The Supremacy of God in Preaching

by John Piper

God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in and enjoying the manifestations which He makes of Himself. . . . 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

There are always two parts to true worship. There is seeing God and there is savoring God. You can’t separate these.

In true worship, there is always understanding with the mind and there is always feeling in the heart. Understanding

conclusion, then, the reason that preaching is so essential to the corporate worship of the church is that it is uniquely suited to feed both understanding and feeling. It is uniquely suited to waken seeing God and savoring God. God has ordained that the Word of God come in a form that teaches the mind and reaches the heart.

Preaching that does not have the aroma of God’s greatness may entertain for a season, but it will not touch the hidden cry of the soul: “Show me thy glory!”

The greatness and the glory of God are relevant. It does not matter if surveys turn up a list of perceived needs that does not include the supreme greatness of the sovereign God of grace. That is the deepest need. Our people are starving for God.

Another illustration of this is the way missions mobilization has happened at our church and the way it has happened again and again in history. Younger people today don’t get fired up about denominations and agencies. They get fired up about the greatness of a global God and about the unstoppable purpose of a sovereign King.

Our people need to hear God-entranced preaching. They need someone, at least once a week, to lift up his voice and magnify the supremacy of God. They need to see the whole panorama of his excellencies.

is not the job of the Christian preacher to give people moral or psychological pep talks about how to get along in the world. When that is needed, someone else can do it. But most of our people have no one, no one in the world, to tell them, week in and week out, about the supreme beauty and majesty of God.

Discouragement can go so deep as to leave this preacher numb. But it is a gift of measureless, sovereign grace that, beyond all desert and all adequacy, God has opened his Word to me and given me a heart to savor it and send it forth week after week. I have never ceased to love to preach.

God will hide from you much of your fruit. You will see enough to be assured of his blessing, but not so much as to think you could live without it. For God aims to exalt himself, not the preacher, in this affair of preaching.

The Goal of Preaching: The Glory of God The Ground of Preaching: The Cross of Christ The Gift of Preaching: The Power of the Holy Spirit

the aims of all genuine preaching are “to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”2 In other words, God is the goal of preaching, God is the ground of preaching, and all the means in between are given by the Spirit of God.

They were always willing to stop at the village window, but they always linked the streets with the heights, and sent your souls a-roaming over the eternal hills of God. . . . It is this note of vastitude, this ever-present sense and suggestion of the Infinite, which I think we need to recover in our preaching.3

The only submission that fully reflects the worth and glory of the king is glad submission. Begrudging submission berates the king. No gladness in the subject, no glory to the king.

When the kingdom is a treasure, submission is a pleasure. Or to turn it around, when submission is a pleasure, the kingdom is glorified as a treasure. Therefore, if the goal of preaching is to glorify God, it must aim at glad submission to his kingdom, not raw submission.

Therefore, the goal of preaching is the glory of God reflected in the glad submission of the human heart. And the supremacy of God in preaching is secured by this fact: The one who satisfies gets the glory; the one who gives the pleasure is the treasure.

The goal of preaching is the glory of God in Christ reflected in the glad submission of his creation.

What in God is righteousness, in man is sin. This is the very point of Genesis 3—that sin came into the world through a temptation, and that the essence of that temptation was, “You will be like God.” The effort to imitate God at this point is the essence of our corruption.

Our parents fell for it, and in them we have all fallen for it. It’s now part of our nature. We take the mirror of God’s image, which was intended to reflect his glory in the world, and turn our backs to the light, and fall in love with the contours of our own dark shadow, trying desperately to convince ourselves (with technological advances or management skills or athletic prowess or academic achievements or sexual exploits or counterculture hair styles) that the dark shadow of the image on the ground in front of us is really glorious and satisfying. And in our proud love affair with ourselves, we pour contempt (whether we know it or not!) on the worth of God’s glory. And as our pride pours contempt upon God’s glory, his righteousness obliges him to pour wrath upon our pride.

Man-centered humans are amazed that God should withhold life and joy from his creatures. But the God-centered Bible is amazed that God should withhold judgment from sinners.

nevertheless, God designed a way to vindicate the worth of his glory and at the same time give hope to sinners who have scorned that glory—and what he designed was the death of his Son. It took the infinitely costly death of the Son of God to repair the dishonor that my pride has brought upon the glory of God.

The cross is also the ground of the humility of preaching because the cross is the power of God to crucify the pride of both preacher and congregation.

objective substitution; it is also a present place of subjective execution—the execution of my self-reliance and my love affair with the praise of man.

