Audio Transcript

God likes to stop human boasting, as John Piper explained in a sermon on Romans 11:17–22, titled “Continue in the Kindness of God,” which he preached in February of 2004. Here’s a short clip of what John Piper said about how we escape the trap of human boasting.

We have to believe that in the kindness of God and in eternal life and in justification and in his working everything together for good, the ultimate, essential good of the gospel is God himself. And the ultimate thing for which we believe him is that he will be for us an all-satisfying treasure.

End of the Gospel

It amazes me. It amazes me about my own life, and it amazes me about churches that we can preach the gospel and not think about what makes it good news ultimately. We use terms like forgiveness of *sins or justification or salvation or reconciliation or propitiation or atonement or ransom. None of those is the end point that makes salvation good news.

Why do you want to be forgiven? Because it feels good not to be guilty or to escape hell? Those are both true and desirable, but that is not what makes it good news. What makes forgiveness good news is that it gets out of the way everything that keeps you from enjoying God. Because the only ultimate joy that fully satisfies is God.

Everything Jesus did on the cross, everything he did in rising from the dead, everything he did by way of illustrating his character in doing miracles and loving people and getting his arms around kids and lepers, was to show us that in the end our satisfaction is going to come from being near him, knowing him, loving him, delighting in him. He is the end of the gospel.

Taste Grace

If we don’t penetrate through eternal life and penetrate through kindness and penetrate through justification and penetrate through Romans 8:28 to him, how is he honored? What we trust Jesus for is we trust him to be a treasure to us that is infinite and all-satisfying.

Father, please, there is only one ultimate escape from boasting, and that is the brokenhearted enjoyment of the God of grace. So break our hearts for our sin and grant everyone in this room to taste grace, to taste Christ, the God of grace.