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.