Page 44 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

Hundreds of times I interrupted my play to stand
by, with wide eyes and a wildly thumping heart, as
my mother or father extracted patients’ teeth –
without anesthetic. I would watch my tiny mother
wriggle her pointed forceps up between the gum and
tooth, seeking a firm grip so the crown of the tooth
would not break off when she yanked. When dealing
with a very large patient, she hung on fiercely to
Figure 26: Tooth extraction those forceps while the patient’s own thrashing
motions worked the tooth loose. The patients cried
out, danced around uncontrollably, and spit up blood. Yet, even after seeing those
reactions, onlookers lined up for treatment. Ridding themselves of toothache was worth
any cost.
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While it is hard for us to understand, somehow God’s grace is much, much greater than our sin (Rom.
5:15). We slog along on earth, struggling with the difficulties of life. God is different. “God delights fully
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in being God.” He is perfect and complete in himself. He is overflowingly happy. He does not need us to
complete his fullness and is not deficient without us. Once we get a taste of him, we want more. “Our
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joy in God is insatiably greedy. The more you have, the more you want. The more you see, the more you
want to see. The more you feel, the more you want to feel. The tragedy of faith is wanting God for
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what he can give.

We value God solely for the things that he can do; we make of Him a mere means to an
ulterior end. And God refuses to be treated so; such a religion always fails in the hour of
need. If we have regarded religion merely as a means of getting things – even lofty and
unselfish things – then when the things that have been gotten are destroyed, our faith
will fail. When loved ones are taken away, when disappointment comes and failures,
when noble ambitions are set at naught, we say, we have tried prayer, and it has failed.
Of course it has failed! God is not content to be an instrument in our hand or a servant
at our beck and call….Has it never dawned on us that God is valuable for His own sake,
that just as personal communion is the highest thing that we know on earth, so personal
communion with God is the sublimest height of all?
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May we say, “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to
his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all
generations, for ever and ever! Amen (Eph. 3:20).”

61 Paul W. Brand and Philip Yancey In His Image (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 227-228.
62 John Piper, The Pleasures of God (Portland: Multnomah, 1991), 9.
63 Ibid., 19.
64 John Piper, Desiring God (Portland: Multnoman, 1986), p. 113.
65 J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1925), p. 73.
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