Vicki from Wisconsin writes in to ask, "Often I hear that we are to love God for who He is, not for what He does for us, to love the giver more than the gifts. How do we know that we are doing this? When I examine my own heart, so much of what I know about God seems to be in relationship to what I enjoy based upon His work as my Creator, as my Redeemer, etc.

I'm just not sure how I know how to separate that out. Perhaps I make it too complicated." Pastor John, what would you say to Vicki? She's probably not making it too complicated because it is complicated. But when we find things are complicated, probably we need to back up and look for a simple way to live.

Because God doesn't mean for complication to paralyze us and to diminish our sense of enjoyment of Him or His gifts. So I would affirm, first of all, she's right. Experiencing God and Jesus through their gifts is inseparable from experiencing Him directly. Because we're creatures and we are creatures in bodies, and as embodied creatures, God has put us in a world to experience Him indirectly.

He is not our gifts. He is not His gifts. He is different from His gifts. And yet, we experience Him through His gifts. And everybody knows that the love for a person and the love for their gifts are not the same. And yet, we experience love through gifts, through touch, through sight, through Christmas presents under the tree.

And we also know, and this gets right, I think, close to the heart of the matter, is that if you love a person, if you love your wife, and she gave some thought to buying you a gift and puts it under the tree and you opened it on Christmas morning, you know that she will feel loved if you go bananas over this gift.

If you lay the gift aside and say, "I really don't care about this, just you," well, that's going to get old, you know? However, if a man breaks into your house with a gun, puts the gun to her head and says, "I want your gift," or a killer, "Really?

Are you kidding me? Take the gift," knucklehead, and the wife would, of course, would know that. You love me 10,000 times more than you love this gift. And yet, if he belittles this gift, if he turns away from this gift, he's not loving her well. And so, that's the way it is almost all the time with God in this world.

Now, here's the catch that's making life hard for her and making her feel discouraged about this, and me too. Since the fall, we've got a major problem on our hands. I think before the fall, before we were sinners, before we humans were sinners, nobody experienced this problem. I think loving God and loving the things that God made were in perfect harmony and there was no idolatry in the world and no competition between God and His gifts because we were not sinners.

Now we are sinners, which means we are spring-loaded to turn gifts into alternatives to God. And so, what does God do? Well, in this age, between our fall and our perfection at the Second Coming, is that He uses pleasure and pain to provide us with revelations of His goodness and protect us from loving substitutes.

He uses a mixture. He brings pleasures into our life in order that we might know Him through those, and He brings pain into our life in order to show us that He is more important than the things. And there are texts that point to - I'm not just making that up, like, "Oh, that would be a nice structure of thought in order to help this go down." Romans 2, 4 says, "Don't you know that the kindness of God is meant to lead you to repentance?" So there you have God giving good things to unbelievers to lead them to repentance.

Psalm 19, 1, "The heavens are telling the glory of God." So He's lavishing us day after day with sunrises and sunsets to get attention for His glory. In 1 Timothy 4, 3, where marriage and food are created to be received with thanksgiving. In 1 Timothy 6, 17, same thing, everything created richly for your enjoyment.

So there's a whole slew of texts that describe the goodness of creation, all of it to say, "You have a good God, a lavish, generous Father. Turn to Him, love Him, be thankful to Him." And then, because we're fallen, that's not all God does. He calls us to a life of self-denial, and He says to Paul, "The reason you were unbearably crushed and despaired of life itself is so that you might rely upon Me." And Romans 5, 3, "Rejoice in tribulation, because it works patience, and patience works hope, and hope doesn't put us to shame." And so we're driven to hope in God because of tribulation.

And Paul in Philippians 3 saying, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord." And fasting and self-denial. So I think the answer is that we should look at everything good that God gives us and see right into it and through it to Him as a good giver.

We should remember that He's a person and that we should be willing to lose it all and say, "To die is gain," because He's more important than any of these things. And He's going to give it all back to us in the age to come when we're suited and fitted to receive it without any idolatry.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. At DesiringGod.org you'll find thousands of other free resources from John Piper. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.