The Essential Warfare for Holiness
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00:00:05.840 | Pastor John, let's talk about the Puritans and personal holiness.
00:00:08.560 | One of the great points that they see in Scripture is this connection between
00:00:11.440 | happiness and holiness, and they obviously developed this in
00:00:14.320 | their theology of who God is. His happiness and his holiness are all
00:00:17.840 | interconnected. And then they worked that out in the
00:00:20.240 | Christian life so that in the end, to be perfectly holy would be to be
00:00:23.840 | perfectly happy. Pastor John, how would you
00:00:26.720 | articulate this connection between happiness and holiness?
00:00:30.160 | I'm going to come at it a little differently, because
00:00:34.080 | the longer I have thought about Christian hedonism,
00:00:37.520 | and God being most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him,
00:00:41.840 | the more careful I have become in talking about the relationship that
00:00:48.400 | way. And here's what usually doesn't get
00:00:52.880 | said when that relationship between holiness
00:00:55.920 | and happiness is being described. I think happiness is part of
00:01:02.240 | holiness. So that if you try to describe for me what it means to be a holy
00:01:08.000 | person, leaving out happiness in God,
00:01:14.080 | so that I will, in response to that holiness, become happy in God,
00:01:18.240 | you can't do it. You can't do it. There is no such thing as
00:01:22.240 | holiness minus happiness in God. Happiness in God is the, I'll risk it,
00:01:29.360 | essence of holiness. So step back and let me define
00:01:33.680 | my understanding of what God's holiness is.
00:01:37.120 | And we had a whole conference on holiness and sanctification here
00:01:41.360 | last year, and I tried to develop this, but I think God's holiness
00:01:45.280 | is God's supreme value, being supremely valuable, the most
00:01:52.160 | glorious, valuable, precious being in the universe, and His acting
00:01:58.640 | in ways that accord with that supreme value. That's His holiness.
00:02:03.520 | So God infinitely delights in His infinite delightfulness, because
00:02:08.560 | otherwise He'd be a liar. He'd be unrighteous. And so His holiness
00:02:14.560 | is being infinitely delightful and delighting infinitely in His infinite
00:02:20.320 | delightfulness. That's His holiness. Now our holiness
00:02:24.160 | is then seeing and agreeing with and treasuring
00:02:30.480 | that. That we see God as infinitely valuable,
00:02:34.160 | infinitely precious, infinitely worthy of trust and delight and admiration and
00:02:39.680 | praise, and we not only see it, but we savor it,
00:02:43.600 | we trust it, we treasure it, we embrace it, we
00:02:47.120 | enjoy it, we're satisfied by it, and we act in accordance with our
00:02:52.400 | esteeming Jesus above all things. And that's our holiness, which means once
00:02:57.200 | you set things up like that, oh, you've just defined the essence
00:03:02.480 | of holiness as seeing God as infinitely valuable and
00:03:08.000 | savoring God as infinitely valuable, and then everything flows from
00:03:11.920 | that. But now your question still is valid because there is--
00:03:19.040 | happiness is like a spiral in the Christian life, I think.
00:03:22.640 | You see God, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." So you
00:03:28.960 | see God and you're blessed by it. You're blessed
00:03:32.000 | by that beatific vision, especially in Christ, in the cross, loving you, dying
00:03:36.320 | for you, rising for you. You see that, and joy
00:03:39.600 | floods your soul because of what you see of God.
00:03:44.480 | That seeing enables you then to do things that God says we ought to do,
00:03:49.520 | like love your enemy. When you love your enemy,
00:03:55.200 | that fruit circles back and makes you happy. There's a
00:04:02.560 | happiness of conscience that when you-- what is Paul saying in
00:04:07.040 | Romans 14? "Blessed is the man who does what he has nothing against." He
00:04:13.120 | only does what his conscience doesn't command.
00:04:15.680 | So when you lay down your head at night, having acted in ways that your
00:04:22.560 | satisfaction in God has enabled you to do, there is another level of happiness
00:04:28.480 | that comes, a kind of a circling or a spiraling up
00:04:32.080 | of happiness, and that happiness then increases your
00:04:36.000 | your joy in God, and that frees you to do more acts of love,
00:04:39.760 | and that makes you happier. When we say God is most glorified in you
00:04:46.960 | when you are most satisfied in Him, we are saying, therefore, the
00:04:52.880 | essential warfare of holiness or sanctification
00:04:58.240 | is the warfare to be satisfied in God. It's a fight to see Him as beautiful
00:05:05.440 | and to savor Him as beautiful. That is the
00:05:08.480 | number one fight. So if you take pornography, or theft, or
00:05:15.840 | desire for applause, any of those sins, the fundamental way that you sever the
00:05:22.640 | root of those sins is by striving for
00:05:27.040 | the power of a superior satisfaction, namely in God. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:05:34.000 | You can find Pastor John's conference messages on this theme at DesiringGod.org
00:05:37.680 | by searching for the titles "Prelude to Acting the Miracle, Putting
00:05:41.280 | Sanctification in its Place," and the message "Act the Miracle, Future
00:05:45.040 | Grace, the Word of the Cross, and the Purifying Power of God's Promises."
00:05:48.880 | You can find those and thousands of other free resources from John Piper at
00:05:52.080 | DesiringGod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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