Isn’t God Most Glorified in Me When I Am Most Self-Giving?
00:00:00.000 | Well, the place of our loving sacrifice in relationship to our delight in God is a point
00:00:10.160 | of constant discussion when it comes to Christian hedonism.
00:00:14.220 | So what glorifies God more, our self-sacrifice or our delight in God?
00:00:20.200 | The question today comes from a listener named Kobe.
00:00:22.720 | "Hello, Pastor Jon.
00:00:23.720 | Thank you for this podcast.
00:00:25.360 | My question is why you emphasize our joy in God as more vital to what most glorifies
00:00:30.680 | God than our love for God and for others.
00:00:34.440 | The greatest commandment is love, which sums up the whole law.
00:00:38.760 | God is love, the Bible says.
00:00:40.520 | God is not joy, not in the same way as he is love.
00:00:46.160 | Isn't it better to say God is most glorified in us when we are most self-giving and loving
00:00:51.940 | towards others?"
00:00:53.680 | I think I would respond by asking this question.
00:00:57.840 | Which is more vital to a rainbow, colors or light?
00:01:04.620 | Now, if you would have a hard time answering that question, maybe you would see why I would
00:01:12.840 | have a hard time answering the question, "Which is more vital to glorifying God, love for
00:01:19.340 | God or joy in God?"
00:01:23.600 | So let me see if I can unpack this illustration of the rainbow and then point to some biblical
00:01:31.760 | passages that might shed light on what I'm trying to say.
00:01:36.500 | I'm picturing a rainbow as the event of God being glorified, and I'm suggesting that the
00:01:45.120 | colors of the rainbow correspond to loving God.
00:01:52.520 | And I would go so far as to say that the colors in the spectrum of the rainbow—red, orange,
00:01:58.400 | yellow, green, blue, violet—correspond to acts of the human heart which would constitute
00:02:06.220 | loving God, like admiration, adoration, submission, treasuring him, desiring to please him, desiring
00:02:20.960 | to be near him.
00:02:22.680 | All of those acts of the heart, which are all more basic and more vital than any external
00:02:29.480 | movements of the muscles or the body, all those acts of the heart are all what love
00:02:36.920 | for God is.
00:02:39.600 | If we love him, we admire him and adore him and submit to him and treasure him and desire
00:02:47.360 | to please him and desire to be near him.
00:02:50.800 | Then in the analogy, I compare joy in God, not to the rainbow with its spectrum of colors,
00:02:59.600 | but to light.
00:03:02.320 | And the implication is this.
00:03:05.440 | Light is essential—we could use the word "vital" to use Kobe's word—light is essential,
00:03:15.520 | is vital to all those colors and thus to the rainbow itself.
00:03:21.720 | No joy in God, no true admiration.
00:03:25.240 | No joy in God, no true adoration.
00:03:28.960 | No joy in God, no true submission.
00:03:31.880 | It would only be legalistic.
00:03:34.200 | No joy in God, no treasuring of God.
00:03:37.100 | No joy in God, no desire to please him or be near him in a way that would honor him.
00:03:45.200 | So I can't play off love for God and joy in God, because joy in God is what makes love
00:03:53.160 | for God love for God.
00:03:55.880 | No rainbow without light.
00:03:58.200 | No love for God without joy in God.
00:04:01.360 | In other words, what I'm trying to do in Christian hedonism, which is what I call this
00:04:08.360 | vision of reality that Kobe's asking about, what I'm trying to do in Christian hedonism
00:04:17.320 | is define what God-honoring love for God is.
00:04:25.400 | Until we try to do this, it's just a word.
00:04:28.920 | And I suspect that many people try to fill up the word, or they just default to filling
00:04:36.480 | up the word love with meanings that are not biblical.
00:04:40.540 | They're not God-honoring.
00:04:42.720 | What does it mean when Jesus says to love God with all your heart, which is deeper than
00:04:50.800 | all your mind, deeper than all your strength, deeper than all your soul, because it's the
00:04:57.480 | affectional animating center of the soul or the person.
00:05:02.140 | And I think a lot of people answer this question by defaulting to something like John 14, 15,
00:05:08.840 | "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," and misread it by saying that love consists
00:05:18.480 | in self-sacrificing bodily activity of commandment keeping.
00:05:23.360 | Because he said, "If you love me, you'll keep my commandments," which is emphatically
00:05:26.880 | not what he says.
00:05:30.900 | He distinguishes love for himself and commandment keeping.
00:05:36.840 | He says, "If you love me, then you will keep my commandments."
00:05:41.680 | They're not the same.
00:05:42.980 | They're emphatically not the same.
00:05:44.920 | They're not the same.
00:05:47.440 | They're different.
00:05:48.440 | If you do one, the other will happen.
00:05:51.800 | Does not say love is keeping the commandments.
00:05:55.800 | It says love is one thing, and if you do it, if you have it, then the commandment keeping
00:06:01.540 | will follow.
00:06:02.540 | It will be the result.
00:06:03.540 | There's something prior, something internal, something massive and deep and distinctive.
00:06:11.040 | When I read the Bible words, "Delight yourself in the Lord," Psalm 37, 4, "Be glad in the
00:06:18.300 | Lord," Psalm 32, 11, "Rejoice in the Lord," Philippians 3, 1.
