Do I Delight in God or in Others Being Impressed by My Discovery About God?
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00:00:05.000 | Brad from Mount Gilead, Ohio, who must be a Bible teacher or pastor because he asks this,
00:00:11.000 | "Pastor John, can you in your personal devotions check the impulse to want to think about how to teach what you're discovering in Scripture
00:00:20.000 | in order to simply enjoy it personally and devotionally?"
00:00:25.000 | What would you say to Brad?
00:00:26.000 | I really enjoy thinking about this question.
00:00:32.000 | The first flag I want to wave is a flag that celebrates the inseparable nature of seeing glory and saying what we've seen.
00:00:46.000 | In other words, I'm not sure that we should fret too much about the impulse of turning our seeing into saying.
00:00:57.000 | I wrote a whole book about this a year or two ago, so it's really important to me.
00:01:03.000 | I've thought a lot about it, and I'm eager to dive into this with Brad.
00:01:09.000 | I've tasted the dangers and the glories of what Brad is talking about.
00:01:16.000 | So we're reading the Bible. We see something new and fresh and amazing.
00:01:21.000 | We experience a flash of genuine enjoyment of what it shows us about God.
00:01:27.000 | And then there's an almost immediate impulse to begin shaping it for a conversation or an email or a devotional thought or a sermon
00:01:37.000 | or a lecture or a blog post or a poem or a tweet.
00:01:41.000 | I mean, this is real dangerous stuff.
00:01:44.000 | And it can feel in that moment as though we have lost the authenticity of our enjoyment of communing with God in the truth we have seen.
00:01:55.000 | That is a real danger that Brad's put his finger on.
00:01:58.000 | I don't want to minimize it.
00:02:00.000 | I want to agree the danger is there.
00:02:03.000 | In fact, I think the danger, at least in my experience, is first that the impulse to plan to teach or restate in some way what I've seen
00:02:17.000 | may reveal that my enjoyment is not really in the Lord himself at that moment,
00:02:25.000 | but rather in the intellectual process of making the discovery
00:02:32.000 | and in the impulse—I mean, if that impulse to go on and teach that reveals that to me, reveals that insidious deception,
00:02:42.000 | to me it has served me well.
00:02:44.000 | And I want to be on my face in repentance pleading with the Lord to deliver me from the bondage to that kind of intellectualism
00:02:52.000 | that finds more pleasure in the processes of intellectual discovery in the Bible than the glorious one we've discovered.
00:03:01.000 | So that's the first aspect of the danger as I've experienced it and I think Brad is describing.
00:03:08.000 | The second part of the danger is that the impulse to turn my insights into, say, a teaching plan or a blog or something
00:03:21.000 | may signal that I crave recognition from an audience for what I've seen.
00:03:30.000 | So my pleasure is not so much in what I've seen as in the approval others are going to give me for seeing it.
00:03:39.000 | How horribly insidious and dangerous this is.
00:03:45.000 | If my impulse to teach reveals that to me, again, I'm on my face, I'm pleading, "Oh God, deliver me from that kind of vain glory."
00:03:56.000 | So Brad is right to be concerned about this and I think there are steps we can take to minimize those dangers
00:04:05.000 | and maximize the benefits and I'll mention those in just a minute.
00:04:10.000 | What I've discovered over the years is that I am helped to see more of God and more of his ways in the Word
00:04:22.000 | precisely by the impulse to turn seeing into saying.
00:04:26.000 | So this is the positive side now.
00:04:28.000 | It's not just dangers that come from this impulse.
00:04:32.000 | There are positive things.
00:04:34.000 | It's precisely the effort to find words, effective, compelling, awakening words,
00:04:43.000 | which bring greater clarity, greater depth to the first flash of insight.
00:04:51.000 | So that's the first positive thing.
00:04:53.000 | Now I suspect the reason God set it up that way relates to the second positive dimension of this impulse,
00:05:02.000 | namely that by its nature, by its very nature, the enjoyment of God himself and all his ways is essentially centrifugal.
00:05:16.000 | In other words, as our minds circle, orbit around some glorious sight, discovery about God and his Word,
00:05:26.000 | viewing it with joy from all the angles as we orbit the thing we've seen,
00:05:32.000 | the very circling of the mind to see the beauty of the truth tends to fling the mind outward where people are
00:05:42.000 | so that they can be drawn into this orbit of seeing.
00:05:47.000 | I think that belongs to the very nature of the truth of God, the very nature of God.
