Is It Selfish to Pray for Joy?
00:00:00.000 | A woman in Sioux Falls, South Dakota writes in to ask, "Pastor John, at times it
00:00:08.560 | feels selfish to pray constantly for God to give me joy. How does a Christian
00:00:12.660 | hedonist who groans to glorify God use prayer to increase his joy in God
00:00:16.680 | without feeling selfish for asking so frequently?" We must define selfishness in
00:00:26.160 | a way that is different from the pursuit of joy that the Bible commends. And here
00:00:33.640 | are my distinctions. I'll give you several. Selfishness, which is a bad thing,
00:00:39.460 | I'm assuming it's bad. There's a bad definition for selfishness and this is
00:00:43.620 | what I mean by the badness of it. It's wanting the exaltation of self without
00:00:49.680 | loving the superior exaltation of God. Number two, selfishness is wanting
00:00:58.440 | something for yourself at the expense of others. Number three, selfishness is
00:01:07.800 | wanting to be happy without our happiness being in the happiness of
00:01:15.080 | others—happiness. And four, selfishness is wanting to be happy without the
00:01:25.840 | happiness being a power to make others happy with the very happiness we have in
00:01:32.280 | God. So those are my four distinguishings of selfishness from the biblical pursuit
00:01:42.040 | of joy. If our craving for joy, our prayer for joy, turns into one of those, we should
00:01:51.080 | feel selfish and we should feel bad and we should repent. But Christian hedonism
00:01:57.440 | is specifically designed to prevent all four of those. And here's how. Christian
00:02:05.040 | hedonism always stresses that our joy is in God. We don't merely pursue joy for
00:02:14.680 | joy, we pursue joy in God. That's the first thing. We've got to keep that in mind
00:02:22.600 | all the time. Christian hedonism then, as we see from texts like Philippians 1:19
00:02:29.880 | to 23, shows that God is magnified by our being satisfied in him. So this joy is
00:02:40.280 | always putting the exaltation of God over the exaltation of self because the
00:02:47.680 | satisfaction of self in God magnifies God. So we never ever exalt ourselves
00:02:55.120 | above God by being satisfied by God. Christian hedonism teaches that it is
00:03:01.640 | more blessed to give than to receive, X 2035, which means that our joy in
00:03:09.520 | God increases when it expands to meet the needs of others. Our joy increases
00:03:17.640 | when others come to share it. Joy is not the kind of thing that if others get
00:03:22.520 | some, you get less. It's just the opposite. If my joy can expand to include you in
00:03:31.760 | it so that yours increases from mine, mine gets bigger. And so there's a built-in
00:03:39.200 | protection against exclusivism. Christian joy has an expansive impulse to it
00:03:47.240 | because it knows that when others share it, it gets bigger. And we are, after all,
00:03:51.440 | Christian hedonists. We don't exclude others. We want more and more and more
00:03:55.640 | people to be included in it, which is the opposite of selfishness. And then
00:04:01.080 | Christian hedonism teaches that our happiness in God is the very power to lay
00:04:08.320 | down our lives for others. Jesus, for the joy that was set before him, endured the
00:04:15.360 | cross. So Jesus' deep sense of satisfaction in his father and what his
00:04:22.760 | father had planned for him on the other side of the resurrection was the very
00:04:26.680 | power that enabled him to die for us. And that's exactly the way we should
00:04:32.720 | be motivated, as Hebrews 1034 shows. You had compassion on those in prison. So
00:04:40.080 | there you are, loving those in prison at great risk. Why? You joyfully accept the
00:04:45.640 | plundering of your property since you knew that you yourselves had a better
00:04:50.880 | possession and an abiding one. So it's the confidence, "My happiness is in God. He
00:04:56.800 | has taken care of me. He has infinite pleasures awaiting me at his right hand.
00:05:01.640 | He is presently the satisfier of my soul. How could I in any selfish impulse not go
00:05:08.240 | to the prison and risk my life to help my brothers and sisters there?" So finding my
00:05:14.760 | fullest satisfaction in God frees me from the need to protect myself and
00:05:19.920 | impels me to a life of sacrifice. So to the question then that I think was
00:05:27.040 | being asked about prayer, how do we not feel selfish by repeatedly praying for
00:05:34.640 | joy in God? I would say keep all of that in mind and then do precisely what the
00:05:41.880 | Psalms say the psalmist did. Psalm 90 verse 14, "Praise, satisfy me in the
00:05:50.080 | morning with your steadfast love that I may rejoice and be glad all my day." So
00:05:55.080 | here's a psalmist praying every day, "Today Lord, satisfy me." And if his joy
00:06:00.800 | dribbles away, Psalm 51 verse 12, "Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold
00:06:07.600 | me with a willing spirit." And the reason those constantly repeating prayers don't
00:06:13.880 | turn us into selfish people is because number one, they glorify God. Number two,
00:06:19.560 | they humble us as ever needy of his satisfying presence. Number three, they
00:06:26.300 | incline us to increase our joy by expanding it into the lives of others.
00:06:33.840 | That's why we want it. And those prayers for joy free us from self-protection so
00:06:42.760 | that we could spend our lives in sacrificial love to others. Thank you,
00:06:48.040 | Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to
00:06:51.400 | us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find
00:06:56.040 | thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm
00:06:59.640 | your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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