I want to talk about a discovery that I made by grace in the word of God fifty years ago. In the fall of 1968 came three months or so during which I passed from ignorance into knowledge concerning things that have shaped everything in my life.
The discovery has to do with the glory of God, and its massive centrality in the universe, and my happiness, and its massive power in my heart and my desire for it.
The discovery was how they relate to each other and how that relationship catapults delighting in God or the enjoyment of God to a place that is so pervasive that it changes everything in life.
I need to clarify something before I launch into explaining the discovery and how it changes everything.
Prejudice Against Joy
Most of you come to this room with preconceptions in your mind and feelings about the word joy or pleasure or happiness or delight or satisfaction. All that cluster of affectional, emotional language has associations for you — some of them positive, some of them negative, and you’re all over the map, because of your peculiar experiences.
“It’s not a sin to want to be happy.”
Let me give a clarification so that I can at least eliminate some misconceptions of what I mean when I talk about delight in God or joy in God or satisfaction in God. The way to clarify would be this: the Bible sometimes talks about sorrow and joy as though they were sequential experiences. First you have one, then you have another. And sometimes the Bible talks about them as simultaneous experiences going on at the very same moment. I can give you two examples. Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”
Everybody gets that, right? Something horrible is going on in your life for a season called “night” here, and you’re crying most of the time. And it passes or it gets fixed or something happens, and joy returns. That’s a sequence. First weeping, then joy. We get that. Everybody understands the difference between crying your eyes out and leaping for joy because something wonderful has happened.
Sorrow and Joy Mingle
However, the Bible also talks about them as simultaneous. For example, in 2 Corinthians 6:10, Paul describes himself as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” Sorrowful and yet unbroken — not sequential — unbroken joy. I don’t think that’s a contradiction, because we use language that way. Don’t we? We all know that sometimes we use the word joy or delight or happinessto describe those bright, cheerful, sunny, smiling expressions of that good feeling. That’s not sorrow.
But other times — and if you’ve walked with Jesus a while, you know this — we also talk about the sweet, precious, deep, unshakeable satisfaction in your soul through the worst of times. I’ll just give you a concrete illustration. When I was 28, I got the phone call that my mother had been killed in Israel in a bus wreck. My dad was in the hospital. They didn’t know if he’d make it. I never walked through anything like this before, so I just put down the phone. My little two-year-old, Karsten, was holding onto my leg like this and saying, “Daddy sad?” And I said to Noël, “Mama’s dead. And Daddy might not make it. That’s all I know.”
I went back to my bedroom, and I knelt down, and I wept for two hours. I know that during those two hours, there was that part in me that was saying, “She was awesome. Thank you for my 28 years with this woman. Thank you that she brought me to Jesus. Thank you that she understood when nobody else understood. Thank you that she’s in heaven. Thank you that she didn’t suffer. It was a brain injury. Thank you.”
I’d never before experienced the simultaneous reality of never being more sad in my life, all while my delight in God’s mercies to me and his rock-solid being there for me and trust in taking her to himself never wavered. That was a gift.
We know this. So when I’m using the word joy, satisfaction, happiness, delight, I’m talking about a kind of spiritual experience that sometimes is bright and cheerful and smiling and laughing and leaping for joy, and other times is just the unshakeable, sweet, deep satisfaction of your soul in God while you are weeping your eyes out.
Can you handle that? Don’t make what I say then superficial. Okay? Don’t hear me in the most superficial way you can imagine delight, happiness, joy, satisfaction, and so on. That’s my clarification so you know what I mean when I’m using this kind of language.
God’s Glory or My Happiness?
It’s fifty years ago. I grew up in a wonderful Christian home and never, never turned my back on what my parents taught me. And love them to this day. They both are in heaven I believe.
I went away to university when I was eighteen, seven hundred miles away from my home. I carried with me a tension that I couldn’t figure out. The resolution of the tension was the discovery four years later, but between 18 and 22 I kept trying to figure it out. Over here, my dad had taught me 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whatever you do, Johnny, whatever you do in word or deed, do all to the glory of God. This world exists for the glory of God. You exist for the glory of God. Make God look glorious by the way you live.” I love that and want to do that.
Over here was the real John Piper, in his heart, craving happiness. I wanted to be happy. I could no more turn that off than I could turn off hunger after skipping ten meals. It was natural, and I believe now it’s God-given. It’s not a sin to want to be happy. It’s not a sin.
