Implications of God’s Passion for His Glory

The essence of Christian Hedonism (as Piper calls it) is that  that everything was made by God to give him glory, and thus (as his creatures) we are happiest when we are seeking to glorify God. In fact, all things derive their meaning by the way in which they magnify the glory of God.

That is easy enough to believe at first glance. When I first picked up God’s Passion for His Glory (half by Edwards, half by Piper), I read the summary of the book: all things exist for God’s glory. I agreed easily. But then in the introduction, Piper hits his readers with a list of implications.

I did not get very far down that list before I realized that I had it all wrong. I had God existing for me, and not me for him. I thought I knew what it meant that my purpose was to glorify God. But this list exposed how flimsy my theology was. It convicted me to read more, study more, and finally to go to seminary. I’m posting these here to provoke you to read the book, and to be thankful that we were made for him.

If man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him for ever, then the following (all off these are taken from God’s Passion for His Glory) are true:  Continue at Jesse Johnson

The Practical Implications of Calvinism (Part 1)

I ask then, What are the implications of Calvinistic thought, this vision of the majesty of God and of the saving truth of Scripture as it relates to us as individuals? In answer let us go back to that general principle which B. B. Warfield calls the ‘formative principle of Calvinism’. I quote Warfield’s words:

It lies then, let me repeat, in a profound apprehension of God in His majesty, with the poignant realization which inevitably accompanies this apprehension, of the relation sustained to God by the creature as such, and particularly by the sinful creature. The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and who, having seen God in His glory, is filled on the one hand with a sense of his own unworthiness to stand in God’s sight as a creature, and much more as a sinner, and on the other hand, with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who receives sinners. He who believes in God without reserve and is determined that God shall be God to him in all his thinking, feeling and willing — in the entire compass of his life activities, intellectual, moral and spiritual — throughout all his individual social and religious relations, is, by force of that strictest of all logic which presides over the outworking of principles into thought and life, by the very necessity of the case, a Calvinist. Read it all HERE