Five Strategies for Avoiding Intellectualism
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, you have for years stressed an approach to Reformed Theology that is both
00:00:05.880 | hard thinking and deep feeling.
00:00:08.840 | Each of us will tend to fall on one side or the other here, either into an anti-intellectual
00:00:13.880 | feeling or an anti-feeling intellectualism.
00:00:18.220 | Both are to be avoided.
00:00:19.460 | In today's question, a listener wants to know this.
00:00:22.360 | Dear Pastor John, in your 30 plus years of ministry, what have you practically done to
00:00:26.440 | avoid mere intellectualism, a cold academic study in your Bible reading and in your exposition?
00:00:34.720 | What would you say?
00:00:35.920 | The first thing I would say is that I need to be, we need to be deeply persuaded that
00:00:45.720 | this really, really matters, this non-cold, non-intellectualistic, warm, practical, affectionate
00:00:58.200 | relation to the living Christ.
00:01:00.420 | We need to be persuaded this really matters because there are a lot of people out there,
00:01:05.240 | I keep bumping into them, there are a lot of people out there who either for personality
00:01:10.140 | reasons or sometimes theological reasons think it doesn't matter what your emotions do.
00:01:15.600 | That is, they think emotions are the caboose at the end of the train.
00:01:20.400 | They're just not essential at all.
00:01:24.240 | And it sounds like the person who wrote this question is persuaded that they matter and
00:01:31.680 | it might be good to ask why.
00:01:34.320 | And here's my reason.
00:01:35.840 | The first and greatest commandment is not to know the Lord our God, which is of course
00:01:42.080 | assumed, but to love the Lord your God, and that includes with all your heart.
00:01:49.720 | And Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians, "If you don't love the Lord, you are accursed."
00:01:57.560 | Love the Lord.
00:01:58.560 | And Jesus says, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever
00:02:03.160 | loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me."
00:02:05.680 | In other words, the love that we must have isn't just a kind of dutiful commandment-keeping
00:02:11.880 | love.
00:02:12.880 | That's not what you have for your kids or your parents.
00:02:18.120 | It's the deepest, heartfelt, affectionate, relative kind of love, the kind we have for
00:02:24.400 | mother and father and son and daughter.
00:02:26.460 | Only more, more for Jesus.
00:02:28.720 | And if we don't have it, we're not worthy of Jesus.
00:02:31.720 | So this is the first thing I would say.
00:02:34.680 | We must be totally, John Piper must be totally persuaded that knowing God truly without loving
00:02:42.920 | him duly is eternally deadly.
00:02:45.920 | Deadly.
00:02:46.920 | I must be persuaded of that.
00:02:48.840 | So I'm trembling at the thought that I could go about my academic work or my scholarly
00:02:53.880 | work or my writing work or preaching work or study work in some kind of cold frame with
00:03:00.400 | no awakened love for God, affection for God.
00:03:04.800 | So the quest for overcoming what he's referring to as intellectualism is a life and death
00:03:11.480 | battle.
00:03:12.480 | That's the first thing.
00:03:13.480 | Second thing I would say is that we should therefore read all things, Scripture and everything
00:03:21.000 | else, especially the Word, the Scripture, but also the world and everything in it.
00:03:26.240 | We should read everything on the lookout for evidences of God's value, not just evidences
00:03:35.020 | of his truth.
00:03:37.120 | The devil owns that God is true and probably knows more true things about God than we do.
00:03:46.340 | But the devil will not own that God is supremely valuable and supremely satisfying.
00:03:53.520 | The devil values himself above God.
00:03:58.280 | God's presence gives no joy and no satisfaction to the devil whatsoever.
00:04:03.880 | Therefore our aim in reading the Bible should not be demonic.
00:04:09.680 | We're not aiming to rise just to the level of the devil.
00:04:14.080 | Our aim is, of course, to see what is really there and what is true about God, but always
00:04:20.360 | more, always more, namely with a view to feeling what is valuable about God, treasuring the
00:04:28.640 | treasure that God is.
00:04:31.000 | The aim is to see the millions of reasons why God is a treasure, not just the millions
00:04:37.640 | of evidence that God exists or has certain attributes.
00:04:43.040 | All of our theological refinement should be for the sake of doxological embrace and enjoyment.
00:04:52.360 | This affects the way you read.
00:04:53.900 | This is what I try to do.
00:04:54.900 | I try to read.
00:04:56.000 | You read on the lookout for evidences of value, evidences of preciousness, evidences that
00:05:02.840 | he's beautiful and sweet and satisfying.
00:05:08.360 | Peter says in 1 Peter 2, verses 1 to 3, "Long for the pure spiritual milk," and I think
00:05:19.320 | he means milk of the Word, "that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you
00:05:25.800 | have tasted that the Lord is good."
