Why Is the Ministry Called ‘Desiring God’?
00:00:00.000 | Well, on Monday, we opened the week talking about the relationship between Christian hedonism
00:00:07.880 | and historic reform theology. And Wednesday, we looked at what Pastor John's fears and
00:00:13.060 | hopes for Christian hedonism are after he's gone. And today, we look at the title Desiring
00:00:18.360 | God Itself and some alternatives. The question is from Trent in Columbus, Ohio. Pastor John,
00:00:24.220 | I was recently celebrating the impact of your ministry with a friend at Chick-fil-A of all
00:00:29.080 | places. We were both stumped by a question. It's this, "How did you arrive at the name
00:00:34.760 | Desiring God when so much of the ministry is not merely aspirational, but is focused
00:00:40.120 | on the actual act of enjoying God Himself in Bible reading and in sermons, for example?
00:00:46.640 | Why not something more accurate like delighting in God?" Pastor John, what would you say to
00:00:51.640 | Trent?
00:00:52.640 | I like this question. It's a good question. It's an insightful question, and the answer
00:00:57.880 | will, I think, be illuminating. Trying to answer it really does reveal a great deal
00:01:05.020 | about the nature of Christian hedonism and a little bit about me. Maybe a lot about me.
00:01:13.120 | I'll give you six reasons, all right, why the book has the title Desiring God. And some
00:01:21.600 | of them are more substantial than others, but they all figure in, I think. Number one,
00:01:27.880 | back when the book was being written between 1983 and 1987, two books were very influential,
00:01:36.240 | popular, significant, that I admired very much, Knowing God by J.I. Packer and Loving
00:01:43.320 | God by Charles Colson. As an utterly unknown writer, me in those days, I had the wild and
00:01:51.320 | crazy dream that maybe my little book could someday be viewed as part of that trajectory
00:02:00.240 | by those great men, right? So it seemed like Desiring God would fit with Knowing God and
00:02:09.920 | Loving God and Desiring God. Was that vain or what? I don't know. It was a dream. Number
00:02:17.440 | two, alternative titles didn't fit my sense of what might be arresting and intriguing
00:02:24.720 | and provocative and true, some of my criteria. For example, delighting seemed to be a word
00:02:34.060 | very few people use except in more refined settings. Enjoying God and rejoicing in God
00:02:42.440 | seemed to me to have the feeling of too much religiosity and not enough ordinariness. Happy
00:02:50.520 | can't be made a verb in English, and the phrase being happy in God sounded cheesy. So when
00:02:58.760 | it came down to it, Desiring God simply had the right sound and the right connotations
00:03:04.260 | for the impact I wanted the title to have. And of course, I could have been wrong. Number
00:03:09.560 | three, as I recall in those days, a cluster of texts was having a tremendous effect on
00:03:18.120 | me for good by awakening in me strong longings for God. Texts like Psalm 73, "You guide me
00:03:28.220 | with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven
00:03:32.240 | but you, and there's nothing on earth I desire besides you? My flesh and my heart may fail
00:03:39.440 | you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever." Or Psalm 42, "As a deer pants for
00:03:45.080 | the flowing stream, so my soul pants for you, O God, my soul thirsts for God." Or Psalm
00:03:54.080 | 63, "O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints
00:04:02.280 | for you." All those texts seemed to point toward the profound importance of having a
00:04:08.840 | heart that continually desires—desires God. Pants for God, thirst for God, seeks for God,
00:04:15.720 | faints for God. So that just seemed like, "Whoa, this is biblical!"
00:04:22.000 | Number four, it was clear to me then, and it is even clearer now, how many years later,
00:04:29.960 | that every experience of delight or joy or satisfaction or happiness or contentment or
00:04:37.840 | cherishing or restfulness—every single experience in this present time and world
00:04:44.920 | of God's goodness and God's wisdom and God's love, no matter how deep, no matter how sweet,
00:04:50.280 | no matter how transforming, will be a mere taste of what is coming to us on the other
00:04:59.520 | side of the grave and in the resurrection. Which means that even when we have experiences
00:05:06.320 | that are full of real joy in God now, they are dominated by experiences of desire. Because
00:05:17.000 | genuine, spiritual, Christ-exalting joy is rooted in an infinite reality, and we are
00:05:26.600 | prevented from feeling appropriate, full, all-satisfying responses to that reality by
00:05:34.280 | our finitude, and in this life, by our sin. Therefore, the concept of desire as central
00:05:42.960 | to the book is because it's central to the Christian life. It's not an arbitrary choice;
00:05:49.560 | it's built into our finitude. The very best experiences of joy in this world are incomplete,
00:05:59.160 | and therefore baked in is desire. Number five, no doubt I was influenced by C.S. Lewis. Nobody
00:06:08.880 | in my experience captured the utterly crucial dimension of human longing—Zehnsucht, German,
00:06:17.440 | he used that phrase—longing in this world as evidence of the next world. Desire was
00:06:25.800 | the very reality that brought C.S. Lewis to Christ, and desire remained a hallmark of
00:06:32.120 | all his experiences of God. And he just had a—I just found everything he wrote on this—well,
00:06:38.160 | yeah, that's right! Number six, my own experience certainly played a huge role in the choice
00:06:45.160 | of desiring God. I don't have the sharpness of mind or the penetrating analytical abilities
00:06:51.680 | of a Lewis, or the capacities to observe the world like Lewis does. He's just off the charts
00:06:57.120 | superior to me. But everything he said about longing of my heart in this finite fallen
00:07:06.480 | world as ever-reaching, ever-grasping, ever-stretching to something beyond, and never being content
00:07:14.960 | with the present experience of ultimate reality, all of it rang true, deeply true to me, and
00:07:20.960 | does to this day. I am fundamentally a desirer. That's my life. In a sense, all I do—I thought
00:07:31.320 | about this sentence, now I'm going to say it—in a sense, all I do in this world is
00:07:38.080 | direct, intensify, or diminish my desires. That's all I do. That's my life. And it wouldn't
00:07:49.520 | be wrong to paraphrase Christian hedonism like this, "God is most glorified in us when
00:07:56.840 | we cleave to him alone for the ultimate satisfaction of all our desires." As far as I can remember,
00:08:06.720 | those are the reasons that I named the book Desiring God.
00:08:13.520 | Very insightful, helpful look back on the origins of that title. Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:18.040 | And thanks for listening to the podcast over at our online home. You can explore all of
00:08:21.120 | our episodes in our archive of about 1,300 episodes to date. There you can find a list
00:08:25.160 | of our most popular episodes, read full transcripts, and send us questions. You might be wrestling
00:08:29.560 | with yourself. Do all that at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:08:35.600 | Well there are introverts and there are extroverts, and that's the topic Monday. Specifically,
00:08:41.000 | how should we think about particular ways God has wired us? Some who are energized by
00:08:44.700 | being around others and others who are energized by being away from people. Specifically for
00:08:49.780 | introverts, how do we guard against social selfishness? That is the question on Monday
00:08:56.800 | when we return. I'm looking forward to that one. I'm your host Tony Reike. We'll see you
00:09:00.120 | then.
00:09:00.320 | [End of Audio]
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