hughbiquitous

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)

Précis

Only God can create joy in God; desiring God requires change at the core of a person that only God can give. God uses means to awaken this joy, but these means are neither identical to joy in God nor guaranteed to produce it through solely human effort; therefore, pray.

Quotes

• When all is said and done, only God can create joy in God… To be satisfied in the beauty of God does not come naturally to sinful people. By nature we get more pleasure from God’s gifts than from himself. (p. 9)