“People are starving for God” is the opening line in Piper’s classic and the theme. Preaching on the majesty of God is very practical to meet the needs of hurting people when they gladly submit to His greatness.
The Supremacy of God in Preaching is divided into two parts. Part 1 is entitled “Why God Should be Supreme in Preaching.” This section is appropriately trinitarian: Chapter one is “The Goal of Preaching: The Glory of God,” the second chapter is “The Ground of Preaching: The Cross of Christ,” chapter three is ”The Gift of Preaching: The Power of the Holy Spirit,” and chapter four is the “Gravity and Gladness of Preaching.”
In Part 2, Piper fleshes out these truths with the life, theology and preaching of Jonathan Edwards.
In chapter one Piper states that his “burden is to plead for the supremacy of God in preaching—that the dominant note of preaching be the freedom of God’s sovereign grace, the unifying theme be the zeal that God has for his own glory, the grand object of preaching be the infinite and inexhaustible being of God, and the prevasive atmosphere of preaching be the holiness of God.”
This kind of God centered preaching is practical. “Then when preaching takes up the ordinary things of life—family, job, leisure, frendships; or the crises of our day—AIDS, divorce, addictions, depression, abuses, poverty, hunger, and worst of all, unreached peoples of the world, these matters are not only taken up. They are taken all the way up into God.”
Preaching the supremacy of God not only glorifies God but meets a person’s greatest need of being satisfied in life. Piper concludes chapter one with this thought: “The wonder of the gospel and the most freeing discovery this sinner has ever made is that God’s deepest commitment to be glorified and my deepest longing to be satisfied are not in conflict, but in fact find simultaneous consummatioin in his display of and my delight in the glory of God. Therefore the goal of preaching is the glory of God reflected in the glad submission of the human heart. And the supremacy of God in preaching is secured by thes fact: The one who satisfies get the glory; the one who gives the pleasure is the treasure.”
