Kennystix's podcast
God Is the Gospel, Session 2
The following message is by pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. Let me pray. Whom have we in heaven but you, O Lord, and on earth there is nothing that we desire besides you, then in everything that we desire we would be desiring you. He loves thee too little, who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake. That's a mystery, Lord, how you can be everything to us. In all the people we love, in all the recreation we love, in all the food we love, in all the art and music that we love, in all the Bible that we love, we don't have to be idolaters. We dare not be idolaters. So would you work this miracle, Lord, of so permeating all of our loves with a delight in you and affection for you and a thanks to you and a treasuring of you so that you have no competitors in our life? That's the mystery and the miracle that we are after in these days. So I ask for it now. Make me an instrument to perform that miracle in people's hearts. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. What I mean by God is the gospel is that the highest, best, final, decisive, good that comes to us in the good news and which all the other elements of the good news are intended to lead to and without which all the other elements of the good news would not be good news is the revelation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ for your everlasting enjoyment. Everything is means except God. And so we're going to review and then move forward in our bullet points. I've got it down to 23. I started with 30. So in the two hours that we have remaining, I'm hopeful that we can do all 23. I think I'll tell you when we're moving from one to the other but I might slip up. So I hope it doesn't confuse you too bad. We got to number 10 and we started into number 11. We moved from our wedding, 38 almost years ago. We moved through Oscar coolman in a class in Germany. We moved through signs and wonder struggles and restlings in the 80s. We moved through Stanford University in an illuminating moment there in the early 80s. We moved through restlings with the meaning of prayer and how not to use it to make a cuckled out of God rather to make prayer a means of praying, hallowed be thy name in every prayer that we pray, that being the goal of it. We move through how do you use stuff and creation and all the good things that God has made in the world so as not to compete with Him and so on. And now we've come to this place where a few years ago, and I can't remember how many, I began to use this little rhyming cupplet. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him and that sums up most of what desiring God ministries in my life in Bethlehem Baptist Church are about. God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him. Where does that come from? I mean, it's an inference from a lot of things. Is there a text you can put underneath it and I would invite you to open your Bibles to Philippians chapter 1. We won't take long on this because I've done this in so many places that so many times that I don't want to be too repetitive in case you have seen it done so many times. But there are enough of you who are newer here to make it worth doing one more time here. Philippians chapter 1, I want to show you a text that you can put under that little rhyming cupplet. Philippians 1, 20, it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not at all be ashamed but that with full courage now, as always, Christ will be honored or you could use a word there, magnified, made much of, glorified, praised, that Greek word, megaluno, you can even hear it in English, what it means, megal, megaluno, made big, Christ will be made to seem as he really is big in my body whether by life or by death. So just stop there. Paul's passion is that his bodily life and death would make Jesus look good. Now ask yourself the question, how would you die in a way that would make Jesus look good, because he says death. How do you die in a way that makes Jesus look magnificent? And he answers in the next verse. He just split off, there's a life and death pair in verse 20 and a life and death pair in verse 21 and they parallel each other. So verse 20 ends in my body whether by life or by death and then he gives the explanation and ground in verse 21 for to me to live and that corresponds with life in verse 20 is Christ. We could talk about that. We could talk a half an hour about that by going over to chapter 3, verses 7 and 8 and 9, where he counts everything is lost for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ now, to live his Christ makes much of Christ. But let's just leave that aside and just talk about the death pair and to die is gay. So now let's go back and just do the death pair. It's my desire that Christ would be honored, made much of, magnified in my body, in dying for to die is gay. How is Christ made magnificent as you breathe your last breath to breathe it with the confidence and the manifestation of joy that this moment is gay? That's amazing because at that moment you're losing everything on earth. Health is gone, family is disappearing, the hope for retirement is not going to happen, the grandchildren you will never see. Gay. How can that be? Verse 23 gives the answer. I'm hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ. Why? For that is far better. The reason it's gained to die is because I get Jesus in complete. No more through a glass darkly, face to face, intimate, full, and that's gain. Though I lose everything I