http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14830404/what-happens-to-desires-without-god
You Might also like
-
When God Sets Sunsets Free: Imagining the World to Come
We often think of creation — forests and oceans, tornados and earthquakes, lions, tigers, and bears — as wild and untamed compared with normal life. And we’re not wrong. When God placed Adam into the world he had made, even before that world fell into disorder through sin, he charged the man “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Part of how humanity images God, then, is by bringing purpose and order to a feral world.
Look closer, however, or perhaps deeper, and we see that creation is not as wild as we typically imagine. Through the fall, Paul tells us, “the creation was subjected to futility” and suffers in “bondage to corruption” (Romans 8:20–21). It’s unfenced and yet now enslaved. It’s untamed and yet trapped. The wonders God has made are held back and smothered by sin. Even the deepest, most dangerous oceans are anchored and weighed down by the curse. Even the strongest, healthiest lions are weak and sick with judgment. Even the most brilliant sunsets are shadows of what they might be.
Of what they will be. One day soon, God will make all we know unmistakably new. Have you learned to long, and pray, for the wonders of a better world to come?
Country of ‘Not Good’
How many of us have reckoned with the glorious potential of a renewed creation — and with the devastating condition of the current one? When God made the world and called it all good, he wasn’t looking at the world as we know it. No, when mankind fell from glory, the oceans, mountains, and stars fell with us. Sin dragged continents of beauty and purity into the awful, nauseating swamp of the curse.
After Adam and Eve took and ate what was not theirs to eat, the consequences were felt far and deep and wide. “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,” God says to Adam, “and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you” (Genesis 3:17). Death and destruction, injury and disease, earthquakes and tornados, malice and treachery, droughts and floods, toil and trouble. Every inch of creation was warped and stained by sin. A cloud 25,000 miles wide fell over the earth, and centuries later it has not lifted. Were God to again survey the sun and the galaxies, the hills and seas, the trees and flowers, the birds and whales, the lions, tigers, and bears, he would no longer call it “good,” at least not in the same way.
Think about that. God meticulously (and effortlessly) painted a living, breathing mural of his creativity and worth, and then stepped back to admire and savor what he had made. It was breathtakingly beautiful. And yet before the first child was born, sin spilled oil over his masterpiece. Sin vandalized and leveled the dream home he had built for us. It was breathtakingly bleak. And that’s still our address today. We now walk and work and play on streets and corners of “Not good.”
We live in a wild and arresting world that’s been arrested by sin — for now. The creation violently treads water, thrashing and gasping for air, but only “until the time for restoring all the things” (Acts 3:21).
If Rocks Could Cry Out
When we think about that world to come, we may have an easy enough time imagining aspects of our new, glorified bodies. Eyes without glasses. Heads without aches. Joints without arthritis. Necks and backs without stiffness. Healthy blood pressures without pills. Organs without cancer. Never struggling to sleep. Never searching for a prescription. Never wondering what’s wrong.
The creation itself “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). If the rocks could cry out, they would go on and on about what God will make out of those who are in Christ, about the wonder of generations cured of sin, about how our holiness will reflect light and life into every corner of creation. Creation’s been let in on a secret about humanity that so many humans never learn: we won’t always be this broken, this tired, this opposed, this confused, this prone to wander. The glorious God will soon glorify us.
And creation’s not just waiting to see what we will be; Paul says it’s longing to see us — eyes fixed on the horizon, holding its breath, waiting for a glimpse of the sun. Why? Because when we become our new, immortal, glorified selves, “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The glory of the new heavens and new earth will be our glory in Christ, to the glory of Christ.
What might a place like that be like? What will it be like to witness the regeneration, not just of souls, but of the whole universe? As easy as it may be to imagine some aspects of a glorified human body, we can have a harder time imagining God healing and renewing creation — but he will.
When the World Sheds the Curse
Imagine, for a moment, whatever you love about this world finally being set free and freshly charged with the glory of God.
