Pastor John, you have for years stressed an approach to Reformed Theology that is both hard thinking and deep feeling. Each of us will tend to fall on one side or the other here, either into an anti-intellectual feeling or an anti-feeling intellectualism. Both are to be avoided. In today's question, a listener wants to know this.

Dear Pastor John, in your 30 plus years of ministry, what have you practically done to avoid mere intellectualism, a cold academic study in your Bible reading and in your exposition? What would you say? The first thing I would say is that I need to be, we need to be deeply persuaded that this really, really matters, this non-cold, non-intellectualistic, warm, practical, affectionate relation to the living Christ.

We need to be persuaded this really matters because there are a lot of people out there, I keep bumping into them, there are a lot of people out there who either for personality reasons or sometimes theological reasons think it doesn't matter what your emotions do. That is, they think emotions are the caboose at the end of the train.

They're just not essential at all. And it sounds like the person who wrote this question is persuaded that they matter and it might be good to ask why. And here's my reason. The first and greatest commandment is not to know the Lord our God, which is of course assumed, but to love the Lord your God, and that includes with all your heart.

And Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians, "If you don't love the Lord, you are accursed." Love the Lord. And Jesus says, "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." In other words, the love that we must have isn't just a kind of dutiful commandment-keeping love.

That's not what you have for your kids or your parents. It's the deepest, heartfelt, affectionate, relative kind of love, the kind we have for mother and father and son and daughter. Only more, more for Jesus. And if we don't have it, we're not worthy of Jesus. So this is the first thing I would say.

We must be totally, John Piper must be totally persuaded that knowing God truly without loving him duly is eternally deadly. Deadly. I must be persuaded of that. So I'm trembling at the thought that I could go about my academic work or my scholarly work or my writing work or preaching work or study work in some kind of cold frame with no awakened love for God, affection for God.

So the quest for overcoming what he's referring to as intellectualism is a life and death battle. That's the first thing. Second thing I would say is that we should therefore read all things, Scripture and everything else, especially the Word, the Scripture, but also the world and everything in it.

We should read everything on the lookout for evidences of God's value, not just evidences of his truth. The devil owns that God is true and probably knows more true things about God than we do. But the devil will not own that God is supremely valuable and supremely satisfying. The devil values himself above God.

God's presence gives no joy and no satisfaction to the devil whatsoever. Therefore our aim in reading the Bible should not be demonic. We're not aiming to rise just to the level of the devil. Our aim is, of course, to see what is really there and what is true about God, but always more, always more, namely with a view to feeling what is valuable about God, treasuring the treasure that God is.

The aim is to see the millions of reasons why God is a treasure, not just the millions of evidence that God exists or has certain attributes. All of our theological refinement should be for the sake of doxological embrace and enjoyment. This affects the way you read. This is what I try to do.

I try to read. You read on the lookout for evidences of value, evidences of preciousness, evidences that he's beautiful and sweet and satisfying. Peter says in 1 Peter 2, verses 1 to 3, "Long for the pure spiritual milk," and I think he means milk of the Word, "that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good." Well, what's the point of that "if," "if you have tasted"?

The point is that all the drinking in the world without tasting will not grow us up into salvation. The aim of drinking the Word is tasting the Savior. It's the tasting that is the nutritional encounter with the living God that grows us up into salvation. That's the second thing I would say.

In all of our reading, be on the lookout for evidences of God's value, not just evidences of his truth, which leads now to the third thing that I would say, namely, that the goal of valuing or treasuring or feeling the preciousness of or enjoying the beauty of God in all of our reading confronts me immediately with the impossibility on my part of making it happen.

You can't make yourself value God. You can make yourself read. You can make yourself list off attributes of God that you see. You can make yourselves list off ways that God behaves, but you can't make yourself feel how wonderful they are. That's why the psalmist cries out, "Open my eyes that I may see wonders in your words." So this third point is pray, pray, pray.

And we pray not only for illumination to see what is really there about God, but to feel. We pray Psalm 90, verse 14, "Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love." Why in the world would the psalmist pray that, except that the human heart doesn't naturally feel it when it hears and sees the beauties of God?

God has to work this. We ask God to make us satisfied in God. So prayer is absolutely essential that not only that my eyes would be open, but that my affections would be awakened. Fourth thing I would say is that beyond the Bible, I read authors who have understood God deeply and felt him mightily and expressed both the understanding and the feeling with clarity and power.

For me, that has been mainly Edwards, Jonathan Edwards, and John Owen, and C.S. Lewis, and the Puritans. You need to find the great seers of God and the great lovers of God and the great expressors of the seeing and the loving. I know you, Tony, would put John Newton in that category, and so would I, kind of a latter-day Puritan who saw things deeply and expressed things beautifully and felt things deeply.

So that's number four. And finally, I would say open your mouth and bear witness to family and friends and neighbors and colleagues to the beauty of God and your joy in him. It's precisely in giving expression to our joy that intensifies the joy itself. A shared joy is a doubled joy.

God loves mission. God loves witness. God loves sharing. God loves loving people. And he does not love hoarding. Therefore, when we turn our affections, when we turn on our affections and express them, express them to other people, God is pleased and our joy is intensified. So those are my five strategies against cold intellectualism.

There are lots more strategies, but maybe that's enough to set the trajectory of discovery. Yeah, sure is. Amen. Thank you, Pastor John, for those five strategies, and I appreciate the shout-out to John Newton and his focus on the affections, on the desires of the heart, which became the focus of my book.

Pastor John, you alluded to this, and you wrote the foreword for it. It's titled, "Newton on the Christian Life to Live is Christ." At least you will enjoy the foreword by Pastor John. I know that much. And for more strategies from Pastor John, see his book, "When I Don't Desire God." There's a lot more there on this theme.

Well, is Christian hedonism only for complementarians, or is it something that can be shared by egalitarians as well? And what do those terms even mean to begin with? We return on Wednesday, and Pastor John will answer a pretty interesting question from a listener on this topic. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then.

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