Well, building a ministry around joy in God leads to a lot of good and important questions that we need to think through. Specifically, today, if our ministry centers on joy, then doesn't this invite sort of an emotional roller coaster type of rhythm into our lives? It's a really important question today from an anonymous listener who writes in to ask this.

"Pastor John, I struggle with thinking that feelings, feelings of peace, love, and joy are the validation and the thermometer of my relationship with God. Thus, my relationship often feels like a roller coaster. I often feel discouraged and anxious when my heart isn't moved with emotion during my time with God.

On the other hand, I am cautious to seek purely emotional highs because I know they can be misleading or even false. Pastor John, what would you say to me?" This question really matters to me because I'm a Christian hedonist. I tell people that the affections of the heart matter just as much, even more, than the thoughts of the mind.

I make the case over and over again that Christian faith, saving faith, is not merely intellectual assent to doctrines, but the heart embrace of the truth, of the person who makes the truth true. I tell people to devote their lives to pursuing satisfaction in God because God is most glorified in them when they are most satisfied in Him.

I utterly reject the notion that faith can be neatly separated from feelings like a caboose at the end of the train can be dropped off with no great loss. It's not the way the Bible talks about the Christian faith, as though this train could go on chugging down with no love for God burning in the engine.

When Jesus Himself said, "Whoever loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me," Matthew 10:37. I think the effort to distinguish saving faith from feelings of glad dependence and thankful trust and heartfelt admiration and pleased submission and contented resting and earnest treasuring, I think that distinction is futile, hopeless.

You cannot strip all those adjectives—glad, thankful, heartfelt, pleased, contented, earnest—you cannot strip all those adjectives from faith and have any saving faith left. What you have left is what the devil can do, or mere oxymorons like unthankful saving trust. In fact, I think the effort to define faith as something devoid of feeling is driven by an ancient and very modern belief in the autonomy of the human will that must be in final control of its destiny.

And since everyone knows we can't immediately control our feelings or emotions or affections, you can't make yourself feel thankful. You can say the word "thank you," but you can't make yourself feel thankful. It's either there or it's not. You can't make yourself feel pleased or glad. Therefore, that view of human nature that says we have to be able to control our own destiny, our own salvation, has to say saving faith cannot include things I can't control.

I have to be in control. But that is simply not what the Bible teaches. The Bible requires many things of us which we cannot immediately produce because we are so corrupt and rebellious. And yet we are responsible to produce them because a sinful condition is no excuse for disobedience.

All that to say that my response to this question is not to make it easy by defining faith separately from the emotions. I mean, I think a lot of people would hear her question and say, "Not a problem. You don't need to let your discouragements go up and down with the rise and fall of your emotions because faith has nothing to do with emotions." That's the way they'd answer.

Now that may sound now, my approach may sound now to our friend, she didn't give us her name, may sound to her like, "Well, okay, I'm simply stuck then, right? Come on, Piper. I asked the question for help. I didn't ask for an analysis." When her emotions go up, she says she has assurance, and when her emotions go down, she has doubts about her salvation and feels anxious because Piper and who knows what other Puritans have taught her that faith is more than mere scent.

Now I would like to try to provide four ways of looking at our spiritual affections that I think will help her and me. They help me bring steadiness to her devotion to Christ and not such volatility or despair. Number one, the biblical realism that the saints have always experienced seasons when clarity and joy and spiritual sensitivity weaken.

Otherwise, David would not have cried out in Psalm 51, 12, "Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit." Paul would not have come to the end of Romans 7 with the words, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?" And Jesus would not have taught us to pray every day, "Forgive us our sins." What is sin but the preference of the heart getting the upper hand over our delight in God and His ways?

And so let's not measure the ups and downs of our affections for Christ as though there were a standard of perfection in the Bible. There's not. We all struggle with ups and downs, strong affections some day, weak affections the next day. Here's number two. Let us make a distinction between the absence of intense joy for Christ or joy in Christ, the absence of intense joy in Christ on the one hand and the presence of intense joy in sin on the other.

Let's make a distinction. It is possible for our spiritual affections to weaken without this being a sign that our carnal affections are triumphant. Of course, we should be concerned with becoming cool toward Christ because that could lead to the shipwreck of our lives where we fail to confirm our calling and election, as 2 Peter 1.9 says.

But we should not assume that the cooling of our affections on any given day is the same as the flaming up of insubordinate rebellion against God and His ways. It could lead to that, but it need not. And the very fact that it causes us grief when our affections flag is a good sign they will restore, they will be restored.

Number three, consider this understanding of the tears of contrition and the tears of sorrow for joylessness. I bounced this off of Noel last night as we went out to dinner together, and she was leaving town today, and I wanted her to hear this because this is my calling up out of thoughts I had years ago when I wrote Desiring God.

I said things like this, but they were fresh and new to me, and I wanted to see what she thought. So here they are now. Consider this understanding of the tears of contrition because I'm hearing in our friend's question that when her joys go down, she feels bad. She feels miserable.

She wants to cry. She's just, "I want to have joy. I want to read my Bible with gladness and happiness and thankfulness and strength, and I don't." So that's what I'm talking about. Are not the tears of contrition the fruit of languishing joy in Christ, impeded by weariness or weakness or sin?

In other words, when joy fades and you feel sorrowful and contrite, brokenhearted because of this fading joy that you should have in Christ, is not the feeling of sorrow and the feeling of regret and the feeling of contrition, are not those painful feelings evidence of the fact that your soul is the kind of soul that has a taste for the goodness of God, the sweetness of God in Jesus?

And is not this taste a sign of your regeneration? Indeed, isn't this taste the very presence of what we might call the remaining aftertaste of joy in the absence of its full expression? If so, I would argue that the tears of contrition, the tears of sorrow for joylessness, are the tears of joy hindered by some physical condition or some weakness or some sin, hindered, and thus these tears are evidence that we are born of God.

Our soul has been made into the kind of soul that will never be satisfied apart from God, and even when joy has gone away, there is an aftertaste of joy that is weeping, and the weeping is the aftertaste of joy, giving evidence that our soul is the kind of soul that will have joy forever.

Here's the fourth and last thing briefly. I would simply point to Paul's teaching about the witness of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and to be sure, the Holy Spirit uses evidence and means in His act of witnessing to our true adoption, but in the end, assurance that we are the children of God is a gift of God, God the Holy Spirit.

So when all is said and done, and we have reflected on as many wonderful biblical realities as we can, and we have cried out with David for the restoration of our joy, our biblical lot is to wait for the Lord, not to despair, not to dictate to God how long He will be concealed, not to become angry, and not to take our eyes off Christ in His Word, but to wait, weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

Amen. Pastor John, thank you for that response. Thank you for the question that was sent in. We love getting questions about Christian hedonism, the idea that it's really at the core of what we do that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. And the profundity of that statement leads to a lot of questions that have to be answered and worked through, which is what we're here for.

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And of course, to get brand new episodes as they're released, subscribe to the Ask Pastor John podcast in your favorite podcast app. I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Friday. DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 2 DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 2 DesiringGod.org Page 1 of 2 DesiringGod.org