Kennystix's podcast
When I Don’t Desire God (Part 2)
There's another relationship between God's self-exaltation, doing everything for His glory, and our delighting in it. And the connection is that when we delight in it, we magnify. This is the closest thing to the heart of the foundation of what I'm saying, that God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him, or to put another way, you glorify what you enjoy, you glorify what you enjoy. If you really love something and delight in it, and talk about it, because it gives you such pleasure, you make much of it, you exalt it. When God is our deepest pleasure, we display Him as our highest treasure, which is why the pursuit of joy is not optional, because the pursuit of God's glory is not optional. The fight for joy is not peripheral, because God's pursuit of His glory is not peripheral. As close to the heart of the universe is God's doing everything for His glory, so close to the heart of Christianity is you're doing everything for joy in God. Because what you take joy in is magnified. It's not just the things you decide. It's the things you love, want, crave, have joy in that you magnify, and God made you to magnify Him, and therefore it cannot be optional or peripheral or non-essential that you say it really doesn't matter that I delight in God. I have decided for God, or I am committed to God, or whatever kind of willpower resolutions you want to make while your heart is in love with pornography, or money, or family, or food. So it's just this level of I decided, I prayed a prayer, I have a commitment, and I see with worldliness, I won't do it. He gets no glory from that. Food gets glory from that, pornography gets glory from that, family gets glory from that, whatever you treasure with your emotions gets glory from the intensity of those emotions. I wish I could go into why, but that's all in that foundational material. Let me just draw out this implication. If it's true that God is most glorified in me, when I'm most satisfied in Him, if that's true, then the fight, the fight to be happy in God is the most important thing in your life. How did Jesus describe conversion? The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field which a man found and covered up, and then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. I read that text for years without seeing the phrase in his joy, and every sermon I ever heard on it was, you can have the kingdom, sell what you got, take the kingdom. It was all kind of in terms of decision, resolve, commitment, and that little phrase. In his joy, take my car, take my computer, take my wedding ring, take it, I get the treasure, and I can buy it all back someday. In heaven, one hundred fold on this earth, and in heaven forever. Jesus got really bent out of shape when Peter said, "Oh Lord, we've left everything and followed you, what do you mean? You've left everything and followed me, like what am I? You've left everything and followed me." He said, "Peter, nobody has left mother or father, sister, brother, houses, lands for my sake, who won't get back in this age a hundred fold, and in the age to come, eternal life. Get off yourself, pity kick." How do you live in persecution and suffering and hardship? The reason I asked this question is because I think when life becomes tremendously hard right up to the brink of death with disease, or accident, or war, or persecution, your reality shows. And how did Jesus instruct us to be real in that moment? How did Jesus instruct us to endure that moment? And I'll read you, the first text I gave you was Matthew 1344 about the Kingdom. This is Matthew 511, "Blessed are you and others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account? Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven." So how do you handle suffering? You look through it beyond it to what God has promised you, is working in and for you and you rejoice in it, even though tears dream down your face in pain. Why did Jesus teach us so many things about himself and his father? Here's why, John 1511, "These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full." Have you ever thought that the four gospels are written for your joy? These things I have spoken to you that my joy, I'll tell you, if there's anybody's joy in the universe I would want to have someday, it would be the joy of the omnipotently emotional son of God, who sees his father and responds like 10,000 sites of the supernova or the Grand Canyon. I would like it very much if the energy and the purity and the delight of the son of God could become mine and he said, "I have spoken these things to you that my joy may be in you and your joy may be explosively full, partly in this life." Oh, I'm no perfectionist, believe me, partly in this life but someday and very soon, sooner than you think in the age to come. And so there are commands everywhere. I'm just underlining how essential the fight for joy is. There are commands everywhere, make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth, serve the Lord with gladness. I just sometimes, I just get so amazed. People will say, "I don't think you should