Faith loves God more than job, retirement, ministry, writing books, building dreamhouses, making your first million, having your first baby. Faith says, whether he treats me tenderly or whether he gives me

up to torture, I love God. Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.

What is it about faith that shows God to be better than everything life offers.

In this episode of Light and Truth,

John Piper opens Hebrews 1129 to 38

to examine how faith reveals the worth of God.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on August 10, 1997. Having faith is not the ultimate determining factor in whether you suffer or escape. God is.

Having faith, therefore, since you can escape by it and since you can die by it, having faith is not the ultimate decisive factor in whether you live or whether you die.

God is, his sovereign will and wisdom and love.

This is tremendously comforting to me.

You may have to wrestle with it.

I don't know where you're coming from,

Theologically.

I wept over these things for months,

and I don't pressure anybody to make hasty jumps into the embracing of a

God of sovereign love. But once you're over the hump, it's incredibly comforting.

It is a great relief to me to know that there is a higher explanation for my pain than whether I measure up in faith.

I tell you that's so comforting.

Because if I had to come to my... I went into the doctor's office about two months ago to have four biopsies on little things all over my skin that come here and here and here.

And so I thought, hmm, maybe I'll die of skin cancer that'd be gruesome and I thought

about I think about those things a lot every time I feel bad I think about dying and I really think about it. I really, really

imagine it. And if I had to come to terms with the fact that I'm dying because I don't have faith,

...