I didn’t know how these two fit together. It seemed to be in the air that if you did a good deed in any way in pursuit of your happiness, it made the deed defective. It didn’t seem to be for God’s glory if it was for your happiness. That was the tension I lived with. I couldn’t deny this biblically. I couldn’t deny this experientially. And therefore, I lived quite torn during my college years.
Then, in the fall of 1968 in a class with Daniel Fuller, who introduced me to some writings of C.S. Lewis that I hadn’t seen before, and writings of Jonathan Edwards that I hadn’t seen before, and his own writings that I hadn’t seen before, I saw things that changed everything.
To Live Is Christ, To Die Is Gain
I’m going to try to show you from Philippians what I discovered. I don’t want you to embrace it because I think it, or because it sounds helpful. Philippians 1:20, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be” — exalted, honored, magnified, whatever word is appropriate.
This is what my dad taught me, right? “Johnny, use your body, use your mind to make Jesus look magnificent, to make Jesus look exalted. That’s why you’re on the planet. Do that.”
That’s Paul’s eager expectation and hope. I want in my body for Jesus to be exalted. That means I want to use my hands and my legs and my eyes and my mouth — I want to do everything with my body so that Jesus looks great, and it makes people want Jesus.
Track the Logic
So my question then became, as you can imagine, “How does that relate to Paul’s happiness, satisfaction, joy, delight?” Now watch the logic. I grew up in a very biblically-saturated home, and yet somehow had not been taught to follow the logic of passages. For me, Bible verses were like pearls on a chain. Here’s a pearl and a pearl. And these pearls are beautiful. I’d take a pearl with me all day long. Or a Bible verse is like a lozenge you put in your mouth, and you suck on it all day long, and you get wonderful sweetness from the verse. I still do that.
But what there is to be seen in the Bible when you don’t think of Bible phrases in terms of little pearls or lozenges, but as links in a logical chain that hang together. The link between verses 20 and 21, that link is forged with the word for, both in the NIV and the ESV because it’s really there in the Greek.
“The core demand of the Bible is not just embracing Jesus as Savior or Lord, but treasuring the Savior and Lord as your chief delight.”
So he says, I want Christ to be exalted, magnified, honored, made great, made to look magnificent “in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” That word for, and that logical connection, changed my life. Let me see if I can help you see what I see. How does that logic work? The word forhere is “because,” right? “I’m confident Christ is going to look magnificent in my body, because to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Notice, “to live” in verse 21 corresponds back to “by life” in verse 20. And “to die” in verse 21 corresponds back to “by death” in verse 20. He’s giving a double argument. “Christ will be magnified in my life, because to live is Christ. Christ will be magnified by my death, because to die is gain.”
Now, I paused and looked at the second pair. “I want Christ to be magnified in my body by my death. Help me to die in a way that will make Christ look magnificent, and it will happen because for me to die is gain.” How does it work? How are you going to do that? What’s the basis of that? How does that work? Because to me to die is gain.
The Missing Piece
There’s a missing piece in the argument. It shows up in the next two verses. Philippians 1:22–23, “If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Now if I go back to verse 21 and say, “You just said to die is gain. What did you mean? How is it gain?” He answers that in verse 23, doesn’t he? “I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” So what’s the gain? With Christ, far better. It is far, far better to be with Christ.
So let me paraphrase the logic now so far. “I want Christ to be magnified in my body as I die, and that will happen, because for me to die is to experience so much more intimacy and closeness with the all-satisfying Christ that I call it gain, even though I lose everything in this world.” Is that a fair paraphrase? Christ is most magnified in my body as I die, when my heart is most satisfied in him as I die. That changed everything.
No Greater Gain
I think that’s what it says. The reason I make Christ look great in the hospital bed, my family standing around me, knowing I’ve got an hour or two before I’m in the presence of Jesus, is if at that moment I can exude for them, “This is going to be awesome. Don’t weep for me. You may weep for you. Don’t weep for me. Gain, gain, gain.” That would make Jesus look pretty good.
How else are you going to make him look good if you’re not satisfied in him? If you’re cleaving to this world — “I don’t want to lose this family. I don’t want to lose this job. I don’t want to lose this dream retirement. I don’t want to lose this house. I don’t want to lose this sexual pleasure I’ve enjoyed all these years. I don’t want to lose anything here. It’s so precious to me. Jesus, wait, wait, wait” — you’re not making Jesus look good.
The saying that captures Christian Hedonism is God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. That’s my biblical argument for it: the logic between verses 20–21 of Philippians 1.
