hughbiquitous

Précis

Preferring anything more than God is evil; righteousness entails a preference for God above all else, including obedience. Thus an indicator of a saved person is the taste for joy in God; its absence is an indicator of deadness in sin. Therefore, fighting for joy is essential, because eternal life is on the line.

A chief difficulty is that joy cannot be willed; it is received freely as a gift, but we are responsible to possess it. We are instructed to actively do something passive. The remainder of the book will address this difficulty, but there are three parts to the answer: First, the fight for joy itself is a gift. Second, we put ourselves in the path of God’s blessing. Third, the fight for joy is a fight to see; a clear vision of the truth inevitably leads to a right response.

NB

Margin notes from chapter 3:

• The theme of irresistible grace runs throughout this chapter. Joy is the inevitable result of God’s grace when it is clearly seen and freely received. (cf. p. 44, “Seeing Christ is what leads to enjoying Christ;” see also quote on pp. 35-36 below.)
• I really like Piper’s phrase “idols of delight” (p. 36) to describe loving the gift more than the giver. God’s gifts must lead us to delight in him.
• I also like his phrase “alien joys” to describe the desires of our fallenness.
• Piper is giving yet another call to actively do something passive. This makes me think he’s right on. God is always calling us to that sort of thing (cf. Eph. 5:18, “Be filled with the Spirit,” etc.)
• Just as we cannot choose our beliefs (doxastic voluntarism), we cannot choose our joys.
• The fact that we’re fighting for joy shows that we have tasted joy in God. The fight for joy in God may be thought of as a fruit of the Spirit.

Quotes

• Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is… The struggle to submit… is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest. (p. 32, quoting Flannery O’Connor)
• Loving Jesus, not just “deciding” for him or “being committed to him” or affirming all the right doctrines about him, is the mark of a true child of God. (p. 34)
• The issue of salvation is loving or hating the light. Love darkness, or love light. That’s the crisis of the soul. But what is love for darkness? It’s preferring darkness, liking darkness, wanting darkness, running to darkness, being glad with darkness. But all of that is what Jesus demands for himself: “Prefer my light, like my fellowship, want my wisdom, run to my refuge, be glad in my grace. Above all, delight in me as a person.” Look around on all that the world can give; then say with the apostle Paul, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1:23). That is what it means to love Christ. And to have no love for him is to be accursed. (p. 35)
• This is what Satan desperately wants to hide from the eyes of our hearts—a spiritual sight of Christ’s glory in the gospel. Not just facts, but the beauty of the facts. (p. 35)
• The saving response to this spiritual apprehension of glory in the cross of Christ must include a pleasing sense of Christ’s beauty. It is inconceivable that faith would find Christ distasteful. It is inconceivable that the regenerate heart could look upon the glory of Christ in the gospel with indifferent or negative affections. (pp. 35-36)
• Saving faith involves no less than being glad to have Jesus himself for who he is. It could not be otherwise, if the aim of God is to glorify his Son. If Christ is followed only because his gifts are great and his threats are terrible, he is not glorified by his followers. A defective lord can offer great gifts and terrible threats. And a person may want the gifts, fear the threats, and follow a lord whom they despise or pity or find boring or embarrassing, in order to have the gifts and avoid the threats. If Christ is to be glorified in his people, their following must be rooted not mainly in his promised gifts or threatened punishments, but in his glorious Person. (p. 36)
• Eternal life is laid hold of only by a persevering fight for the joy of faith. (p. 37)
• There is a devil-may-care, cavalier, superficial attitude toward the ongoing, daily intensity of personal joy in Christ, because people do not believe their eternal life depends on it. (p. 37)
• The Christian life… is an earnest warfare from beginning to end, and the war is to defend and strengthen the fruit-bearing fields of joy in God. (p. 37)
• The person who will receive the crown of eternal life is the person who successfully endures trial—that is, the person who fights for joy in the pain of loss and gets the victory over the unbelief of anger and bitterness and discouragement. (p. 37)
• Worship services, Bible studies, prayer meetings, and fellowship gatherings in many churches do not have a spirit of earnestness and intensity and fervor and depth because people do not really believe that anything significant is at stake in the fight for joy—least of all their eternal life. The all-important priority seems to be cheerfulness, even jollity. (p. 38)
• Maintaining joy in God takes “work”; that is, it’s a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ. (p. 39)
• Joy happens in the heart spontaneously. You don’t get up in the morning feeling blue and then immediately experience joy simply because you decide to. If you are tired when you wake up, you can force yourself to throw your legs out of bed. But if you are gloomy and discouraged when you wake up, you cannot just start feeling happy. Joy is not in the power of the will the way physical motion is. (p. 40)
• How does the fact that joy is a free gift of God relate to our responsibility to have it? One of the reasons we experience joy in God as spontaneous is that it’s a gift. And one of the reasons we must fight for it is that we are responsible to have it. So the questions are virtually the same: How do we fight for something that is spontaneous? And, what can we do to obtain a totally free gift? (p. 40)
• Our fight for joy does not coerce God to give the gift of joy, but puts us in the path where he has ordained the blessing to come. I say it carefully, lest I sound as though joy can be demanded from the Almighty. It is a fruit of the Spirit that grows on the tree of faith (Gal. 5:22); it is not a wage God must pay for our work or for our fight. That God ordinarily gives joy when we walk in certain paths is no guarantee that he will do so according to our timetable. (p. 42)
• We should fight to walk in the paths where he has promised his blessings. But when and how they come is God’s to decide, not ours. If they delay, we trust the wisdom of our Father’s timing, and we wait. In this way joy remains a gift, while we work patiently in the field of obedience and fight against the weeds and the crows and the rodents. Here is where joy will come. Here is where Christ will reveal himself (John 14:21). But that revelation and that joy will come when and how Christ chooses. It will be a gift. (p. 43)
• The fight for joy is first and always a fight to see. (p. 43)
• The fight does not undermine the fact that joy is a gift and a spontaneous experience. The joy that comes from seeing beauty is spontaneous no matter how hard one fought to see. The fighting does not cause the joy. Seeing causes the joy. And it does so freely. There is no coercion. No one stands before a beautiful sunrise and says, “Now I worked hard to get up this early; you owe me happiness by your bright colors.” No. We stand there, and in humility we receive. And if the joy comes, it is a gift. (p. 44)
• The essence of the Christian life is learning to fight for joy in a way that does not replace grace… Our joy in [Jesus] will be the greater because we see him as the one who gives both the joy and the strength to fight for it. (p. 44)

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)

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)