00:06:23.840 | I hear God calling me, calling for a heart response to him that is essential to all other
00:06:35.480 | God-exalting responses.
00:06:38.240 | In other words, if you try to pick out a kind of heart response to God and call it love,
00:06:45.200 | like admiration or adoration or submission or treasuring or desiring, none of those would
00:06:53.440 | be authentic or God-exalting if delight in the Lord and gladness in the Lord and rejoicing
00:07:03.640 | in the Lord were stripped out of them.
00:07:07.320 | You should try it.
00:07:08.660 | See what happens to adoration and admiration and submission and treasuring and desiring.
00:07:14.820 | If you try to conceive of them in a heart that does not find God himself delightful
00:07:24.940 | and satisfying.
00:07:27.340 | So my answer to the first half of Kobe's question, "Why does Piper emphasize joy in God as more
00:07:37.700 | vital to what most glorifies God than love for God?"
00:07:44.940 | My answer is, I don't play them off against each other because they are not two different
00:07:51.260 | ways of glorifying God.
00:07:53.740 | Loving God is the magnificent spectrum-laden rainbow that glorifies God, and the light
00:08:01.860 | of joy in God is what makes the rainbow the rainbow.
00:08:07.060 | So when David says, King David in the Old Testament, when he says in Psalm 40, verse
00:08:12.980 | 16, "May all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you.
00:08:19.820 | May those who love your salvation say continually, 'Great is the Lord.'"
00:08:26.100 | He is showing that rejoicing in God and being glad in God is at the essence of what loving
00:08:35.300 | God and his salvation is.
00:08:39.900 | Now we don't have time to adequately answer Kobe's second question, namely, "Why does
00:08:45.260 | Piper think that joy in God is more vital to glorifying God than loving people?"
00:08:52.140 | After all, Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before others so that they may see your
00:08:57.220 | good works," and those are clearly works towards people, love towards people, "that they may
00:09:02.220 | see your loving good works towards people, and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
00:09:07.180 | Yes and amen."
00:09:08.180 | Oh, that we might all do more loving acts towards people that God might get glory.
00:09:16.260 | Now my answer to that question that he just asked is basically the same as my answer to
00:09:21.020 | the first half of the question.
00:09:23.540 | Do all good works glorify God?
00:09:27.780 | Do not.
00:09:29.260 | There are many good works that do not please or glorify God.
00:09:34.220 | Hypocritical good works, selfish good works, self-exalting good works, all kinds of good
00:09:40.780 | works that do good for people that are sinful, don't have any God in them at all.
00:09:47.340 | Though I give my body to be burned and have not love, I'm nothing.
00:09:51.660 | Give away all I have to feed the poor and have not love, I'm nothing.
00:09:54.740 | There are lots of good works that don't honor God.
00:09:59.580 | Whatever is not from faith is sin.
00:10:02.180 | And if I had time, I would argue, especially from texts like 2 Corinthians 8.2 and 9.7
00:10:10.860 | and Romans 8.12 and Hebrews 13.17 and Micah 6.8, that—I would argue this—that God-exalting
00:10:19.420 | love for people is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.
00:10:28.980 | So it would be wrong to think in terms of joy in God being more or less glorifying toward
00:10:36.620 | God than love to people is glorifying toward God, because there is no such thing as authentic
00:10:46.540 | God-honoring love for people without joy in God.
00:10:55.040 | So bottom line, in my Christian hedonism, delighting in God, being glad in God, rejoicing
00:11:03.380 | in God, being satisfied in God, all those biblical categories are not alternatives to
00:11:11.700 | loving God or loving people.
00:11:14.540 | They are what makes love for God and love for people authentic, God-honoring.
00:11:21.420 | Amen.
00:11:22.420 | So many great texts here to study in this discussion.
00:11:26.100 | Thanks, Pastor John.
00:11:27.100 | I would encourage you, if you mainly listen to this podcast in audio form or if you listen
00:11:31.660 | through YouTube, when there's an episode like this one with a lot of key texts, you
00:11:35.420 | can go to DesiringGod.org and find the full transcript of what was just said, and there
00:11:40.540 | you can spend more time carefully studying and meditating through the texts that Pastor
00:11:45.140 | John introduces into these episodes.
00:11:48.860 | However you join us, thank you for making the Ask Pastor John podcast a part of your
00:11:52.540 | day.
00:11:53.540 | You can stay current with our new episodes on your phone by subscribing through your
00:11:56.380 | preferred podcast app or through the APJ app, or even now through the DG YouTube channel.
00:12:02.820 | To search our past episodes or browse our most popular episodes or to send in a question
00:12:06.580 | of your own, do those things at our online home.
00:12:09.220 | That's DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:13.980 | Well speaking of key scripture passages, is my body my friend or is my body my foe?
00:12:22.140 | It's a question we must ask and it's a question we can answer with scripture.
00:12:27.620 | And the question is up next on Monday when we return.
00:12:30.540 | Until then, I'm your host Tony Reinke.
00:12:31.940 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with longtime author and pastor, John
00:12:36.500 | Piper.
00:12:37.500 | We'll see you Monday.
00:12:37.500 | [End of Audio]
00:12:38.000 | �
00:12:39.000 | �
00:12:40.000 | �
00:12:41.000 | �
00:12:42.000 | �
00:12:43.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]