Desiring God Ministries presents the following message by
Dr. John Piper.
Well, it's been a great privilege for me
to be here.
I know that I have benefited more than
any of you has, as is the case
whenever you minister.
That's part of my lesson in coming.
Leighton Ford said and asked, will we burn,
will we risk, and will we last?
Let me connect this morning's question, will we
last, to Tuesday's question, will we burn?
The connection goes like this.
God loves his glory with white hot zeal
and does everything he does to uphold and
display that glory in the world.
One of the reasons we said that is
not unloving, even though 1st Corinthians 13 5
says, love seeks not its own.
One of the reasons it's not unloving for
God to seek his own glory with such
great passion is because God's passion to be
glorified and my passion to be satisfied come
to simultaneous consummation in one act of joy.
And I illustrated that with the roses given
to my wife.
The implication of that great truth, which is
probably one of the greatest I've ever discovered
in my theological reflections, is that you should
make it your lifelong commitment to pursue happiness
in God.
Or to put it negatively, if any teaching
in the world or any teaching in the
church prompts you to try to sever the
root of your desire for happiness and somehow
deny or crucify your passion to be glad,
that teaching will compromise your worship and will
weaken your love for other people.
That remains to be shown, that last sentence.
Demas has deserted me in love for this
world.
That's the text that came to me yesterday
as I thought of illustrating the opposite of
lasting.
Will we last?
Demas did not last.
2 Timothy 4.9. Demas, in love with
this world, has deserted me.
He left the cause.
He didn't last.
Now, I wonder how many of us would
preach to Demas like this, in love with
the world.
Right.
Demas, if you would just learn to stop
seeking your own happiness, if you would just
learn to cut the root of that passion
for joy and start serving God and doing
your duty, then you might last.
I wonder how many would preach to him
like that.
It's in the air, that kind of talk.
That's not the biblical answer.
That is not the biblical response to Demas.
The biblical response to Demas, I hope to
show you this morning, and as the means
of persevering to the end, is Demas, Demas,
who has enticed you to stop seeking your
joy in God?
Who deceived you, Demas, that you began to
think that you could find fulfillment in the
broken cisterns of this world and abandon the
fountain of living waters?
Demas, wake up and pursue joy!
That's the answer.
That's the biblical answer to Demas.
People who fall in love with the world
don't need to be told to stop pursuing
joy.
They need to be told it's serious about
pursuing joy.
Stop being deceived about where joy can be
found.
So my counsel to you on this last
question is that the secret to lasting is
to recognize this truth that God is most
glorified in you when you are most satisfied
in him, and therefore your fulfillment and his
glory come to simultaneous consummation as you never
ever forsake the pursuit of your gladness in
God.
Don't ever forsake it.
Now the way I want to develop this
this morning is to raise six objections.
I don't know how your mind grows deep
in God, but I'll tell you how mine
works.
I get an idea reading one text in
the Bible and then I meditate on it.
I was reading in Psalm 77 this morning.
I will meditate on all thy works and
muse on thy mighty deeds.
I meditate.
You know what meditation consists in for me?
Asking questions of the thought I just had.
Raising problems from other passages of scripture that
don't seem to fit this passage of scripture
until I've gotten to the root of unity.
I'm going to raise six biblical objections to
what I just said and answer them all
from the Bible, Lord willing.
In doing that, I don't just want to
defend what I said.
I want it to be understood because I
know that when I stand up in the
American milieu and say, make it your lifelong
vocation to pursue your joy, it is very
liable to misunderstand.
If you were to think right now that
this is just another echo of the self
-esteem gospel or just another spinoff from the
health, wealth, and prosperity, you would be lightyears
separated from where I'm heading.
What I'm doing here is finding, I hope,
a new and creative way to torpedo the
health, wealth, and prosperity gospel.
That's just a forecast that you misunderstand.
Six objections.
Number one, does the Bible really teach that
you're to pursue your joy?
I mean, joy, okay, if it's just an
unintended result.
