John Piper - A Godward Life: Savoring the Supremacy of God in All of Life

B ooks dont change people; paragraphs do. Sometimes even sentences. I can still remember an afternoon in the fall of 1968 in a bookstore on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California, as I read the first page of The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis. Even if I had not read another page, my life would have been changed forever. I can probably boil it down to two sentences: We are halfhearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. Almost thirty years later I still feel the shudder of discovery and the rush of light that passed through me. Nothing would ever be the same again. Just one paragraph and the decisive work was done.

This is not new. Sixteen hundred years earlier in August of 386, Saint Augustine was in spiritual turmoil. In a garden in Milan, Italy, he flung himself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which streamed from his eyes. I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fists; I locked my fingers and hugged my knees. Then he heard the sing-song voice of a boy or a girl, I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, Take it and read, take it and read. Augustine took this as a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall. He opened and read, Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and natures appetites. In two sentences the knot was cut. I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.

For Luther it was another one of Saint Pauls great sentences, Romans 1:1617. For Jonathan Edwards it was 1 Timothy 1:17. For John Wesley it was the Preface to Luthers Commentary on Romans. And the list could go on. The point is that much reading of many books may be like the gathering of wood, but the fire blazes forth from a sentence. The mark is left on the mind not by the kindling of many pages, but by the red-hot iron of a sentence set on fire by God.

My prayer is that God might be pleased to take the short readings of this book and set a sentence or a paragraph on fire in your mind. The readings are only two or three pages long. They are not arranged in any topical order. What holds them together is a quest to savor the supremacy of God in all of life. Awakening and feeding that hunger is my aim.

INTRODUCTION