Do I Love God or Just Love Loving Him?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Evan writes in to ask Pastor John, "I have a follow-up question from episode number 326.
00:00:10.000 | I have trouble distinguishing the difference between loving God and loving theology,
00:00:14.000 | or loving God and just loving loving God.
00:00:17.000 | Can you give some practical tips to make sure I am truly loving God
00:00:20.000 | and not just loving the theology about Him?"
00:00:23.000 | Pastor John, how would you make this distinction tangible for Evan?
00:00:27.000 | Well, my first response to Evan is that the fact that you care about that,
00:00:32.000 | that you even can articulate it that way, is a very good sign,
00:00:36.000 | and I'm encouraged that God has done enough in your life
00:00:40.000 | so that you're not blindly going on loving loving God without really loving God,
00:00:45.000 | because you know the difference between the two.
00:00:48.000 | But as I thought about this, at least four practical tests for you and anybody,
00:00:58.000 | really all of us, to test whether we are just fascinated with theology about God
00:01:07.000 | or whether we really love God.
00:01:09.000 | Test number one, is your love for God and your vision of God through the theology
00:01:18.000 | changing your life at the practical root?
00:01:24.000 | What you do, what you love to do, what you're entertained by,
00:01:29.000 | what your preferences are, the way you treat people, are you patient,
00:01:34.000 | are you killing sin by the Spirit, are you bearing the fruits of the Spirit?
00:01:40.000 | In other words, holiness of life is the mark of authentic faith
00:01:46.000 | in and through good theology.
00:01:49.000 | You can have a good theology and be a rotten person,
00:01:53.000 | and so it's the person who gets changed by authentic faith through right theology.
00:02:01.000 | James said, "Faith without works is dead."
00:02:05.000 | And so if we're not being changed from the inside out, then probably we're playing games.
00:02:12.000 | Number two, test number two, do you love to bear witness to the truth of the gospel
00:02:20.000 | as good news to people who need it,
00:02:24.000 | or do you only like to discuss it with people who already know it?
00:02:29.000 | In other words, the essence of biblical truth is news.
00:02:35.000 | Gospel means news, good news.
00:02:38.000 | And a lot of people seem to never get around to the newsishness of it.
00:02:43.000 | They're always analyzing it, and you want to shake them and say, "Hey, this is news!
00:02:49.000 | This is news! The King has come!
00:02:53.000 | Sins are forgiven! Hell and death and sin are overcome!
00:02:57.000 | Heaven is open! God is willing to be our friend!
00:03:00.000 | There's news in all the worlds!"
00:03:02.000 | If you have no inclination to tell anybody that as news, you've got a problem.
00:03:10.000 | I mean, something's deeply, deeply wrong.
00:03:13.000 | It's as though you're listening to the news at night,
00:03:17.000 | and you're just analyzing the grammar, grammar, grammar, grammar, grammar,
00:03:19.000 | and you don't ever hear anything coming out of the news that strikes you as either bad or good news.
00:03:25.000 | And Jesus said, "Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed."
00:03:31.000 | So we don't want to be around people and have no inclination to speak news into their lives.
00:03:39.000 | That's number two. Test number two.
00:03:40.000 | Test number three.
00:03:41.000 | Do you take risks with your life for the sake of the gospel?
00:03:47.000 | Your money, your career, your relationships?
00:03:51.000 | We know what we value by what we take risks for.
00:03:55.000 | Hebrews 10:34, "You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property,
00:04:00.000 | since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one."
00:04:05.000 | So the test of whether you really love your better possession
00:04:09.000 | is whether you're accepting the plundering of your property
00:04:14.000 | and taking risks to go visit people in prison.
00:04:16.000 | Here's the last test, number four.
00:04:18.000 | How does your theology serve you when you're suffering or dying?
00:04:23.000 | Ideas about God aren't going to cut it in those moments.
00:04:29.000 | Your fears will slice through that in a minute,
00:04:34.000 | and you will be terrified that ideas aren't going to save you.
00:04:38.000 | We show what is at the root of our commitments
00:04:43.000 | by how those commitments serve us in suffering.
00:04:48.000 | Paul said, "We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength
00:04:53.000 | that we despaired of life itself.
00:04:56.000 | Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death."
00:05:00.000 | And then he added, "That was to make us rely not on ourselves,
00:05:05.000 | but on God who raises the dead."
00:05:08.000 | So my question is, test number four,
00:05:10.000 | when the doctor--interesting, I just got a call today
00:05:14.000 | from a doctor following up on the hospitalization I had a while back.
00:05:18.000 | They did a second CT scan on my belly,
00:05:23.000 | and when I saw the number on the cell phone, I thought, "Okay."
00:05:30.000 | I didn't know whether he'd call or not, and he called,
00:05:33.000 | and he said, "Not a problem. Clear CT scan."
00:05:39.000 | So now at that moment,
00:05:44.000 | am I finding that the God who raises the dead
00:05:48.000 | is a sweet and all-sufficient rock,
00:05:54.000 | or am I panicking and realizing I've been playing games all my life?
00:06:00.000 | So I'll just give you a word for each test.
00:06:03.000 | Holiness, news, risk, and suffering.
00:06:08.000 | Those are our four possibilities, Evan, for how you might test yourself.
00:06:12.000 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you, Evan, for the question.
00:06:15.000 | If you have a question for Pastor John,
00:06:17.000 | especially a follow-up from an episode you may have heard in the past,
00:06:20.000 | please email those questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:06:23.000 | If you're in the app, you can just send us an email from right there.
00:06:26.000 | Tomorrow we will look at a question from a listener named Josh who asks,
00:06:30.000 | "Can I believe the whole Bible and still not be one of the elect?"
00:06:34.000 | That's a frightening question,
00:06:36.000 | but it's a question that's very common in the Ask Pastor John mailbag.
00:06:38.000 | We'll be back tomorrow to hear Pastor John's answer.
00:06:40.000 | Until then, I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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