What might the shores along O‘ahu look like glorified? What about the endless fields of tulips in the Netherlands? How beautifully might a choir of nightingales sing? Will we get to listen to rain fall and thunder roll without ever wondering what damage might be done? What might a Southern Californian orange taste like, right off the tree? How much sweeter will fresh strawberries be? Can you begin to smell the rose gardens, brighter than ever and stripped of their thorns? Can you see yourself canoeing glorified rivers, climbing glorified trails, biking through glorified fields, sitting beside glorified lakes? How soon will it all stop feeling like some wild, impossible dream?
Outside of Scripture, no one has whet my appetite for the new creation more than Randy Alcorn has. He says, “To get a picture of Heaven — which will one day be centered on the New Earth — you don’t need to look up at the clouds; you simply need to look around you and imagine what all this would be like without sin and death and suffering and corruption” (Heaven, 17). Do you ever do that? Few things are more lethal to worldliness than to imagine what this world might really be like when it sheds the curse, when God washes the oil spill from his painting and breathes it into new life.
And the light animating it all will be the nail-scarred, once-dead man on the throne. At the center will be the Lion of Judah, roaring over every mile and creature,the Lamb of God, slain to make it all possible and beautiful. John Piper writes,
We will never forget that every sight, every sound, every fragrance, every touch, and every taste in the new world was purchased by Christ for his undeserving people. This world — with all its joy — cost him his life. Every pleasure of every kind will intensify our thankfulness and love for Jesus. (Providence, 687)
Seeing the New Heavens Now
As stunning as that future day will be, what God will reveal about us then is actually already true. Listen closely: “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). We won’t become sons that day; we’ll finally get to see the fullness of our sonship. A few verses earlier, Paul writes,
All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs. (Romans 8:14–17)
The new creation, with our new bodies, will be a worldwide, centuries-long parade of what God has already done in our hearts through faith. If you are in Christ, you are a new creation — right now (2 Corinthians 5:17). The apostle John saw this same reality:
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. . . . Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:1–2)
Oh we will be changed, in the twinkling of the eye, at the last trumpet, but we won’t be born again again. If we are in Christ, the new heavens already live in us. And because his Spirit lives in us, everything that will make the new creation so captivating and satisfying is already ours in him.
-
The Power of Your Personal Testimony
Audio Transcript
In the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, we read a remarkable story of a man born blind who was made to see by the miraculous healing power of Christ. It was the kind of miracle, like so many of them, that could not be kept a secret. Word spread far and wide of what Jesus had done to this young man. But the power players of the day rejected the news. And so we read that
the Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. But how he now sees we do not know, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age [that is, he’s at least 13 years old]. He will speak for himself.” (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.)
So there’s a power move here, an intimidation factor at play. John continues,
Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” He [the healed man] answered, “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (John 9:18–25)
“Was blind, but now I see” — a famous line, worked into John Newton’s famous hymn “Amazing Grace.” John 9 is a key chapter in explaining God’s plan for physical disability. But it’s also a key chapter for understanding how we as Christians, changed by the grace of God, can testify of Christ before the world’s most powerful and educated people. Here’s Pastor John to explain.
Here we see the full-blown courage of a beggar — a mere beggar standing up to the most religious, most educated people of the land. And we see here full-blown blasphemy in response to that kind of courage.
Testifying Power
Verse 24: “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” In other words, “Join us in blasphemy, or we’ll excommunicate you out of the synagogue.” That’s not like being excommunicated out of Bethlehem, because do you know what happens if we do discipline on an unrepentant person? They go join another church. In spite of any letter we might send, there are churches of all kinds, and people just move on.
That can’t happen here. When you get kicked out of a synagogue, you get kicked out of Judaism. This is life. This is like being in a Muslim-dominated context. You can’t be there as a Christian. It won’t work. This is huge. Don’t just hear, “We’ll kick you out.” Getting rid of you from the synagogue means you’re out of the community. This is huge, what this man was standing up against.
“A personal testimony trumps arguments when they’re bad arguments — and they’re all bad when they’re against Jesus.”
