John Piper is back joining us again outside the studio and over the telephone and today

we have a really great question from a listener named David in Nashville, Hello Pastor John.

You've said that steeping yourself in and meditating on God's promises is one of the

primary ways we can experience abiding joy in Him.

So what are some of God's promises in the Bible that you have treasured most throughout

your life and why?

Let me answer this in three stages that more or less correspond to three stages of my

life.

Although they really do overlap as I guess the first one lasts my whole life and the

second one lasts my whole life and the third one so they kind of overlap but they have

different starting places.

My memory of my childhood isn't good enough to recall which verses were most, which

promises were most special to me in my teenage years or early earlier.

I look in the Bible that my parents gave me when I was 15 and I see heavily underlined

in red pencil certain passages so I know God was speaking to me as a teenager and helping

me by His word but my memory is just not good enough to remember that experience.

But in my early 20s one verse took on monumental proportions and nothing has dislodged it from

its primary place to this very day in my fight against sin, encouragement of my heart, carrying

through challenges in industry and that is Isaiah 41 verse 10, fear not for I, this is God

talking.

I am with you.

Be not dismayed for I am your God.

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