The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the divine plan that balances justice and mercy in religious belief.
John Piper's quote encapsulates a profound theological concept where God's wisdom orchestrates a means of salvation that embodies love, all while maintaining His righteousness. This delicate balance suggests that the act of delivering sinners from divine wrath does not undermine God's justice, but rather fulfills it through the redemptive act of love.
In practice
During a sermon about divine justice and mercy, this quote can clarify the concept of salvation.
God will not turn away from doing you good. He will keep on doing good. He doesn't do good to His children sometimes and bad to them other times. He keeps on doing good and He never will stop doing good for ten thousand ages of ages. When things are going bad that does not mean God has stopped doing good. It means He is shifting things around to get them in place for more good, if you will go on loving Him.
You donβt have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.
Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good.
Christ did not die to make good works merely possible or to produce a half-hearted pursuit. He died to produce in us a passion for good deeds. Christian purity is not the mere avoidance of evil, but the pursuit of good.
The key to Christian living is a thirst and hunger for God. And one of the main reasons people do not understand or experience the sovereignty of grace and the way it works through the awakening of sovereign joy is that their hunger and thirst for God is so small.
Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.
It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?
Through forgiveness, which essentially means recognizing the insubstantiality of the past and allowing the present moment to be as it is, the miracle of transformation happens not only within but also without.
There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.
God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!
What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.
Lying is the most simple form of self-defence.
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