Verse 25 is his most famous sentence. People all over the world know this sentence, even if they don’t know the Bible: “Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” I hope you feel something here. You don’t think of yourself as a theologian and you don’t think of yourself as a scientist, but you’ve got people coming against your faith with every manner of argument — historically, scientifically, experientially. They’re coming against you if you try to be a bold, regular witness.
And I want you to feel the power of this: a personal testimony trumps arguments when they’re bad arguments — and they’re all bad arguments when they’re against Jesus. Don’t be intimidated. This man was way less educated than everybody in all these rooms, and he’d been blind all of his life. And he just simply said with all boldness, “Look, you may know some things I don’t know, but I can see.”
Doctrines of Courage
One of the reasons I teach and preach on the doctrines of grace is because there are so many Christians who don’t know how they got saved, so that they don’t know they have a stunning testimony that they sheer believe. Your belief is a miracle; you didn’t choose it.
Of course, if you have a theology that says, “I did it,” then you’ve got no testimony to the power of God in your life. But at age 6 or 16 or 36, when you saw Jesus as needed and beautiful and sufficient, and you confessed, “I’m a sinner, I need you, I receive you,” a miracle happened. A miracle happened. That’s why these theological things matter.
You can stand up in front of the Senate and say, “I don’t know much about what you guys deal with here. I just know one thing: I was blind once, and now I see the glory of Christ as self-evidencing and compelling, and I will die for him. I’ll stake my life on the truth of what I’ve seen in Jesus.” That’s what you can say. That’s very powerful. It is here. It will come to a point where they can’t handle him anymore. That’s what he said. I hope you’re willing to say it. I hope you have enough understanding to say it, and if you don’t, I hope you study about how you got saved, so that you will know that if you’re saved, you can say it.
Blind Hearts
His courage becomes scorn. Verse 27: “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” Whoa, what are you doing, man? You’re going to get yourself killed. They’re very hostile, of course. Verses 28–29: “They reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’”
Now the controversy has revealed another deceit: They’re not disciples of Moses. They think they are. They’re not, because Jesus said in John 5:46, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.” “You don’t know Moses, and you don’t know God. You talk about Moses. You read Moses. You talk about God. You read God’s word. And you don’t know God, because if you knew God and you knew Moses, you’d know me.”
Again, the controversy is revealing what’s really going on in the Jewish leaders’ hearts. Now we are seeing who’s really blind here. They take the first five books of their Bible, and they read them, and they don’t see anything. They’re blind. We’re watching a man whose sight is becoming clearer and clearer and clearer, and whose courage is becoming stronger and stronger, and we’re watching these Pharisees reveal more and more blindness. You don’t want to be a part of that.
Jesus in Pursuit
Jesus and the beggar have a conversation in verses 35–38, after the Jewish leaders cast the beggar out. What makes this conversation so amazingly significant is that Jesus sought him out and found him. Verse 34: “‘You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?’ And they cast him out.” Now, that’s really serious. To whom will he turn when he’s just been cast out of the community? To whom will he turn?
He doesn’t have to turn anywhere. Jesus turns to him. We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Jesus found him. Jesus seeks him. It is no accident that the next chapter is about the Good Shepherd who gathers his sheep. It’s no accident. John knows what he’s doing. He found him. “That’s one of mine. Nobody else wants him right now. I want him.” That’s what I’m praying he’ll do to you in the next five minutes of this sermon. He is after you. He is going to find you. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re there.
Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.” He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him. (John 9:35–38)
“Do you confess Christ openly and defend him with your simple testimony, ‘I was blind, and now I see’?”
Then the beggar is gone out of this story. He never says another word. We never see him again. The last thing he does is worship Jesus. I pray that’s the last thing I do. Jesus does the works of God. Jesus is the glory of God. Jesus is to be worshiped. That’s the point of the story. The beggar is blind. He calls Jesus a man. Then he calls Jesus a prophet. Then he defends him at huge risk to his life. And then he worships him after he is found by Jesus.
‘Finally, I Saw’
Jesus came into the world to seek worshipers. That’s why he’s here. Do you confess him openly and defend him with your simple testimony? No big apologetic reasoning. Some of you are called to that, but most of you aren’t. You’re just called to be witnesses. If you see a car hit a person, you can be a witness. You don’t need any education at all.
