The Leaves
A
leaf. Behold a single leaf. So fragile, it tears like paper, crushes
in your hand to a moist stain, sharply fragrant. Dry, it burns swift
and crackling as newsprint, pungent as gunpowder. Yet a leaf may
withstand hurricanes, stubbornly clinging to its limb.
Hold it open in your palm. It is perfect as a newborn’s smile. Pinch
its stem between thumb and forefinger and hold it to the light. Eden
bleeds through. Its veins are like bone work in silhouette. This single
leaf, joined to the tree, drinks poison from the air, drinks it
serenely as Socrates downing his cup of hemlock, and refuses to return
in kind, instead spilling out life-giving oxygen. This leaf tilts to
catch the sun, its warmth and radiance, to distill the heat and light
down to the shadows, down to the roots, back up to limbs. To shade the
earth. To feed you and me.
A leaf. God makes these season after season, one after the other,
billions upon billions, from the Garden to the New Jerusalem, most for
no eye but His own. He does it faithfully, or else I would not live to
tell about it, or you to hear.
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The Fruit of Hope: Love (Quote by John Piper)
"If I am emphasizing a future- and heaven-oriented focus somebody might object and say,
'John, if you focus on that, you're going to produce a way of thinking
that creates an escapist mentality. You're going to cause people to be
so heavenly-minded that they're no earthly good.' We must ask,
therefore, 'Is that true?' When Christians set their hearts earnestly
and intensely on the hope of the Glory of God, on the hope of seeing
Jesus, on the hope of being free from sin, on the hope of no longer
getting sick anymore, on the hope of having an eternity of happy
tomorrows--if we have our hearts set on that hope in the future--does
it create an escapist mentality? Does it cause our minds to be so much
in heaven that we neglect the pressing needs around us?...
"...The Bible portrays just the opposite. The Bible teaches and shows
that a strong confidence in the promises of God and passionate
preference for the joys of heaven over the joys of earth is precisely
the power that breaks the bondage of worldly selfishness...and ends with the fruit of love.
"I don't think that the problem today is that too many people are
passionately in love with the joy of heaven; name three. The problem is
not that professing Christians are retreating from the world in order
to read the Bible half the day and sing worship songs the other half
while the world goes to Hell. That is not the problem. The problem with
the Church is that professing Christians are reading the Bible ten
minutes a day, earning money half the day, and spending the rest of the
time enjoying and fixing what they spent their money on. It is not
heavenly mindedness that hinders love. It is worldly-mindedness that
hinders love."
Keep reading... Keywords: money,piper,sermon,priority,love
