Read this...

The following are the headings of Piper's thoughts (and David Powlison's) concerning Cancer. Read the article here.

"You will waste your cancer if:

1. You do not believe it is designed for you by God.
2. You believe it is a curse and not a gift.
3. You seek comfort from your odds rather than from God.
4. You refuse to think about death.
5. You think that “beating” cancer means staying alive rather than cherishing Christ.
6. You spend too much time reading about cancer and not enough time reading about God.
7. You let it drive you into solitude instead of deepen your relationships with manifest affection.
8. You grieve as those who have no hope.
9. You treat sin as casually as before.
10. You fail to use it as a means of witness to the truth and glory of Christ.

I have been pondering the glory of God recently. And how I don't think about it, or love it, or cherish it near enough. On the other side of the coin are the 'civilian affairs' talked about in 2Ti 2:4: "No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of [this] life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier."

From my experience, it is an uncommon thing in this culture for people who name themselves "Christians" to be so ravished by the glory of God. Do I itch for any sort of chance to proclaim His name, to honour it, or to tell other people that they should be?

I want to work on internalizing the glory of God in my thoughts, not simply in the meaningless, purely intellectual way, but in a way which consistently stirs the heart to action. Someday perhaps I will have the faith to declare that a personal experience of Cancer, or some other difficult struggle, is a blessing from God because it allows me to tell about how great he is. I want that.