What’s the Origin of Desiring God’s Slogan?
00:00:00.000 | Today's question gets to the heart of what we do here at DesiringGod.org and the question
00:00:10.560 | comes to us from Barry in Columbus, Ohio.
00:00:13.480 | Pastor John, I have a history question for you about the DG slogan.
00:00:18.620 | God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
00:00:22.580 | How did the slogan come to be written?
00:00:25.180 | Did it come to you alone or were others involved and how?
00:00:28.800 | Did Christian hedonism flow from the statement or was the statement a distillation after
00:00:33.240 | the theology was already developed?
00:00:36.200 | What role did the line from the Westminster Confession of Faith play in your own statement?
00:00:41.600 | Thank you for your diligence and precision in all of your teaching over the years.
00:00:47.240 | Now this would be an interesting little research project for somebody to do.
00:00:51.720 | Maybe you Tony, you're good at this.
00:00:53.120 | I haven't done it, but my guess is that an electronic copy of Piper's Collected Works
00:00:58.960 | exists somewhere, which came out this year.
00:01:03.160 | Those Collected Works came out this year and with a search, you could probably find out
00:01:08.760 | or anybody could, I suppose if they had it, find out what was chronologically the first
00:01:15.320 | appearance of that phrase, God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him, in
00:01:20.600 | all my published writings.
00:01:21.600 | I don't have any idea what the answer to that is, but let me try to answer Barry's questions
00:01:26.840 | as best as I can reconstruct things from my memory.
00:01:32.040 | First, the vision of life called Christian hedonism preceded by quite a few years, the
00:01:41.720 | slogan, God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him.
00:01:46.280 | My guess is if you date my awareness of these things, my discovery of these things from
00:01:52.720 | age 22, which I would roughly, it was probably another 12 or 15 years before I ever used
00:02:03.680 | that statement.
00:02:04.680 | I don't know when I first used it, but I'm sure that I was thinking in terms of Christian
00:02:10.220 | hedonism long before that formulation ever came along.
00:02:15.380 | What I said for years was that one of the greatest discoveries I ever made was that
00:02:21.600 | God's passion to be glorified in John Piper's and John Piper's passion to be happy were
00:02:28.480 | not at odds because they came to fulfillment in one and the same act, namely the act of
00:02:35.440 | worship.
00:02:37.060 | My heart's praising God was not only magnifying His name, it was also bringing my joy in Him
00:02:46.080 | to consummation.
00:02:48.020 | So wonder of wonders, I didn't have to choose between glorifying God and being happy because
00:02:54.640 | God's glory was shown in my happiness in God.
00:03:00.600 | And you can see right at this point that we're just inches away, just inches away from the
00:03:06.880 | slogan because all I had to do was make those truths pithy and rhyming.
00:03:14.800 | And here's just a little glimpse into how I write and preach.
00:03:19.840 | Somewhere along the way, as I was preparing one of the dozens and dozens of messages over
00:03:25.740 | the years that I gave on Christian hedonism, somewhere along the way, as I was preparing
00:03:31.220 | a message, I was trying to find a fresh way to put the truth into a pithy, memorable form,
00:03:42.600 | which I still do.
00:03:43.600 | I still want to find new ways.
00:03:46.200 | And the words came, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."
00:03:54.700 | So the slogan did not come first.
00:03:58.300 | The reality came first.
00:04:01.040 | And then over the years, with every new opportunity to explain the reality, I would be grasping
00:04:06.900 | for fresh ways to say it.
00:04:09.020 | And that formulation stuck.
00:04:12.340 | Now, as far as those who helped me, the most important thing to say would be the psalmist,
00:04:20.060 | "Praise yourself in the Lord," and Jesus calling for rejoicing in the midst of the worst suffering,
00:04:26.220 | and the apostle Paul with his passage in Philippians 1 especially.
00:04:31.420 | So the reality, the people that helped me were Bible writers.
00:04:36.220 | And as far as the formulation goes, Jonathan Edwards would be the person who helped me
00:04:40.540 | most.
00:04:42.680 | With regard to Paul, Philippians 1, 20 to 23 contains the reality that Christ is most
00:04:50.040 | magnified in us when we are most satisfied in Him, especially at the moment of suffering
00:04:57.560 | and death, because Paul explains that his passion is that Christ be magnified in his
00:05:04.720 | dying because at the moment of death, Paul considers it gain to lose everything here
00:05:11.440 | and have only Christ, which I sum up as Christ was most magnified in Paul's dying when in
00:05:21.640 | his dying, Paul was most satisfied in Christ.
