hughbiquitous

Précis

Desires and delights differ in that delight enjoys a thing that is present, but desire looks forward to something to be realized in the future. Though painful because the object desired is absent, desires are yet pleasant in themselves: a token of the object desired has been tasted found satisfying, and remains anticipated in its fullness.

The pain of desire for God functions as an assurance; it is evidence that the One desired has been tasted. The ultimate satisfaction of this desire in the age to come functions in the present to fuel sacrificial love for others.

Ultimately, desire and delight are not the object of our pursuit, and we must guard against desiring and delighting indiscriminately: only desire and delight in God are righteous and satisfying.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 2:

• “When all the supports of human life and earthly happiness are taken away…” (see below, p. 25)—cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: “[Satan's cause] is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
• Piper cites the parable of the hidden treasure (”The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”, Matthew 13:44)—cf. modernparable.com.

Quotes

• It was when I was happiest that I longed most… The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing… to find the place where all the beauty came from. (p. 22, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again [with Joy], was itself again such a stabbing. (p. 22, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• When all the supports of human life and earthly happiness are taken away, God will be our delight, our joy. This experience is humanly impossible. No ordinary person can speak in truth like this. If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace. (p. 25)
• Conversion meant discovering that Jesus was a treasure of such surpassing worth that joy would enable a new disciple to leave everything and follow him. (p. 25)
• Desire is awakened by tastes of pleasure. The taste may be ever so small. But if there is no taste at all of the desirability of something, then there will be no desire for it. In other words, desire is a form of the very pleasure that is anticipated with the arrival of the thing desired. It is, you might say, the pleasure itself experienced in the form of anticipation. (p. 26)
• There is delight by memory and a delight by anticipation. (p. 27)
• I will not try to build a wall between desire and delight, or between longing and pleasure. Sometimes I will speak of desiring god and sometimes of delighting in God. Sometimes I will speak of the inconsolable longing for God and sometimes the pleasures at his right hand. The difference between desire for God and delight in God is important mainly to make clear that finite creatures like us, who have a spiritual taste for the glory of God, will always want more of God than we presently experience—even in eternity. (p. 27)
• We kick ourselves that our cravings for lesser things compete with God as the satisfaction of our souls. Rightly so. This is a godly grief. (p. 28)
• The strength of our desire is not the measure of the strength of the final pleasure. That truth can rescue us from despair and keep us fighting in this fallen world for all the joy possible in God. (p. 28)
• Our calling here is to fight for joy—ours and the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. The aim is that God’s worth—his infinite desirability—be known and prized and praised in all the world. This is what we mean by God being glorified. He is most glorified in and through his people when we are most satisfied in him. The intensity of our pleasure and our desire bear witness of his worth to the world, especially when we are freed by this (present and hoped for) pleasure to leave the pleasures of this world for a life of sacrifice and love for others. (p. 29)
• Desire and delight have this in common: Neither is the Object desired or delighted in. God is. (p. 29)
• I aim to pursue joy in God so that the infinitely valuable objective reality of the universe, God, will get all the glory possible from my life. (p. 29)
• “I want to be happy” may be Christian shorthand for “I want to know the One, and the only One, who is in himself all I have ever longed for in all my desires to be happy.” (p. 29)
• Inexorably Joy proclaimed, “You want—I myself am not your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.” (p. 30, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy. (p. 30, quoting Jeremy Taylor)
• God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed the devil thinks more true thoughts about God in one day than a saint does in a lifetime, and God is not honored by it. The problem with the devil is not his theology, but his desires. (pp. 30-31)
• Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions—they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God. (p. 31)

In 2003, I was awakened from a spiritual nap (or was it a coma?) by John Eldredge’s books: The Sacred Romance, The Journey of Desire, Wild at Heart, and Waking the Dead. Shortly thereafter, I read John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, and found much of the same “fire-in-the-belly” passion, but it was different: Piper was less sensational and more sober, less escapist and more entreating. Eldredge made me want to watch Braveheart; Piper made me want to follow Christ. No vicarious, spectator-sport catharsis riding on a fictionalized middle man for Piper; just real-life experience following the real Lord of Glory by taking up a real cross and really following him.

The difference between the two could be compared to the contrast between Tony Robbins at a personal growth conference and Winston Churchill addressing a nation at war. One psyches you up to take your life to the next level; the other readies you to die a great death in the service of something more significant than yourself.

I now recognize what it was in Eldredge that resonated so powerfully with me: the idea feebly expressed as “desire.” C. S. Lewis had a better word for it: Sehnsucht, a German word that defies precise translation into English, but which Lewis adequately described as an “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Don’t misunderstand Lewis’s ignorance there; he knew that God was the ultimate object of his longing, but God’s transcendence, his otherness, makes it impossible to specify with any sort of precision the nature of our longing for him.

