Four Key Ways We Enjoy God in Our Work
00:00:00.000 | A listener named Fano writes in, "Hello Pastor John, if Christ is the only one that can truly
00:00:10.600 | satisfy my hunger for joy, why then do I seek to excel in what I do?
00:00:16.840 | What I do brings me joy, and I also feel like it brings glory to God too, but I get confused
00:00:21.600 | about joy.
00:00:22.840 | If God is my joy, why do I care in making the perfect meal or writing the best paper
00:00:27.220 | for academia?
00:00:28.220 | Thank you for any help you have to offer."
00:00:30.560 | What would you say to Fano?
00:00:34.160 | I love this question, and I found myself, as I was thinking about it, just soaring.
00:00:41.120 | I love to think about the relationships of the enjoyment of God with the things that
00:00:48.160 | God has made and the activities He designed us to perform.
00:00:51.720 | This question is so unbelievably important.
00:00:55.520 | So I, however, empathize with Fano's perplexity.
00:01:02.440 | It is one thing to enjoy the simplicity of delighting in God Himself and delighting in
00:01:08.540 | His gifts and delighting in activities that He's equipped us to do.
00:01:12.960 | It's quite another thing to articulate with words how all of this fits together, without
00:01:22.480 | contradicting any scriptures and without demeaning any of God's gifts.
00:01:27.560 | So for those of you listening in who simply want to go on your way full of the Holy Spirit,
00:01:35.120 | overflowing with proper enjoyments without complicating your life with explanations
00:01:40.160 | in words that get all tangled up in complexity, then I say, with John Owen, I bid you farewell.
00:01:48.640 | If you want to keep listening, I'm going to go into the tangle and see if we can sort
00:01:54.120 | it out.
00:01:55.120 | At least I need this very much, and it sounds like Fano does, too.
00:01:59.680 | So let me simply set the stage for the answer by drawing attention to a batch of relevant
00:02:07.040 | passages from the Bible which show that Fano's question is necessary.
00:02:12.720 | It's demanded by text, not just by experience.
00:02:16.160 | So first you've got Psalm 73, 25, "Whom have I in heaven but you, O God?
00:02:22.320 | And there is nothing on earth I desire besides you."
00:02:24.920 | I mean, think of that statement, "Nothing on earth I desire besides you.
00:02:27.840 | My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
00:02:33.040 | And then you add to that Philippians 3, 8, where Paul says, "I count everything as loss
00:02:38.800 | because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
00:02:44.620 | For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things.
00:02:47.600 | Count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ."
00:02:50.360 | I think the point of those passages is not to say there can be no legitimate pleasure
00:02:58.920 | in God's gifts.
00:03:00.960 | Too many other texts contradict that idea.
00:03:04.320 | But the point is, only in God, or supremely in God, we find our pleasure.
00:03:13.720 | Those texts are intended to say that compared with God and compared with Christ's beauty,
00:03:22.360 | all other gifts, including rewarding activities that he gives us to do, are as nothing, like
00:03:28.920 | dust in the balances.
00:03:30.840 | That's how much our delight in God himself, how much the glory of God compares to the
00:03:35.160 | gifts, the glory of his gifts.
00:03:38.280 | So I don't think those texts are designed in the Psalms or anywhere else as canceling
00:03:45.200 | out the legitimacy of a proper enjoyment of God's gifts.
00:03:50.040 | The big question is, okay, what does proper mean?
00:03:54.360 | And we start stumbling upon texts like this.
00:03:57.480 | Philippians 4, 11, "Therefore my brothers whom I love and long for, my joy and crown,
00:04:06.560 | stand firm thus in the Lord."
00:04:07.980 | So here we have Paul, who just said he counts everything as rubbish compared to Christ describing
00:04:17.160 | the fruit of his apostolic labor in the people at Philippi as his joy and his crown.
00:04:26.400 | And when he does it, he's not being an idolater.