“I saw” — 95 percent of Christians are saved that way. No big argument — just, “I saw. Finally, I saw. I was reading the Gospels, and I couldn’t resist this man anymore. He was real. He’s real. He’s true. He’s exactly what I need. He’s what the world needs. He’s real. This is not made up. I saw.”
I simply ask, Do you confess him openly and defend him with your simple testimony, “I was blind, and now I see”?
-
How Do I Make Christian Hedonism My Own?
Audio Transcript
Good Monday morning, everyone. Well, we are Christian Hedonists, and that’s something we have dedicated several episodes to explaining on the podcast. You could look at, for example, APJs 958, 1201, and 1281.
For those of you who want to teach this glorious truth, how do we take Christian Hedonism and make it our own? Or even more broadly asked, how do any of us take the key teachings of others and incorporate them into our ministry so that we’re not simply mimicking our teachers? That’s an important question faced by any budding Christian communicator, writer, teacher, or preacher. And it’s the question today in the inbox.
“Dear Tony and Pastor John, hello to you both! My name is Gabriel, an international student studying in Australia. I praise God for your ministry and for the realities you have pointed to in the Bible, especially in opening my eyes to the connection between our joy and God’s sovereign glory. My question is this: How do I make Christian Hedonism my own, especially when it comes to teaching? I’m young, but I hope to teach one day, maybe even preach the word. But often I find that I’m checking myself to see if I’m simply copying what you said. I see that the realities are there in the text and the Bible, but your ministry is so thorough and wholesome I almost feel I can’t say anything without echoing you. Perhaps I think incorrectly. How can we carry on encouraging, teaching, preaching this reality in our own voice? I would be honored to hear your thoughts.”
Gabriel’s question touches on a tension that every teacher feels when he has found something true and precious in God’s word, and desires that it be seen and loved by others, and that those others, generation after generation, preserve and pass on the truth and the preciousness of the reality that he has seen.
Tension of Treasured Truth
And the tension is this: On the one hand, we want the very thing we have seen in Scripture to be preserved and not distorted or corrupted or lost. And on the other hand, we know that if it is to be preserved for generations, the people that preserve it must have a grasp of it that is deeper than simply imitating the words of those who taught them the reality, showed them the reality. So, there’s a tension between holding fast to what is fixed and having freedom to give fresh and vital expression and application to that fixed reality.
So Gabriel has discovered the truth and the beauty of what we call Christian Hedonism — namely, the thought and the life that flow from the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And as he grows in his understanding and seeks to share with others what he’s seen, he finds himself sounding like his teacher, like me in particular. And he wonders if there are steps he can take so that he isn’t what I would call — he didn’t use this language, this is my language — a secondhander, a mimic. We don’t want him to be that; he doesn’t want to be that.
Moving from Imitation to Maturity
Now, what would I point out to Gabriel first if he’s going to be helped beyond being a secondhander? What I would point out to Gabriel first is that he’s probably at a particular point in an inevitable process that moves from discovery, through imitation, through the maturity of creative expression, and onto more and more discovery, and so on.
So his question is really, I think, “How can I move along in a natural process that I’m in?” Let me use an analogy. Compare the mystery and the wonder of how little tiny children learn language. The first thing they do is listen, look, and feel; listen, look, and feel. So you’ve got this two-week-old baby — listen, look, feel, with some very uncreative crying to express inarticulate desires.
And then one day they echo back, “Mama.” “Dada.” You just burst with the thrill that they made the connection between the reality of a person and a word coming out of their mouth: “Mama.” “Dada.” And all of it right now is simply imitation, echoing, copying — but oh, how real it is, right? It’s real. You don’t say, “Oh, he’s just copying me.” This is an awesome point in his development.
And then, within a year or so, an absolutely astonishing thing happens. All of the reality that this baby has been processing quietly (eyes, ears, touch) suddenly comes together, miraculously it seems, in his mind and out comes a sentence — two words, three words — that the baby put together out of his own little head, imitating nobody. Nobody had just spoken that sentence to him. It emerged out of his own mind. Absolutely amazing. And the rest of their lives, they’ll be turning observed and desired reality into sentences, some of which have never been spoken in the history of the world. Amazing.
