The Ultimate Good of the Gospel

The ultimate good of the gospel is seeing and savoring the beauty and value of God. God’s wrath and our sin obstruct that vision and that pleasure. You can’t see and savor God as supremely satisfying while you are full of rebellion against Him and He is full of wrath against you. The removal of this wrath and this rebellion is what the gospel is for. The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s glory and the removal of every obstacle to our seeing it and savoring it as our highest treasure. “Behold Your God!” is the most gracious command and the best gift of the gospel. If we do not see Him and savor Him as our greatest fortune, we have not obeyed or believed the gospel."
-John Piper

In the Image of God

"God created us for this:
to live our lives in a way that makes Him look more like
the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that He really is.
This is what it means to be created in the image of God."
-- John Piper

On Accusing God...

I came across this quote the other day while reading "The Pursuit of Holiness" and found it so thought-provoking that I had to text it to several of my friends who have been living through many of the same things I have been.
It's one thing to say God is right. It's yet another to really feel in the depths of your heart that He IS right, no matter what He chooses to do with your life.

"To complain against God is in effect to deny His holiness and to say that He is somehow not fair and just. It is less injury to Him to deny His being than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God...He that saith God is not holy and right speaks much worse than he that saith there is no God at all."
~ Stephen Churnock, 17th century