Yes, he stoops to use us in our nothingness.

Yes, he makes something of us, but isn't the biblical orientation?

What a God! What a God! What grace!

Only God's grace can renew a God-centered life.

And that's John Piper's focus from 1 Corinthians 3, 5-9,

in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached 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?

I believe the root of the rotten tree and the unravelling 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

...