The Nature of God as Evidenced through His Bountiful Grace

Introductory part of The God-Centered Ground of Saving Grace by John Piper

... The goal is God through grace. Not grace through God.

I wonder if that difference sounds significant to you. I think it's immensely significant. Because one of the great divides in American religious life today, as I see it, is whether God is made a means to grace, or grace is made a means to God.

Does the quest of our lives and the longing of our hearts and the labor of our minds terminate on God, in whom we live and move and have our being, so that grace is indescribably precious because it carries us safely to him?Or is God brought in alongside our planning, and our techniques and methods and political strategies and therapies and treatments as a means to the experience of various forms of grace?

I want to press this because I believe it makes a tremendous difference whether our ultimate treasure is the grace of God or whether our ultimate treasure is the God of grace. It seems to me that the most fundamental question standing before American evangelicalism today is whether we put God or ourselves at the center of grace. And my passion today is to plead for the God-centeredness of saving grace; that we cherish saving grace because it brings us to God, rather than cherishing God because he brings us grace.
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