If enough people, if enough people over enough years of our life as a church, my little life of preaching,

and your life of ministering where you are, if enough people, wives and husbands and sons and daughters,

and sisters, and employees and employers, teachers and students would begin to shape their

lives around the all-pervasive reality of a glorious sovereign God, a garden of healing could grow up. A chain of misery could be broken for generations

to come. Can a fractured world be healed without a Godward vision? In this episode of

light and truth, John Piper turns to 1 Corinthians 3 verses 5 to 9 to call us beyond a man-centered worldview to the all-pervasive reality of God.

This sermon was originally delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on February 28, 1988.

What I have in mind is the effort to get to the root of the rotten tree.

The effort to find the hand that is unraveling the whole moral fabric of American culture, to go back up the

river of social life to the source of the pollution and find out why in the last generation

there has been a flood of drug addiction, pornography, boasted homosexuality,

alcoholism, depression, unfaithfulness, divorce, abuse, eating disorders, insecurity, bitterness,

power grabbing, greed. Why? Now, I believe the root of the rotten tree and the unraveling

hand and the source of the pollution is the disregard of God in all his biblical glory and grandeur and grace. It might be a hostile disregard, atheism,

Islam. It might be a condescending disregard, secular relativism. You can have your God, we have our Zen or our science.

It might be a naive form.

Bible-believing Christians who claim to know God and virtually absorb their values from television and not the Bible.

The absence of a radical God-centeredness in all of life is the root problem of our culture

and its collapse. And as I assess how to invest my little life most usefully to the glory of God and to the

eternal good of the greatest number of people, I ask who and what institution in our culture

is going to both care for the casualties and go behind the

casualties to the cause. And when I talk about the cause now, I have something far broader

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