God's Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (with the Complete Text of the End for Which God Created the World)

by John Piper

In his essay The End for Which God Created the WorldThe End for Which God Created the World, the great theologian Jonathan Edwards proclaimed that God's ultimate end is the manifestation of his glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.

Pastor John Piper has devoted his years of ministry to exploring the implications of this stunning truth for life and ministry. Understanding that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him has made all the difference for John Piper-and can transform your life as well.

Here Piper passionately demonstrates the relevance of Edwards's ideals for the personal and public lives of Christians today through his own book-length introduction to Edwards's The End for Which God Created the WorldThe End for Which God Created the World. This book also contains the complete essay supplemented by almost a hundred of Piper's insightful explanatory notes. The result is a powerful and persuasive presentation of the things that matter most in the Christian life.

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Paperback, 266 pages

Published January 6th 2006 by Crossway Books (first published September 15th 1998)

tags: theology, faith, philosophy, christianity, church, religion, biography, church history, nonfiction, christian living, christian

Book Quotes

“Seek not to grow in knowledge chiefly for the sake of applause, and to enable you to dispute with others; but seek it for the benefit of your souls, and in order to practice. . . . Practice according to what knowledge you have. This will be the way to know more. .”

― John Piper

“One part of that divine fullness which is communicated is the divine knowledge. That communicated knowledge, which must be supposed to pertain to God's last end in creating the world, is the creature's knowledge of HIM. For this is the end of all other knowledge, and even the faculty of understanding would be vain without it.”

― John Piper

“God created the world to exhibit the fullness of His glory in the God-centered joy of His people.”

― John Piper

topics: God

“Sometimes people ask: should we pursue obedience to God or joy in God? Edwards would answer: The question involves a category confusion. It's like asking: should I pursue fruit or apples? Obedience is doing what we are told. And we are told to delight ourselves in the Lord. Therefore pursuing joy in God is obedience. In”

― John Piper

“me in these things is incalculable. I love his words, "The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted."56 But I also love to say it my way: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

― John Piper

“When God is so often spoken of as the last as well as the first, the end as well as the beginning, it is implied that as he is the first, efficient58 cause and fountain from whence all things originate; so, he is the last, final cause for which they are made; the final term to which they all tend in their ultimate issue. This”

― John Piper

“There are two ways of recommending true religion and virtue in the world, which God hath made use of: the one is by doctrine and precept; the other by instance and example.”

― John Piper

“You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you.”

― John Piper

“[God] had respect to himself, as his last and highest end, in this work; because he is worthy in himself to be so, being infinitely the greatest and best of beings. All things else, with regard to worthiness, importance, and excellence, are perfectly as nothing in comparison of him. All that is ever spoken of in the Scripture as an ultimate end of God's works is included in that one phrase, the glory of God.”

― John Piper

“Our evangelistic task is not to persuade people that the gospel was made for their felt needs, but that they were made for the soul-satisfying glory of God in the gospel.”

― John Piper

“God is glorified not only by His glory's being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God's glory [doesn't] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it. Jonathan Edwards Miscellanies”

― John Piper

“the pursuit of our soul's satisfaction--our joy and delight and happiness--is not sin. Sin is the exact opposite: pursuing happiness where no lasting happiness can be found. "My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (Jer. 2:13, RSV). Sin is trying to quench our unquenchable soul-thirst anywhere but in God. Or, more subtly, sin is pursuing satisfaction in the right direction, but with lukewarm, halfhearted affections (Rev. 3:16).”

― John Piper

“Resolved: To live with all my might while I do live." And”

― John Piper

“our concern with truth is an inevitable expression of our concern with God. If God exists, then he is the measure of all things, and what he thinks about all things is the measure of what we should think. Not to care about truth is not to care about God. To love God passionately is to love truth passionately. Being God-centered in life means being truth-driven in ministry. What is not true is not of God. What is false is anti-God. Indifference to the truth is indifference to the mind of God. Pretense is rebellion against reality, and what makes reality reality is God. Our concern with truth is simply an echo of our concern with God. And all this is rooted in God's concern with God, or God's passion for the glory of God.”

― John Piper

“Edwards believed his Biblical theology was, in fact, a true rendering of reality, and therefore could stand confidently in the marketplace of philosophical ideas and give an account of itself--which in his hands it would do.”

― John Piper

“it is to no avail merely to believe that God is holy and merciful. For that belief to be of any saving value, we must "sense" God's holiness and mercy. That is, we must have a true taste for it and delight in it for what it is in itself. Otherwise the knowledge is no different than what the devils have.”

― John Piper

“The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”

― John Piper

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. . . . This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. . . . Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. . . . It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. . . . We all . . . need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century . . . lies where we have never suspected it. . . . None of us can fully escape this blindness. . . . The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.23”

― John Piper

“The great end of all study--all theology--is a heart for God and a life of holiness. The great goal of all Edwards's work was the glory of God. And the greatest thing I have ever learned from Edwards, and the driving vision of this book, is that God is glorified most not merely by being known, nor by merely being dutifully obeyed, but by being enjoyed in the knowing and the obeying.”

― John Piper

“books that enlarge our grasp of truth and make us wiser must feel, at first, beyond us. They "must make demands on you. They must seem to you to be beyond your capacity."24 If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.”

― John Piper

John Piper

John Piper (1946 - Present)

is a Calvinistic Baptist Christian preacher and author currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His books include ECPA Christian Book Award winners Spectacular Sins, What Jesus Demands from the World, Pierced by the Word, and God's Passion for His Glory, and bestsellers Don't Waste Your Life and The Passion of Jesus Christ. The evangelical organization Desiring God is named for his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986).

In 1980, after what he described as an "irresistible call of the Lord to preach", Piper became Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he has been ministering ever since. Piper hit the evangelical scene after the publication of his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986) and has continued to publish dozens of other books further articulating this theological perspective. In 1994, he founded Desiring God Ministries, which provides all of Piper's sermons and articles from the past three decades, and most of his books online free of charge, as well as offering for sale books, CDs, and DVDs and regularly hosting conferences.

John Stephen Piper is a Reformed and Baptist theologian, preacher, and author, currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books.

Piper's motto in ministry, preaching, and teaching is: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." He calls those who live out this motto Christian Hedonists. Piper places a heavy emphasis on the objective and absolute nature of truth and is confident in the Christian's ability to grasp that truth through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
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