1. Imitate for a season.
Now that pattern of listening, then echoing, and then creating and ongoing discovery is the way we learn for the rest of our lives. So, my first piece of advice for Gabriel is this: don’t begrudge a season of discovery and imitation. When someone helps you see a reality that you hadn’t seen before, it is inevitable that you will describe the reality in the words of the one who helped you see it. That’s normal; it’s good. But you are right to be concerned that you should not remain in this early phase of understanding and expression. So how do you move on to find your own voice and not lose the reality?
2. Press through words to experience.
So my second piece of advice is that you practice pressing through language to reality, that you never settle for mere words — not my words, not even Bible words. When the Bible speaks, uses words, you press into those words, and through those words, to the reality — the reality of love, the reality of joy, the reality of faith, the reality of Christ, the reality of God. These are not mere words. This is the rock-bottom necessity of not remaining a child or a secondhander.
“Before you can find your authentic voice, you must have an authentic experience.”
Have you tasted the reality expressed in the words of your teacher or the Scriptures? That’s what everyone should ask. Have I tasted the reality, or is it just words? Before you can find your authentic voice, you must have an authentic experience of what you are trying to give voice to. This is a matter of earnest prayer, earnest study. O Lord, “open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).
3. Observe the truth from different angles.
The third piece of advice I would give is that you not only press through your teacher’s words to that reality, but that you be constantly on the lookout in Scripture for more reality — realities that when they are brought together with the reality of Christian Hedonism will cause you to see it in fresh light, and the diamond will reveal more of its facets than you knew existed, perhaps even more than your teacher has ever seen.
4. Find fresh language for old reality.
The fourth piece of advice I would give is that you make a studied effort to find fresh, faithful, compelling, culturally appropriate language to describe the reality that you have come to love. This studied effort at creative expression will almost certainly go off the rails if the biblical reality is not clearly seen and firmly rooted in Scripture, and gladly embraced with your heart and your mind. Without this, the effort at creativity will almost certainly degenerate into creating new reality, rather than new expressions of old, unchanging reality.
5. Don’t despise tried-and-true expressions.
The fifth piece of advice I would give is that none of us be put off by old, tried-and-true expressions of reality. That is, we shouldn’t feel the need to always be saying things in new ways, as if old ways are inevitably inadequate. Some of the language describing a wonderful reality is so rooted in Scripture, and so well-suited to the reality, and so compelling in its application that it shouldn’t be left behind just because it’s been around for a long time.
“God gave us the language of Christian Hedonism, and we don’t need to be ashamed of repeating his old, happy language.”
“Delight yourself in the Lord” has been around for three thousand years (Psalm 37:4). “Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love” has been around for three thousand years (Psalm 90:14). “We have this treasure,” treasure in earthen vessels, has been around for two thousand years (2 Corinthians 4:7). “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” has been around two thousand years (Philippians 4:4). “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” — that’s been around for three thousand years (Psalm 16:11). These aren’t John Piper’s words. God gave us the language of Christian Hedonism, and we don’t need to be ashamed of repeating his old, happy language.
6. Read widely.
And the last thing I would say is that you read widely concerning the things you care about. It is good to find a teacher who shows you things you’ve never seen. It is also good to listen to a half a dozen other teachers who can help you see the same thing from different angles, or other things that put the thing you love in an even brighter perspective.
No Longer a Secondhander
And I’ll just end by saying that in the mid-to-late ’70s, anybody who listened to or looked at the twentysomething John Piper, and also knew his teacher, Dan Fuller — they laughed. They laughed because my mannerisms, my tones of voice, my peculiar expressions, they all echoed my most influential teacher. I didn’t begrudge that. Frankly, I considered it a badge. I liked it. I was very happy to be the inadvertent imitator of the man who showed me so much glory. But I grew out of that, and there came a day when nobody saw me as an imitator anymore.