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John Piper opens the portrait of Jesus from Scripture—his excellence, beauty & complexity. A compelling invitation to see & enjoy Christ above all else
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You have never met him in person.
You do not know anyone who has — at least, not in the ordinary way one person meets another, face to face, across a table or a room. The man who walked the roads of first-century Galilee, who calmed storms and healed the blind and wept at a graveside and was crucified outside Jerusalem — you have not met him in that way. And yet the claim of the Christian faith is that he can be known. Not from a distance. Not merely historically. But personally, savingly, transformingly — in a way that changes everything.
How?
John Piper's answer is the Bible. The portrait of Jesus that God has given us in his Word is not a pale, secondhand substitute for knowing him in person. It is the very means through which the living Christ makes himself known — with such clarity, such depth, such unique excellence and spiritual beauty, that the soul that truly sees him cannot help but respond the way it responds to sunlight and honey: not by arguing about it but by knowing, with an immediate and irreducible certainty, this is real.
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is an invitation to that kind of seeing — and to the savoring that inevitably follows when we see him truly.
One of the most striking things about the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels is how consistently he defies every attempt to contain him in a simple category or a manageable framework.
He is the one who baffled the proudest and most learned religious scholars of his day with his wisdom — and was understood and loved by children. The one who spoke with an authority that made soldiers say they had never heard anyone speak like this — and who remained silent before his accusers when silence was the most powerful thing he could say. The one who calmed a raging storm on the Sea of Galilee with a single word — and would not call down twelve legions of angels to get himself off the cross.
Every time you think you have a handle on Jesus — every time you have filed him into a category that makes sense — he does something that shatters the category and leaves you standing before a person who is genuinely unlike anyone else who has ever lived.
That complexity is not a problem to be managed. It is an invitation to look more carefully — to resist the temptation to reduce Jesus to the dimensions our minds find comfortable and to keep opening our eyes wider to the one who is, Piper argues, the most magnificent, the most beautiful, the most endlessly compelling person in the universe.
At the heart of Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is a conviction that Piper holds with deep personal intensity and communicates with genuine pastoral passion: the excellence and spiritual beauty of Jesus Christ have a self-authenticating quality.
You do not need a philosophical argument to know that light is light. You open your eyes and see. You do not need a chemical analysis to know that honey is sweet. You taste and know. And in the same way — when the portrait of Jesus in God's Word is truly seen, when the complexity and depth and beauty and excellence of who he is are genuinely encountered — the soul that is being drawn by the Spirit of God recognises, with an immediacy that goes beyond argument, that this is true.
This is what Piper means when he invites readers to look at the Jesus of the Bible with open eyes. Not merely to read about him or accumulate information about him, but to genuinely see him — to hold the portrait still long enough, to look carefully enough, to let the full complexity and beauty and excellence of the person revealed in Scripture actually land on the soul.
When that happens — when Jesus is truly seen rather than merely studied — savoring inevitably follows. Because no one who truly sees him can remain indifferent to him.
Across the chapters of Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, Piper opens up different dimensions of who Jesus is — drawing from the full canvas of Scripture to present a portrait that is simultaneously more intellectually compelling and more personally arresting than any simplified version of him can convey:
Jesus the Son of God — the eternal Word who was with God and was God before the foundation of the world, and who took on human flesh in an act of condescension so radical that eternity will not exhaust its wonder
Jesus the servant — who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many, who washed his disciples' feet on the night before his crucifixion, who made himself of no account for the sake of those he came to save
Jesus the teacher — whose words carried an authority unlike anything his hearers had encountered, whose parables opened up the kingdom of God in ways that were accessible to children and inexhaustible to scholars
Jesus the healer — who touched lepers, restored sight to the blind, raised the dead, and demonstrated in every miracle that the kingdom of God was breaking into a broken world with power that nothing could withstand
Jesus the suffering servant — who sweat drops of blood in Gethsemane, who was betrayed, mocked, beaten, and crucified, and who bore in his body the full weight of the sin and judgment that his people deserved
Jesus the risen Lord — who walked out of the tomb on the third day, appeared to his disciples, and ascended to the right hand of the Father where he reigns and intercedes and will return in glory
Each dimension of this portrait is developed with Piper's characteristic depth and devotional intensity — and each one is an invitation to keep looking, to see more clearly, and to find in what you see a beauty and an excellence that commands not just intellectual assent but genuine, personal, life-orienting love.
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is essential reading for:
John Piper is the founder of desiringGod.org, chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary, and one of the most widely read and deeply influential Christian authors of the past half century. He served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church for 33 years. His lifelong passion — that God is most glorified in his people when they are most satisfied in him — finds perhaps its purest expression in this book, which is fundamentally an invitation to find in Jesus Christ the most satisfying object of human contemplation and love that the universe contains.
Other John Piper titles available at forthetruth.in include:
Jesus said it himself: if anyone's will is to do God's will, they will know whether his teaching comes from God.
The promise is clear. The condition is honest and demanding — not intellectual achievement but moral orientation, a genuine willingness to do what God asks rather than a mere desire to have questions answered. And the result, for those who come with that kind of openness, is a seeing that becomes a knowing that becomes a savouring.
Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is John Piper's invitation to come with that openness — to look at the Jesus of the Bible with genuinely open eyes, to hold the portrait long enough and carefully enough for its beauty and excellence to land, and to discover that what you find there is not just the answer to your questions but the satisfaction of your deepest longings.
See him. And you will savour him.
