Greetings and salutations. This is Kevin DeYoung, and you are listening to Life and Books and Everything.

This is a special summer episode, and it's me flying solo for what I think will be a little bit more

of an abbreviated time together. We are brought to, as always, by Crossway, grateful for their

partnership in sponsoring Life and Books and Everything, and want to come into you today.

The revised and updated version of John Piper's book, The Supremacy of God in Preaching,

which is being released soon by Crossway.

Definitely, and I'm eager to see the revised, expanded version,

but certainly the older version is definitely top five of my most best preaching books that I've read.

And so I'm really looking forward to this new one.

So do check out John Piper with a glowing blurb from Sinclair Ferguson calling it one of the few must-read books when it comes to

preaching. So I'd like us to think a bit, and as we are coming to the Fourth of July holiday here

in America, and I know we have people listening from outside of the United States.

And hopefully there may be something still beneficial as you listen to me, talk about a couple of

books and do some rumination on the meaning of America. That's what I want to talk about. The

meaning of America. It seems to me that to a large

degree, many of the most contentious debates in our society at the moment have to do with history.

And we may not know that we're debating history, but we are. They have to do with the story that we tell ourselves, the story that we tell our children, the story that we pass on in our schools. What is the story of America? And just to put it in very extreme terms, perhaps the received story for many many years was a story of great triumph moving from strength to strength and perhaps a few unfortunate blemishes here and there.

But we did away with slavery with the Civil War

and Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement did away with the remaining

oppression towards African Americans and there's some, the trail of tears and Native Americans is not a glowing mark.

But for the most part, a story of heroes, a story of virtue, a story of liberty, of freedom from tyranny,

and maybe depending upon your upbringing, even a great story of God's providence, maybe God's covenanted people, American

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