How utterly dependent we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching! All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look down at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, “O God, this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life (2 Cor. 2:16). My God, who is sufficient for these things?”

Without this demonstration of Spirit and power in our preaching, nothing of any abiding value will be achieved no matter how many people may admire our cogency or enjoy our illustrations or learn from our doctrine. The goal of preaching is the glory of God in the glad submission of his people. How is God to get the glory from an act that is so manifestly human? First Peter 4:10–11 gives a resounding answer to that question:

Unless we learn how to rely on the Word of the Spirit and the power of the Spirit in all lowliness and meekness, it is not God who will get the glory in our preaching.

Where the Bible is esteemed as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, preaching can flourish. But where the Bible is treated as a record of valuable religious insight, preaching dies.

give me that book! At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book.”3

The really effective preachers have been ever-growing in the Word of God. Their delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law they meditate day and night (Ps. 1:2). Spurgeon said of John Bunyan, “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.”5

There are five steps that I follow in seeking to preach not in my own strength but in the strength that God supplies. I sum them up with an acronym so that I can remember them when my mind is befogged by fear or distraction. The acronym is APTAT.

the vision before his eyes is of an absolutely sovereign God, self-sufficient and all-sufficient, infinite in holiness, and therefore perfectly glorious. God’s actions are never motivated to meet his deficiencies (since he has none), but are always motivated to display his sufficiency (which is infinite). He does what he does for the sake of his glory. Our duty and privilege, therefore, is to conform to this goal and reflect the value of God’s glory by delighting in it. Our calling and our joy is to render visible God’s glorious grace by trusting him with all our heart as long as we live.

Preaching about hell is never an end in itself. You can’t frighten anyone into heaven. Heaven is for people who love purity, not for people who simply loathe pain. Nevertheless, Edwards says, “Some talk of it as an unreasonable thing to think to fright persons to heaven; but I think it is a reasonable thing to endeavor to fright persons away from hell—’tis a reasonable thing to fright a person out of a house on fire.”23

Powerful preaching is like surgery. Under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, it locates, lances, and removes the infection of sin.

Good preaching is born of good praying. And it will come forth with the power that caused the Great Awakening when it is delivered under the mighty prayer-wrought influence of the Holy Spirit.

The spirit we long to see in our people must be in ourselves first. But that will never happen until, as Edwards says, we know our own emptiness and helplessness and terrible sinfulness. Edwards lived in a kind of spiraling oscillation between humiliation for his sin and exultation in his Savior.

Lack of intensity in preaching can only communicate that the preacher does not believe or has never been seriously gripped by the reality of which he speaks—or that the subject matter is insignificant. This was never the case with Edwards. He stood in continual awe at the weight of the truth he was charged to proclaim.

One of the main points of this book is that people are starving for the grandeur of God. Most of them don’t know that this is what their hearts are longing for. It is the great work of the preacher to show them the greatness of God, Christ, salvation, life, death, heaven, hell, and the ways of God in the world. It is our job to help them see that their addiction to entertainment is like addiction to sugar. It gives ever-shorter highs and then lets you fall lower and lower. But a steady diet of Bible-saturated truth and wonder enlarges the soul and strengthens the heart, and makes Jesus precious beyond words. This happens when the preacher is persuaded that everything he says must be tethered to the Bible, and when he helps his people see that tethering and base their lives on it.

God. And as we look out over the wasteland of our secular culture, must we preachers not ask: Who but us will say to this people, “Behold your God!”? Who will tell the people that God is great and greatly to be praised? Who will paint for them the landscape of God’s grandeur? Who will remind them with tales of wonder that God has triumphed over every foe? Who will cry out above every crisis, “Your God reigns!”? Who will labor to find words that can carry the “gospel of the glory of the blessed God”? If God is not supreme in our preaching, where in this world will people hear about the supremacy of God? If we do not spread a banquet of God’s beauty on Sunday morning, will not our people seek in vain to satisfy their inconsolable longing with the cotton candy pleasures of pastimes and religious hype? If the fountain of living water does not flow from the mountain of God’s sovereign grace on Sunday morning, will not the people hew for themselves cisterns on Monday, “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13)?

We are called to be “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1). And the great mystery is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). And that glory is the glory of God. And “it is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:1)—faithful in magnifying the supreme glory of the one eternal God. Not magnifying like a microscope that makes small things look bigger, but like a telescope that makes unimaginably great galaxies of glory visible to the human eye. If we love our people, if we love the “other sheep” that are not yet gathered into the fold, if we love the fulfillment of God’s global purpose, we will labor to “spread a table in the wilderness” (Ps. 78:19). People everywhere are starving for the enjoyment of God.