thought was pleasurable, no more sex, no more physical eating in this in-between time in heaven, no body, body's lying in the grave, just amazing intimacy and closeness and clarity with the greatest person in the universe, that's all. And he counts it gain. So Paul must think that when you are satisfied in Jesus, it magnifies Jesus. Isn't that the assumption here? Because he's arguing, I want to magnify Jesus in dying and the way I magnify Jesus in dying is to be satisfied in Jesus as I die. I don't need anything on earth anymore. It's all gone. Everything I live my life for is gone on earth and I get one thing in replace of everything. I get Jesus and when I weigh it, everything on earth versus Jesus, I say, gain. And at that moment, Jesus is magnified. And I just put that into a rhyming couplet, Jesus is most magnified in me when I am most satisfied in Him, especially at the moment of death or at any other moment of loss in your life. So that's bullet point number 11. The discovery that the best way to sum up God is the gospel or Christian hedonism or my life or the meaning of the universe is God is most glorified in his human creatures when they are most satisfied in him at the moments when every other satisfaction is being stripped away. Some of you will not live out the year. But I hope when the moment comes, you will remember this. The Holy Spirit will come and he will illumine your heart in such a way that Christ will be gained in the moment with tubes everywhere. Number 12 is simply a drawing out of how we talk about the greatness of the love of God and the greatness of the salvation of God. Consider two Psalm verses, Psalm 70 verse 4 goes like this. Say all those who love your salvation, say evermore...now what would you expect them to say? Let all those who love your salvation say evermore, you might expect them to say, "Great is your salvation." And that's not what the...what it says, it says, "Let those who love your salvation say evermore, 'Great is God.'" So learn to talk like this. Either that means a saving God saves in order that we might see the greatness of him in his saving. So saving is a display of his greatness or it means he is saving us from the inability of seeing him as great. Either way, he's the gospel. Salvation is not mainly about getting well from a disease. It's not mainly about prospering in your business, it's not mainly about a fixed up marriage, it's not mainly about escaping hell, it's not mainly about reunion with mom in heaven, it's mainly about seeing, savoring and saying, "God is great." That's what it says in Psalm 70 verse 4, here's another one, Psalm 63 verse 3, "Because your steadfast love is better than life," now that's a lot like Philippians 1-21. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise blank. And you might think that it would say, "Your steadfast love," because it says, "Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise your steadfast love." That's not what it says, nothing wrong with that, totally nothing wrong with that, it's just not what it says, it's teaching us something else, it's teaching us what this little conference is about, because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you, and either that means that in your steadfast love, I see a kind of person whom I love, and it isn't what he does, it's what he does is pointing to his character and his character thrills me. I praise him or it means that his steadfast love is the means by which he liberates me from my inability to see how worthy he is, either way he's the gospel. And his steadfast love is taking us there. So that's bullet point number 12, teaching us how to take this truth and see it in the Psalms and see it in the Bible where we maybe didn't know it was found. Now this brought me bullet point number 13 to ask the question, I've been doing this now for about five years, I've been doing it this way. I want to understand the nature of the love of God for me, because here I am going around the country and writing stuff, arguing that God in all that he does exalts himself for your enjoyment. And there are folks who don't like that picture of God. It feels like he's a megalomaniac. So I have asked myself, what is it to be loved? What does it mean biblically to be loved? And I think right at this point we hit our culture about as broadside as we can hit it, because what the culture means by being loved, at least at the surface level is the opposite of what the Bible means by being loved. So let me tell you what I think those two are and then take you to John chapter 11, so you can be turning there. Gospel of John chapter 11, this is the place where I have found in recent years the most illuminating support for what I'm about to say, John chapter 11. The world, I think, by and large, feels loved. Now when I say the world, I mean unregenerate human beings. They have not been born again. They are natural. They think without God at the center. Their affections have not been awakened. They are dead spiritually according to Ephesians 2, 5, and being dead spiritually, the spiritual things of God are foolishness to them, and they have no categories for handling much biblical truth, especially this one. So for the unregenerate American, or any other human being, to be loved is to be made much of. I feel really loved by you if you make much of me, praise me, thank me, applaud me, compliment me, build my ego, give me some, help me with my self-esteem. That would be the language of our last 40 years or so. I'm frankly quite sick of it, and I think a