(upbeat music) - In the last podcast, we talked about making truth discoveries for ourselves, owning truth, affectionately clinging to biblical realities, and not just reading about it from others. And I'm curious, Pastor John, as you read and study the Bible for yourself in your own devotional times, is there for you a space between the initial discovery of a truth and your affectionate embrace of it?

Is there a process between seeing a new truth and owning that truth for yourself? Or is this something that really just happens immediately for you? - Well, the answer is yes, yes. Absolutely, it can be immediate. In fact, it usually is immediate. And the reason for stepping back from an immediate experience of something either terrifying or sweet and precious, a whole range of emotions may happen immediately when you see something for the first time that you have never seen before.

I think the reason you may have to step back from that is you might not have it quite right. There might be an aspect of it that you're seeing accurately and an aspect of it that you're seeing inaccurately. And so some of your emotions might be spiritually appropriate to the aspect that you see truly.

And some of your emotions might be mistaken by responding to something you're misapprehending and to discern whether that's the case or not, there will be a season, it may not be that day, it might be a week later, or it might be five minutes later where you get out your dictionary and look that word up and you see, oh, it didn't mean what I thought it meant and all my emotions were based on an error.

Or you may find that the error in this text was true in another text so that the emotions were real, they were just based on another aspect or another place in the Bible rather than this place in the Bible. I think that's very helpful to get the intellectual support underneath the emotional experience so that it's confident now.

And when you speak of it to others or commend it to others, you can commend both the experience that you had and you can commend the intellectual warrant for it that you've checked out. You know, this is simply, I've got Lewis coming out of my pores right now and Lewis is so big on the distinction between two kinds of knowing, the knowing of the intensity, say, of sexual intercourse with your wife and the thinking about that experience and how to maybe bless her more in it.

You can't do both of those at the same time because when you're in an experience of exquisite joy or let's just say fear, maybe you just saw a bear on the front porch of your cabin and your door's not locked. And right at that moment, you're not analyzing the nature of fear.

You're just fully experiencing fear. Later, you can look at it and Lewis is just supremely gifted at both of those and all of us should be, I think, more or less given to both of those. Let fitting emotions rise and glut yourself on the glory of God in any discovery you make in the Bible.

Then later in the peace and the coolness of your reflective moments, study it out and make sure you saw what you really saw. - Thank you, Pastor John. And thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. You can visit us online at desiringgod.org to find thousands of books, articles, poems, sermons, and all sorts of other resources from John Piper, all free of charge.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)