Monday Musings

Christian preachers, more than all others, should know that people are starving for God. If anyone in all the world should be able to say, “I have looked upon thee in the sanctuary, beholding thy power and glory,” it is the herald of God. Who but preachers will look out over the wasteland of secular culture and say, “Behold your God!”? Who will tell the people that God is great and greatly to be praised? Who will paint for them the landscape of God’s grandeur? Who will remind them with tales of wonder that God has triumphed over every foe? Who will cry out above every crisis, “Your God reigns!”? Who will labor to find words that can carry the “gospel of the glory of the blessed God”?

If God is not supreme in our preaching, where in this world will the people hear about the supremacy of God? If we do not spread a banquet of God’s beauty on Sunday morning, will not our people seek in vain to satisfy their inconsolable longing with the cotton candy pleasures of pastimes and religious hype? If the fountain of living water does not flow from the mountain of God’s sovereign grace on Sunday morning, will not the people hew for themselves cisterns on Monday, broken cisterns that can hold no water . . .?

We are called to be “stewards of the mysteries of God…” And the great mystery is “Christ in you, the hope of glory…”  And that glory is the glory of God. And “it is required of stewards that they be found faithful” – faithful in magnifying the supreme glory of the one eternal God, not magnifying as a microscope that makes small things look bigger; but as a telescope that makes unimaginably great galaxies of glory visible to the human eye.

John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching (Baker, 1990), p. 108-109.