet point number one, a little vignette from a little five-year-old girl, but Jesus isn't there, so it can't be heaven, can it? Number two, Noelle and I will have been married 38 years in December.

Rejoicing in God Through Suffering

Newly hanging on our bedroom wall after a remodeling that happened while we were away, new paint and carpet in our bedroom, she put up this new old plaque which has on it the wedding text that my dad read at our Barnesville, Georgia wedding 38 years ago almost, which goes like this.

Though the fig tree should not blossom and there be no fruit on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the field yield no food. There be no flocks in the stalls and no herd in the stalls. Yet, will I rejoice in the Lord.

I will take joy in the God of my salvation. Well, that was our wedding text. God had given us at age 20 and 22 enough sobriety and enough experience that we knew life would be hard. Marriage would be hard.

Child rearing would be hard. One day, health would fail. Jobs wouldn't go the way you want them to, so we just flew this banner over our marriage. If there's no food in the field, if there's no cattle, if there's no sheep, if there's nothing on the vine, we are not going to get in God's face about that.

We're going to bow down and we're going to say, we still have you, though you slay me, yet will I trust you. So, it hangs on our bedroom wall now, and it's flown like a banner over these 38 years. So, if you understand that text, everything else fails, but God never fails.

You always have God, then you'd understand God is the gospel. God is the gospel, not the stuff that he gives, the good stuff that he gives, but he himself. That's number two. Number three, a moment of illumination at Stanford University, 1982.

Christian Hedonism and Satisfaction in God

I had been a pastor for two years, and I had been developing for some time this thing called Christian hedonism, which is fleshed out in everything, but especially in desiring God. And I was working it through, those ideas, trying to figure out whether I should use that term and what I meant by it and how it related to everything in life, Christian hedonism.

Tom Schrader quoted the key phrase, God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. That's what I've come to use now. But in those days, I hadn't hit upon that phrase. That phrase came much later.

So, I was at Stanford, invited to come talk to intervarsity students. It was a big, thriving intervarsity chapter at Stanford in the early 80s. Maybe there is now, I don't know. And the leader of it at the time was a Christian hedonist coming out of the same stock that I had come, and he had invited me and Tom Steller, my associate, to come out there and talk about it.

So, I did that. I began to talk about what I was seeing in the Bible as far as our pursuit of our joy in God. And after a session or two, the students, I could see on their faces questions. Like, I thought I was walking into friendly territory here where everybody already understood this, and I was just going to unpack it, flesh it out.

And then we had a Q &A time, and basically, they started saying, that's not the way our leader says it. I'm not going to use his name. That's not the way he says it. I said, why not? And they began to unpack this.

Well, the way he says it, the way he stresses it is that God, according to Acts 17 .25, God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything, but he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.

And so, God is the great worker and the great servant. They quoted Isaiah 64 .4, who is seen a God like you who works for those who wait for him. Second Chronicles 16 .9, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, seeking to show himself powerful on behalf of those whose heart is whole toward him, and on and on.

These texts of God's gracious, mighty work on behalf of his people. And that's what we delight in. That's what we rejoice in. And you haven't said anything like that yet. You are talking about rejoicing in God, just God, not what he does, not his bearing of his right arm on behalf of us like the Bible says he does so many times.

And that's just different. And I thought to myself, hmm, it is different. And I didn't know that stress was different. And in subsequent years, I have come to see that that could be a significant difference depending on how those trajectories go.

Because if students develop a way of thinking about God whereby his mighty work on our behalf becomes what they delight in, they might be their own God. And God is simply the lackey who brings about what they want to happen anyway.

If God's willing to work for me and do what I want, who wouldn't want that? He's pretty strong, and he might get it done when I can't get it done. And that's so close to the truth, and yet maybe so far.

And so, right away, 24 years ago, I saw I'm holding on this one. I believe all those texts. It thrills me to no end that God works on my behalf. I love to think of God as helping me. I'll help you. I'll strengthen you.

