INFINITE JOY IN GOD

I can't believe it's been two months since I did a post on Piper's book When I Don't Desire God. I apologize to those who've been waiting in anticipation. *grin* Today I want to write about chapter 2 which is titled What is the Difference Between Desire and Delight. When I first started reading this chapter I thought he was getting into a little hair splitting but his main point is that there isn't really a wall separating our desire for God and our delight in God. We can have both at the same time and even though we desire more of God, in that desiring there is joy. Paul says in Romans 5:2, "We rejoice in hope of the glory of God." At the same time, the object of our joy (the Lord) is both experienced now (Romans 5:5) and not yet fully experienced. That brings me to the title of this post. Piper says, "There will always be more of God to enjoy. Which means there will always be holy desire - forever." Even in heaven we will exist as finite creatures who will worship forever an infinite God.

I find it refreshing that someone out there in the world of American evangelicalism is actually talking about fighting to increase our desire for God. Who else out there is really talking about this? I'm constantly disappointed when I browse through my local Christian bookstore. Not only will they sell outright false teaching from people such as Joel Osteen but a lot of the stuff in there is skim milk. The meaty writings are all relegated to a clearance corner. While I'm glad I can get some great books by Andrew Murray and Charles Spurgeon on clearance, I think it's sad that the average Christian today is not interested in them or even knows who they are. Why else would it be on clearance? OK, enough of my rant about Christian bookstores. I've told my husband several times that one of my dreams is to open a bookstore which carries profound life changing books, old books by Edwards and Owen and others, and no gifts, T-shirts or WWJD bracelets.

How is your level of desire for God? I ask this question of myself as well. Are you pressing hard after the Lord? In the words of Piper himself I "kick myself that my cravings for lesser things compete with God as the satisfaction of my soul." Do you have this godly grief? In one sense it is good to be convicted. But Piper also reminds us that the fact that we grieve over the smallness of our desire is in itself evidence that we have tasted. Psalm 34 says, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." And "the strength of our desire is not the measure of the strength of the final pleasure." This is good news and should spur us on in the fight for joy that Piper speaks of in this book. Because ~

"God will be glorified both by the intensity of the present delight that we have in His beauty and by the intensity of the desires we have for more revelation of His fullness...The intensity of our pleasure and our desire bear witness of His worth to the world..."

Piper's aim is "to pursue joy in God so that the infinitely valuable objective reality of the universe, God, will get all the glory possible from my life." How's that for a life goal? He then goes on to discuss that while "our goal is to see and savor 'the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God' (2 Corinthians 4:4), the spiritual affections, or emotions, that arise from our pursuit of this goal should not be discarded. We are pursuing Christ. We are also commanded to rejoice in the Lord. "God is glorified in His people by the way we experience Him, not merely by the way we think about Him." It isn't enough to think right things about God. God commands us to rejoice in Him. Piper says ~

"Oh, how easy it is to think we are what we ought to be when the emotions are made peripheral. Mere thoughts and mere deeds are manageable by the carnal religious mind. But the emotions - they are the weathercock of the heart. Nothing shows the direction of the deep winds of the soul like the demand for radical, sin-destroying, Christ-exalting joy in God."

So let us measure our hearts by how much we treasure Christ, how much we delight in Him over and above anything else in this world. But let us not be discouraged. If we are grieved by our lack of desire, that grief can glorify God as well. Our grief communicates our repentance and our desire for God.