lot of secular people are sick of it also. I don't hear quite as much of it now as I did 15, 20 years ago. But it's still there, if you go to the bottom of school curricula, if you go to the bottom of how to manage an office, if you look at what the world has for wisdom, how to make things work in corporate situations, it's work on people's self-esteem. Stroke them, everybody likes it, and so it works, it works. That's what it means to be loved. Love people means to make them feel significant. Now, will you try to add that or use that as the means by which God loves us? It won't work. Biblical love from God to us keeps God at the center, not us. So here's my definition of the way God loves us. God loves us by doing everything He has to do at great cost to Himself, to remove every obstacle from inside of us and inside of Him, to bring us to the place where we enjoy Him which makes much of Him. Just like we saw in Philippians 1, 20 and 21, when you enjoy Him, you magnify Him. And God's way of loving you is to strip you, if He must, of every substitute satisfaction so that you can have the best one Himself. And if you remember, the voice of the Don Tretter, I can't remember which of the books it was in where Eustis had to be stripped of his skin. Remember that one? If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's okay. Being stripped of every vain satisfaction so that like a snake you have your skin ripped off is painful. But when it's done and you see God as the magnificent soul-satisfier that He is, you know I have been loved. If God were to come to you and play the world game of stoking your ego, stroking you, making you feel loved like you already know how to feel loved, He would be so cruel. He would be preserving the very obstacles that keep you from everlasting and full satisfaction namely in Him. You have to have your eyes open. These have to be gotten out of the way. God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the essential way to love. If you try to love like that, if I were to walk in here and say, "Okay, I came to love you folks." The way I love you is by displaying to you my greatness, my glory, my beauty, my all-satisfying perfections and so what I would really like is for you to see me who I am and be so caught up in me that you praise me everlastingly. You would say, "I'm sick, I'm evil and you would be absolutely right." And if God showed up here or Jesus, the Son of God showed up here, that's exactly what love would do. He has no other way that He can love you fully but to say, "I'm here and I am infinitely glorious. You were made to see me, savor me, speak of me, be with me forever." John chapter 11 goes like this, "Now a certain man," or in verse 1, "was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair whose brother Lazarus was ill." Which means this relationship is precious between Mary and Martha and Jesus and Lazarus. Verse 3, "So the sister sent to him saying, 'Lord, He whom you love.'" Now mark that word love because that's what I'm after here. What does love mean? "He whom you love is ill." And her thought of course is, "You're going to come fix this quick." But when Jesus heard it, He said, "This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God." Now mark that word because I want to know how love and glory relate to each other. That's what I'm after. It is for the glory of God so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. Verse 5, "Now Jesus loved," so there it is again. He cannot get away. That's what the text is about. It's about love. It's about glory. How do they relate? Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. And then I hope the version of the Bible that you have in your lap begins verse 6 with something like the word, "Therefore or so." If it says, "But," you'd need a new version. Because the word is "oon" in Greek, and everybody knows what "oon" means, first year Greek students, it means "therefore," translated in my version. So that's fine, so means "therefore" in English. So because He loves them, see that, get the connection, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Mary because He therefore, since He loved them, when He heard that Lazarus was ill, He stayed two days longer where He was. We saw a text from John last night that blew us away in John 7, where the brothers wanted Him to go do His works because they didn't believe in Him, and John's always doing things to break our brain. And here He says, "I love them. I love Martha. I love Mary. I love Lazarus." Lazarus is very sick and on the point of death, so I'm not going to go. So I'm not going to go. So I'm not going to go. Therefore I'm not going to go. Now how do you make sense of the "therefore" in verse 6? And the answer is verse 4. If this were a seminar, I'd have you, I'd have you take a test and say, "Explain from verse 4 the therefore," or verse 6, because verse 4 says, "This illness that I'm going to let kill Him, I'm staying here two days longer to make sure He's dead when I get there." That's what He's saying. This illness is for the glory of God. So that, the Son of God, that's me, the Son of God may be glorified through it. Now how would you paraphrase this? I would paraphrase it like this. To love is to do whatever you have to do, even at the cost of your brother's life, to reveal to you the glory of God. How is it? That's just what it says. It says, "What else can you do with it? I'm not going to go heal Him, I'm going to let Him die, so that you will see the glory of God, because I love you, I love you, I will