be talking about pursuit of joy. I think you should be talking about serving Jesus and obeying Jesus." This joy stuff is just, what Bible do you read? Serve the Lord with gladness, serve the Lord with gladness. This is not rocket science. This is clear, serve the Lord with gladness. There is a kind of service he doesn't like, murmuring service, board service, glum service. Serve the Lord with gladness. This is biblical. Are we biblical people or just get our truths from our emotions or non-emotions? Psalm 32, 11, "Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, shout for joy, all you upright in heart." Psalm 37, 4, "Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart." That's a command, not a suggestion. If you don't want to delight in me, that's okay. Go ahead with your house or whatever. It's not an option. It's a command. Philippians 4, 4, "Rejoice in the Lord always," and again, I will say, "Rejoice," and he was writing from prison. I want to underline and make sure I underline that you hear me say, "Paul," when he writes like that, "Rejoice in the Lord always," and again, I say, "Rejoice." This man knew more suffering than all of you combined probably. You read the list. I'll read you one of the list, 2nd Corinthians 6, "As servants of God, we commend ourselves in every way by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings. If you were beaten for Jesus, I would like to know who you are. Come up here and tell me, I was beaten for Jesus, and I will bow down and give thanks for you and your faith. Beatings, calamities, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger, through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as imposters, and we're true. We're treated as unknown and yet well known. We're treated as dying, and behold, we live as punished and yet not killed." And here's the key phrase for me. As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? If that weren't in the Bible, I couldn't come to this conference. After that list, and that's the short list, the long ones in chapter 11, that's the short list of his pain, he said, "Sorrowful, but always rejoicing." I say to the guys over and over again, "Desiring God," and I say to the staff at Bethlehem Baptist Church, "Among the several ways that we can describe the ethos of this ministry and this church, let this be near the top, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." I want you to be able to taste that. I want suffering people to come into this conference and come into our church and come into the door, "Desiring God Ministries," and feel like these are not chipper people who've never tasted the dark night of the soul, never tasted the loss of a loved one, never tasted the pain of a wayward child. These people are so naive about reality, they just jabber about joy. I don't want that. The opposite of joy is not suffering. It's despair in suffering. I knew the end of chapter 1 in the book when I don't desire God, which this conference is built on. I have a section entitled this, "The Aim," meaning the aim of the book, and I would say the aim of this conference, "The aim is not to soften cushions but sustain sacrifice." The reason I care so deeply about your joy in God is first, as I've said, because God is glorified by what you enjoy, and secondly, it is that joy alone which will liberate you and free you to become a person for others, a person of love. The fight for joy is not a fight to be comfortable or have security or be prosperous or any other of the American ideals that are advertised to us every day. It is a fight to join Jesus on the Calvary Road, and now some of you know the text I'm about to quote, "It's a fight to join Jesus on the Calvary Road." The fight to be happy in God is a fight to join Jesus on the Calvary Road, Hebrews 12-2. Looking to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him stayed on the Calvary Road and endured the cross, despising the shame. That's the road I want you on when we're done. It's not a chipper road, it's not a rah, rah road, it's not a praise God anyhow road. It's a road of suffering, it's a road of tears, it's a road of empathy with all the dying people that you're aware of, and the people whose marriages are in trouble, the people whose kids are on drugs, it's the people you know that are broken in your vicinity, and your joy is going to become a high pressure zone that begins to make wind when it bumps up against low pressure zones of need and that wind is called love. Because you're moving, your joy is moving out and spilling over, I have so much in Jesus. No, I mean I have a lot of stuff, but oh I'm brimming with what really counts in life, and I'm going to use my stuff and my time and my energy to make your day for Jesus. I want to serve you for Jesus, that's the goal, horizontally, and oh how that will glorify God because Jesus says it does. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works. This is the spillover of joy in God, according to 2 Corinthians 8-2. They overflowed in liberality because they were full of joy in grace. So joy produces that kind of risk-taking love, and it is worth the fight. So here's where we are now, we just finished foundations, 45 minutes worth of foundations out of these sessions, and I'm going to build now on that. And where we're going is that for years and years after I wrote Desiring God 1986, and I've spoken on it hundreds of times I suppose, arguing for the things I just spent 45 minutes arguing here, and writing about them in every way I could write about, and preach as many ways I could preach, the most common question that came back to me when I was done, like if I were to just stop right now, one of the most common questions would be people coming up, often with cheers saying, "I think you're probably right, and I'm not there. I'm not there." I don't delight in God like that. I don't feel like He's a grand canyon that I stand beside in the morning. I don't feel like He's a supernova that causes me to explode with joy. I just got to get up in the morning and go to work. I hardly even know what you're talking about. My experience of God isn't anything like you're talking about. That was the most common for 20-plus years. That was the most common response. It wasn't a theological issue like, "Oh, you believe this, or you believe that, and I don't." That wasn't the problem. That sounds sort of biblical, and I feel scared that I may not even be a Christian. You know what? I don't think that's a bad response at all. Back in the Puritan days, back when pastors preached the Bible and people trembled, people were concerned about their assurance a lot. The Puritan pastors had to get really serious about getting them into the Bible, praying down the Holy Spirit and trying to help people gain some Holy Spirit-given affection for God. That would be the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit that I'm a child of God instead of just, "I signed a card. I prayed a prayer." It must be. It's a logical deduction, which is the way most people are taught to get assurance today. I prayed. I signed the card. The Bible says, "If I do this and this, then I got the Holy Spirit. So I must have the Holy Spirit. I have no experience of the Holy Spirit. I don't have any changed affections. God is not precious to me. He's not a treasure, but I did those things. So the inference is, that's not Christianity. And so when I said these things for all these years, there was this trembling, this concern and this simple question of, "How do you fight for joy? What if I don't desire God? What if I don't desire God?" And so I kept notes and I thought and prayed for years and years, and then finally last year, I put this together and now I would like to just do a few conferences like this to help people. I'm not eager to make anybody feel miserable. I would like you to work through the misery of questioning to rock solid assurance, because you should have assurance. The Bible talks about assurance. So I want to clarify now, in the minutes we have left here, I've got four clarifications of the fight for joy. Those statements that what I do mean what I don't mean by the fight for joy, and then we'll plow into how you do the fighting in real nitty gritty practical ways. So we'll start the clarifications here and we'll pick them up in the next hour. So let's see how many we can do here. The first one is this, the fight for joy is a fight for joy in God, not a fight for joy in general. I know some of you are going to walk out of this room and say I said things I didn't say, because you don't like what I'm saying, and when you don't like what somebody says you distort what they say. But I'm trying to make this clear. The pursuit of joy that I am commending, the fight for joy is a fight for joy in God, not in general. Let's see any old place. This subjective experience of joy means nothing to me unless it is riveted in an object outside of me. Has reality outside of me? I don't create it. It's just there. I must deal with it. And it's the glory of God. C.S. Lewis, wow, has he been helpful to me on this? I don't know if you've ever read C.S. Lewis's autobiography, "Surprise by Joy." Sounds like some of you have. I commend it. It's a little bit weighty, not everybody struggles with what he struggled, but I did. And therefore, when you read a book that carries you where you are going, it works, helps. And let me read you his struggle and his main discovery. That book is mainly about this point in my message, namely that the pursuit of joy, which everybody has, should be not a pursuit of the experience but of God and joy in God. So here's what he said. I perceived, and this was the wonder of wonders, that I had been equally wrong in supposing that I desired joy itself. Joy itself considered simply as an event in my own mind turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which joy was the desiring. And that object quite clearly was no state of my own mind or body at all. I asked if joy itself was what I wanted, and labeling it aesthetic experience had pretended I could answer yes. But that answer, too, had broken down inexorably joy proclaimed, "You want I myself am your want of something other, outside, not you, nor any state of you," period, close quote. The fight for