Sometimes your heart is wavering and your mind is not holding together and it's going all directions like this and you can't seem to get your feet on the ground or your hands on anything firm and life is just shaking.

Well, that's normal.

And that's why this valley of motivation and foundation is here saying,

God is one day going to take away everything in your life that shakes

and replace it with something that cannot shake.

In a fragile and fleeting world, what promise steadies us?

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper turns to Hebrews 12 18 to 29 calling us to anchor our lives

in the promise of God's unshakable kingdom.

This sermon was originally delivered at Bevilleham Baptist Church on September 7, 1997.

Father, you are very great.

This is a passage that takes the breath away when one begins to grasp its reality.

The contrasts in it are profound.

The height and the depth of it is great, and the time I have to work on it is very small.

And I pray that you therefore will winnow this sermon so that the chaff is driven away and the nourishing grain will remain and fall on good soil.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Last week, we looked at verses 12 to 17 that comes just before what I read here, and we noted that it's a series of exhortations or commandments like Be Strong in verse 12 and run a straight race in verse 13 and pursue peace and holiness in verse 14.

And don't be like Esau who sold his birthright for Bolus Serial in verses 16 and 17. And we saw that the relationship between those exhortations

and the preceding verses of 4 through 11 was that the preceding verses were all about God and

his loving discipline in our lives and were the basis of those exhortations.

And we saw that in the word, therefore, at the beginning of verse 12.

And we stressed that those exhortations are not ways of getting God to act a certain way, but they are descriptions

of the way you act when you trust that God is already acting a certain way on your behalf.

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