Thoughts

I'm currently re-reading Piper's God is the Gospel and am loving it all over again. Here are just a couple of the quotes that I've really enjoyed recently.

God had "shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." This is the way the Holy Spirit does his ongoing change in us. He does not change us directly; he changes us by enabling us to see the glory of Christ. This is crucial to understand. It shows how Christ-exalting the Holy Spirit is. He will not do his sanctifying work by the use of his direct divine power. He will only do it by making the glory of Christ the immediate cause of it.

At the end of his great prayer in John 17:26 he said to his Father, "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." The love God has for the Son will be in us. That is, the love for the Son that will be in us will be the Father's love for the Son. We will not merely love the Son with our paltry ability to love. But our love for the Son will be infused with the divine love between the Father and the Son. Therefore, we should realize from John 17:26 that Jesus made God known so that God's pleasure in his Son might be in us and become our pleasure in Christ.

Repentance of sin is a sorrow arising from the sight of God's excellency and mercy... Jonathan Edwards

The sorrow of true contrition is sorrow for not having God as our all-satisfying treasure.

The gospel awakens sorrow for sin by awakening a savor for God.

Edwards used the term "disinterested love" to designate love that delights in God for his own greatness and beauty, and to distinguish it from love that delights only in God's gifts. Disinterested love is not love without pleasure. It is love whose pleasure is in God himself.