00:05:54.000 | He is not a privatistic God.
00:05:57.000 | He is a very public God.
00:05:59.000 | He is a displaying God, a communicating God, an expansive God.
00:06:04.000 | So it's not surprising to me that not only would our seeing become centrifugal almost immediately,
00:06:15.000 | but that he would design for that centrifugal impulse that it would be a way of seeing more.
00:06:25.000 | That seems exactly the way God would be.
00:06:29.000 | And the third positive thing I would say about this impulse that Brad feels to teach something that he's seen almost immediately when he's seen it and enjoyed it,
00:06:41.000 | the third thing is that the teaching or the writing is not a separate thing from the enjoyment of what we have seen,
00:06:53.000 | but is the overflow of it.
00:06:57.000 | It's the extension or the expansion of the enjoyment.
00:07:00.000 | So teaching, at least this is what it ought to be, I think, teaching is not strictly a mere second step after enjoyment,
00:07:11.000 | but is an extension of the enjoyment itself.
00:07:15.000 | Otherwise, I think teaching becomes inauthentic.
00:07:21.000 | And that can be a danger almost as great as the original inauthenticity of the enjoyment,
00:07:30.000 | that that would be if we only had the enjoyment in order to teach it.
00:07:36.000 | So it cuts both ways.
00:07:38.000 | For teaching to be authentic, it must be an extension of that joy, I think.
00:07:44.000 | Otherwise, it's just not Christian teaching of glorious truth.
00:07:49.000 | And the last thing, maybe the fourth thing, I've lost count, the fourth observation that's positive about this impulse is that to aim at the building of faith,
00:08:03.000 | to aim at the refining of holiness, to aim at the empowering of mission in the lives of those we teach,
00:08:11.000 | those aims are organically, inseparably, essentially related to the expansion and extension of the enjoyment of God that we have experienced.
00:08:25.000 | This very enjoyment is what we want to happen in the world.
00:08:31.000 | More and more and more people coming to see and savor the glory of God's grace.
00:08:37.000 | That's what faith is.
00:08:38.000 | That's what holiness is.
00:08:40.000 | That's what the mission is about.
00:08:43.000 | So I'll end here.
00:08:45.000 | The steps that I think Brad should take to minimize the dangers, maximize the benefits, is first, and he's already doing this,
00:08:55.000 | test your heart to see if you are enjoying God authentically and supremely,
00:09:01.000 | or if you're enjoying the process of discovering things about God more than you're enjoying God himself.
00:09:09.000 | So do a self-check there.
00:09:11.000 | Number two, and this is the most practical thing I have found,
00:09:16.000 | pause repeatedly when meditating on the scriptures and actually tell God how much you are enjoying what you have seen.
00:09:27.000 | Tell him. Tell him.
00:09:29.000 | Talk to him about how good he is and beautiful he is and wise he is and just he is.
00:09:35.000 | Build into your meditation a time, for example, to sing to him.
00:09:41.000 | I find this to be a great test of my soul.
00:09:45.000 | Am I in such a hurry to finish my reading, get on with saying it somewhere,
00:09:53.000 | or to read more, to get more insight, that I find it to be annoying to pause and sing to God about his goodness?
00:10:08.000 | Or am I ready to pause, ready to soak, ready to say to God?
00:10:15.000 | I find that to be a barometer of the temperature of my authenticity that really works better than any other barometer.
00:10:24.000 | And the third thing, practically, I'd say to Brad is when the mind is drawn out by the impulse to teach or speak or write or whatever,
00:10:33.000 | say what you have seen.
00:10:35.000 | Make sure that you view this not merely as a way of saying but as a way of seeing more of God by saying
00:10:47.000 | and make sure that all you're teaching is the overflow, the authentic overflow of your enjoyment.
00:10:54.000 | Boy, those are really beautiful implications we all need.
00:10:57.000 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:10:59.000 | And alluded to earlier in the episode is John Piper's book, "Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully,"
00:11:04.000 | a book you can download for free at DesiringGod.org/books.
00:11:09.000 | Well, tomorrow we have another great question.
00:11:11.000 | This one comes from a podcast listener who notices all the promises in the Psalms that are given to the righteous.
00:11:18.000 | So who qualifies in God's book to be the righteous, and how can we qualify?
00:11:23.000 | John Piper is back tomorrow to explain.
00:11:26.000 | Don't miss this episode.
00:11:27.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:11:28.000 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
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