Future Grace

I just started reading John Piper's book Future Grace. Actually, I'm not even done with the first introduction yet (it has two). I was just hit hard by a couple of paragraphs and wanted to share, so I've stopped reading at the moment.

The book has grown out of the conviction that behind most wrong living is wrong thinking. Jesus calls us, for example, to a radical purity. But I find that many Christians have no categories for thinking clearly about the commands and warnings and promises of Jesus. When he says that we should pluck out your lusting eye, he backs it up with a warning: "It is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell" (Matthew 5:29). Threats of going to hell because of lust are simply not the way contemporary Christians usually talk or think. This is not because such warnings aren't in the Bible, but because we don't know how to fit them together with other thoughts about grace and faith and eternal security. We nullify the force of Jesus' words because our conceptual framework is disfigured. Our Christian living is lamed by sub-Christian thinking about living.

I have found in twenty years of preaching and teaching and struggling with people who want to be authentic Christians, that the way they think about Christian living is often absorbed from the cultural air we breathe rather than learned from categories of Scripture. Not only that, some of the inherited categories of "Christian" thinking are so out of sync with the Bible that they work against the very obedience they are designed to promote.

Yes...this is a problem, and most likely the problem I have. I hope he's going to get to explaining about that threat of hell, because yes, I am confused about how it fits in. Not to mention freaked out because lust is a big problem for me. But mainly, I think his point is this: read your Bible, folks.