How Do I Know If I Love the Gifts More Than the Giver?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:05.000 | Vicki from Wisconsin writes in to ask, "Often I hear that we are to love God for who He is, not for what He does for us, to love the giver more than the gifts.
00:00:14.000 | How do we know that we are doing this? When I examine my own heart, so much of what I know about God seems to be in relationship to what I enjoy based upon His work as my Creator, as my Redeemer, etc.
00:00:25.000 | I'm just not sure how I know how to separate that out. Perhaps I make it too complicated."
00:00:31.000 | Pastor John, what would you say to Vicki?
00:00:33.000 | She's probably not making it too complicated because it is complicated.
00:00:38.000 | But when we find things are complicated, probably we need to back up and look for a simple way to live.
00:00:46.000 | Because God doesn't mean for complication to paralyze us and to diminish our sense of enjoyment of Him or His gifts.
00:00:57.000 | So I would affirm, first of all, she's right.
00:01:01.000 | Experiencing God and Jesus through their gifts is inseparable from experiencing Him directly.
00:01:13.000 | Because we're creatures and we are creatures in bodies, and as embodied creatures, God has put us in a world to experience Him indirectly.
00:01:28.000 | He is not our gifts. He is not His gifts. He is different from His gifts.
00:01:34.000 | And yet, we experience Him through His gifts. And everybody knows that the love for a person and the love for their gifts are not the same.
00:01:48.000 | And yet, we experience love through gifts, through touch, through sight, through Christmas presents under the tree.
00:01:58.000 | And we also know, and this gets right, I think, close to the heart of the matter, is that if you love a person, if you love your wife,
00:02:06.000 | and she gave some thought to buying you a gift and puts it under the tree and you opened it on Christmas morning,
00:02:14.000 | you know that she will feel loved if you go bananas over this gift.
00:02:23.000 | If you lay the gift aside and say, "I really don't care about this, just you," well, that's going to get old, you know?
00:02:31.000 | However, if a man breaks into your house with a gun, puts the gun to her head and says, "I want your gift," or a killer,
00:02:39.000 | "Really? Are you kidding me? Take the gift," knucklehead, and the wife would, of course, would know that.
00:02:48.000 | You love me 10,000 times more than you love this gift. And yet, if he belittles this gift, if he turns away from this gift,
00:02:58.000 | he's not loving her well. And so, that's the way it is almost all the time with God in this world.
00:03:05.000 | Now, here's the catch that's making life hard for her and making her feel discouraged about this, and me too.
00:03:12.000 | Since the fall, we've got a major problem on our hands. I think before the fall, before we were sinners,
00:03:20.000 | before we humans were sinners, nobody experienced this problem. I think loving God and loving the things that God made
00:03:27.000 | were in perfect harmony and there was no idolatry in the world and no competition between God and His gifts
00:03:34.000 | because we were not sinners. Now we are sinners, which means we are spring-loaded to turn gifts into alternatives to God.
00:03:46.000 | And so, what does God do? Well, in this age, between our fall and our perfection at the Second Coming,
00:03:55.000 | is that He uses pleasure and pain to provide us with revelations of His goodness and protect us from loving substitutes.
00:04:07.000 | He uses a mixture. He brings pleasures into our life in order that we might know Him through those,
00:04:16.000 | and He brings pain into our life in order to show us that He is more important than the things.
00:04:26.000 | And there are texts that point to - I'm not just making that up, like, "Oh, that would be a nice structure of thought in order to help this go down."
00:04:34.000 | Romans 2, 4 says, "Don't you know that the kindness of God is meant to lead you to repentance?"
00:04:40.000 | So there you have God giving good things to unbelievers to lead them to repentance.
00:04:45.000 | Psalm 19, 1, "The heavens are telling the glory of God." So He's lavishing us day after day with sunrises and sunsets to get attention for His glory.
00:04:57.000 | In 1 Timothy 4, 3, where marriage and food are created to be received with thanksgiving.
00:05:05.000 | In 1 Timothy 6, 17, same thing, everything created richly for your enjoyment.
00:05:10.000 | So there's a whole slew of texts that describe the goodness of creation, all of it to say,
00:05:16.000 | "You have a good God, a lavish, generous Father. Turn to Him, love Him, be thankful to Him."
00:05:24.000 | And then, because we're fallen, that's not all God does. He calls us to a life of self-denial,
00:05:30.000 | and He says to Paul, "The reason you were unbearably crushed and despaired of life itself is so that you might rely upon Me."
00:05:38.000 | And Romans 5, 3, "Rejoice in tribulation, because it works patience, and patience works hope, and hope doesn't put us to shame."
00:05:46.000 | And so we're driven to hope in God because of tribulation.
00:05:50.000 | And Paul in Philippians 3 saying, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord."
00:05:59.000 | And fasting and self-denial. So I think the answer is that we should look at everything good that God gives us
00:06:08.000 | and see right into it and through it to Him as a good giver.
00:06:13.000 | We should remember that He's a person and that we should be willing to lose it all and say,
00:06:19.000 | "To die is gain," because He's more important than any of these things.
00:06:24.000 | And He's going to give it all back to us in the age to come when we're suited and fitted to receive it without any idolatry.
00:06:32.000 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:06:35.000 | Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:06:39.000 | At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper.
00:06:43.000 | I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.
00:06:45.000 | [end]
00:06:47.000 | [music]
00:06:49.000 | [music]
00:06:51.000 | [BLANK_AUDIO]