I’m reading John Piper’s new book, Spectacular Sins, which is proving to be a fast read that packs a ton of weight. This is vintage Piper–serious, pointed and profound. For reasons I unpack at the old blog, BitterSweetLif, here’s an excerpt I love:
We are pushing our way through a blood-spattered life that makes us feel connected to the world and disconnected at the same time. We are here but not here. Love binds us to the tragic earth, and love binds us to the Treasure of heaven. Christians are strange. Our emotions are inexplicable in ordinary terms.
Piper gets it.
Sam Storms has been on my radar for awhile, as a guy with strong loyalties to the Bible, Jonathan Edwards, and Calvinistic theology. Storms is a prolific writer and a fan of John Piper, which in my book, is also in his favor–oh yeah, and he’s local to Kansas City too, so I could hypothetically run into him in a coffee shop. All that said, The Hope of Glory is the first Storms volume I’ve read. It’s a series of 100 “daily meditations” on Colossians, and it didn’t disappoint.
Here are the three primary reasons I’ve already bought and given away multiple copies of this book:
- It’s devotional. In other words, it was good for my soul. Sam Storms writes in a worshipful way that pushes my thoughts toward Jesus, not just theological understanding. These really are “meditations.”
- It’s instructive. The Hope of Glory was one source I drew from when I preached a short series of sermons on Colossians, and Storms’ blow-by-blow approach to each verse (or phrase, in some cases) doesn’t fail to enlighten. At the same time, he stays grounded in the wider context of each passage and Colossians as a whole. So in this sense the book is a commentary.
- It’s short. More accurately, the chapters are short. The book covers the whole book of Colossians in about 350 pages, but you can read a chapter in 5-10 minutes.
Overall, I highly recommend The Hope of Glory as a study resource and for devotional reading.
Lindsay has a theory that when we come to know Jesus, he takes our preexisting avenues of aesthetic grace and expands them. For example: Before conversion, indie music and theater dramas were the things that made your soul jump up and wave its arms around, but you thought that the Grand Canyon was a yawn-inducing hole in the ground.
Then, after Jesus resuscitated the walking corpse that was your soul, you walk by the Grand Canyon again and are so inspired that you nearly fall off the edge in a paroxysm of John Piper-like worship. You still love music and drama, but now the Grand Canyon is GQ too–all because Jesus has enlivened your heart with his grace so now you see created beauty in more places.
You think the theory stacks up?