I hear that all the time.
Don't pursue it.
Let it come as a forgotten, unintended result
of obedience.
Second objection, I'll just list them and then
we'll come back to them.
What about self-denial?
What about Keith Park's fourth point?
Renewed acceptance of the sacrifice principle.
Third, doesn't this focus on my pleasure, my
joy, my happiness, put too much emphasis on
emotion?
Isn't the essence of Christianity will, decision?
Fourth, what becomes of the noble concept of
being a slave of Christ?
Paul's favorite word for himself, doulos, I'm a
servant, I'm a slave.
It just sounds so different what you're saying.
It doesn't sound like the service of a
slave to his master.
It's self-seeking pursuit of joy.
Fifth, it doesn't sound like love to other
people.
Is it loving to pursue your own joy?
I mean, the Bible says love seeks not
its own.
First Corinthians 13.5. And finally, if life
becomes a pursuit of my pleasure, how in
the world can the centrality of God be
maintained?
Those are my six objections.
There is a resounding biblical answer to every
one of them, and I hope it unfolds
as well as defends what I'm trying to
say, namely, that you will last in the
service of the King if you can acknowledge
and embrace the great truth that the pursuit
of your joy is a means to glorifying
your Father and a pathway to loving the
world.
Objection number one, does the Bible really teach
that you should pursue your own joy?
It does, and it does so in at
least four ways.
Number one, it commands it.
Psalm 37.4 is not a suggestion, it's
a command.
Delight yourself in the Lord.
And there are many others.
Joy is commanded, and the pursuit of it
is commanded.
Delight yourself in the Lord is the opposite
of be indifferent to whether you're joyful in
God or not.
Second, the Bible teaches this by means of
threats.
I remember reading in C.S. Lewis one
time a quote from Jeremy Taylor, which said,
God threatens terrible things if we will not
be happy.
And I always thought that was clever, but
I didn't know whether it was biblical until
I read it almost verbatim in Deuteronomy 28,
verse 47.
Because you did not serve the Lord your
God with joyfulness and gladness of heart, therefore
you will serve your enemies whom the Lord
will send against you.
God threatens terrible things if we will not
be happy.
It does so, the Bible teaches this in
three ways.
I mean, in a third way.
The nature of faith demands it.
For example, Hebrews 11.6. Without faith, it
is impossible to please God.
For whoever would draw near to God must
believe two things, that he is, and that
he is a what?
Rewarder.
Now just ponder this for a minute.
You cannot please God unless you are fully
persuaded in coming to him that you will
be rewarded.
You cannot please God unless you come to
him for reward.
If you try to come to God in
some self-denying way to do him a
favor instead of get a favor for you,
he is not pleased with your coming.
If you try to put him in the
position of a beneficiary and yourself in the
position of a benefactor, you know nothing of
biblical faith and cannot please God.
Right at the essence of faith is the
demand that you pursue your joy in God.
If you don't, if you fall prey to
the stoic notion that somehow service of God
is rooted in something else than your passion
to be glad in him, God is not
pleased.
A fountain is pleased when you stoop to
drink, not when you pour buckets.
And the fourth way that the Bible teaches
that this is an obligation upon Christians to
pursue their joy is by the nature of
sin.
Jeremiah 2, 12 and 13.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this and be
shocked.
Be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my
people have committed two evils.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living
waters, and hewed out for themselves broken cisterns
that can hold no water.
Now, what would be your definition of evil
on the basis of that text?
Evil is the insanity of forsaking the source
of everlasting joy.
That's what that verse says very clearly.
Evil is the universe appalling, heaven-stunning insanity
of seeking joy in the broken cisterns of
money, sex, alcohol, drugs, prestige, power, and forsaking
the fountain of living water.
Be appalled, O heavens, this is the essence
of sin.
They forsake the glory of God and embrace
creatures and worship frogs.
Those four ways, at least, the Bible makes
very plain that you must make it your
lifelong goal and commitment and allegiance to pursue
your joy in God.
