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)