00:05:25.360 | And so it's a short jump from that to the simpler phrase.
00:05:31.360 | Jonathan Edwards, he comes within millimeters of what I'm saying.
00:05:36.320 | Here's what he wrote.
00:05:37.320 | The most important quote from Edwards on Christian hedonism for me, "God glorifies himself toward
00:05:44.600 | the creatures in two ways, by appearing to their understanding and two, in communicating
00:05:50.880 | himself to their hearts and in their rejoicing in him, the manifestations which he makes
00:05:57.880 | of himself."
00:05:58.880 | God, here it is, "God is glorified not only in his glories being seen, but in its being
00:06:11.760 | rejoiced in."
00:06:13.240 | Let me shorten that.
00:06:15.240 | God is glorified in his glory being rejoiced in.
00:06:22.100 | All I did was make that rhyme.
00:06:24.040 | That's all I did.
00:06:25.480 | So there it is.
00:06:26.480 | I didn't make it up.
00:06:28.320 | He goes on, one more sentence, "When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified
00:06:37.280 | than if they only see it," which so easily becomes, "The more they delight in the glory
00:06:44.760 | of God, the more God is glorified in them."
00:06:47.680 | And you just see we're just millimeters away from the slogan.
00:06:52.440 | The last thing Barry asks about is the role of the Westminster Catechism question.
00:06:57.600 | What is the chief end of man?
00:06:59.560 | The answer to that question was a stimulus from early on, very early on, from the very
00:07:06.120 | beginning you might say, a stimulus to figure out what they meant by the word "and."
00:07:16.480 | And it became a confirmation later that Christian Hedonism really is what they were thinking.
00:07:23.240 | Here's their answer.
00:07:25.560 | Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
00:07:32.480 | And I was entranced by the word "and."
00:07:37.280 | Glorify God and enjoy him.
00:07:42.280 | Before—I would say long before—I noticed that the word "end" is singular.
00:07:49.600 | Man's chief end—not ends—end, one end, is two things, to glorify God and enjoy him,
00:07:59.360 | which certainly seems to say that these two are not two distinct acts, glorifying and
00:08:06.120 | enjoying, but one act.
00:08:08.160 | In fact, I don't think I'd seen that when I wrote the book Desiring God.
00:08:13.320 | Not sure about that, but I think that's the case given the way I unpack it at the beginning
00:08:17.440 | of that book.
00:08:18.520 | And my way of seeing their oneness is that the enjoying of God to the fullest in all
00:08:27.960 | we do is the way we glorify him to the fullest in all that we do.
00:08:34.480 | So however it is that all of this came together for me, here I am at age 71, more thankful,
00:08:41.760 | more full of thankfulness than I've ever been that God has shown me these things from
00:08:49.080 | his word because few things, maybe none, have ever revealed my own sinfulness more, and
00:08:57.200 | the preciousness of the gospel more, and the true goal of life more, and the real path
00:09:04.600 | of holiness more, and the ultimate ecstasy of eternity more than the truth that God is
00:09:12.240 | most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him.
00:09:18.080 | Amen.
00:09:19.080 | It is a profound point.
00:09:20.480 | Thank you for giving your life to explaining it and helping us all see it as well, Pastor
00:09:24.800 | John.
00:09:25.800 | I'm really grateful.
00:09:26.800 | And thanks for listening and making this podcast a part of your day and a part of your workout
00:09:31.640 | and a part of your commute.
00:09:32.640 | However you listen, thank you for joining us.
00:09:34.600 | Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and you can keep
00:09:38.400 | up with our new episodes through the feeds, and you can search our past episodes in our
00:09:42.360 | archive and even reach us by email with a question about what DG is all about, like
00:09:46.840 | this question from Barry.
00:09:48.640 | You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:54.120 | Well if you read the precious gospel of John, you will eventually come to that rich 15th
00:09:59.480 | chapter where Jesus talks about what it means to abide in him.
00:10:04.080 | So what does it mean for our lives?
00:10:06.040 | How do we abide in Christ and what does this look like in our daily lives?
00:10:11.580 | We will hear from John Piper when we return on Friday with a listener's question on that
00:10:15.960 | very point.
00:10:16.960 | I'm your host Tony Reinke and we will see you then.
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