Never to deny the pursuit of joy, never
to pretend as if you don't have this
craving and passion and longing for happiness, but
rather to glut it on God.
So I say that the first objection is
answered.
The Bible does teach that we should do
this.
Second objection, what about self-denial?
And what about Keith Park's fourth point?
Mark 8.35 says, whoever would save his
life will lose it.
Or John 12.27, he who loves his
life will lose it.
My answer is simply to say, finish the
verse.
And whoever loses his life, for my sake
and the gospel, will save it.
Now, what is Jesus appealing to?
What condition of the heart and motive is
he appealing to when he says, if you
try to save your life, you're going to
lose it, but if you lose it, you'll
save it.
Now, what do you want to do?
Lose it or save it?
And the answer is, I want to save
it.
He says, all right, I've told you how
to save it.
Lose it.
But in no way does he compromise the
principle that we should passionately want life.
Rather, he simply tells us how to get
there, namely, die.
And if you try to cut the nerve
of your longing for life, you rip the
heart out of that text.
The measure of your longing for life, your
longing for everlasting joy, is the amount of
comfort you are willing to give up to
get it.
I preach incessantly at my church against the
padding of our lives with comforts.
Because it's a rattle.
It is not going to pay off.
Flannery O'Connor, I don't know if you've
ever read any of her novels, southern Catholic
novelist, she said, I don't assume that renunciation
goes with submission or even that renunciation is
a good in itself.
Always you renounce a lesser good for a
greater.
The opposite is what sin is.
That's exactly right.
The struggle to submit is not a struggle
to submit, but a struggle to accept and
with passion.
I mean, possibly with joy.
Picture me with my ground teeth, stalking joy,
fully armed, too, for it is a highly
dangerous quest.
You might get your head chopped off by
a Muslim Shiite or something like that.
You know, as I've pondered more and more
this way of thinking, missionary biographies have become
the greatest resource of support.
And this is so encouraging because so many
people think what I'm saying without, they don't
give any attempt to understand it, they just
hear a few words, that it cuts the
nerve of missions.
You all know the great saying of Jim
Elliot, we have t-shirts at Bethlehem with
this saying on the back of them that
our young people wear.
He is no fool who gives what he
cannot keep to gain, what he cannot lose.
And Elizabeth Elliot ended her book when the
press had said, what a tragic and stupid
loss of these five missionaries.
And she said, that reporter did not understand
the second line of Jim Elliot's credo, to
gain what he cannot lose.
Jim Elliot did not commit any ultimate sacrifice
or any ultimate self-denial.
His whole philosophy of life was, it would
be foolish to stay in Wheaton, Illinois.
It's not foolish to give your life away
to gain what you cannot lose.
Lottie Moon said, there is no greater joy
than the saving itself.
David Livingston came back from Africa and spoke
at Cambridge.
I wish I had the quote here, it's
found in the Perspectives book, it's found in
my book, but the sentence that's most crucial
is this.
David Livingston said to those young men and
women, I never made a sacrifice.
Hudson Taylor in his little book, The Spiritual
Secret of Hudson Taylor, says exactly the same
words, and I've historically wondered whether there's some
kind of copying going on there.
Hudson Taylor at the end of his life,
as he made his last tour with his
son, getting up in the middle of the
night, reading his little Bible at 2 a
.m. in the morning, said, I never made
a sacrifice.
Zwaymer, at the end of his life, looked
back over the years and remembered those days
of 107, 105 degree temperatures and the week
in which he lost both of his daughters
within one week, little girls, and he said,
the joy of it all comes back to
me and I would do it all again.
Ralph Winter, who can't stand my word hedonism,
I don't think he's been converted yet, I
call this Christian hedonism, by the way.
Nevertheless, in his magnanimity, was willing to say
a nice thing about the book, because I
think I hooked him, see I trapped him,
because one of the ways I moved towards
mission was a little book he wrote about
that big, I think University put it out,
and the last sentence in the book after
describing sacrifices says, and don't forget the joy,
which is a perfect paraphrase of Acts 20,
35.
