John Piper

Piper on Edwards on video

Tony Reinke John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, Video

tss-jonathan-edwards.jpgIf you have not listened to John Piper on Jonathan Edwards in a message entitled A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: Why We Need Jonathan Edwards 300 Years Later you are missing one great message! And if you’ve never seen the video, that’s because it’s been unavailable.

Until now.

Today DG released several conference videos from the years (see here). The priceless message A God-Entranced Vision of All Things can be read, heard and watched here.

Evangelicalism today in America is basking in the sunlight of ominously hollow success. Evangelical industries of television and radio and publishing and music recordings, as well as hundreds of growing megachurches and some public figures and political movements, give outward impressions of vitality and strength. But David Wells and Os Guinness and others have warned of the hollowing out of evangelicalism from within…

What is missing is the mind-shaping knowledge and the all-transforming enjoyment of the weight of the glory of God. The glory of God-holy, righteous, all-sovereign, all-wise, all-good-is missing. God rests lightly on the church in America. He is not felt as a weighty concern. David Wells puts it starkly, “It is this God, majestic and holy in his being, this God whose love knows no bounds because his holiness knows no limits, who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world.” It is an overstatement. But not without warrant.

What Edwards saw in God and in the universe because of God, through the lens of Scripture, was breathtaking. To read him, after you catch your breath, is to breathe the uncommon air of the Himalayas of revelation. And the refreshment that you get from this high, clear, God-entranced air does not take out of the valleys of suffering in this world, but fits you to spend your life there for the sake of love with invincible and worshipful joy.

Sermon notes: Abide in My Love (John 15:9)

Tony Reinke Abide in Christ, John Owen, John Piper, Preaching notes, Sermon notes, spurgeon

abide-in-my-love.jpgThe Twin Cities and the surrounding communities are coming out of a tragic week. In John 15 the disciples were heading into tragedy. Jesus’ words of comfort in John 15:1-11 provided the content for a sermon I delivered on this past Sunday (Aug. 5) at Trinity Bible Church in North Branch, MN. Abiding in Christ is a call for Christians to press into the vine and find our spiritual vitality in Christ and Him crucified. Jesus reminds us that we are both saved and sustained by the Cross.

Abide in My Love – 8/5/07 – sermon notes (pdf)
Abide in My Love – 8/5/07 – sermon audio (mp3) 32.6 MB

[See more sermon notes. Words of helpful criticism are always welcomed on content and delivery.]

(Tony S. Reinke; Trinity Bible Church; North Branch, MN; 8/5/2007 AM service; 47:23; 32.6 MB; John 15:1-11, John 15:9, Galatians 2:20, John 6:53-58, Galatians 1-2, The Glory of Christ by John Owen).

Terminating the Gospel on God

Tony Reinke Audio, C.H. Spurgeon, Communion with God, Gospel, Gospel in Culture, John Owen, John Piper, Preaching

Terminating the Gospel on God
by Tony Reinke

Lord willing, if the 16-inches of snow expected in the Twin Cities holds off until tonight, I’ll be headed to the North Woods with some dear Christian brothers. It will be a weekend of fires, food, hiking, snowmobiles and (hopefully) millions of stars and the Northern lights. So a short post before I pack my hatchet, matches and camera.

Even coming into 2007, I eagerly anticipated that God would teach me many new things about communion with Himself. I cannot wait to finally get a copy of Kelly Kapic’s soon-to-be released, Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Baker). And later this Winter Justin Taylor and Kapic will release Owen’s Communion with God in the same format as Overcoming Sin and Temptation last year (Crossway). Folks like myself are being stretched to capture the Puritan idea that our union with God drives our communion with Him. Discovering many contours of communion with God is my anticipation for 2007.

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer explained the danger of terminating on justification and thinking that union with God is the end of all things. Tozer writes, “We have been snared in the coils of a spurious logic which insists that if we have found Him, we need no more seek Him” (16). And earlier, “To have found God and still to pursue Him is the Soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart” (14).

Recently another very helpful contour in this discovery came a quote from John Piper last Sunday at the Resolved conference in California. Here is the excerpt that grabbed my attention:

“I want God. Forgiveness just gets stuff out of the way between me and God. Forgiveness has value for one reason – it brings me to God reconciled. That’s what I want pastors to get to. I don’t want you to stop at justification. I don’t want you to stop at forgiveness. I don’t want you to stop at eternal life. I want you to push though all of those because the Bible does … ‘We rejoice in God through Jesus Christ, through whom we have received reconciliation’ (Rom. 5:11). But the point is we finally have gotten to the end and ‘we rejoice in God.’ Reconciliation is a means to the end of making God the Gospel! … We get out of the way everything that is an obstacle to enjoying God when we are forgiven. Take justification: ‘Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God’ (Rom. 5:1-2). That’s the point of justification. Who cares if we’re righteous? Do you want to be God? Is that why you want to be righteous? You want to boast in your righteousness? Why do you want to be righteous? … Because when you get righteousness you get God! You don’t get put in hell — you get God! … All the things we usually terminate on when we preach the Gospel we terminate one step early. We need in America a great awakening of radical God-centeredness … We need millions and millions of believers that are so oriented on ‘God as the Gospel’ they break through forgiveness to God, and through justification to God, and through reconciliation to God, and through eternal life to God.”

– John Piper, “God is the Gospel”, sermon (2007.02.18) 39:53-43:25

The warning that Piper and Tozer sound is a warning not to be a “too easily satisfied religionist.” We need to see that God, not justification, is the heart of the Gospel. I love books, and I love doctrine, and I love Calvinism, and I love the message of a God who covers sinners with His Own righteousness. I love these things! But all doctrines are intended to push us deeper into a relationship with Himself. Tozer was right when he wrote, “God waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain” (17).

But reading books, biographies and diaries of men who followed hard after God is not communion. Spurgeon’s words challenge me here:

“My soul – never be satisfied with a shadowy Christ. … I cannot know Christ through another person’s brains. I cannot love him with another man’s heart, and I cannot see him with another man’s eyes. … I am so afraid of living in a second-hand religion. God forbid that I should get a biographical experience. Lord save us from having borrowed communion. No, I must know him myself. O God, let me not be deceived in this. I must know him without fancy or proxy; I must know him on my own account.”

To personally rejoice in God is the goal of the Gospel. Owen, Tozer, Piper and Spurgeon remind us that our spiritual vision is too small. We seek 15-minutes of prayer time when we should be asking to see more of God’s glory (Ex. 33:18), panting for more of Him (Ps. 42:1-2) and clinging tightly to Him (Ps. 63:8). That is communion.

So let the Gospel and Calvinism and all bible study and theology terminate in personal communion with Him. If we do, we’ll begin to understand what the Gospel is really all about.