joy, clarification number one, is a fight for joy in God, so crucial, so crucial. Why then? Somebody should ask me, why then do you insist over and over again in everything you write that we should pursue joy in God? Why don't you just say pursue God? And there are three reasons. Number one, it isn't my idea to talk like this, it's God's idea. Deuteronomy 2847 is one of the scariest warnings in the Bible. Goes like this, "Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, you will serve your enemies." God is so bent on having people pursue joy in Him that if they try to serve Him without that joy, they will serve their enemies. That's how blood earnest God gets in this issue of pursuing joy. So it's not me who made up all the commandments, delight yourself in the Lord, rejoice in the Lord. That's Bible talk, not my talk. That response, God is glorified by our experience of Him joyfully, not merely by the way we think about Him. The devil has had more theologically accurate thoughts about God in the last 24 hours than you will have in a lifetime. You believe that, I do, I think He's brilliant and He knows God inside out and hates what He knows. Satan's problem is not doctrine, it's delight. Therefore getting our heads straight won't save us and it won't glorify God by itself. And I hope you know I'm really big on doctrine. But I'm at this point saying the reason I push joy in God is because all the right thinking about God in the world is not as good as Satan's thinking about God. He just hates it. And the third response is people don't awaken to how desperate their condition is before God usually I think until they begin to measure their hearts by the demand for joy in God. A lot of preaching of the law, and I think that's a good thing, deals with the law just at a due level, a deed level, don't commit adultery, don't lie, don't steal, and doesn't probe the depths of command number 10, which is the root of all the others. Thou shalt not desire things in ways you shouldn't come in. There is the root problem in the law, and so when we preach not enough people, probe people's consciences and hearts as to what do you delight in? What are you going to watch on television when you go home tonight? What is your default activity when there's no pressure on you? What is your heart reflexively drawn to? Those are the things that damn us, isn't adultery, I mean good grief, it does not take a lot of willpower to stay out of bed with another woman. But not to have a desire to look at a picture, desire, that's damning. To know that my heart has to change, my whole structure of motivation has to change, my whole priority of treasuring things in the world has to change. I'm damned, there's nothing I can do, I feel totally devastated by this indictment. That's a third reason why I think we should not just say pursue God, because you know what people will do with the word, pursue God, pursue God, pursue God. They'll just fill in all the verbs they feel comfortable with. I'll read about him, I'll talk about him, I'll do some things for him. But you touch my heart, because I'm in love with money, and I'm in love with the praise of man. So don't connect, pursue God with, pursue joy in God, because that will get me in trouble. So those are my three reasons for why, even though I totally agree with C.S. Lewis, we are after God in a certain way, not to indict him, not to ignore him, not merely to say right things about him, we're after God to enjoy him. And if we don't, we don't honor him. It's a huge, huge issue. You might, my goal is God and happiness in all that he is for me. Now I'm going to stop here, let me tell you where we're going next. The second, the first clarification of this was the pursuit or the fight for joy is a fight for joy in God, not just the experience in general. The second clarification is, Piper, why must we fight if joy is a gift? Fight and spontaneity, and if joy isn't spontaneous, it's not joy. You don't decide to be happy in the next five seconds. You can decide to pursue happiness by doing things that make you happy, but your emotions are not like your little finger. You can take your little finger and, under almost any emotional circumstances, say, go down, go up, go down, go up, go down, isn't that remarkable? Go down, go up. You can do that. You can't do that with happiness. So happiness is something that just comes and is spontaneous, and the Bible in Galatians 5.22 says, "It's a fruit of the Holy Spirit," then what this fight language? That's the second clarification that we will take up next time. Let's pray. Father in heaven, please take these words and our time in worship and apply them by your spirit to the hearts of your people. Awaken, fresh longings to know you, longings to see you, longings to rest in you and be satisfied in you and be content in you and delight in you and treasure you above all things. I'm asking for a miracle, Lord, so please come and perform it. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.
John Piper | If it’s true that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, then the fight to be happy in God is the most important thing in life.