Remembering it is more a blessing to give
than to receive.
So he doesn't have to buy my language,
but he is a Christian hedonist, whether he
likes to admit it or not.
And as I said last night, I mean,
as I sat last night, right back there,
listening to that magnificent message from Keith Parks,
and he hit number four.
See, I know that when people hear this,
are we willing to reaffirm the principle of
sacrifice?
And at my church, if anybody said that,
all eyes would shift to me.
What's Piper going to do with that?
Now, how did that message end last night?
I wish I had the poetry, a little
bag, Christ extends his hand, gives him a
little crumb, and he goes home and he
opens his bag, and it's just a crumb
of gold.
And I wrote it down real fast.
The bag could have been full of gold.
That's the point of the story.
Keith Parks here, that's the point of the
story.
The bag could have been full of gold,
be given his whole life away.
Now, therefore, we must always put sacrifice and
self-denial within a certain framework.
Peter, I believe, was rebuked in Mark 10
for this statement.
What becomes of us, Lord?
We've left everything to follow you.
And what was Jesus' response to him?
I don't know whether he gritted his teeth
and went like this, but I'll just pretend
that he did.
Peter, get off it.
The self-pity, self-sacrifice, self-denial thing,
get off it.
Nobody has left house or mother, sister, father,
brother, lens, for my name's sake, that won't
be repaid back a hundredfold in this life
and in the life to come, eternal life
with persecution.
Don't ride this self-pity thing, delight in
me.
There's so many other missionaries we could quote
on this point of the true place of
self-denial.
There's no ultimate self-denial in the Christian
life.
You deny yourself tin so that you can
have gold.
You deny yourself sand so you can stand
on a rock.
You deny yourself mud pies in the slums
so you know what a holiday at the
sea is like.
There is no ultimate self-denial.
There's only temporary, minor self-denial.
That's objection number two.
I hope it's answered.
There is a place for self-denial, but
it isn't ultimate.
There is a place for sacrifice, but it
isn't ultimate.
The third objection, aren't we making too much
of emotions when we stress that we should
pursue joy, happiness, pleasure?
I'm using those terms interchangeably, by the way,
because the Bible does.
Thou dost show me the path of life.
In thy presence is fullness of joy.
At thy right hand are what?
Pleasures forevermore.
I don't bellyache and quibble about it.
Words are butter.
You can make words mean anything you want.
The Bible uses joy, happiness, and pleasure interchangeably
all over the place in the Psalms.
I want you to pursue pleasure.
At God's right hand, forevermore.
Now, the question is, doesn't that put too
much emphasis on emotion?
Isn't the essence of Christianity a decision, a
will to do a thing, to accept the
Lord, to obey?
Joseph Fletcher, who wrote Situation Ethics, I read
that when I was a junior at Wheaton
in an apologetics class.
And I remember one argument from it that
left me cold and seemed to warm everybody
else, as I recall in those days.
He said, love is commanded in the Bible.
Emotions cannot be commanded.
Ergo, love is not an emotion.
It's an act of will.
Everybody was excited about that.
I think that's dead wrong.
I couldn't articulate theologically why that didn't sit
with me in those days.
I know why it didn't, because I grew
up in the Bible and I knew that
emotions were commanded everywhere in the Bible.
For example, rejoice in the Lord.
Joy is commanded.
Hope in God.
Hope is commanded.
Fear him who can cast both soul and
body into hell.
Fear is commanded.
Let the peace of Christ rule in your
heart.
Peace is commanded.
Be aglow with the spirit, never flagging zeal.
Zeal is commanded.
Weep with those who weep.
Grief is commanded.
Desire the sincere spiritual milk of the word.
Desire is commanded.
Be kind to one another and tenderhearted.
Tenderheartedness is commanded.
Be broken and contrite, James 4, 9.
Be wretched, mourn, and weep.
Be proud and arrogant.