While Eldredge pursued this desire in terms of risk—to the point of making God a risk-taker, à la open theism—Piper instead defines this desire in terms of certainty, with God himself being its source, its object, and its satisfaction, in all of his sovereign, unchanging glory. Both men place boredom and ennui in opposition to desire: one remedies it with the thrill of the unknown and uncertain; the other, with the thrill of the known but numinous.

Eldredge set up a false dichotomy with passion and desire on one side and doctrine on the other; Piper shows that the two sides are not in conflict with one another, but are, in fact, in perfect harmony. When we desire God (there’s the desire) for who he is (there’s the doctrine), we enjoy the greatest win-win available to men: giving glory to God while finding satisfaction for our souls.

Eldredge’s desire, therefore, is too small. It is too attainable; the one who decries the “less-wild lovers” has, himself, settled for less. By contrast, Piper’s desire cannot be wrought by human doing. Perhaps it is better described in terms of joy (as Lewis did) rather than desire: the object of Eldredge’s joy was somewhere in his own vicinity; Piper’s is found in the wholly other: God himself.

But the best indicator that Piper got it right and Eldredge got it wrong may be the fact that Piper’s call to joy provokes in his readers a sort of discouragement. Joy in God is so difficult and elusive, it moved Piper to write When I Don’t Desire God, a book affirming this difficulty and elusiveness and the need to fight for joy with dogged determination. You don’t see Eldredge describing his journey of desire as a “liberating and devastating” phenomenon the way Piper characterizes Christian Hedonism.

So I’m grateful for John Piper, but I’m also thankful for John Eldredge: thankful, that is, in the way a man is thankful for the providence of a common cold that sent him to the doctor but led to the early detection of his life-threatening cancer. God used Eldredge’s books in my life as a gateway to bigger and better desires; desires worthy of a sovereign, glorious, incomprehensible, and transcendent God; desires worthy of a bloody cross and an empty tomb. I hope God blesses John Eldredge with desires of this magnitude the way he did for me. I hope he does it for you, too.

Précis

Joy in God is a duty enjoined upon Christians. Easily neglected because of sin’s opposition to and corruption of holy joy, it elevates our standard of delight beyond reach: we depend on God for its initiation and satisfaction. This creates existential dissonance; joy in God is insatiable and elusive. Yet, it is an essential property of new life in Christ: desires, not just decisions, really matter. Thus, joy in God must be fought for.

This joy, once realized and mature, sustains the hard, unnatural work of the Christian life: sacrificial love.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 1:

• There is a false dichotomy that is often set up between head and heart, between doctrine and affections. God is sovereign over the whole of a man; there is nothing mutually exclusive about “head-joy” and “heart-joy.” “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Mt. 22:37)
• It is often observed that “love is a decision,” and it is. But if it is only a decision and is wholly removed from the affections, then something is wrong.
• Lewis said, “the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one” (see below); cf. Ps. 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Properly aligned desires glorify God and satisfy the desirer.
• This joy is not merely to promote our good spirits. It’s to get us through the hard things God calls us to do. It must become the most basic motivation we have.
• The greatest commandment was to love God with the whole person; the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. The first fuels the second; joy in God makes sacrificial love possible no matter what the circumstances are, no matter who the neighbor is.

Quotes

• Christian Hedonism is a liberating and devastating doctrine. (p. 11)
• Indwelling sin stands in the way of my full satisfaction in God. It opposes and perverts my pursuit of God. It opposes by making other things look more desirable than God. And it perverts by making me think I am pursuing joy in God when, in fact, I am in love with his gifts. (p. 14)
• [Upon discovering Christian Hedonism] Manageable, duty-defined, decision-oriented, willpower Christianity now seemed easy, and real Christianity had become impossible. (p. 14)
• God [has] to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God. (p. 14)
• The truth and beauty and worth of God shine best from the lives of saints who are so satisfied in God they can suffer in the cause of love without murmuring. (p. 15)
• Salvation is the awakening of a new taste for God, or it is nothing… Conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks. (pp. 15-16)
• If human happiness, whose perfection it is to be united with God, were hidden from man, he would in fact be bereft of the principal use of his understanding. Thus, also the chief activity of the soul is to aspire thither. Hence the more anyone endeavors to approach to God, the more he proves himself endowed with reason. (p. 16, quoting John Calvin)
• Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites… [Rather, they ought] to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures… Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value… [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement… There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting. (p. 17, quoting Jonathan Edwards)
• For there exists a delight that is not given to the wicked, but to those honoring Thee, O God, without desiring recompense, the joy of whom Thou art Thyself! And this is the blessed life, to rejoice towards Thee, for Thy sake. (p. 18, quoting Augustine)
• Provided the thing is in itself right, the more one likes it and the less one has to “try to be good,” the better. A perfect man would never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch, which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it’s idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits, etc.) can do the journey on their own! (p. 18, quoting C. S. Lewis)
• Spiritual desires and delights are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are not objects to be handled. They are events in the soul. They are experiences of the heart. (p. 19)
• Love is not a mere choice to move the body or the brain. Love is also an experience of the heart. So the stakes are very high. Christ is to be cherished, not just chosen. The alternative is to be cursed. Therefore life is serious. (p. 19)
• When I address the question, “What should I do if I don’t desire God?” I am addressing the question: “How can I obtain or recover a joy in Christ that is so deep and so strong that it will free me from bondage to Western comforts and security, and will impel me into sacrifices of mercy and missions, and will sustain me in the face of martyrdom?” (p. 20)
• The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death. (p. 21)

