What Comes First: My Obedience to Jesus or My Joy in Jesus?
00:00:00.000 | Well, how is my obedience connected to my joy?
00:00:07.000 | It's a question today from Jonathan.
00:00:09.280 | "Hi, Pastor John.
00:00:10.280 | I'm a seminary student in South Africa.
00:00:13.080 | My question is about Christian hedonism.
00:00:16.080 | What a deep and powerful thing enjoying God is, which God used greatly in my conversion.
00:00:22.580 | After a couple of years, however, my joy in God grew very dim.
00:00:26.780 | Not only my joy, but also my contentment and prizing of God above all else.
00:00:31.840 | A most joyful state, but it disappeared.
00:00:35.480 | This is especially true when I fall into sin.
00:00:37.560 | I feel that sin blinds me to who God is, and thus I don't enjoy Him for who He is because
00:00:42.820 | I can't see Him for who He is.
00:00:44.720 | Is that true?
00:00:46.060 | And how much of our joy in Christ is only achievable and possible in a state of robust
00:00:51.240 | obedience to Christ?"
00:00:53.040 | Pastor John, what would you say to Jonathan?
00:00:56.080 | I'm going to say things a little differently than Jonathan, but first let me affirm his
00:01:02.760 | insight, namely, that when we are living in disobedience to Christ, our joy in Him will
00:01:11.320 | be minimal or nonexistent, depending on the depth and duration of the disobedience.
00:01:20.120 | That's true.
00:01:21.360 | So you might say, "Our greatest enjoyment of Christ can only be enjoyed, can be had
00:01:28.640 | in a robust state of obedience."
00:01:31.360 | I think that's true.
00:01:34.440 | But I think it's important to penetrate into the relationship between obedience and joy
00:01:41.360 | a little more deeply instead of simply saying, "If you obey Jesus, your joy will be greater."
00:01:48.040 | Because if we leave it at that, we won't really see clearly what the nature of obedience
00:01:56.240 | is and its relationship to joy in Christ.
00:02:00.180 | I would ask Jonathan, or anybody, "Do you think that obedience to Jesus is distinct
00:02:07.600 | from enjoying Jesus?"
00:02:09.800 | In other words, is it accurate to think of obeying Him as one thing and then as a result
00:02:17.240 | of doing that, this other thing happens called enjoying Him?
00:02:22.840 | It's really not like that.
00:02:25.240 | Why not?
00:02:26.240 | Well, first, because we are commanded to enjoy Him, "Delight yourself in the Lord" (Psalm
00:02:33.280 | 37:4) and elsewhere, "Rejoice in the Lord."
00:02:36.480 | So that obedience to that command is enjoyment of God, not just a cause of enjoyment.
00:02:46.720 | And second, because all Christ-honoring obedience is rooted in our treasuring Jesus, our enjoying
00:02:57.320 | Jesus, so that it wouldn't be accurate to say that enjoying Jesus is only the result
00:03:05.240 | of obedience when in fact it's part of obedience and the cause of obedience, or the root of
00:03:11.640 | obedience.
00:03:13.920 | So what Jonathan is saying is not at all wrong.
00:03:19.200 | It's only half, or maybe a third, of the picture.
00:03:23.480 | He's stressing that the utterly necessary truth that whenever we are walking in disobedience,
00:03:31.560 | our joy is going to be limited or canceled, that's true.
00:03:35.760 | And you can see it especially in John 14, 21-23, where Jesus says, "Whoever has my commandments
00:03:41.320 | and keeps them, he it is who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father,
00:03:47.440 | and I will love him and manifest myself to him."
00:03:53.280 | In other words, there's a correlation between our loving Jesus and keeping His commandments
00:04:00.960 | and the clarity and sweetness of the manifestation that we have of Jesus and the Father in our
00:04:08.200 | hearts.
00:04:09.200 | "I will manifest myself to him," Jesus says, "as he is loving me and walking in fellowship
00:04:15.200 | with me and keeping my words."
00:04:17.700 | Those manifestations of the preciousness and sweetness and power and reality and presence
00:04:24.160 | and beauty and worth of Jesus will be forfeited when we are loving other things more than
00:04:32.000 | Jesus and not keeping His Word.
00:04:35.000 | That's true.
00:04:36.000 | That's the truth that Jonathan is seeing and emphasizing.