Gratitude is commanded, Ephesians 5, 20, for everything
you think.
Now, all of those are emotions.
You cannot turn any of those on by
an act of will directly, but they're commanded.
You see, I didn't have the theological savvy
in those days to call this Augustinianism.
Please turn the tape over now for the
remainder of the message.
I didn't have the theological savvy to recognize
that there is a biblical reality called the
right of God to demand from his creatures
what they deserve, what he deserves, whether they
can give it or not in their fallen
corruption.
I didn't read Augustine, command what thou wilt
and grant what thou commandest, until much later.
And he was talking about sexual continence at
the time.
So I understand theologically now why Joseph Fletcher
was dead wrong.
He's not an Augustinian.
He doesn't believe in the sovereignty of God
over human souls that has a right to
tell a corrupt human being who hates him,
love me or go to hell.
God has a right to tell a human
being, love me, fear me, trust me, follow
me, even though that human being is dead
and trespasses and sins and hates God and
never will move until the Holy Spirit moves
him.
Now, I don't think, therefore, that the essence
of Christianity is willpower.
And I think one of the great maladies
of the evangelical church in America is that
we have de-supernaturalized conversion to make it
manageable in evangelism by saying all you need
to do is decide something like sign or
go or do or something.
You don't have to be changed.
You don't have to be born again.
You don't have to have a new set
of affections.
Nothing needs to change except the decision that
you want to go to heaven and not
hell.
And Jesus is the way.
Who wouldn't want that without any change at
all in their behavior or in their affections?
I don't think we've done well and it
is the source of horrendous nominalism in the
churches and the perplexing thought of so many
people as supposedly converted and never ever being
changed.
You know, if we had time, I'd love
to go over John 3, 18 to 20.
Light has come into the world and men
love darkness rather than light.
They do not come to the light because
they love darkness and their deeds are evil.
You see what that means?
People do not come to the light.
Now, in John's vocabulary, coming to the light
means believing on Jesus and they don't come
because they hate the light.
So, what must come first?
Coming to the light or loving the light?
Now, where do you hear that in evangelism
today?
That you must be so born of God
that you cease to hate the light, that
you trust the pathway to God.
We've got things turned around, I think, and
it's reaping a harvest of nominalism.
Fourth objection to what I'm saying is what
became of service?
What became of being a slave of God?
Now, this is very important.
This could be the key element to your
lasting in your ministry.
What is your service like?
I want to try to show you that
most of our people do not understand what
it means to serve God.
Is God a plantation owner whose business just
won't make it if he doesn't have sufficient
slave labor?
You like that analogy?
Of course you don't.
Well, you better be careful about the way
you talk about service then, right?
Acts 17, 25, God is not served by
human hands as though He needed anything, for
He Himself gives to all men life and
breath and everything.
You can't serve God.
That ought to be the text you use
when you talk about service.
It can't be done.
Psalm 50, verse 12, If I were hungry,
I would not tell you, for the world
and all that is in it is mine.
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
Pay your vows to the Most High.
Call upon me in the day of trouble,
and I will deliver you, and you will
glorify me.
I'll deliver you, and you'll glorify me.
You don't work for me, I work for
you.
I get the glory for doing the work
in this affair.
Service isn't slave labor for an employer who
needs you in order to make it in
the business world.
Service is fundamentally receiving.
I'll show you this from another great text.
Matthew 6, 24, No one can serve two
masters.
Either he will hate the one and love
the other, or he will be devoted to
the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and money.
Now, have you ever asked yourself, how do
you serve money?
Is money a master who is telling you
things to do so that money will get
your help and benefit?
No, that's not the image.
How do you serve money?
You serve money by being devoted to a
lifestyle of positioning yourself always to benefit from
what money can get you.
Say that again, that went a little fast
maybe.
So serve money is to always be devoting
yourself to be in the right position to
get maximum benefit from money.
That's the way you calculate your life.
Now, if that's the way you serve money,
let's just flip it around and ask, now,
how do you serve God?