I'll hold you up with my victorious right hand. But I'm always asking, what is the good he's doing for me? See, I'm pushing on it. I'm pushing on what's the good that he... When his eyes rove throughout the whole world seeking someone to show himself powerful on behalf of, what is he powerfully accomplishing for me?

And I'm pushing that all the way to the end. And the end is, he is doing everything he does to bring me to the point where I will rejoice in him above all things, in him above all things. That's what he's doing for me.

That's bullet point number three, a illuminating moment at Stanford University. Number four, when I came to Bethlehem in 1980, in my heart, I was very insecure about this ministry. I was 34 years old, and I'd never been the pastor of a church before.

I had probably preached 15 times in my life. I had never done a funeral. I had never baptized anybody. I had never done a baby dedication. I had never shepherded anybody through the dying process, and on, and on, and on.

I was so green, I can't believe they hired me. And so anxious, and nervous, and insecure in that, I was throwing myself on God daily. And one of the texts that became so precious to me in those days was, see if you remember where it comes from, it occurs twice in the Psalms, back-to-back, why are you downcast, oh, my soul?

And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. I said that 500 times, walking to church and home in those days, walking to business meetings, walking to hospitals, doing things I'd never done before.

Why are you downcast? Why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, not yourself, hope in God. That's Psalm 42 .5 and Psalm 43 .5. Those two Psalms are very closely connected. So, pretty soon at our church, I said, I want that on the side of the building.

I want a big, nothing effeminate here, no floozy little script, you know, a big, fat, bold, masculine letters. Hope in God. So, they put this big wooden sign, the letters like H was, I mean, the two stems of the H were that big H, hope in God.

And they put it up on the side of the building so that people used to call us the Hope in God Church. They didn't know the name of the church, it was just the Hope in God Church because there it was. Because that's the way I walked to church.

That's the way I walked. I came down 8th Street over from 11, Elliot Avenue, and there it was. Hope in God. Now, the question is, if you have a Bible, turn to Psalm 43. Psalm 43. Just want to point something out here about the context of that phrase.

Maybe start at verse 3. The psalmist is very anxious because he feels like God has rejected him. He knows he hasn't. You can see that in verse 1. Vindicate me, O God, I've got enemies. But it sure feels like, hmm, like you're pretty far off.

And then he says, verse 3, send out your light and your truth. So, he's pleading, Lord, let light go on in my life and in my heart because I feel very dark right now. I feel like I can't see very far in front of me and you may be there, but the dark is keeping you concealed.

Would you let light come and let me see truth, and then let them lead me, let this light and truth lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling? Then, if you do that, if you let light shine on this path, and I see you at the end of the path, I'm moving.

And then the next place he arrives is the altar. Verse 4, then I will go to the altar of God. Now, you know what happens at the altar in the Old Testament? In the Old Testament, it's not communion table, although precursor.

That's where sins get taken care of. Animals get their throat slit there, and blood is poured out there. And so, light goes on, I see my God, I'm a sinner, I go to the altar, and then, verse 4, second line, to God, my exceeding joy.

That is what I came to see is what he means in verse 5 when he says, hope in God, hope in God, for I shall again praise Him. I will praise Him. And interestingly enough, this phrase, exceeding joy, that's what it is in my version here, the ESV.

Literally, it's the gladness of my rejoicing. It's just two glad words, the gladness of my rejoicing, or the rejoicing of my rejoicing, which I take to mean I will come to God, who is the joy in all my joys.

There are other joys, aren't there? You have a good supper tonight, maybe, or you go home and have a dessert tonight, or you have somebody you love with you. There are other joys. But I think the biblical point is, and we'll talk about this more, that God is the joy of all our joys.

All of our joys should have at their bottom, their center, their essence, joy in God the giver. That was the early days at Bethlehem as the Lord was teaching me about resting in Him, not just His work or His gifts.

Desiring God Above All Earthly Joys

Bullet point number five, my prayers included in those days, Psalm 73, verses 24 and 25. I can remember there was a season in the early 80s, actually on into the mid to late 80s, 86, where almost every time it seemed like I had to do a spontaneous prayer in a service or at a meeting or somewhere, out of my mouth would come, whom have I in heaven but you?

