All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching. ( 2 Timothy 3:16 )
You Must Suffer by John Piper
Our theme is “Treasuring Christ and the Call to Suffer,” and I have at least seven aims in our time together:
1.I want to persuade you that your suffering is an essential part of Christian existence. You will suffer (Acts 14:22). And there is kind of suffer that honors Christ and a kind that does not.
2.I hope to be able to help you suffer in a way that will make Christ look great (2 Cor. 12:9-10).
3.I hope to help you taste and see that Christ is more precious than everything else in the universe (Ps. 73:24; Phil. 3:8; 1:20; Ps. 63:3).
4.I want to help you believe that nothing will happen to you apart from God’s will. And in the worst of times, he is 100 percent for you—and not against you—if you are in Christ. Not 99.9 but totally for you (Matt. 10:28-31; Rom. 8:31-32). Everything you need is yours in Christ.
5.I would like to persuade you that you are in Christ by faith alone apart from any works you do before or after your conversion (Phil. 3:9-10). If being in Christ is the place where everything works for your good, then how you get there really matters. And by works is not how you get there—before or after your conversion.
6.I want to motivate you and empower you to embrace suffering and hardship and risk and danger for the relief of human suffering, especially eternal suffering, for the glory of Christ. May Wheaton not be one of those ludicrous places where it is thought to be loving to relieve physical suffering for people who are on the road to hell without mention of the gospel. You don’t have to choose between those. Love will embrace the hard-to-reach place and go at life’s peril (Mark 8:34-35).
7.I am praing that God will use these talks to introduce you into, or confirm you in, the mysterious way of life found in 2 Corinthians 6:10, which we wave as a banner over our church: “Sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”
John Piper - How The Supremacy Of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice
In 1939, Howard Guinness, one of the early founders of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, wrote a little book called Sacrifice. He was trying to do then what I am trying to do now. He wrote, Where are the young men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap, and be faithful even unto death, who will lose their lives for Christ’s, flinging them away for love of him? Where are those who will live dangerously, and be reckless in this service? Where are the men of prayer? Where are the men who count God’s Word of more importance to them than their daily food? Where are the men who, like Moses of old, commune with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend? Where are God’s men in this day of God’s power? Indeed, where are the pastors who say with the apostle Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.
John 15:1-7 I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 2 Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3 Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 7 If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
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