You devote your life to always being in
the place to get maximum benefit from God.
And that's right.
That's what service is.
And that's the pursuit of joy in God's
service to God.
It's like God's got this light that shines
down on the stage of the world called
the light of his love and the light
of his blessing, and he's moving.
And in this light, there pours down just
infinite love, infinite forgiveness, infinite joy, and he
starts to move it through the world.
Serving God means watching it and just kind
of moving around, stay in the light, walk
in the light as he is in the
light.
My most important text for a philosophy of
ministry at my church is 1 Peter 4
.11. It says, let him who serves, not
the word, let him who serves serve in
the strength that God supplies, that in everything
God may get the glory through Jesus Christ
to him be the dominion forever.
The one who gives the strength gets the
glory.
Beware of this notion of working for God.
Of course, Paul said he was a servant.
Of course, there are biblical words and sentences
that say serve him and work for him
and lay yourself down for him.
But if you don't take them in the
whole context of who God is as an
overflowing fountain and the one from whom all
blessings come and all strength comes and all
wisdom comes, you might fall into the notion
in your executive capacities of thinking that you
are really indispensable and that God is a
plantation owner.
And if you don't do your neck of
the work, then poor God, he'll just be
at his wits end to know how to
get the job done.
It's a very, very dangerous thing.
It's very self-exalting and very belittling to
the all sufficient wisdom and power of God
who will finish his work.
I use the illustration about duty concerning my
wife and the roses.
Let me use another one from Edward John
Carnell, because that's really what we're talking about
here, serving and doing your duty.
Carnell has made a great difference in my
life.
I never met the man, but he has
meant a lot to me.
He said, suppose a husband asks his wife
if he must kiss her good night.
Her answer is you must, but not that
kind of must.
This is his comment.
What she means is this, unless a spontaneous
affection for my person motivates you, your overtures
are stripped of all moral value.
And so it is in the service of
God.
You say, I must serve him.
He might just say, not that kind of
must.
Now, the fifth objection I want to raise
is, is it loving to live this way
in view of what 1 Corinthians 13 says,
love seeks not its own.
Here I am telling you to spend your
whole life pursuing your own joy in God,
unwavering allegiance to the fulfillment of your passionate
desire for happiness.
Am I leading you away from joy?
I mean, from love?
Well, to take this text as a jumping
off place, two verses early, it said, though
I give all my goods away and give
my body to be burned and have not
love it what?
Prophets mean nothing.
Whoa.
You mean we're supposed to be interested in
profit?
It's right there in 1 Corinthians.
The answer is right there in 1 Corinthians,
two verses away.
Of course, you're supposed to be interested in
profit.
Paul is appealing to your desire for profit,
not money, life, joy, meaning, pleasure at his
right hand forevermore.
No human being will ever criticize you for
enjoying loving them.
I've been to many hospitals, hundreds and hundreds
of times into the hospital to see people.
Let me ask you this.
Do you feel more loved when you are
visited begrudgingly or cheerfully?
Do you feel more loved when you are
visited begrudgingly?
It's the pastor's duty, he must come.
Or cheerfully?
I love being here with you.
Well, the answer is you feel more loved
when you are visited cheerfully, I think.
If that's true, what must a pastor always
pursue in his visitation in order to be
maximally loving?
Carefulness, joy.
You see this.
If you try to abandon your pursuit of
joy in the ministry, you won't love people.
You'll abort.
You'll dry up.
It says in Hebrews to the church, let
the pastors serve joyfully, for otherwise it would
be of no benefit to you.
If you want to benefit your people, you
must serve them joyfully.
A morose, gloomy, downcast pastor is deadly to
his people.
Nobody has ever criticized me as being unloving
when I have told them I love or
I delight or I enjoy serving you.
They've never said, well, get off your joy
kick and start being beautiful.
It just never happened.
This is very profound because the Bible could
so lightly be misunderstood at 1 Corinthians 13
.5 and numerous other places where it says
love seeks not its own.
