(upbeat music) - Welcome back to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast. We talked about sonship with Dr. Don Carson last Friday. And Pastor John, a lot of people emphasize who we are in Christ as an important way to help us overcome our personal discouragements and triumph over personal sin struggles and to walk in fullness of joy, of course.

But in your ministry over the years, you seem to strike a different note. You talk about God being the gospel or about enjoying God as our ultimate happiness. So how do you work with these two categories of number one, our identity in Christ, and number two, our enjoyment of God himself?

How do you balance those two? - It is true and a great truth that we are, that who we are in Christ is often the motif of counselors to help liberate people. I think that's great, to help liberate people who are stuck in bondage to sin and depression and dysfunctional relationships and we wanna help them.

Do you know who you are in Christ? I think that's great as far as it goes. We are perfect in Christ. We are loved in Christ. We are accepted in Christ. We are, yes, enjoyed by God in Christ. And by God's spirit, we are becoming in practice, in reality, what we are in principle in Christ, more and more beautiful, like Christ.

I don't wanna underplay those unspeakable truths at all. The question for me is, is that the ultimate goal of our salvation? And the answer, I think, is no. Those things are true of us so that we may be freed from the despair of damnation and from the paralysis of despair and so have capacities suitable to approach and behold and enjoy God fully.

Who we are in Christ is a means. It's a means, not an end. All of that to us and in us is meant to fit us to make God our all-satisfying end. Everything that happens to us, everything that happens in us for good, making, giving us a kind of identity, all of it is designed to make us the kind of beings who can see and enjoy God perfectly.

And the tragic thing about modern self-oriented life, popular thinking, counseling, preaching, education, entertainment, is that it all leaves us without our ultimate treasure, our ultimate reason for being, namely to know and understand and perceive and experience and delight in God himself. God is subtly treated as a means to what we really finally want, namely I wanna be something, I wanna be someone.

Now, this was really helpful for me to see. I'm able to affirm the whole scripture, I think, that speaks of who we are in Christ and delight in the truth of it. But if I stop there or if we stop there, I think we treat the end or the final goal of redemption or the ultimate thing in which we rejoice as something less than God, namely our own becoming, and we become idolaters.

So the crucial question for me is where is my final happiness? The way I asked it one time in a passion talk at Passion was what's the bottom of your joy? Is it being something or someone, or is it God, seeing and knowing and admiring and enjoying God? One of them does not cancel out the other.

That's so crucial to say. I don't want anyone to hear me say that I'm canceling out the preciousness or the importance of becoming or being. It is a glorious truth that we will be like Christ, that we will share his glory, that we will shine like the sun, Jesus said, in the kingdom of our Father.

We will sit on the throne with Jesus, it says in Revelation. We'll rule the nations. We're gonna judge angels. You can't say anything greater about us except to call us God, which the Bible's not going to do. All of this is true and gloriously true and has not been revealed to make us sad.

We shouldn't read those statements and say, well, yeah, John Piper said not to get too excited about those. Are you kidding me? You haven't begun to feel as excited as you should be that one day you're gonna judge angels, one day you're gonna rule nations and sit on the throne with Jesus and shine like the sun.

I mean, your emotions haven't even begun to rise to the point of excitement about those things. But the question is, is that the sweetest ground of my joy or is God the ultimate and sweetest ground of my joy? And I think if we get them backwards, we're gonna hurt ourselves and not just dishonor God.

Our souls are not made to find ultimate joy in the words, "Well done, good and faithful servant." I mean, Seuss Lewis wrote a great sermon that that's the weight of glory. And I wanna say, amen to hear those words. I'm sure a few things will make me cry like those words, that anybody could regard John Piper's paltry ministry and service of the King of Kings as a well done will be beyond measure in value except for one thing.

We're not made to find ultimate joy in being glorious, in having done a great job. We are made to find ultimate joy in God. God is the infinite value in the universe. Nothing rises to the level of God's worth. We were made to see and savor ultimate worth. All the glorious things in us ultimately fit us for that.

That's what glorification is. I'll say that again. That's what glorification is, being what we must be in order to maximally enjoy God in the fullest way forever. - That is glorious. God is the gospel and that is, he is the sweetest thing in the universe. Thank you, Pastor John, for that wonderful reminder.

And this concludes episode number 899, 899, which means tomorrow we're gonna hit episode number 900 in the podcast series, which is just incredible. And when you do a podcast like this one for so long, and especially with the topics that we talk about, where we tackle the breadth of theological dilemmas and we wrestle with so many serious ethical questions and things in the news, it raises the question of whether or not we can overthink the Christian life.

And if we can, how so? Tomorrow I'm gonna ask Pastor John that very question. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)