And on earth there is nothing that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever. It was just woven into my mind. Whom have I in heaven but you?

And on earth there's nothing I desire besides you. John Bloom, who just led worship next door and will lead it here in this room tomorrow, wrote a song. And John, you're listening, so maybe we'll sing it tomorrow.

I don't know whether you've planned to sing it or not. But John turned this into a song because it was so much in our lives in those days, so much in our lives. Whom have I in heaven but you? Answer, nobody, even though my mother's there.

And it would be pleasant and sweet to see her again. Whom have I in heaven but you? And on earth there is nothing that I desire besides you. And you read that and you say, you can't mean that. You just can't mean that.

What possibly could that mean since I have other things here that I enjoy? And so did Jesus. He enjoyed his disciples, sometimes. Which led me to the sixth bullet point. Namely, as I was writing the book Desiring God in the mid-'80s and on into age six when it was published, I was wrestling with how to think of the created world over against God.

See, have God, the Creator, who's always existed and is, therefore, of absolute and infinite value, and all the universe is of lesser value because he made it. And the thing made is always of less value than the maker.

And so you and I and everything he made is of a second order, and he's of the primary order, and we are to delight in him and love him and treasure him above all that he has made. Does that mean that the only function of the creation is to tempt us to idolatry?

Why did you make a world? Why bodies, metal, paper, light, sound? None of that existed before God created things. Why did you make so much non-God? Was it just to trip us up so that we would make God out of non-God and suffer for it?

Why stuff? Why creation, material things? That was just a huge question for me in the mid-'80s as I was wrestling with texts like, and nothing on earth do I desire besides you. Here's where I landed on that.

Bread exists so that we would have some inkling of what Jesus meant when he said, I am the bread of life. That's why bread exists. Water and thirst exist so that we would have some inkling of what he meant when he said, whoever believes in me will never thirst.

I'm the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. God created the world so he could enter it and say things like that and point us toward himself.

Everything on planet earth is to reveal God. The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork, and so does bread and water. Then I read this amazing quote in Augustine.

Augustine said, He loves thee too little who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake. That helped me so much. He loves thee too little, you too little, who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake.

God evidently thought that in creating things, our love for him would be more varied and more intense and more revelatory of his greatness if they became occasions for our delight in him, which led me now, without leaving the point, to bullet point number seven, I was wrestling with fasting.

Fasting, Feasting, and the Desire for God

Because fasting is simply a species of self-denial, and self-denial seems contradictory to the goodness of creation. In other words, you have texts in the Bible that say things like this, 1 Timothy 4 ,4, Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for then it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.

Amazing. Everything created by God is good and is not to be rejected. Jesus comes along in Matthew 9. Remember what happened? John's disciples come and they say, We're fasting. Pharisees fast. Your disciples aren't fasting.

Remember what he said? One of those stunning, self-revelatory, indirect claims. He said, The wedding guests don't fast when the bridegroom is here. They don't fast when the bridegroom is here, which is a huge claim.

But then he said, This is relevant for us. The days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken away, then they will fast. I think what he means is the new Christian fasting, the new wine that goes into new wineskins, is not that fasting is done away with, but that it has a new, powerful meaning.

Namely, the bridegroom has come. He's come. We've seen his magnificence 33 years or so, three years of demonstrative glory. Now, instead of planting his kingdom then, he leaves. He says, Go make disciples.

I'm coming again. There will be a great marriage supper of the Lamb. We will celebrate. No more fasting in the kingdom, but for now. So what is the meaning of fasting? What is the meaning of self-denial?

The meaning of fasting is that we want him back. Every Tuesday, the first Tuesday of every month at Bethlehem, we have what we call the first Tuesday fast, and it's for the second coming. I don't know if there's another church in the nation who fasts for the second coming.

Maybe. But when I read Matthew 9, 15, I said to myself, I've never done that. Never done that. Forty years or plus of my life, I've never fasted for the bridegroom to come. And so now we do once a month.