What that means is love seeks not its
own limited, private, materialistic pleasures.
Love is willing to lay down its life
for other people for joy.
Now, we've got enough time to go to
Hebrews.
We're going to spend the rest of our
time, and I want to show you the
most hedonistic writer in the New Testament.
Let's go to Hebrews.
I don't know who it is.
I wish I knew.
I have a feeling it might be Barnabas.
I wrote a paper one time that Barnabas
wrote Hebrews, and I developed a 20-page
case for Barnabas.
I named one of my sons Barnabas.
I'd like it to be Barnabas.
But I don't know who it was, but
he was somebody who taught me that what
I'm saying is biblical.
Let's go to chapter 10.
I'm going to say the same thing, and
all of them show that love for people
flows from the pursuit of joy.
The first one is in Hebrews 10, 32
-34.
So relevant right now in many, many places
in the world where Christians are incarcerated.
Let's start reading at verse 32.
Verse 33, 34.
Recall the former days when you were enlightened,
you endured a hard struggle with suffering, sometimes
being publicly exposed to abuse and affliction, and
sometimes being partners with those so treated?
For you had compassion on the prisoners, and
you joyfully...
Underline that word.
Back in the earlier days, some people had
been arrested evidently and put in prison, and
the Christians who were not yet in prison
were forced with a choice.
Will we identify with those who have been
publicly in prison or will we go underground
and lay low?
And they prayed and they came to the
conclusion evidently that they would identify with them,
sometimes being partners with those so treated.
So what do they do?
They say, well let's go visit them.
Let's go visit them.
And they said, well if we go visit
them while we're gone, they'll light our house
on fire or beat us up in the
streets if we identify with them.
And they say, let's go anyway.
They looked at their lives and said, the
steadfast love of the Lord is better than
life.
And they looked at their possessions and they
said, we have a possession in heaven that
cannot fail.
And they looked at their goods and said,
let goods and kindred go, this mortal life
also, the body they may kill.
God's truth abides still, this kingdom is forever.
And they sang a hymn, walked down the
street, and they burned their houses.
Or something like that.
Threw the furniture in the street.
They plundered your property.
And they joyfully accepted the plundering of their
property.
Now I ask you, is not in this
text the pursuit of joy in the superior
inheritance of heaven, the ground of their ability
to love those prisoners?
As they contemplated, shall we love them with
our bodies or not, the power to love
them was the pursuit of reward in heaven.
Had they not loved that reward more, they
would not have gone.
Now, let me confirm this with three other
passages.
Hebrews 11.
I'm going to skip Hebrews 11, 6, where
we've already talked about the nature of faith
as believing that God is a rewarder.
Hebrews 11, 24 to 26.
By faith, Moses, when he was grown up,
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's
daughter, choosing rather to share ill treatment with
the people of God than to enjoy the
fleeting pleasures of sin.
Underline that word, fleeting.
He chose to share ill treatment.
And you could, if you stopped right there,
I suppose say, see, he's not pursuing joy,
he's pursuing ill treatment and he's forsaking joy.
But keep reading.
He considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater
wealth than the treasures of Egypt.
Why?
For he looked to the reward.
He had a choice here.
I can be rich in Egypt and safe
in Egypt if I disassociate myself with these
ragtag Israelites.
Or I can identify with these Israelites and
get myself in big trouble.
Which will I do?
Where does the source and power of loving
these people come from?
And the text says he looked to the
reward.
What did he think when he looked at
it?
Oh, that's, I shouldn't live for that.
I should turn away for that.
I should forget that and get that out
of my mind and be dutiful here.
That's just crazy.
He looked to the reward and fell in
love with the reward, found himself liberated from
the love of the praise of men and
the comforts of this world, and he laid
his life down for 80 years for those
people.
Here's another text.
You all know this one far better than
those.
Chapter 12, verse 2.
The greatest act of love in the universe
was driven by the pursuit of joy.
Believe that?