not spare you one of the most horrible things in life. This poor guy has got to die twice. And you're going to be grieving for three or four days, weeping your eyes out. And I know all that. I'm causing all of that by not going now." Why? Verse 5 says, "Because I love you, because I love you, and a spared brother is not what love is about here. Love is about your seeing by glory." That's bullet point number 13, a textual foundation for this definition of being loved. Being loved is not being spared from dying. Being loved is not mainly being healed, mainly the marriage being fixed. Those can be acts of love. God does those things. Being loved is mainly God doing whatever He has to do, whether it's Lazarus death or His death, so that I will see, savor and be satisfied by the glory of Jesus. That's love. Any other act that leaves me short of that may feel like love to a million unregenerate people, and it isn't. Love is when God gets you to God. Bullet point number 14, I want to go back a couple hundred years, 250 or so, to my mentor. My main mentors are all dead. There are a few living ones. My dad is still alive, Dan Fuller is still alive, colleagues around me refine and sharpen my thinking, but most of my most influential mentors are dead. Most of them wrote this book, this is the Bible. A few of them after the Bible wrote things that were so profoundly shaping in my life, I will thank God through eternity for them, and the main one is Jonathan Edwards. Edwards had an effect on me, especially in his book, The End for Which God Created the World, and Religious Affections and Freedom of the Will, those three books were the main powerhouses in my life about 30 years ago. I want to quote what we've just seen from Edwards, some of it. I'll close probably this afternoon with Edwards just to pay tribute to his influence in me. So Edwards, here's the situation, Jonathan Edwards was a pastor in New England, born 1703, died 1758, and was the main human spark plug of the first great awakening. And so he saw phenomenal conversions and signs and wonders and terrible abuses of all of that. And therefore he struggled with sorting his way through the chaff and the wheat of what was real and what was not real in the great awakening. Anytime God does a great work, Satan really messes it up. And Edwards was so wise, unlike Charles Chauncey in Boston, in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the Boston clergy, who had their button up positions just right, could not take the wild enthusiasm that was spreading through the churches. They just said, "This cannot be of God, this is enthusiasm," which was a very bad word in those days. And Edwards applied one of the greatest minds in history to sort it out and not throw it away. And his analysis in religious affections of the human heart are devastating. There were no evening services in Munich from 1971 to 1974 when Noel and I and our little baby Karsten were in Munich, Germany, studying. There were no evening services on Sunday. So what I did on Sunday evenings was sit in a rocking chair when my wife wasn't using it with baby Karsten and read the religious affections. It took me a year because I could only handle a page or two at a time. It was an absolutely devastating experience to read Jonathan Edwards' analysis of my heart. So here's just a couple of paragraphs. This is "God is the Gospel," and this is page 137. I'll tell you what I'm getting to his words. Let me read just a sentence or two of my words. It's amazing that this same idolatry is sometimes even true when people thank God for sending Christ to die for them. There is a kind of thanks that is idolatrous. You can thank God in an unregenerate idolatrous way, Edward said. Perhaps you have heard people say how thankful we should be for the death of Christ because it shows how much value God puts upon us. In other words, they are thankful for the cross as an echo of our worth. What is the foundation of this gratitude? Jonathan Edwards calls it the "gratitude of hypocrites." Why? Here's the quote, "They first rejoice and are elevated with the fact that they are made much of by God. Then on that ground God seems in a sort lovely to them. They are pleased in the highest degree in hearing how much God and Christ make of them so that their joy is really a joy in themselves and not in God." That I fear is in many churches today. That sounds so up to date, I cannot believe it. Page 137, here's page 150. Jonathan Edwards, this is me again, learned this to his own heartache as he studied the permutations of hypocrisy in the fallout of the great awakening. Here's what he says, "This is the difference between the joy of the hypocrite and the joy of the true saint. The hypocrite rejoices in himself. Self is the first foundation of his joy. The true saint rejoices in God. True saints have their minds in the first place, inexpressibly pleased and delighted with the sweet ideas of the glorious and amiable nature of the things of God. This is the spring of all of their delights and the cream of all their pleasures, but the dependence of the affections of hypocrites is in a contrary order. They first rejoiced that they are made so much of by God, and then on that ground he seems in a sort lovely to them." There are many evangelistic church growth strategies today that are playing right into that hypocrisy. They simply take fallen people where they are, who love to be made much of, and they find ways of making God and the cross the means of affirming what they already are, so they don't have to be born