The Books #5

Well...you knew it was coming.  The trouble is John Piper has suffered a little from massive exposure over the last few years, which means his every word has been followed by the people who follow other people's every words - a pressure most of us don't have to live with, nor the consequences.

Anyway, when I bought this:

he had only just turned up on these shores (in fact I bought the American edition straight from DG).  And I can only say: it is the book I wished I had read at the start of my Christian life, it's just that good.  It would have saved me so much trouble - and especially and fundamentally with this: that happiness and Christianity were, to all intents and purposes, not really connected in my mind.  I don't know if someone had said that to me, but as a young Christian and onwards the impression I had got from church, leaders, other Christians was somehow joy was not the concern of Christianity.  Maybe my misunderstanding - but I suspect I wasn't alone.

So having heard him in '98, I got the book and it all fell into place, and powerfully so.  (I told a Christian friend what I had heard in '98 in a 3-minute summary and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say it changed his life).

And yet what we really find here is, basically, traditional evangelical thinking  - particularly, in places, Puritan; and especially and overtly, Jonathan Edwards.  I just hadn't seen it before - but there it was.  And every fella saying Piper was some kind of mad uber-charismatic heretic, simply had not been reading Banner's Puritan Paperbacks properly (as I hadn't).

In this book you get his main thesis (pursuing God's glory and pursuing personal joy is fundamentally the same thing) and then how all the key areas of Christian life fit into that (Bible reading, prayer, missions etc).  And with it such warm-heartedness and passion. Calvinism on fire.

Like anyone with a big idea, it's always possible to go too far and see it everywhere.  Most people with big ideas do.  But there is something pervasive and persuasive about the principle Piper works out here.  To any younger Christian with a good reading ability and struggling through the fundamental questions of the faith, this is the book I would give.