Look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of
our faith, who, for the joy that was
set before him, endured the cross.
What was the strength to love me?
The joy that he saw beyond, and I
think the joy he saw beyond, was the
glory of his Father in a chorus of
redeemed people with the Son thrown in their
midst.
And for the joy of my redemption, praising
him and his Father, he was willing to
endure anything.
But if you were to tell Jesus Christ,
in order to love me, you must stop
pursuing your joy.
You would oppose the atonement.
If I understand verse 2.
One more.
I'm preaching on this in three days.
I'm working on Hebrews 13.
Hebrews 13, 13.
The title of my sermon is The Sacrifice
of Suffering.
Verse 12 says that Jesus suffered outside the
gate in order to sanctify the people, and
then it applies to us.
Verse 13.
Let us go forth to him outside the
camp for, let's just stop right there, and
bear abuse with him.
Let us go forth to him outside the
camp and bear abuse with him or for
him.
That's what I'm going to summon my people
to do.
And I'm going to paint a picture of
the glory of laying down your life with
Jesus and for Jesus outside the camp.
And I'm going to talk about evangelism outside
the camp.
I'm going to say the camp is the
comfortable place.
The camp is the easy place.
The camp is secure.
Outside the camp is where the rattlesnakes are.
And you better go with Tim White out
there, the boy that was killed a few
blocks from our church.
And then I'm going to close with verse
14.
But we seek a city that is to
come.
It doesn't just happen to arrive because we
lay down our lives with no view to
the city.
So this notion that there is a stoic
Christianity that somehow is surprised by reward at
the end, that it was never pursuing and
didn't give any care for it all, is
not biblical.
And it cuts the nerve and heart right
out of joy in the Christian life.
And it strips us of our power to
love.
My last objection, with this I close, is
in the pursuit of my joy, my pleasure,
my happiness, what becomes of the centrality of
God, which is what I held up for
us on Tuesday.
And the answer is so simple.
Let me get at it in two ways,
just briefly.
Sometimes people say to me, aren't you making
a god out of pleasure?
I say, no.
You have already made a god out of
what you take most pleasure in.
Pleasure is not a god.
Pleasure is worship.
Money might be your god.
Sex might be your god.
Power might be your god.
A big staff might be your god.
But pleasure is simply the pursuit of whatever
you have as your god.
I haven't made pleasure into a god.
You all are pursuing something with a passion.
That's your god.
You magnify your god by the intensity of
the pleasure that you seek in him.
Money or God.
You make central, not pleasure, but whatever you
take most pleasure in.
That's my first answer.
I'm not making pleasure or myself central when
I say I can only find fulfillment and
joy and delight in God.
He is central.
And here's my second way of getting at
it, just a little image that maybe will
stick in your mind.
There are eight little puppies, little brown furry
puppies on the kitchen floor and they're all
hungry and thirsty and they're tangled and they're
fighting each other like this.
And you take a big yellow bowl of
water and you put it on the floor.
And suddenly these tangled eight little self-consumed
puppies are going to the water.
And there they are like little brown petals
around this yellow center.
Now I just ask you, what is central
in that scene of those thirsty puppies?
What is central?
What are we making central at that moment?
Thirst?
Water.
And when the Holy Spirit comes upon us
and you and your ministry so that you
and all of your staffs and all of
your personnel can say with the psalmist, oh
God, thou art my God, I seek thee,
I thirst for thee as in a dry
and weary land where no water is.
At that moment, two glorious things are going
to happen.
God is going to be glorified as the
fountain of living water and all your people
are going to be satisfied in him.
And it's the discovery of that truth that
God is most glorified in us when we
are most satisfied in him that I think
will make you last and keep your service
from being legalism and depleting and discouraging.
Oh Father in heaven, if I've said anything
amiss, I've used any scripture amiss, just clear
it up, cancel it out.
But if I have hit any nail on
the head, drive it home.
Oh God, for our everlasting joy, for our
burning, for our risking, and for our lasting.
And above all things,