Here is a short excerpt from John Piper’s book, “Don’t Waste Your Life”, addressing how the distorted, Western perception of love has disrupted the way we see God’s love and greatness.
In this excerpt, Piper argues that seeing God’s love rightly enables us to embrace a right view of ourselves, know God’s true intentions towards us, and thereby be empowered to love others rightly, truly, and missionally. It’s awesome, check it out:
“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 helping 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 affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God—and 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 themselves 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.”
I love the last sentence. But we must know that Piper’s analogy was not at all exaggerated, but rather, greatly understated. It is an incredible opportunity to soak in the uncontested beauty of the Alps. But this creation is only a dim reflection of the greatness of the hand who made it. Indeed, the creation only serves to merely represent the Creator. Living in light of who God is now and seeing Him face-to-face later is a reality much surpassing an experience before the Alps. In fact, the Alps will seem largely irrelevant and insignificant when measured to the enrapturing beauty and greatness of God–of who He is, defined by what He has done for us in the Gospel. To be locked in a room of mirrors when the beauty of the Alps is at hand would be a tragedy. How much more so with God, the Creator of these mountains.
I have heard it said that the most satisfying moments in life are those that are self-forgetful–when we simply lose all bearings of ourself and its needs, and instead, all our focuses and emotions are captivated by a beauty much independent from ourselves–one that’s much larger and enthralling. Those experiences change us. They give us a taste for what truly matters most, and leave us wanting to live for it–because by living for it, we re-taste the joy of when it was first beheld, and it gets sweeter all the more.
To love people is to give them what is best for them. It is not to tolerate, condone, or promote their opinions and positions by deeming them as relatively important for the individual. No, rather, it is to lovingly show them the greatest treasure in all reality. And if we refrain from sharing this truth to people, we will be robbing them of the greatest opportunity in life. In fact, we would not be loving them (indeed, hating them) if we ignored or neglected to tell them about the most eternally-weighty, life-death, joy-pain situation of our fate, which is hinged on the beauty of the Gospel and God. It changes everything, and we must be bold—loving and gracious—with passion for the utmost joys of all people, which is beholding the greatness of God, and not the greatness of ourselves. One leads to the highest of life and joy, and the other is a fatal pursuit.
