Earlier this year Crossway publishers released an updated version of John Piper’s book, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God. It was only a few weeks ago that they did the same thing for John’s book, Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God. If any of you have read only one or neither of these books, I highly recommend that you do so. Here are John’s comments in the Introduction to Future Grace:

"The ultimate purpose of this book is that God be prized above all things. I could also say that the ultimate purpose is the praise of the glory of God’s grace. The reason why both are aims and both are ultimate is that prizing is the authenticating essence of praising. You can’t praise what you don’t prize. Or, to put it another way, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

On the other side of the coin, the aim of this book is to emancipate human hearts from servitude to the fleeting pleasures of sin. Sin is what you do when your heart is not satisfied with God. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it holds out some promise of happiness. That promise enslaves us until we believe that God is more to be desired than life itself (Ps. 63:3), which means that the power of sin’s promise is broken by the power of God’s. All that God promises to be for us in Jesus stands over against what sin promises to be for us without him. This great prospect of the glory of God is what I call future grace. Being satisfied with that is what I call faith. And therefore the life I write about in this book is called living by faith in future grace” (xxi).

If after reading that you think this book is merely theoretical reflections on the grace of God, you would be greatly mistaken. The aim, says John, “is to emancipate human hearts from servitude to the fleeting pleasures of sin.” There’s hardly anything more practical and more urgent and more needed than that.

So, please get both books. It doesn’t matter which one you read first, as long as you read both of them!

Sam