Saturday, December 14, 2013

The Pleasures of God

Don't read John Piper for an hour immediately before going to bed lest you wake up with thoughts like these swirling in your brain in all out attempt to connect the dots, before the coffee is even done brewing, and causing you to wonder ceaselessly, yet again, just who this God is that has chosen you to have a sneak peak at the unfathomable beauty of His glory to come:

* One of God's greatest pleasures is His delight in His good plans for His children.

* God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

* So, when I am satisfied in God and His good plans for me, I will be most satisfied in Him.

* To be most satisfied in God I must be most satisfied in God, not other things.

* When I pray and long for God to be glorified in me, it means that I must be most satisfied in God.

* For God to answer that prayer He must first make me delight in what He delights in, namely His glory.

* To prove that I delight in Him, as a Christian's desire would be, he removes what I do delight in to reveal what my greatest delight really is.

* The pain comes when it is discovered that it is not God, or His good plans, who is my greatest delight.

* God takes away what I desire more than Him for my own good, for my eternal good, to prepare me to delight in Him above all else for an eternity in His presence. He makes Himself my greatest desire so that I can say as Paul did in Philippians 3:8, "I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ."

* Nothing else will satisfy me like God will. Attempts to be satisfied elsewhere will graciously fail if God is going to be glorified in me.

* When I am fully satisfied in God, my delight in Him will overflow.

* God is like a mountain spring, never ending, never needing filling, freely offering my thirsty soul to fill on Him alone to be satisfied so that I will be able to run down the mountainside and share with others, knowing that there will always be enough grace and He will never run dry which means that I can be filled yet again.

* God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.

~My thoughts from the book by John Piper, The Pleasures of God