On "Desiring God"

I am currently reading, “Desiring God” by John Piper; and I have been extremely blessed with the depth and genuineness of his writing catching myself often reflecting on his ideas in the last few days. I have yet to finish the book, but I want to share with you some lines from it that struck me the most. The whole book has got me thinking a lot on loving the Lord and the joy that comes with it, so really these lines are by no means representative of the whole but it will give you a glimpse of the profundity of the subject on desiring God. So here it goes…

“Happiness in God is the end of all our seeking. Nothing beyond it can be sought as a higher goal.”

“The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

“This is a subtle thing. We strive against God’s all-sufficient glory if we think we can become a means to His end without making joy in Him our end.”

“On the contrary, the one who actually sets himself above God is the person who presumes to come to God to give rather than get. With a pretense of self-denial, he positions himself as God’s benefactor — as of if the world and all it contains were not already God’s!”

“Strong affections for God, rooted in and shaped by the truth of Scripture — this is the bone and marrow of biblical worship.”

“Love is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.”

“Love is the overflow of joy — in God! It is not duty for duty’s sake or right for right’s sake. It is not a resolute abandoning of one’s own good with a view solely to the good of the other person. It is first a deeply satisfying experience of the fullness of God’s grace, and then a doubly satisfying experience of sharing that grace with another person.”

“Love abounds between us when your joy is mine and my joy is yours. I am not loving just because I seek your joy, but because I see it as mine.”

“But in truth, everything Christians ‘give’ to God is simply a rebound of God’s gift to them. All our service is done ‘in the strength that God supplies’ (1 Peter 4:11), so that it is in fact God who ‘earns’ the reward for us and through us.”

” … there are rare and wonderful species of joy that flourish only in the rainy atmosphere of suffering.”

“When the Holy Spirit awakens the heart of a person to delight in the holiness of God, an insatiable desire is born not only to behold that holiness, but also to be holy as God is holy.”

“It is an indictment of our own worldliness that we feel more exhilaration when we conquer an external mountain of granite on our own strength than when we conquer the internal mountain of pride in God’s strength.”

“The miracle of Christian Hedonism is that overcoming obstacles to love by the grace of God has become more enticing than every form of self-confidence. The joy of experiencing the power of God’s grace defeating selfishness is an insatiable addiction.”

“Normal Christian life is a repeated process of restoration and renewal. Our joy is not static. It fluctuates with real life. It is vulnerable to Satan’s attacks.”

These are but a few of the lines that caught my attention while reading the book. I hope that it has given you some insight on being a Christian and our happiness in God. But like I said, these lines don’t represent everything that the author is trying to convey.