Brad from Mount Gilead, Ohio, who must be a Bible teacher or pastor because he asks this, "Pastor John, can you in your personal devotions check the impulse to want to think about how to teach what you're discovering in Scripture in order to simply enjoy it personally and devotionally?" What would you say to Brad?

I really enjoy thinking about this question. The first flag I want to wave is a flag that celebrates the inseparable nature of seeing glory and saying what we've seen. In other words, I'm not sure that we should fret too much about the impulse of turning our seeing into saying.

I wrote a whole book about this a year or two ago, so it's really important to me. I've thought a lot about it, and I'm eager to dive into this with Brad. I've tasted the dangers and the glories of what Brad is talking about. So we're reading the Bible.

We see something new and fresh and amazing. We experience a flash of genuine enjoyment of what it shows us about God. And then there's an almost immediate impulse to begin shaping it for a conversation or an email or a devotional thought or a sermon or a lecture or a blog post or a poem or a tweet.

I mean, this is real dangerous stuff. And it can feel in that moment as though we have lost the authenticity of our enjoyment of communing with God in the truth we have seen. That is a real danger that Brad's put his finger on. I don't want to minimize it.

I want to agree the danger is there. In fact, I think the danger, at least in my experience, is first that the impulse to plan to teach or restate in some way what I've seen may reveal that my enjoyment is not really in the Lord himself at that moment, but rather in the intellectual process of making the discovery and in the impulse—I mean, if that impulse to go on and teach that reveals that to me, reveals that insidious deception, to me it has served me well.

And I want to be on my face in repentance pleading with the Lord to deliver me from the bondage to that kind of intellectualism that finds more pleasure in the processes of intellectual discovery in the Bible than the glorious one we've discovered. So that's the first aspect of the danger as I've experienced it and I think Brad is describing.

The second part of the danger is that the impulse to turn my insights into, say, a teaching plan or a blog or something may signal that I crave recognition from an audience for what I've seen. So my pleasure is not so much in what I've seen as in the approval others are going to give me for seeing it.

How horribly insidious and dangerous this is. If my impulse to teach reveals that to me, again, I'm on my face, I'm pleading, "Oh God, deliver me from that kind of vain glory." So Brad is right to be concerned about this and I think there are steps we can take to minimize those dangers and maximize the benefits and I'll mention those in just a minute.

What I've discovered over the years is that I am helped to see more of God and more of his ways in the Word precisely by the impulse to turn seeing into saying. So this is the positive side now. It's not just dangers that come from this impulse. There are positive things.

It's precisely the effort to find words, effective, compelling, awakening words, which bring greater clarity, greater depth to the first flash of insight. So that's the first positive thing. Now I suspect the reason God set it up that way relates to the second positive dimension of this impulse, namely that by its nature, by its very nature, the enjoyment of God himself and all his ways is essentially centrifugal.

In other words, as our minds circle, orbit around some glorious sight, discovery about God and his Word, viewing it with joy from all the angles as we orbit the thing we've seen, the very circling of the mind to see the beauty of the truth tends to fling the mind outward where people are so that they can be drawn into this orbit of seeing.

I think that belongs to the very nature of the truth of God, the very nature of God. He is not a privatistic God. He is a very public God. He is a displaying God, a communicating God, an expansive God. So it's not surprising to me that not only would our seeing become centrifugal almost immediately, but that he would design for that centrifugal impulse that it would be a way of seeing more.

That seems exactly the way God would be. And the third positive thing I would say about this impulse that Brad feels to teach something that he's seen almost immediately when he's seen it and enjoyed it, the third thing is that the teaching or the writing is not a separate thing from the enjoyment of what we have seen, but is the overflow of it.

It's the extension or the expansion of the enjoyment. So teaching, at least this is what it ought to be, I think, teaching is not strictly a mere second step after enjoyment, but is an extension of the enjoyment itself. Otherwise, I think teaching becomes inauthentic. And that can be a danger almost as great as the original inauthenticity of the enjoyment, that that would be if we only had the enjoyment in order to teach it.

So it cuts both ways. For teaching to be authentic, it must be an extension of that joy, I think. Otherwise, it's just not Christian teaching of glorious truth. And the last thing, maybe the fourth thing, I've lost count, the fourth observation that's positive about this impulse is that to aim at the building of faith, to aim at the refining of holiness, to aim at the empowering of mission in the lives of those we teach, those aims are organically, inseparably, essentially related to the expansion and extension of the enjoyment of God that we have experienced.

This very enjoyment is what we want to happen in the world. More and more and more people coming to see and savor the glory of God's grace. That's what faith is. That's what holiness is. That's what the mission is about. So I'll end here. The steps that I think Brad should take to minimize the dangers, maximize the benefits, is first, and he's already doing this, test your heart to see if you are enjoying God authentically and supremely, or if you're enjoying the process of discovering things about God more than you're enjoying God himself.

So do a self-check there. Number two, and this is the most practical thing I have found, pause repeatedly when meditating on the scriptures and actually tell God how much you are enjoying what you have seen. Tell him. Tell him. Talk to him about how good he is and beautiful he is and wise he is and just he is.

Build into your meditation a time, for example, to sing to him. I find this to be a great test of my soul. Am I in such a hurry to finish my reading, get on with saying it somewhere, or to read more, to get more insight, that I find it to be annoying to pause and sing to God about his goodness?

Or am I ready to pause, ready to soak, ready to say to God? I find that to be a barometer of the temperature of my authenticity that really works better than any other barometer. And the third thing, practically, I'd say to Brad is when the mind is drawn out by the impulse to teach or speak or write or whatever, say what you have seen.

Make sure that you view this not merely as a way of saying but as a way of seeing more of God by saying and make sure that all you're teaching is the overflow, the authentic overflow of your enjoyment. Boy, those are really beautiful implications we all need. Thank you, Pastor John.

And alluded to earlier in the episode is John Piper's book, "Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully," a book you can download for free at DesiringGod.org/books. Well, tomorrow we have another great question. This one comes from a podcast listener who notices all the promises in the Psalms that are given to the righteous.

So who qualifies in God's book to be the righteous, and how can we qualify? John Piper is back tomorrow to explain. Don't miss this episode. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.