Main Session 7 - Monday Evening

Here are my notes from John Piper's message this evening. The afternoon's message was titled "Discern What Pleases God: Himself" and this message is "Discern What Pleases God: Obedience."

Mr. Piper speaks more slowly than Josh or other preachers, so I was able to capture a lot more of what he said. It was a good message to get a lot of. Typos to be corrected.

God’s self-exaltation is the most important form of love that God has toward us. And even unbelievers have tasted in this life what it means to experience the kind of thing I’m talking about I’m saying that if we had eyes to see God as we will one day, to see him and his son, we would be so thrilled by what we see that we would “become like him” and experience deep, satisfying joy.

Unbelievers understand this in measure.

Picture of the person standing on top of the huge pillar of rock. What is the advertisement celebrating? “You’ve never felt more alive; you’ve never felt more insignificant.”

What are they onto?!

Man, totally tiny and vulnerable, feeling massively insignificant and loving itt! Believer or unbeliever, God has left a mark of his destiny on our hearts. It’s not about you! It’s about the greatness you’re going to see and be swallowed up in, and that’s what you’re made for!

How tragic when the devil makes us think that happiness comes from being made much of! Heaven will not be a hall of mirrors! The sense pertaining to ourselves will be a glorious self-forgetfulness! The most wonderful times are the brief moments when I am totally oblivious that I exist.

If you knew your own heart, you would hear and know the echo of God’s majesty for which you were made.

God’s saving love is His commitment to do everything that must be done to make Himself the everlasting and all-satisfying treasure of sinners. (Afternoon’s message)

Link with this message: When we see what had to be done so that God could make himself the treasure of fallen sinners, that determines what kind of obedience pleases or displeases God.

If you see what He did at Calvary, you’ll know two kinds of obedience that God cannot abide, and two corresponding kinds of obedience that He lives and delights in.

What God DID through Christ to make sinners like me treasure Him above all, forever, governs the kind of obedience He’s pleased and displeased by.

Two kinds of obedience He abominates. Two main points. What God hates, and why.

Obedience offered to God as the ground of our justification

If you take your obedience to the word of God, and commend it to God as the basis, or the ground, of why He should count you righteous or acceptable, He HATES that obedience. Because it usurps the place of his Son’s obedience. What He did to make Himself the treasure of sinners was to provide His Son as the perfect sacrifice for your sins and the perfect obedience for your righteousness. If you then come up with obedience that you commend to him as the ground of your righteousness, He will say NO, because it nullifies my Son’s life! Paul said Il will not nullify grace, because if righteousness were by the law, the Christ died in vain!

First kind of obedience God hates because of the WAY He showed his love for us is the obedience that commends itself to Him as the basis of our righteousness before Him.



Obedience that conceives of itself as payback for God’s grace

The reason He cannot abide and abonimantes obedience conceived as payment for past grace, is because what Christ did in order to make God our treasure, was to provide a rock-solid ground and guarantee of all future grace, including the grae that enables our obedience.

So then if you conceive of your obedience on the future as payback for future grace, you are an abomination to God because it nullifies the work of Christ to purchase FREE grace!



Why does God abominate obedience offered as ground for being counted righteous?

Romans 3:28 “We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”
Galatians 2:16 “Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ. So we also have believed in Christ Jesus in order that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.”
Galatians 2:21 “I do not nullify the grace f God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died in vain.”
Offering God our obedience to the law as the ground for our justification nullifies grace because it usurps the place of Christ in our salvation. Cancels grace. Nullifies mercy, because Christ is offered in His life and his death as the obedience and the sacrifice with I must have!

Where do I get that?

Romans 5:18-19 “…. for as by one man’s disobedience the many were appointed sinners, so by one man’s obedience, many are appointed righteous.”
Romans 10:3 “…being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they didn’t submit to God’s righteousness, for Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes….”

This is nullifying the whole issue of justification by our works -

1 Cor 1:30 “And because of Him, you are in Christ, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification and redemption… Christ became our righteousness”
Phil 3:8 “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and counted them as rubbish, in order that I might gain Christ, and be found in Him, not by any righteousness of my own….”

