Money, Sex, Power

Living in the Light

• All of creation was meant to communicate the supreme beauty and worth of God.
• God created the world for His glory. He created the world so that He would be magnified by the way His creatures find their greatest satisfaction in Him.
• Money, sex, and power exist ultimately to show that God is more to be desired than money, sex, and power.
• Everything hangs on what we value as supreme. What is our highest treasure? What is our greatest satisfaction? When God takes that place in our hearts (of the greatest treasure and satisfaction); then money, sex and power begin to find their true and beautiful order. 

Definitions and Foundations

• Money: not just paper and coins but the pleasures, advantages or status that money can signify.
• Money, sex and power are gifts from God. If they sink us, it's not because they are bad. It's because something happened inside of us to turn instruments of grace into instruments of sin, into altars and incense in the temple of pride.

Notes from John Piper's book: Living in the Light: Money, Sex and Power.

Waiting and Dating-Part 1

• Habits and attitudes established during the dating years generally carry over into marriage.

Principles of Dating Readiness

1. You are not ready to date until you are fully aware of both the benefits and the dangers of dating. Human beings interact with each other in the spiritual, soulical and physical dimensions. Healthy relationships should always begin at the spiritual and intellectual levels - the levels of purpose, motivation, interests, dreams and personality. The physical dimension is the least important.
2. A good understanding of God's standards for relationships. This requires a certain degree of spiritual maturity.
• There are only 2 choices: either you will follow God's standards by deliberate choice, or you will follow the world's standards by default. Unless you plan ahead to keep yourself pure on a date, you probably won't.
• Dating is no place for trial and error.
3. Resolve in your spirit that you will not lower or compromise God's standards for any reason, even if it means losing dates. Standing firm on what you believe is a sign of both spiritual and emotional maturity. There are no second-class areas of life to God. He is after your best. He wants you to obey Him, follow His Word, and stand firmly on His standards. Anything less and you cannot expect to receive His best.
4. YOU ARE READY TO DATE WHEN YOU DON'T NEED TO
• If you feel that you need a date in order to be complete or fulfilled personally, you are not ready for dating. Need involves demand and implies that there is something lacking in life. As long as you perceive lack or incompleteness within yourself, every relationship you enter will be, to one degree or another, an effort to supply that lack or bring a sense of completeness.
• You are ready to date only to the extent that you feel whole and complete within yourself, apart from any other person (except God). When you regard dating as a matter of choice rather than necessity, you are ready.
• Before Eve came along, Adam was alone, but he was not lonely. Loneliness is a spiritual disease. Adam was alone because he was the only one of his kind, but he was completely fulfilled as a person. In tending the garden he had meaningful work to do. In his authority over the living creatures, he was exercising his God-given dominion over the created order. He enjoyed full and open fellowship with his Creator.
• The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose. You are ready to date when you have first learned how to be single.