00:05:29.520 | Well, what's the point of that "if," "if you have tasted"?
00:05:34.360 | The point is that all the drinking in the world without tasting will not grow us up
00:05:43.120 | into salvation.
00:05:44.840 | The aim of drinking the Word is tasting the Savior.
00:05:50.480 | It's the tasting that is the nutritional encounter with the living God that grows us up into
00:05:57.880 | salvation.
00:05:58.880 | That's the second thing I would say.
00:06:02.040 | In all of our reading, be on the lookout for evidences of God's value, not just evidences
00:06:10.180 | of his truth, which leads now to the third thing that I would say, namely, that the goal
00:06:17.440 | of valuing or treasuring or feeling the preciousness of or enjoying the beauty of God in all of
00:06:26.520 | our reading confronts me immediately with the impossibility on my part of making it
00:06:33.360 | happen.
00:06:34.960 | You can't make yourself value God.
00:06:38.520 | You can make yourself read.
00:06:40.120 | You can make yourself list off attributes of God that you see.
00:06:44.700 | You can make yourselves list off ways that God behaves, but you can't make yourself feel
00:06:51.640 | how wonderful they are.
00:06:54.520 | That's why the psalmist cries out, "Open my eyes that I may see wonders in your words."
00:07:01.120 | So this third point is pray, pray, pray.
00:07:06.100 | And we pray not only for illumination to see what is really there about God, but to feel.
00:07:14.080 | We pray Psalm 90, verse 14, "Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love."
00:07:19.880 | Why in the world would the psalmist pray that, except that the human heart doesn't naturally
00:07:25.480 | feel it when it hears and sees the beauties of God?
00:07:29.440 | God has to work this.
00:07:30.440 | We ask God to make us satisfied in God.
00:07:34.360 | So prayer is absolutely essential that not only that my eyes would be open, but that
00:07:39.600 | my affections would be awakened.
00:07:43.160 | Fourth thing I would say is that beyond the Bible, I read authors who have understood
00:07:52.480 | God deeply and felt him mightily and expressed both the understanding and the feeling with
00:08:00.240 | clarity and power.
00:08:01.620 | For me, that has been mainly Edwards, Jonathan Edwards, and John Owen, and C.S. Lewis, and
00:08:08.200 | the Puritans.
00:08:09.700 | You need to find the great seers of God and the great lovers of God and the great expressors
00:08:19.180 | of the seeing and the loving.
00:08:21.800 | I know you, Tony, would put John Newton in that category, and so would I, kind of a latter-day
00:08:28.160 | Puritan who saw things deeply and expressed things beautifully and felt things deeply.
00:08:35.040 | So that's number four.
00:08:36.320 | And finally, I would say open your mouth and bear witness to family and friends and neighbors
00:08:47.680 | and colleagues to the beauty of God and your joy in him.
00:08:52.420 | It's precisely in giving expression to our joy that intensifies the joy itself.
00:09:00.520 | A shared joy is a doubled joy.
00:09:05.100 | God loves mission.
00:09:07.840 | God loves witness.
00:09:09.560 | God loves sharing.
00:09:11.240 | God loves loving people.
00:09:14.040 | And he does not love hoarding.
00:09:18.280 | Therefore, when we turn our affections, when we turn on our affections and express them,
00:09:28.240 | express them to other people, God is pleased and our joy is intensified.
00:09:35.080 | So those are my five strategies against cold intellectualism.
00:09:41.300 | There are lots more strategies, but maybe that's enough to set the trajectory of discovery.
00:09:47.140 | Yeah, sure is.
00:09:48.140 | Amen.
00:09:49.140 | Thank you, Pastor John, for those five strategies, and I appreciate the shout-out to John Newton
00:09:54.160 | and his focus on the affections, on the desires of the heart, which became the focus of my
00:09:59.380 | book.
00:10:00.380 | Pastor John, you alluded to this, and you wrote the foreword for it.
00:10:03.180 | It's titled, "Newton on the Christian Life to Live is Christ."
00:10:07.380 | At least you will enjoy the foreword by Pastor John.
00:10:09.740 | I know that much.
00:10:10.980 | And for more strategies from Pastor John, see his book, "When I Don't Desire God."
00:10:15.620 | There's a lot more there on this theme.
00:10:18.180 | Well, is Christian hedonism only for complementarians, or is it something that can be shared by egalitarians
00:10:24.140 | as well?
00:10:25.140 | And what do those terms even mean to begin with?
00:10:27.160 | We return on Wednesday, and Pastor John will answer a pretty interesting question from
00:10:30.420 | a listener on this topic.
00:10:32.580 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then.
00:10:34.940 | [END]
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00:10:37.440 | 2.
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00:10:39.440 | 3.
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00:10:41.440 | 4.
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00:10:43.440 | 5.