again. For spiritual delights, we're telling them that the delights they already have with themselves at the bottom and themselves at the center is what God came to affirm. The cross is an affirmation of that. That's deadly, and I would urge you to kill it in your own heart, put it to death. Rather, what we offer to people is not a satisfaction of their own unregenerate desires to be at the bottom of their joy, but rather a call to recognize that's idolatry and that's suicidal, and by the way, we have something so much better. You can't even imagine it, it's so much better, and I will get this afternoon to some practical ways you can help people see that, even when they're not yet born again. We need to help people catch a glimpse of that. Bullet point number 14 was Jonathan Edwards. Number 15, now this came out at the question and answer time last night in such a helpful way to me. Set my mind just worrying with effort to re-understand and re-explain, so I stayed up late rethinking and writing this little bullet point number 15, and the brother who brought it up last night, I thank you because what helps me most in the kinds of questions that come is when somebody has thought as far as I have. They're with me. They've read what I've written and they've thought what I've thought, and they've got a new question that I haven't asked and I'm pushed, which is the only way to grow, right? If you only get asked questions you already know the answer to, then you don't grow. So every now and then you go out and you do one of these Q and A's and somebody stands up and pushes you, which is good. So here's the issue, you keep saying, Piper, that to be loved by God is not to be made much of by Him at bottom, but His making us able to enjoy making much of Him. That's what you keep saying, and that's exactly what I keep saying, and I still believe it after last night. However, clearly there are texts in the Bible where God makes much of us. Okay? So if you've been sitting here thinking, doesn't he know what's in the Bible? He keeps saying not that, but this and it's really, isn't it both or how does they fit together? So let me read you some of those texts. Where are they? There they are. Zephaniah 3 17, the Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. God rejoicing over us. Psalm 147 verse 11, the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear Him, in those who hope in His steadfast love. God takes pleasure in us, can I take your breath away and wonder how that fits with our being created to take pleasure in Him? 1 Peter 1, 6, and 7. In this salvation you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, which though perishable, is tested by fire, may redown, it is now, that your faith may redown unto praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. I do think that means praise toward us, glory toward us, honor toward us because of our faith. It's breathless that there will be praise not just towards God but towards sinners. 1 Corinthians 4-5, chapter 4 verse 5, "Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart, then each one will receive His commendation from God." Now the word "commentation" there, "epinon," is translated almost everywhere else, "praise." Each one will receive His praise from God. Well done, good and faithful, servant. One more, Romans 2-29. But a Jew is one inwardly and circumcision is a matter of the heart by the Spirit, not of the letter, His, that is, the true Jew whose heart is circumcised, His praise is not from man but from God. So there's a sampling, a sampling of text in which the Bible uses the most lavish language of God, rejoicing over us, praising us, commending us, thus making much of us. So the question then becomes what does that mean? How does He do that? And how does it fit together with everything I've said so far? Well I can think of two possible meanings, and the first is so obviously wrong, but I'll mention it anyway, just so we get it out of the way, it might mean that He takes pleasure in our physical body. That is part of who you are, you have a body. And so God looks at the intricacy of the eyeball and He says, "That's great! That's awesome!" He looks at the circulatory system and he says, "Magnificent!" Of course he's talking about his handiwork. He made the eyeball and he made it all work, and he could mean that. But I don't think he means that because those texts talked about persons doing certain things and having certain character, he means me as a person, not my body, he's not impressed with my body. He may be. The heavens are telling the glory of God, the human eyeball is telling the glory of God and anything that tells the glory of God, "Please, this God!" But that's not what he's talking about in these texts. He's talking about persons with personalities. So the question becomes, "How does He think, praise those personalities?" And they're not in the abstract, like, "I'm a person without any reference to what I feel or think or do." No, personality is always a given with some kind of feelings coming from it, some kind of deeds coming from it, some kind of thinking coming from it, when so God, when He sees us as a personality, uniquely you, He sees you as a thinking, feeling, doing, being, and therefore He has to decide whether He likes it or not or loves it or not. So when you ask, "Does He love me, me?" That personality, that's what was being asked sort of last night, "Does He love me, my personality?" To answer that question, you have to ask what you mean by love and they're two possible meanings, aren't