In Christ we have righteousness from God.

Been spending time looking at the flow of thought in Luke 17-18. Did Jesus ever talk like this, or is it just Paul?

Luke 17:10 does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say “we are unworthy servants.”
Luke 18:9-14 Parable to some who trusted in themselves, that they were righteous. Pharisee and tax collector. Pharisee saw his works as grounds for his justification. Tax collector saw need for forgiveness.
Rich young ruler – Jesus says “one thing you lack,” and then he says three things. Sell all you have – distribute to the poor and gain treasure in heaven – come follow Me. Why does he say one and give three? Here’s the unity. The man had a hand clenched around great wealth. Jesus says “In that hand, clenched so tightly, must be ME!”

This is it – right here – warning all of us at New attitude – “I am not pleased by obedience offered to God as ground for being counted righteousness, because it usurps the place of Christ. Nothing can replace ME!”


What does please God, when it comes to justification, being counted righteous?

The New testament calls faith in the Gospel, “obedience.” At least twice. For example, 1 Peter 4:!7 “obeying the Gospel.” I take this to mean comply with the Gospel summons to trust the obedience of Another.

2 Thess 1:7 “… inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God, and those who do not obey the Gospel.”

Be careful here – The Gospel: Christ died for our sins, providing a perfect sacrifice for our sins, perfect obedience for our righteousness. Cast yourself TOTALLY on him for salvation, and when you do that, you are OBEYING the Gospel. The obedience to the Gospel is the renunciation of all of the obedience in ME!

Don’t try to mix in works as ground for acceptance. What you are obeying is the command that you FORSAKE your own works and trust WHOLLY in the works of another! There iS an obedience that pleases the Lord, and the name of it is faith.

Faith – there is no other act of the human soul in the same category as faith. If you try to mix anything in with it, it becomes works.

Faith in Christ for justification is a receiving of an alien obedience, not an offering of my own. It is a turning away of my obedience and saying I’m undone, and I will embrace, receive the sacrifice and obedience of Another. Faith is a totally receiving act. Not a pushing-out act, a receiving of Christ and all that He is for us.

There is an obedience that pleases God – the obedience to the Gospel called faith.


Second obedience that’s an abomination:

Conceiving of your life as a Christian as payback for grace.

Why is God displeased of this? Because what God did in Christ in love to make Himself the everlasting treasure of sinners, was not only to provide a ground for their perfection, but to provide a ground and guarantee of all future grace, bought, secured, by that redemption.

This obedience is displeasing to the Lord because it will nullify the grace bought for you at Calvary.

Texts:

1 Cor 15:10 “By the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace toward me was not in vain, but I worked harder than any of them. Nevertheless it was not I, but the grace of God…”
The GRACE comes from Christ crucified. You do not commend yourself as paying Him back.

O to grace, how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be.

Daily I’m constrained to go deeper and deeper into debt to grace. The more grace you take advantage of the more you are in debt to grace, since you can’t repay it!

The obedience that pleases God is the obedience that banks on the ever-present arrival of future grace.

What God wants in the morning is not payback, but INCREASING DEBT! God, what do I have that I did not receive? And if I received it, how can I boast?

Psalm 116:12 “What shall I render to the Lord for all of His benefits to me?”
What comes next?
v. 13 “I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord.” For what? More grace!

how do you pay back God? Answer. Ask for more!!!!

This spring is magnified when we take our empty buckets and fill them

God doesn’t need ANY of our payback, and He’s glorified when we go through our life not for payback, but going deeper and deeper into debt as we ask for more grace.

“God is able to make all grace about to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may about in every good work.” Where do good works come from that please God? GOD is able to make all grace abound to you!

What should you think? What should you do?

You should devote your mind and your heart to seeing Christ for who He is and savoring Him for how much He’s worth. The real battle for obedience that pleases God is receiving grace and being satisfied in Christ!

2 Corinthians 8

What we have here is a picture of love that pleases God, obedience that pleases God, and how it can happen In your life

“ We want you to know brothers about the grace of God that was given among the churches in Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.”