If you were to name a book that profoundly shaped your life and ministry as a pastor, which would you choose? For me, one answer comes easily.
I first read God Is the Gospel soon after its release in 2005. At that point, I think I had read everything John Piper had written (and had been profoundly affected by Desiring God, When I Don’t Desire God, and Future Grace in particular). I lapped up the biographical addresses he delivered at the Pastors Conferences. But none of these matched the impact that God Is the Gospel had on my life and ministry.
One passage in particular (on page 56 of my well-thumbed and heavily marked copy) sums up the message that struck me so powerfully:
The ultimate good of the gospel is seeing and savoring the beauty and value of God. God’s wrath and our sin obstruct that vision and that pleasure. You can’t see and savor God as supremely satisfying while you are full of rebellion against him and he is full of wrath against you. The removal of this wrath and this rebellion is what the gospel is for. The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s glory and the removal of every obstacle to our seeing it and savoring it as our highest treasure. “Behold your God!” is the most gracious command and the best gift of the gospel. If we do not see him and savor him as our greatest fortune, we have not obeyed or believed the gospel.
Why did this book have such a far-reaching impact on me? There are at least three reasons.
My Main Job as a Preacher
First, the book clarified the goal of my preaching.
I had been a pastor for about eleven years when I read God Is the Gospel. We had just come through a challenging season. In hindsight, I realize I was exhausted and worn down. So, what now? In the pages of this book, the answer hit me like a freight train: My job is to invite people to “Behold your God” in and through the gospel.
It’s not that I wasn’t trying to do that before. But, like many preachers, my preaching lacked laser-like focus. I longed to exegete the text in all its richness so that people would be thrilled, equipped, and strengthened, but my target often seemed slightly fuzzy. Piper helped to sharpen that aim immeasurably.
Reading this book triggered a gradual but profound shift in my preparation. I still labored to understand and explain the text, but I poured more and more energy into thinking through the impact this text should have on the people in front of me and, in particular, how this sermon might help them to see and savor God in Christ more. More explicitly than ever, my goal became helping people to gasp at, glory in, bow before, delight in the Lord Jesus.
God Beyond the Means
God also used this book to recenter my own life.
I suspect I am not alone in tending toward the cerebral. Reading theology or musing over exegetical problems has always come more easily to me than engaging with God himself. God Is the Gospel provided me with a timely reminder of the fact that God gives us himself. When Piper (channeling Jonathan Edwards’s 1733 sermon “The Christian Pilgrim”) asked, “Would you be happy in heaven if God were not there?” he exposed a long-hidden deficiency in my thinking. He continues,
Propitiation, redemption, forgiveness, imputation, sanctification, liberation, healing, heaven — none of these is good except for one reason: they bring us to God for our everlasting enjoyment of him. . . . The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It’s a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don’t want God above all things, then we have not been converted by the gospel. (47)
I realized that in much of my thinking (as well as my preaching), I had been attempting to help people marvel at the means God uses, rather than pointing them to the end of all his activity: delighting in God himself as the “greatest treasure of my longing soul” (as the song “O Lord, My Rock and My Redeemer” puts it). For that alone I am deeply grateful.
Key Ministry Signature
Finally, God Is the Gospel may have even changed the key signature of my ministry.
I am aware of the danger of exaggerating the difference one book can make. It’s certainly not as if my life and ministry pre-2005 were bereft of the gospel or any hint of “sovereign joy,” and reading God Is the Gospel suddenly changed everything. That was not the case. But it would also be a mistake to underestimate the impact that this book had on me.
Looking back, I can see this was a season when something terribly important shifted. I had longed for people to come to God, and even to come to know God, for many years, but after reading this book, I yearned for people to come to delight in God through Christ. Because of this, the tone of my preaching and conversations began to change, as a dominant note of enjoying God — Father, Son, and Spirit — enhanced and enriched my proclamation of the gospel.
In addition, the insights summed up so beautifully in God Is the Gospel provided both a rich biblical framework and a vocabulary for ensuring that my ministry remains genuinely Trinitarian, as the sovereign initiative of the Father, the decisive intervention of the Son, and the intimate ministry of the Holy Spirit work together to enable us to glorify and enjoy God forever. This is no small thing.
In the providence of God, God Is the Gospel has had a significant, lasting impact on my life and ministry. I thank God for it with all my heart.
Desiring God