A listener named Fano writes in, "Hello Pastor John, if Christ is the only one that can truly satisfy my hunger for joy, why then do I seek to excel in what I do? What I do brings me joy, and I also feel like it brings glory to God too, but I get confused about joy.

If God is my joy, why do I care in making the perfect meal or writing the best paper for academia? Thank you for any help you have to offer." What would you say to Fano? I love this question, and I found myself, as I was thinking about it, just soaring.

I love to think about the relationships of the enjoyment of God with the things that God has made and the activities He designed us to perform. This question is so unbelievably important. So I, however, empathize with Fano's perplexity. It is one thing to enjoy the simplicity of delighting in God Himself and delighting in His gifts and delighting in activities that He's equipped us to do.

It's quite another thing to articulate with words how all of this fits together, without contradicting any scriptures and without demeaning any of God's gifts. So for those of you listening in who simply want to go on your way full of the Holy Spirit, overflowing with proper enjoyments without complicating your life with explanations in words that get all tangled up in complexity, then I say, with John Owen, I bid you farewell.

If you want to keep listening, I'm going to go into the tangle and see if we can sort it out. At least I need this very much, and it sounds like Fano does, too. So let me simply set the stage for the answer by drawing attention to a batch of relevant passages from the Bible which show that Fano's question is necessary.

It's demanded by text, not just by experience. So first you've got Psalm 73, 25, "Whom have I in heaven but you, O God? And there is nothing on earth I desire besides you." I mean, think of that statement, "Nothing on earth I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." And then you add to that Philippians 3, 8, where Paul says, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things. Count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ." I think the point of those passages is not to say there can be no legitimate pleasure in God's gifts. Too many other texts contradict that idea. But the point is, only in God, or supremely in God, we find our pleasure.

Those texts are intended to say that compared with God and compared with Christ's beauty, all other gifts, including rewarding activities that he gives us to do, are as nothing, like dust in the balances. That's how much our delight in God himself, how much the glory of God compares to the gifts, the glory of his gifts.

So I don't think those texts are designed in the Psalms or anywhere else as canceling out the legitimacy of a proper enjoyment of God's gifts. The big question is, okay, what does proper mean? And we start stumbling upon texts like this. Philippians 4, 11, "Therefore my brothers whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord." So here we have Paul, who just said he counts everything as rubbish compared to Christ describing the fruit of his apostolic labor in the people at Philippi as his joy and his crown.

And when he does it, he's not being an idolater. Then we have the same Paul saying in 1 Timothy 6, 17, "To the rich, don't be haughty, don't set your hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy." So set your hope on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.

So now we have an enormous material, relational, intellectual, artistic truckload of blessings poured out by God on us with the divine intention that we enjoy them without becoming idolaters. And then we have Paul saying to the Ephesian elders, and I'm going here because of Fano's question about activity, actions, he enjoys actions and behaviors and writing and so on.

Paul said in Acts 20, 35, "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, 'It is more blessed, happy, satisfying to give than to receive.'" In other words, if you are performing an act of giving, and that could be giving of any kind, right, it could be giving your time, giving your skill, giving your words, giving your money, then this should be experienced as blessedness.

In other words, it should be enjoyable. I think that's what that text says. He said the same thing in 2 Corinthians 9, 7, "Each one must give." Money is in mind, but any giving would be true. One must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, because God loves a cheerful giver.

In other words, when you're not merely receiving from God the enjoyment of his fellowship, but rather turning it outward towards other people and engaging in activities of giving yourself away, giving your gifts away, time, talent, giving it all away, you should be doing it with cheerfulness. You should be enjoying it.

And the same thing pops up in, I know Ecclesiastes is notoriously difficult to interpret, but I think we can agree that some things, however you interpret Ecclesiastes, some things are repeated so often, they're so unqualified, they're so related to God's will that we know they're intended by the inspired author to be embraced.

And here's an example, three examples. Ecclesiastes 2.24, "There's nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil." And then he adds, "This also I saw is the hand of God." And then Ecclesiastes 3.13, "Everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in his toil." And then he adds, "This is God's gift to man." And then chapter five, verse 19, "Everyone is to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil." And then he adds, "This is the gift of God." And of course, everything we've seen now, everything we've seen so far, fits in with God's original purpose for man on the planet, that we have meaningful work to do, and that was not a result of the fall that we have to work.

Rather, Genesis 1.28, "Before the fall, God blessed man," woman, "said, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it.'" Or when he put Adam in the garden, he said, it says, "The Lord took the man, put him in the garden to work it and keep it before the fall." And of course, before the fall, he didn't mean and find it boring and begrudged getting up in the morning.

He meant, "Go at it with all your heart and mind and find joy in it," just like Ecclesiastes said. So, here's my very short and tangled, and I think exciting, answer to how joy in God fits together with the calling that is on us to enjoy God's gifts and to enjoy the work that he gives us to do.

I've got three or four steps. Number one, our work and the enjoyment of it and the enjoyment of God's gifts in it is the overflow of joy in God himself. In other words, our enjoyment of our work or our enjoyment of God's gifts should be an enjoyment of honoring what God has given us and what he has done for us.

He causes us to enjoy his gifts as an overflow of the enjoyment of himself. And the reason I say that is because of 2 Corinthians 8, verse 2, "Their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed," there's my key word, and that's in the Bible, "have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part." So they are undertaking activities of giving and serving, and those very activities are called overflow of joy.

First, we taste the kindness of God in the gospel, and everything else becomes overflow. Second, in all our enjoyment of God's gifts, including the gift of meaningful work, we are tasting something of God himself in his gifts. God created things as good because he is good. They are expressions, they are aspects of his goodness, and we should learn to enjoy the sweetness of the peach because there is something of God's sweetness in the sweetness of the peach.

Third, when we do our work conscious of being created by God, dependent on God, gifted by God for certain work, motivated by God, being eager to do it as to God, then we can say that our very work is—this was kind of a fresh insight for me—our very work is an embodiment or an incarnation of the very glory of God that delights us, and thus we find our work delightful.

Delightful, precisely in proportion to the way it reflects the glory of God in which we delight. In other words, all the aspects of our working—think about it—all the aspects of our working are thinking, the working of our muscles, the working of our nerves, the working of our eyes and ears, the emotional capacities we have to relate to people, and on and on and on.

All the aspects of our working, all of this is designed by God to show the glory of God. And we love the glory of God. We delight in the glory of God. And when all of that comes into play in God-honoring work, we enjoy that work because we experience this work as the very embodiment of the glory of God.

How else could it be if God is creating all those possibilities for us as a demonstration of his glory? And finally, I would say all of our working, all of our ministry, all of our activity should be the pursuit of an enlargement, not just the overflow of, but the enlargement of our enjoyment of God himself, in the sense that we want the fruit of our lives to be such a display of the all-satisfying glory of God that other people see it.

Other people see it and come to share in it so that our joy in God is enlarged by their joy in God. So that's my best effort, Fano. I hope in the piling up of words, there is at least a smidgen of truth and insight that happens. Wonderful. Thank you, Pastor John.

Please keep up with all of our episodes with our free app for your phone. And of course, you can get the apps and send us your question, like Fano did. Today, you can send those in online at our online podcast home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, tomorrow, we're going to talk about the book of Ruth and why such an interesting little story holds cosmic importance, just like our own lives.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you tomorrow. "Ruth" by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cover by Artist.ly/Artist.ly