00:04:31.280 | Then we have the same Paul saying in 1 Timothy 6, 17, "To the rich, don't be haughty, don't
00:04:39.360 | set your hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything
00:04:48.060 | to enjoy."
00:04:49.060 | So set your hope on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.
00:04:55.520 | So now we have an enormous material, relational, intellectual, artistic truckload of blessings
00:05:05.540 | poured out by God on us with the divine intention that we enjoy them without becoming idolaters.
00:05:16.740 | And then we have Paul saying to the Ephesian elders, and I'm going here because of Fano's
00:05:23.140 | question about activity, actions, he enjoys actions and behaviors and writing and so on.
00:05:30.460 | Paul said in Acts 20, 35, "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, 'It is more
00:05:35.700 | blessed, happy, satisfying to give than to receive.'"
00:05:42.340 | In other words, if you are performing an act of giving, and that could be giving of any
00:05:49.740 | kind, right, it could be giving your time, giving your skill, giving your words, giving
00:05:54.300 | your money, then this should be experienced as blessedness.
00:06:01.220 | In other words, it should be enjoyable.
00:06:04.020 | I think that's what that text says.
00:06:06.320 | He said the same thing in 2 Corinthians 9, 7, "Each one must give."
00:06:11.940 | Money is in mind, but any giving would be true.
00:06:14.800 | One must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, because
00:06:22.160 | God loves a cheerful giver.
00:06:25.320 | In other words, when you're not merely receiving from God the enjoyment of his fellowship,
00:06:31.560 | but rather turning it outward towards other people and engaging in activities of giving
00:06:38.020 | yourself away, giving your gifts away, time, talent, giving it all away, you should be
00:06:43.860 | doing it with cheerfulness.
00:06:46.560 | You should be enjoying it.
00:06:50.000 | And the same thing pops up in, I know Ecclesiastes is notoriously difficult to interpret, but
00:06:58.760 | I think we can agree that some things, however you interpret Ecclesiastes, some things are
00:07:08.180 | repeated so often, they're so unqualified, they're so related to God's will that we
00:07:14.100 | know they're intended by the inspired author to be embraced.
00:07:18.680 | And here's an example, three examples.
00:07:21.600 | Ecclesiastes 2.24, "There's nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink
00:07:28.560 | and find enjoyment in his toil."
00:07:33.120 | And then he adds, "This also I saw is the hand of God."
00:07:38.760 | And then Ecclesiastes 3.13, "Everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in his toil."
00:07:45.720 | And then he adds, "This is God's gift to man."
00:07:50.000 | And then chapter five, verse 19, "Everyone is to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil."
00:07:56.160 | And then he adds, "This is the gift of God."
00:08:01.600 | And of course, everything we've seen now, everything we've seen so far, fits in with
00:08:06.400 | God's original purpose for man on the planet, that we have meaningful work to do, and that
00:08:12.760 | was not a result of the fall that we have to work.
00:08:17.480 | Rather, Genesis 1.28, "Before the fall, God blessed man," woman, "said, 'Be fruitful,
00:08:24.640 | multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it.'"
00:08:30.400 | Or when he put Adam in the garden, he said, it says, "The Lord took the man, put him in
00:08:36.360 | the garden to work it and keep it before the fall."
00:08:41.200 | And of course, before the fall, he didn't mean and find it boring and begrudged getting
00:08:48.120 | up in the morning.
00:08:49.120 | He meant, "Go at it with all your heart and mind and find joy in it," just like Ecclesiastes
00:08:54.080 | said.
00:08:55.080 | So, here's my very short and tangled, and I think exciting, answer to how joy in God
00:09:06.560 | fits together with the calling that is on us to enjoy God's gifts and to enjoy the work
00:09:13.320 | that he gives us to do.
00:09:14.400 | I've got three or four steps.
00:09:16.400 | Number one, our work and the enjoyment of it and the enjoyment of God's gifts in it
00:09:23.960 | is the overflow of joy in God himself.
00:09:28.800 | In other words, our enjoyment of our work or our enjoyment of God's gifts should be
00:09:38.080 | an enjoyment of honoring what God has given us and what he has done for us.
00:09:47.120 | He causes us to enjoy his gifts as an overflow of the enjoyment of himself.
00:09:54.200 | And the reason I say that is because of 2 Corinthians 8, verse 2, "Their abundance of
00:10:00.520 | joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed," there's my key word, and that's in the
00:10:08.880 | Bible, "have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part."
00:10:15.320 | So they are undertaking activities of giving and serving, and those very activities are
00:10:24.440 | called overflow of joy.
00:10:27.880 | First, we taste the kindness of God in the gospel, and everything else becomes overflow.
00:10:36.080 | Second, in all our enjoyment of God's gifts, including the gift of meaningful work, we
00:10:44.640 | are tasting something of God himself in his gifts.
00:10:51.520 | God created things as good because he is good.
00:10:56.260 | They are expressions, they are aspects of his goodness, and we should learn to enjoy
00:11:03.520 | the sweetness of the peach because there is something of God's sweetness in the sweetness
00:11:12.460 | of the peach.
00:11:14.840 | Third, when we do our work conscious of being created by God, dependent on God, gifted by
00:11:22.440 | God for certain work, motivated by God, being eager to do it as to God, then we can say
00:11:30.080 | that our very work is—this was kind of a fresh insight for me—our very work is an
00:11:38.400 | embodiment or an incarnation of the very glory of God that delights us, and thus we find
00:11:49.720 | our work delightful.
00:11:52.160 | Delightful, precisely in proportion to the way it reflects the glory of God in which
00:12:01.360 | we delight.
00:12:02.880 | In other words, all the aspects of our working—think about it—all the aspects of our working
00:12:07.960 | are thinking, the working of our muscles, the working of our nerves, the working of
00:12:14.280 | our eyes and ears, the emotional capacities we have to relate to people, and on and on
00:12:19.200 | and on.
00:12:20.200 | All the aspects of our working, all of this is designed by God to show the glory of God.
00:12:28.240 | And we love the glory of God.
00:12:29.400 | We delight in the glory of God.
00:12:31.520 | And when all of that comes into play in God-honoring work, we enjoy that work because we experience
00:12:40.000 | this work as the very embodiment of the glory of God.
00:12:44.380 | How else could it be if God is creating all those possibilities for us as a demonstration
00:12:50.280 | of his glory?
00:12:51.520 | And finally, I would say all of our working, all of our ministry, all of our activity should
00:12:58.100 | be the pursuit of an enlargement, not just the overflow of, but the enlargement of our
00:13:07.400 | enjoyment of God himself, in the sense that we want the fruit of our lives to be such
00:13:15.200 | a display of the all-satisfying glory of God that other people see it.
00:13:20.300 | Other people see it and come to share in it so that our joy in God is enlarged by their
00:13:28.340 | joy in God.
00:13:30.320 | So that's my best effort, Fano.
00:13:32.760 | I hope in the piling up of words, there is at least a smidgen of truth and insight that
00:13:41.520 | happens.
00:13:42.520 | Wonderful.
00:13:43.520 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:13:45.920 | Please keep up with all of our episodes with our free app for your phone.
00:13:48.880 | And of course, you can get the apps and send us your question, like Fano did.
00:13:52.800 | Today, you can send those in online at our online podcast home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:13:57.200 | Well, tomorrow, we're going to talk about the book of Ruth and why such an interesting
00:14:03.480 | little story holds cosmic importance, just like our own lives.
00:14:08.440 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:14:09.440 | I'll see you tomorrow.
00:14:10.640 | [END]
00:14:12.640 | "Ruth" by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cover by Artist.ly/Artist.ly
00:14:18.640 | [BLANK_AUDIO]