To Make Much of You...

For the next little while, I will probably be posting mad quotes from Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. It just deserves it.

"...[Many people] do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone's self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and hleping him like what he sees.
This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest afections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God - and in savoring him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themslves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors."

John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life, page 33