How To Treasure God

Excerpt from John Piper: Praying for All His Purposes, Meditating on All His Word

Where does faith come from? Or: How do you become a person who treasures all that God is for you in Jesus? If faith works through love (Galatians 5:6), and love causes people to magnify our Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16), then the great question in life is, how shall we have this faith? How shall we come to treasure God like this?

One answer is given in Romans 10:14–17.

How then shall they call upon Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall
they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a
preacher? 15 And how shall they preach unless they are sent? . . . 17 So faith
comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.

There is Paul's answer: "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ." This is why our Spiritual Dynamic includes the phrase, "meditating on all his Word." Prayer has a crucial role to play too, which is why we say, "praying for all his purposes." For example, in Psalm 119:18 the psalmist prays like this:

Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Thy law.

In other words the Word of God contains wonderful things, but we will not see them without God's help—his illumination (2 Corinthians 4:4, 6); his opening our hearts like he did for Lydia (Acts 16:14); his opening our minds like he did for the apostles (Luke 24:45). And if we miss what is in the Word of God without his help, then prayer becomes the natural partner to hearing the Word. We pray, "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things from your law."

We are going to spend two Sundays on prayer during Prayer Week at the beginning of the year (nine weeks from now). So I want us to focus on this other line in our spiritual dynamic this morning and tonight—"meditating on all his Word." "We join God in magnifying the supremacy of his glory by . . . meditating on all his Word." This is the way faith begins and the way faith grows—by hearing and meditating on the Word of God. And as faith grows—as we come to treasure more and more what God is for us in Jesus—we have more and more freedom and strength to love as we ought. And when we love as we ought, people will see our good deeds and give glory to our Father in heaven. And our mission will be fulfilled.