Sermon of the WeekHow God's Word Produces Our Work

Here is John Piper preaching in 2006 around the time of his prostate cancer diagnosis. He uses an eschatological passage and the example of personal experience to show how God's Word works in and through us to produce God honoring lives through faith.

This seems an appropriate sermon to publish after my recent meditations on the "rest of God" and on entering into it. I already mentioned how this is not such a rest as to RESULT in inactivity - nor even such a rest as COMES from inactivity; it is, rather a rest arrived at through striving to remove all the obstacles to knowing God and abiding in Him and His promises. It is through the gifted faith that we have that produces the fruit which is evidence both to us and to others of the reality of our belonging to God. Listen to this and I don't think you'll find Piper and I are too far apart.

How God's Word Produces Our Work - John Piper

His text:

1Cor 15:51-58 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
55 “O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58 Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.