00:04:41.700 | He has experienced the loss of joy and of the intimate, sweet manifestations of Christ
00:04:48.760 | to his soul because he's walked in sin.
00:04:52.520 | That's true.
00:04:53.520 | That's what will happen.
00:04:55.240 | But there's another side to this, which if we miss it, there will be no way out for Jonathan.
00:05:02.480 | How's he going to get out of this?
00:05:06.320 | If he thinks simply in terms of, "I've got to obey so that I can enjoy," if that's the
00:05:15.320 | only way he's thinking, he'll never get out.
00:05:19.440 | Because seeing Jesus as satisfying and experiencing Him as precious is the pathway to obedience,
00:05:31.440 | not just the result of obedience.
00:05:34.200 | You can't obey first in order to enjoy if the enjoyment in Him is the path to obedience.
00:05:41.280 | If we treat obedience as something that you do first and then all joy in Jesus follows,
00:05:50.820 | we will have turned obedience into a work of the law or a legal external performance
00:05:57.040 | that has in it no Christ-exalting worth and therefore will not result in true enjoyment
00:06:04.600 | of Jesus.
00:06:06.520 | All Christ-exalting, all gospel-rooted obedience is the obedience of faith, Romans 1:5.
00:06:16.840 | It comes from faith.
00:06:19.640 | Obedience comes from faith.
00:06:20.680 | And faith is a seeing and savoring of the truth and beauty and worth of Jesus in the
00:06:29.040 | gospel.
00:06:30.040 | Therefore, faith, specifically what Paul calls in Philippians 1:25, the joy of faith is the
00:06:37.040 | root of all Christ-exalting obedience, not just the fruit.
00:06:44.480 | So by all means, Jonathan, cease from all the outward actings of sin.
00:06:53.040 | Cease, but let the main battle of your life be not just against outward actions that have
00:07:02.400 | to change, but mainly against inward blindness that needs to be overcome with fresh glimpses
00:07:11.440 | of the glory of Christ.
00:07:14.160 | Then the new obedience will not be a tribute to your willpower, but a tribute to the beauty
00:07:21.080 | of Christ that has broken the power of the deceitfulness of sin.
00:07:26.880 | Jonathan has been walking in disobedience because of the deceitfulness of sin.
00:07:32.840 | Hebrews 3:13, Ephesians 4:22, "Sin is telling lies to him.
00:07:37.360 | It is saying that the path of disobedience will produce more pleasure."
00:07:41.800 | It won't.
00:07:43.640 | It's a lie.
00:07:44.800 | The pleasures are fleeting, Hebrews 11:25.
00:07:48.320 | They are shallow.
00:07:50.020 | So the battle to be fought in Jonathan's heart, in all of our hearts, is not just how to stop
00:07:57.600 | doing bad things so that we can enjoy Jesus.
00:08:01.520 | No, no, no, no, no.
00:08:03.160 | But how to stop believing false things.
00:08:07.160 | The answer is, by all means forsake bad behaviors, but mainly the battle is, look to Jesus.
00:08:16.800 | Look to all that God is for you in him and pray for eyes to see his all-satisfying beauty
00:08:25.840 | and worth so that you rest in him and are so satisfied that the root of sin is severed
00:08:34.400 | and you walk in obedience.
00:08:37.440 | Beautiful.
00:08:39.720 | Well articulated.
00:08:40.720 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:42.760 | And thanks for listening to the podcast over at our online home.
00:08:45.320 | You can explore all of our episodes in our archive of about 1,300 episodes to date.
00:08:49.600 | There you can see a list of our most popular episodes, read full transcripts, and submit
00:08:53.680 | questions you might be wrestling with yourself.
00:08:55.960 | For all that, go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:00.520 | And speaking of joy in Christ, the entire goal of the Ask Pastor John podcast is to
00:09:04.760 | make you happier in Jesus.
00:09:07.980 | But can this podcast actually kill your joy?
00:09:12.580 | When I read this question from a podcast listener, I thought, wow, we need to address this one,
00:09:16.440 | Pastor John.
00:09:17.440 | This is the question on Friday when we return.
00:09:19.760 | Can this podcast kill your joy in Jesus and how?
00:09:24.440 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:09:25.440 | We'll see you then.
00:09:25.880 | [BLANK_AUDIO]
00:09:34.360 | [ Silence ]