Book Quotes

I just started "God's Passion for His Glory" by John Piper. In the first half of this book Piper seeks to press the reader to read Jonathan Edwards' "The End for which God Created the World" printed in the second half of the book. Here are some nifty quotes from the introduction & part one:

1) "'I think the Word of God teaches us more things concerning it... than has been generally believed, and that it exhibits many things concerning it exceeding glorious and wonderful than have been taken notice of.' In simple modern English: we have scarcely begun to see all of God that the Scriptures give us to see, and what we have not yet seen is exceedingly glorious." (p. xii-xiii)

2) Sereno Dwight, Edwards' first biographer, said, "'From the purest principles of reason, as well as from the fountain of revealed truth, he demonstrates that the chief and ultimate end of the Supreme Being, in the works of creation and providence, was the manifestation of his own glory in the highest happiness of his creatures.'" (p. 31)

3) "The further up you go in the revealed thoughts of God, the clearer you see that God's aim in creating the world was to display the value of his own glory, and that this aim is no other than the endless, ever-increaing joy of his people in that glory." (p. 32)

4) "God-centered grace nullifies the gospel of self-esteem." (p. 35)

5) "Human beings do, in fact, have more value than the birds (Matt. 6:26). But that is not the bottom line of our happiness. It simply means that we were created to magnify God's glory by enjoying him in a way birds never can." (p. 35)

6) "No act is truly virtuous-that is, truly loving-that does not come from and aim at joy in the glory of God." (p. 35)

7) "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 flory of God in the gospel." (p. 35)

8) "God is mightily honored when a people know that they will die of hunger and thirst unless they have God." (p. 41)

9) "Genuine affections for God are an end in themselves." (p. 42)

10) "'Where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things. (Edwards)'" (p. 44)