God really loves his glory.

God has a burning zeal for his glory to be known and exalted and honored and loved and reverenced. God is radically God-centered. The heart that is

most serious and most passionate about the glory of God is God's heart. For years, I just assumed

God's glory was something I was supposed to care about.

And it didn't hit me until sometime later that God cares about his own glory more than I ever could.

I'm Dan Kruver.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper shows how God's own passion for his glory

changes the way we understand everything else. This message was originally delivered

at the Bethlehem Baptist Church Youth Retreat in the winter of 2004.

Let me begin tonight's session on God's passion for his glory with some autobiography.

A little bit of talk about my desire to be happy as a teenager and how God took some very unusual steps to drive it deep.

And then secondly, my reverence for the glory of God as a teenager and how God took some unusual steps to make that intense. When I was your age, let's just say, let's start at 14, I had a very severe case of acne, pimples, zits.

None of you come close.

In fact, it's amazing to me how few teenagers have what I had.

None of you come close.

And it had a pretty significant effect on me.

It was so bad that my mother and father sent me to a dermatologist, that's a skin doctor.

He would burn my face with a lamp, he would rub dry ice all over it and sizzle it,

and then he would go poking at it with his little fine needles,

and it hurt so bad, tears would run down my face

and then he would send me out to my car to drive home in front of human beings and I looked

like a truck had hit me. I mean it was bad enough to have the problem. It was to have been treated

...