they? One is agape kind of unconditional, pursuing your good kind of love. And the answer to that is yes, because He elected you unconditionally, He regenerated you unconditionally, you didn't have to do anything for those. He put Christ forward to die for you before you were born, so you didn't meet any conditions for that. And He exercises His sovereign keeping power on the basis rooted in that unconditional election, unconditionally, He's going to keep you, He will overcome every backsliding that you ever do and keep you for Himself. So yes, the personality that you are, God pursues for His glory and for your good, but that's not what most people mean when they say, "Does He love me?" Mostly, okay, okay, okay, they say, "I'm going to talk to a lot of people like this." They say, "Okay, I understand what you're saying, I was elected unconditionally, He's pursuing my good." I want to know, "He like me." This one or no, does He like me? Now that's the second kind of love. Love is used this way in the Bible and in your language. The first kind of love is, "I'm sticking up for this kid, whether he's good or bad. I'm moving on this kid, you have a kid, you're going after him." You might think he's an absolute jerk at this stage in his life, your own kid, and he's not doing anything to win your love. You're just doing it. It's free. I'm going after you. That's the first kind. The second kind of love is Edwards called it the love of complacence, the love of liking, approving, delighting, and that's what these texts are saying. Love does that, and the question is on what basis? What does He like about us? Because the Bible is very clear, sometimes He likes us more, and sometimes He likes us less. Otherwise, Paul wouldn't be able to talk about, "I do everything I do in order to please Him. I want to please Him, please, please." That means sometimes you're not pleasing Him, and sometimes you are pleasing Him. And my question is simply, "What's He pleased by?" And my answer is, "He's pleased by our being pleased by Him." He delights in our delighting in Him. He takes joy in us because of our taking joy in Him. That's the bottom line. Because if I try to find any other answer to the question why He likes me, it resolves into that. I have to push it to that. You might say, "He likes me because I'm good, or He likes me because I do right things." Well what does good mean? And what does right mean? And my answer is ultimately being a good person means doing everything you do out of delight in God. You have no sense of satisfaction in God, keeping God central in your life. So I have no problem affirming all of these texts that God rejoices over me. God commends me. God praises me, provided I ask the question why, and I answer it biblically, namely when He looks upon this servant. He sees one who has despaired of his own sinfulness, who has forfeited all of his merit with me. And he has cast himself on my mercy, and he is treasuring my love and myself. And I look at that and I say, "I like that, I like that a lot." The question last night that pushed a little farther was, "Is there anything else about us that he likes?" And my answer was, and is, everything you do with your mind in thinking, with your heart in feeling, and with your hands in doing and making, God may delight in, provided it's flowing from and expressing a satisfaction in Him. So the answer is yes, yes, if you're a writer, and you write a poem for your daughter on her birthday, if you're a carpenter and you get the angle exactly right, or you lay tile, like I'm a real stickler on grout, between tiles in bathrooms, like public bathrooms and motel bathrooms, and I'm looking at the tile over the tub, and you can just tell what kind of hotel you're in by, whether the guy went like that, or whether you've got this bead that is unbelievably uniform, that's skill, that's amazing, whereas some hotels just like they went, stuffed in the corner like this, and I say, "I could do that." That's why I do grout. God can look at a beautiful seamstress, hem, or a beautiful grout for a tile worker and love it, if it is coming from a heart that rests in Him, delights in Him, wants to display Him. It's all about Him, that He made the world with tile, He made the world with cloth and thread and needle for the display of His glory as we enjoy Him and all of His reflections in His world. So I'm not going to back away from the centrality of God in God's love for me. He loves me in that He does everything He does to remove obstacles to my enjoyment of Him. And He delights in me, praises me, commends me, says well done to me if and when my heart has broken free from the idolatry of needing to be at the bottom of my own joy and is willing to get out of the way that God become the bottom of my joy, and then out of that fountain of delight in God, do all the things that I do in my life. Then God will say well done, well done, that will be a reflection of His own worth. So that's bullet point number 15. And maybe before I leave it, I should ask the question why does God tell us that, tell us what I just said. Why does He tell us that He delights? What are we supposed to think? Now the only reason I mention this as we transition is because I have the fear that when some people read these texts that God delights in us, rejoices over us, commends us, praises us, that feels so good to them. Finally, I find a text that I like that their joy in God shifts onto joy in God's joy in them. And there's a very subtle difference here because the reason the joy is coming