I’m eagerly anticipating the first whiff of autumn in the air. This summer has been long, hot, and taxing.

Back around Memorial Day, things were quite different. Since then, I’ve been promoted to a manager’s job, church has been a whirlwind of change, and huge chunks of my world remain unsettled as a result. In addition, there has been the general messiness and frailty of life in our fallen world… in the month of August alone I had to replace my Civic’s transmission, our stove, our landline phone (twice), and my Ryobi trimmer/edger.

I like stuff to “just work,” but it feels like nothing in my life has been “just working.”

Hopefully I’m not being naïvely optimistic when I say that the prospect of fall seems to offer a welcome dose of stability. As Thomas Wolfe said, “All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.” It’s not October yet, but bring it on…

One measure of the familiar is returning this week; namely, we’ll be restarting our second hour at church on Sunday. I’ll be returning to the teaching rotation along with Eric to teach Wayne Grudem’s Christian Beliefs — though I must add a quite-serious “Lord willing,” because teaching space is contingent on various facilities issues getting worked out. (Those facilities issues are one of the things that made the summer feel really long to me, and I’m at a long arm’s length from any sort of responsibility for that stuff. God bless the guys who keep the roof over our heads and the lights on!) In any event, I look forward to working with Eric again; I’m grateful for his friendship and his partnership in advancing the life of the Christian mind at Grace Fellowship and beyond.

Elsewhere, as Señor Bulldawgy has noted, there’s been precious little activity this summer from my blogging friends — my “band of bloggers,” you might say; it’s a few of us on the music team from church he’s talking about: John (keys), Kevin (guitars), and David (percussion) are among the five-star chefs of Grace Fellowship’s musical kitchen. Meanwhile, I’m the home-ec student in the corner playing bass. I love playing with those guys, even though I can’t smile and play at the same time.

But I digress… there has indeed been little in the blogosphere to enjoy. For my part, I posted exactly one entry in August, and it wasn’t much of one at that. I’ve begun to just not care that my Google Reader account has 100+ (and that’s a big “+”) unread items. Not long ago, a series of blog posts I read made me wonder whether technology is our servant or our master. I suppose the blog slowdown among my friends is a hopeful sign on that score.

Hopefully, the autumn will bring my circle of friends an abundance of time to think and write. In that hope, I offer two measures of authorial advice that Justin Taylor recounted last year.

• J. I. Packer on How to Become a Better Writer
• C. S. Lewis on How to Become a Better Writer

I’ll add one more of my own. I did something this weekend that I encourage you bloggers to do: browse your own blog archives. See how your passions and interests may have changed. See if you are struck by any posts that make you think “boy, that was lame” or “I want to write more like that.” It was a profitable exercise for me, I think, but time will tell…

So bring on the fall — lowercase “f” — and see you on the blogs!

If a person does not become what he understands, he does not really understand it.

— Søren Kierkegaard

At first this quote got me thinking about my understanding of the Gospel. Have I become what I have beheld in the Gospel of Christ? That’s a good question to be asking oneself. Sanctification cannot be mere intellectual assent. It must be the working out of a vital and vibrant faith—but this certainly includes the discipleship of our minds.

But then another thought hit me: what about the atheists, the naturalists, the materialists, the nihilists… have they become what they have understood?

I offer that they cannot. Their worldviews are incoherent and cannot be lived in. On those views, any notion of understanding is ruled out because it is immaterial: understanding is a supernatural phenomenon, so if you desire understanding, you must reject a merely naturalistic view of the world.

Rather than try to explain, I’ll let Professor Lewis do it (emphasis mine):

The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

— C. S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory