Isn’t the Joy-Centered Life Just an Emotional Roller Coaster?
00:00:00.000 | Well, building a ministry around joy in God leads to a lot of good and important questions
00:00:09.240 | that we need to think through.
00:00:10.760 | Specifically, today, if our ministry centers on joy, then doesn't this invite sort of an
00:00:16.560 | emotional roller coaster type of rhythm into our lives?
00:00:20.720 | It's a really important question today from an anonymous listener who writes in to ask
00:00:24.800 | this.
00:00:25.800 | "Pastor John, I struggle with thinking that feelings, feelings of peace, love, and joy
00:00:32.560 | are the validation and the thermometer of my relationship with God.
00:00:37.440 | Thus, my relationship often feels like a roller coaster.
00:00:42.160 | I often feel discouraged and anxious when my heart isn't moved with emotion during my
00:00:46.880 | time with God.
00:00:48.800 | On the other hand, I am cautious to seek purely emotional highs because I know they can be
00:00:53.640 | misleading or even false.
00:00:55.960 | Pastor John, what would you say to me?"
00:00:59.600 | This question really matters to me because I'm a Christian hedonist.
00:01:04.440 | I tell people that the affections of the heart matter just as much, even more, than the thoughts
00:01:14.600 | of the mind.
00:01:15.920 | I make the case over and over again that Christian faith, saving faith, is not merely intellectual
00:01:25.640 | assent to doctrines, but the heart embrace of the truth, of the person who makes the
00:01:33.360 | truth true.
00:01:34.880 | I tell people to devote their lives to pursuing satisfaction in God because God is most glorified
00:01:42.560 | in them when they are most satisfied in Him.
00:01:46.480 | I utterly reject the notion that faith can be neatly separated from feelings like a caboose
00:01:54.660 | at the end of the train can be dropped off with no great loss.
00:02:00.040 | It's not the way the Bible talks about the Christian faith, as though this train could
00:02:08.320 | go on chugging down with no love for God burning in the engine.
00:02:14.360 | When Jesus Himself said, "Whoever loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me,"
00:02:19.000 | Matthew 10:37.
00:02:20.720 | I think the effort to distinguish saving faith from feelings of glad dependence and thankful
00:02:31.600 | trust and heartfelt admiration and pleased submission and contented resting and earnest
00:02:41.480 | treasuring, I think that distinction is futile, hopeless.
00:02:47.320 | You cannot strip all those adjectives—glad, thankful, heartfelt, pleased, contented, earnest—you
00:02:57.120 | cannot strip all those adjectives from faith and have any saving faith left.
00:03:06.120 | What you have left is what the devil can do, or mere oxymorons like unthankful saving trust.
00:03:17.920 | In fact, I think the effort to define faith as something devoid of feeling is driven by
00:03:28.000 | an ancient and very modern belief in the autonomy of the human will that must be in final control
00:03:35.760 | of its destiny.
00:03:37.380 | And since everyone knows we can't immediately control our feelings or emotions or affections,
00:03:43.280 | you can't make yourself feel thankful.
00:03:45.620 | You can say the word "thank you," but you can't make yourself feel thankful.
00:03:48.840 | It's either there or it's not.
00:03:51.080 | You can't make yourself feel pleased or glad.
00:03:54.160 | Therefore, that view of human nature that says we have to be able to control our own
00:04:00.560 | destiny, our own salvation, has to say saving faith cannot include things I can't control.
00:04:08.320 | I have to be in control.
00:04:11.020 | But that is simply not what the Bible teaches.
00:04:13.920 | The Bible requires many things of us which we cannot immediately produce because we are
00:04:21.760 | so corrupt and rebellious.
00:04:24.080 | And yet we are responsible to produce them because a sinful condition is no excuse for
00:04:29.400 | disobedience.
00:04:30.680 | All that to say that my response to this question is not to make it easy by defining faith separately
00:04:38.920 | from the emotions.
00:04:39.920 | I mean, I think a lot of people would hear her question and say, "Not a problem.
00:04:45.080 | You don't need to let your discouragements go up and down with the rise and fall of your
00:04:49.200 | emotions because faith has nothing to do with emotions."
00:04:51.840 | That's the way they'd answer.
00:04:53.080 | Now that may sound now, my approach may sound now to our friend, she didn't give us her
00:04:58.560 | name, may sound to her like, "Well, okay, I'm simply stuck then, right?
00:05:03.800 | Come on, Piper.
00:05:04.800 | I asked the question for help.
00:05:05.800 | I didn't ask for an analysis."
00:05:08.120 | When her emotions go up, she says she has assurance, and when her emotions go down,
00:05:12.440 | she has doubts about her salvation and feels anxious because Piper and who knows what other
00:05:19.760 | Puritans have taught her that faith is more than mere scent.
00:05:25.480 | Now I would like to try to provide four ways of looking at our spiritual affections that
00:05:33.120 | I think will help her and me.
00:05:35.960 | They help me bring steadiness to her devotion to Christ and not such volatility or despair.
00:05:43.680 | Number one, the biblical realism that the saints have always experienced seasons when
00:05:49.520 | clarity and joy and spiritual sensitivity weaken.
00:05:54.320 | Otherwise, David would not have cried out in Psalm 51, 12, "Restore to me the joy of
00:06:01.360 | your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit."
00:06:03.880 | Paul would not have come to the end of Romans 7 with the words, "Wretched man that I am,
00:06:09.160 | who will deliver me from this body of death?"
00:06:11.800 | And Jesus would not have taught us to pray every day, "Forgive us our sins."
00:06:17.000 | What is sin but the preference of the heart getting the upper hand over our delight in
00:06:23.720 | God and His ways?
00:06:25.600 | And so let's not measure the ups and downs of our affections for Christ as though there
00:06:32.760 | were a standard of perfection in the Bible.
00:06:36.920 | There's not.
00:06:38.240 | We all struggle with ups and downs, strong affections some day, weak affections the next
00:06:47.320 | day.
00:06:48.320 | Here's number two.
00:06:49.400 | Let us make a distinction between the absence of intense joy for Christ or joy in Christ,
00:06:56.520 | the absence of intense joy in Christ on the one hand and the presence of intense joy in
00:07:03.280 | sin on the other.
00:07:05.080 | Let's make a distinction.
00:07:06.080 | It is possible for our spiritual affections to weaken without this being a sign that our
00:07:12.360 | carnal affections are triumphant.
00:07:15.020 | Of course, we should be concerned with becoming cool toward Christ because that could lead
00:07:21.480 | to the shipwreck of our lives where we fail to confirm our calling and election, as 2
00:07:27.240 | Peter 1.9 says.
00:07:29.640 | But we should not assume that the cooling of our affections on any given day is the
00:07:36.400 | same as the flaming up of insubordinate rebellion against God and His ways.
00:07:43.680 | It could lead to that, but it need not.
00:07:47.060 | And the very fact that it causes us grief when our affections flag is a good sign they
00:07:52.980 | will restore, they will be restored.
00:07:56.940 | Number three, consider this understanding of the tears of contrition and the tears of
00:08:04.580 | sorrow for joylessness.
00:08:07.620 | I bounced this off of Noel last night as we went out to dinner together, and she was leaving
00:08:12.940 | town today, and I wanted her to hear this because this is my calling up out of thoughts
00:08:20.180 | I had years ago when I wrote Desiring God.
00:08:22.380 | I said things like this, but they were fresh and new to me, and I wanted to see what she
00:08:28.220 | thought.
00:08:29.220 | So here they are now.
00:08:30.940 | Consider this understanding of the tears of contrition because I'm hearing in our friend's
00:08:36.020 | question that when her joys go down, she feels bad.
00:08:39.860 | She feels miserable.
00:08:40.860 | She wants to cry.
00:08:41.860 | She's just, "I want to have joy.
00:08:43.980 | I want to read my Bible with gladness and happiness and thankfulness and strength, and
00:08:48.580 | I don't."
00:08:50.100 | So that's what I'm talking about.
00:08:52.300 | Are not the tears of contrition the fruit of languishing joy in Christ, impeded by weariness
00:09:03.900 | or weakness or sin?
00:09:06.220 | In other words, when joy fades and you feel sorrowful and contrite, brokenhearted because
00:09:13.980 | of this fading joy that you should have in Christ, is not the feeling of sorrow and the
00:09:23.140 | feeling of regret and the feeling of contrition, are not those painful feelings evidence of
00:09:32.420 | the fact that your soul is the kind of soul that has a taste for the goodness of God,
00:09:39.900 | the sweetness of God in Jesus?
00:09:43.660 | And is not this taste a sign of your regeneration?
00:09:48.660 | Indeed, isn't this taste the very presence of what we might call the remaining aftertaste
00:09:58.260 | of joy in the absence of its full expression?
00:10:02.860 | If so, I would argue that the tears of contrition, the tears of sorrow for joylessness, are the
00:10:13.740 | tears of joy hindered by some physical condition or some weakness or some sin, hindered, and
00:10:24.300 | thus these tears are evidence that we are born of God.
00:10:30.780 | Our soul has been made into the kind of soul that will never be satisfied apart from God,
00:10:40.940 | and even when joy has gone away, there is an aftertaste of joy that is weeping, and
00:10:50.300 | the weeping is the aftertaste of joy, giving evidence that our soul is the kind of soul
00:11:00.900 | that will have joy forever.
00:11:02.860 | Here's the fourth and last thing briefly.
00:11:06.660 | I would simply point to Paul's teaching about the witness of the Holy Spirit.
00:11:11.340 | The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and to be sure,
00:11:16.460 | the Holy Spirit uses evidence and means in His act of witnessing to our true adoption,
00:11:23.420 | but in the end, assurance that we are the children of God is a gift of God, God the
00:11:32.180 | Holy Spirit.
00:11:33.500 | So when all is said and done, and we have reflected on as many wonderful biblical realities
00:11:40.740 | as we can, and we have cried out with David for the restoration of our joy, our biblical
00:11:48.860 | lot is to wait for the Lord, not to despair, not to dictate to God how long He will be
00:11:58.540 | concealed, not to become angry, and not to take our eyes off Christ in His Word, but
00:12:06.100 | to wait, weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.
00:12:13.900 | Amen.
00:12:14.900 | Pastor John, thank you for that response.
00:12:16.500 | Thank you for the question that was sent in.
00:12:18.900 | We love getting questions about Christian hedonism, the idea that it's really at the
00:12:23.620 | core of what we do that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
00:12:31.620 | And the profundity of that statement leads to a lot of questions that have to be answered
00:12:35.000 | and worked through, which is what we're here for.
00:12:38.220 | And for more information about us or the podcast, go to our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:45.940 | There you can explore all of our 1,200 episodes that we've done in the past.
00:12:49.060 | You can scan through a list of our most popular episodes, read transcripts, and even send
00:12:53.340 | us a question of your own.
00:12:54.340 | And of course, to get brand new episodes as they're released, subscribe to the Ask Pastor
00:12:59.540 | John podcast in your favorite podcast app.
00:13:02.940 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:13:03.940 | We'll see you back here on Friday.
00:13:05.620 | [END]
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