When I say you should call yourself upright or righteous, I mean in that context, a justified sinner who is walking by faith.

That's the general direction of your life.

You trust the promises of God, and you follow him in faith. That's the general direction of your life. You trust the promises of God and you follow

him in faith. Not sinlessness, but faithfulness. That's real important to me because otherwise

the promise of the Lord delights and the prayers of the upright wouldn't have allowed anybody in this room.

If you've ever hesitated to call yourself righteous, because you know how far you fall short, this one's for you.

I'm Dan Kroover. In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper reminds us that God delights in the prayers of those who walk by faith, not those who walk perfectly.

The seminar was originally delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on Wednesday evening, March 18, 1992.

When we meditate on the fact that something as good as a sacrifice to God can be an

abomination to God, which it says in our text, Proverbs 158, what do we learn about the kind of human acts that please God?

And what we learn is that you can never say by looking at an act in and of itself abstracted from where it's coming from and the tone and

inner dimensions of it, you can never look at that and say that is by its external form pleasing

to God. Because offering a sacrifice

is a good thing.

Was ordained by God in the Old Testament.

So here's a man offering a sacrifice

and God's looking at it and saying

that's abominable.

That act of obedience

is an abomination to me and so what that little phrase the sacrifice of the

wicked is an abomination to god says to me is that the wickedness consists not in the act

but the root of the act and so what we learn about the acts that please God is that they are acts that are not just

...