So, feasting because everything he gives is good and is not to be rejected. If received with thanksgiving, that runs up the beam of generosity and gives glory to the giver. And fasting. Why fasting? To show that the emblem, food, is not as valuable as the reality, God.

You need both in your life. You need world affirmation and world denial. Those are real intention in the New Testament. And some people fall off the log on one side. I'm a world affirming person because God made it, and it's good.

Therefore, I'm doing everything. And the world denying, they go towards asceticism. No, no, no. He's not here. The God of this world is ruling this thing. This is an evil age. And so, withdraw. And both are in the Bible.

Both are in the Bible. And the way they fit together is intention with sometimes feasting because he is good and a giver, and all of our love for him can ride up the beam of his generosity into his very heart.

And I am so prone to idolize his gifts, I will do self-denial in my life as well. The Apostle Paul said, I pommel my body. I do not fight as one beating the air, but I pommel my body lest I should be cast away.

He knew the dangers of his own body, his own lusts, his own appetites. So, in my wrestling with Psalm 73, 24, and 25, Whom have I in heaven but you? And on earth there is nothing that I desire besides you.

I concluded that by feasting and fasting, I want to make sure that if there is something I desire on earth, that desire is a desire for God. If I get hungry for supper, I want to transpose the music of that physical longing into a spiritual hunger.

You can do that. That's called transposition. C .S. Lewis wrote a whole sermon about it. You can transpose the music of natural emotions, natural affections, and natural appetites into another key of spirituality.

You can say as your stomach is growling and you're hungry for supper, This much, O God, this much my heart longs for you. And to prove it, from time to time I will skip supper to show that it is not my God, that you are my God.

And other times I will receive it with great gratitude, and in it I will taste more of you, because you made that to bear witness to the kind of God you are, to satisfy me physically in that way. Those were huge struggles for me in the eighties.

I don't claim to have all the problems answered. I just knew I wanted God to be the gospel. I wanted God to be the end. I didn't want anything competing with God in my life. If there's any way I could not be an idolater, I want to avoid being an idolater.

From the simplest kind of misuse of the innocent idols to the worst kind of misuse of the wicked idols. Toward the end of the eighties, we, as a church, began to wrestle with the issue of signs and wonders, charismatic things.

Spiritual Gifts and the Danger of Loving Power

The vineyard was starting, John Wimber, in Anaheim, California. We put 50 people on a bus and sent them to Anaheim. Risky stuff. You can lose a lot of friends that way in the Reformed community. And I'm there, big time, in the Reformed community.

I love the doctrines of grace, but I love the Bible more. And the Bible says, earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. Earnestly desire the higher gifts, the highway of love, chapter 13, sandwiched by 12 and 14, 1 Corinthians.

So we were wrestling. We just said, Lord, we don't know how all this works out. We just cannot see cessationism in the Bible. Can't see it. And so we don't know what the experiential alternative is in our day.

So we will simply go around the country and listen. And then we'll come back and try to find our way. Now, here is the way it relates to God is the gospel. What I have found, while still affirming my wide-open eagerness to experience all the fullness of God and all the gifts that He would be pleased to give me for the good of His people and for the reaching of the lost, is that it is possible to love power more than God.

And there are biblical examples of it. Do you remember Acts chapter 8? Simon the magician, Simon Magus, he saw Peter lay his hands on people, and they received the Holy Spirit. And his heart immediately believed that that was happening and that God did it.

Believed, believed. And so he offered Peter money for it. I would like that. I would like that. Would you give me that power? And you remember J .B. Phillips' translation of Peter's words? To hell with you and your money.

That's actually in the Bible. Actually, it's toned down. Cursed be you and your money or something like that. So to hell with you and your money. You are in the gall of iniquity. Your heart is not right with God.

Wanting power from God for spiritual purposes is no sign of being born of God or walking right with God. Now, turn with me to Deuteronomy 13. I'll show you something really amazing. It was these kinds of texts that just cautioned me not to be blown away by too many prophetic things that were going on.