from God to them, the reason God is rejoicing in them is because they're enjoying God. If now they see this joy coming to them, which is supposed to affirm that and they replace that with this, in other words, I'm now no longer rejoicing in God as God. I'm rejoicing in how could I feel when He tells me He likes me. They're no longer doing what God likes and they've lost it. By making it an idol, it goes away. The reason God tells us in the Bible that He rejoices over us is to affirm us in what we are and our being that He likes, not to allure us away from that into liking His liking us. The reason you like being liked biblically is because the liking affirms your liking Him. You see how Edwards blew me away? I mean, you read enough of that day after day and you feel like your heart is just being peeled back like an onion. Is there any chord of this thing? Is there any place where there's no hypocrisy in John Piper? Is there any place where there's no sin? Is there any place where there's no self-exaltation? Peel away, peel away, peel away and the answer is no. I am completely selfish in a sinner until I'm bored again. And God puts His own seed in me out of which He becomes my joy and it really is my joy. What a deliverance new birth is. Bullet point number 16 is to observe this and I think I'll say this and then we'll take our break. What we've just said in defining love as God's doing whatever He has to do to maximize our satisfaction in Him answers the objection raised by this author named Michael Prouss in the London Financial Times several years ago. This is a photocopy. The reason it's so dark is because as you know perhaps the financial times is on yellow paper, faded newspaper. Ever seen it? It's faded. I don't know why they printed it that way. Here's what Michael Prouss says and he speaks for millions. Worship, he's not a believer. I don't even think of releasing God. Worship is an aspect, I wrote to him by the way, I'm not just, I got his email address, I wrote a long letter in response to this pleading with him, there's another way to see this. I never heard back so he could still pray for Michael Prouss. Worship is an aspect of religion that I always found difficult to understand. Suppose we postulate an omnipotent being who for reasons inscrutable to us decided to create something other than himself. Why should he expect us to worship him? He didn't ask to be created, our lives are often troubled and we know that human tyrants puffed up with pride, crave, adulation and homage, but a morally perfect God would surely have no character defects. So why are all these people on their knees every Sunday? His only way to understand what he's heard about God seeking worship, which is what John 4, 23 says, seeking worshipers, is that he's a megalomaniac. He's got character defects. He has no way to understand a God who is self-exalting any other category than we don't like people like that and that's true, we don't. So my point is everything we have seen up till now in this conference is I think a magnificent answer to that objection because what it says is Michael Prouss, the problem is you don't have an understanding of love that will work with God. The understanding of love is that God wants us all to be maximally happy. We cannot be maximally happy if we are at the bottom of our happiness, but only if God is at the bottom of our happiness. If that is what will make us happy to see and savor and display God, then God in order to love us must offer himself to us as the most beautiful, attractive, all satisfying being in the universe. He must do that for us, which means God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving thing and the highest virtue. Michael, you've got to get this, you've got to open your eyes to see that you can't put God in a human box and say we've got to relate to God the way we relate to everybody else and since everybody else would be a megalomaniac if they offered themselves to us for our satisfaction that God can't be that way. God must be that way or he can't be loving. I don't know whether that's what I wrote to him. I just pleaded, I said, you're so close, I feel the force of your argument. It would work. It would work if God were not really God and the all satisfying treasure of the universe offered to us at the expense of his own son for our everlasting enjoyment. Can you see this? Can you see this? Let me pray, we're going to take a break. Father, we've got one more hour together after this and so much more, so much more about Christ crucified, the main thing we haven't even talked about yet, at the center of how you did this for us. So take these minutes of refreshment and don't let our hearts go away from engagement with you but rather keep us feeling, thinking, ready to understand. Let's draw near now, I pray, and bless these moments of interaction and then come back and help us one more time, I pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God Online at www.desiringgod.org, there you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources, you can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Desiring our website is www.desiringgod.org or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God-2601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota-55-406. And God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
The greatest gift of the gospel isn’t what God gives to us but who he is to us. Only when we receive him as our highest treasure will we truly know the beauty of all Jesus Christ has accomplished.