John Piper's books are always a refreshing read when scattered throughout other writers with varying styles. I love that he references almost everything; I love that you can be confident he's done his research, and I love that he has a clear passion for the Bible and what it has to say about anything and everything.

That being said, this book was a great Piper read. He tackles alot about the processes of thinking and feeling and their connections to our individual relationships with God. His focus is on Godly thinking as a means of loving God more. He says, "Loving Him with all of our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express this heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things" (Kindle location 1186). Piper emphasizes the gospel and how truly understanding the gospel is the same as accepting it because of Holy Spirits work in illuminating the Truth.

His emphasis on humbly dwelling on the "compelling beauty" of God is a great encouragement and challenge for the individual who is mostly wrapped up in thinking about God in a systematic and analytical way. On the other hand, his emphasis on the importance of rational and logical use of the mind is a poignant and directive message to people so caught up in beauty, passion, and feeling that they're missing some huge things in their relationships with God.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about using (in Piper's words) both thinking and feeling, both meditation and experience, both belief and passion in relationship with God as means to know Him and love Him more.

p.s. John Piper has some great responses to the Relativistic bent of our society and my generation!

Some favorite quotes:

"Some joys are only possible on the other side of sorrow" (location 317).

"Our self-centered hearts distort our reason to the point where we cannot use it to draw true inferences from what is really there. If our disapproval of God's existence is strong enough, our sensory faculties and our rational faculties will not be able to infer that He is there" (location 822).
-A great, great summary of the blindness that we experience before illumination from the Spirit of God allows us to see.

"The corruption of our hearts is the deepest root of our irrationality" (location 828).

and the answer...

"Because our hearts now see Christ as infinitely valuable, our resistance to the truth is overcome. Our thinking is no longer the slave of deceitful desires, because our desires are changed. Christ is the supreme treasure. So our thinking is made docile to the truth of the gospel. We don't use our thinking to distort the gospel anymore. We don't call it foolish. We call it wisdom and power and glory [I Cor. 1:@3-24]" (location 1009).

"The phrase 'compellingly beautiful' stresses two things that I am arguing for. One is that loving God is not a mere decision. You cannot merely decide to love classical music-or country western music-much less God. The music must become compelling. Something must change inside of you. That change makes possible the awakening of a compelling sense of its attractiveness. So it is with God. You do not merely decide to love him. Something changes inside of you, and as a result he becomes compellingly attractive. His glory-his beauty-compels your admiration and delight. He becomes your supreme treasure. You love him"
-Wow, this is an amazing quote. Such a good way of understanding so much about loving God and why so many people don't love Him. It's both convicting to my own heart and illuminative of others'.

Piper quotes J Gresham Machen from "What Is Faith?" about relativism and it's mindset.
"This temper of the mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms...Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what the mean by these terms" (kindle location 1456).