I was prophesied over by some pretty big-name prophets, and they didn't get it right, which disillusioned me somewhat with their ministry. Deuteronomy 13, verses 1 to 3. If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, whoa, stop there.

Let that sink in. It really happened. The man in the red shirt, back row, you're on your way to Indonesia. You don't have all the money. I think you're about $40 short of what your goal was today, and I think somebody in here would like to...

Those things really happen. I don't think it takes an earpiece with somebody cheating in the back hall. They really happen. Now, what do you do with it? You say, well, if it really happens, he must be real.

Wrong. And if it happens, and he tells you, verse 2, the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and he says, let's go after other gods, which you have not known, and let us serve them. So he's calling them away from Yahweh.

You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. Why not? Listen to this amazing, amazing statement. For the Lord your God is testing you to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

God, God did it to test you. That God is willing to work through a false prophet to do a sign and a wonder should make us very sober. The test is not whether you can do a sign and a wonder. The test is, do you speak the truth about God from his holy word?

And so what I saw over and over again was, I just want to know God. I want to know God. I want to walk with God. I want to experience God. I want to love God, treasure God, be faithful to God. I want to see God.

And I don't want anything to get in the way, whether it's stuff or power. That was very big. I think we still can learn things. I learned heaps. I liked and benefited from John Wimber. He's not one of the guys I'm talking about.

So God is more important than power. God is more important than signs and wonders and more important than spiritual gifts. God is the gospel, none of those things. Bullet point number nine. Now I'm jumping back to 1974 to illustrate what I just said because I realized as I was walking through this, I've thought about these before.

Believing in Jesus for the Right End

Where have I thought about this? 1973, December, my doctor father in Munich, Germany dropped dead running to catch a subway. He was 63 years old. His name was Leonard Goeppelt. And I was on my way through a doctoral program and he died.

And in that system, your doctor father died, you might as well pack it up. And I'd invested three years of my life and I thought, oh my, what am I going to do? I don't need to give you the details of how God mercifully got me through, but here's the point.

In replacing him for the year until they hired a new faculty member in New Testament, they brought in Oskar Kuhlman from the University of Basel. Now Oskar Kuhlman was for me, as I was going through seminary, a great name.

Christ in time, redemptive history. In those days, to read Oskar Kuhlman was like reading Don Carson in America or some big world-class theologian. And they were going to bring him in and I'd get to sit in one of his classes my last semester while I was trying to finish.

And his class was the Gospel of John. And Oskar Kuhlman was 80-some years old. He was retired. And I don't know if you've ever seen a picture of him from his books, but he always looks like his eyes are falling closed.

And I thought, whoa, what's wrong with this guy? And in fact, he had some condition with his eyelids and he had little built-in bridges on his glasses that if he'd lift his eyelids like this, push his glasses like this, and let them go, his eyelids would kind of rest on the top of his glasses.

And every now and then his glasses would slide down and his eyes would go shut. And so he'd lift his eyelids up, push the glasses back up, and he'd keep lecturing. Just an unforgettable experience. But that's not the main thing.

That's just a little aside. The main thing is that he only got about halfway through chapter 1 in 18 weeks. And the reason is because the way he was teaching it is he'd start, and he'd start unpacking, and then he'd jump to other places in John and illuminate chapter 1.

And that's how he's bringing it in. So we only got halfway through chapter 1, but the whole thing was being dumped into chapter 1. And one of the chapters that I remember was John 7. Go there with me.

This proved very, very, very determinative for my approach towards some signs and wonders things and the supremacy of God and the nature of faith. And God is the gospel. So here we are in chapter 7 of John.

After this, Jesus went about in Galilee. He would not go about in Judea because the Jews were seeking to kill him. Now the Jews' feast of the booths was at hand, so his brothers... Okay, now these are his physical Mary's children, brothers.

His brothers said to him, Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples also may see the works that you are doing. For no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.

That's a lot of faith, isn't it? And the next phrase says, verse 5,. For not even his brothers believed in him. That's unintelligible. Or is it? What in the world does that comment mean? For not even his brothers believed on him.