I listened to an excellent sermon this week from John Piper called “How the Supremacy of Christ Creates a Radical Christian Sacrifice.”  Piper’s words were gripping and challenging and I think a lot closer to real Christianity then most of what we normally hear.  It’s been on my mind all week and I’ve been praying that God would not let the message slip away but instead press it into my heart.  So timely was this quote I came accross today which touches on some of what I’m being challenged with:

When the prosperous man on a dark but starlit night drives comfortably in his carriage and has the lanterns lighted, aye, then he is safe, he fears no difficulty, he carries his light with him, and it is not dark close around him. But precisely because he has the lanterns lighted, and has a strong light close to him, precisely for this reason, he cannot see the stars. For his lights obscure the stars, which the poor peasant, driving without lights, can see gloriously in the dark but starry night. So those deceived ones live in the temporal existence: either, occupied with the necessities of life, they are too busy to avail themselves of the view, or in their prosperity and good days they have, as it were, lanterns lighted, and close about them everything is so satisfactory, so pleasant, so comfortable—but the view is lacking, the prospect, the view of the stars.

Søren Kierkegaard, The Gospel of Suffering, trans. David and Lillian Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1948), 123, cited in Vernard Eller, The Simple Life