I studied this book with my small group this past semester, and I found it thought-provoking and insightful. It's hard to strike a balance between being overly intellectual when talking about the act of thinking, and John Piper did an excellent job of unpacking Scripture simply yet profoundly. His main goal with this book was to talk about the interconnection and importance of using your mind to love God ("love the Lord your God with all your mind"). He debunks some interpretations of commonly misquoted scripture (Jesus saying "I praise you Father for you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children", and Paul's "For God has made foolish the wisdom of this world"), and ultimately shows you WHY we think the way we do and HOW God intentionally designed our minds.

My main takeaways from Piper are that you cannot separate your mind from how God designed it--God made the human mind to view everything through the lens of Himself as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Thus, there is no such thing as objectivity apart from God, or science being a separate vehicle from religion. All truth is God's truth, and science just finds how God did it. However, sin has crept into the mind, and instead of using our minds to rejoice in the truth, we use our power of thinking to manipulate and reason into what we want, rather than the truth (like the Pharisees asking for a sign). I was so convicted of that. To "understand" literally means to "stand under" the authority of the truth of something (like gravity for instance, the understanding of which keeps you from flinging yourself off the side of a cliff). So the more you understand God and his truth, the more you humbly must submit to His authority in your life. Piper also pleads with the reader to think about reading the Bible in a new way, asking questions (what's the therefore there for?) and unpacking what God was trying to say. He pointed out that all authors want their reader to understand the point of their book, and they do not mean to be intentionally misunderstood--if I say I'm allergic to apple peels, don't tell the cook that I don't like apples at all; tell him to peel the apples. God wants us to think about what He said, and thinking is the key that helps us know Him and love Him more.