Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. We have been doing this podcast for almost a decade now. And over those ten years there have been some moving pastoral moments. I remember one from a long time ago. I looked it up. It was back in APJ 131. It’s an oldie. There, Pastor John was talking about important Bible verses to memorize, ones that he has found particularly useful in serving others. One such text was Psalm 130:3: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” There Pastor John testified, “How many times have I knelt down, put my arm on somebody who has just been broken over some sin that they have committed, and been able to pray over them this text: ‘Lord, if you would mark iniquities, who could stand?’” That’s a moving picture of a word spoken pastorally.

That image, and that text, comes to mind when I think of today’s sermon clip because there’s a question about how we approach God in the midst of our brokenness, particularly in this brokenness we experience over our own sins. This very question gets answered robustly in Nehemiah 9–10. God’s people are in distress. It’s distress caused by their own sins. They know it. And they know they deserve the distress itself. So how do we approach God now? Here’s Pastor John to explain, looking at Nehemiah 9.

Starting with Nehemiah 9:6–37, the Levites are praying. This chapter is a prayer. They’re praying to the end of verse 37, and they’re crying out “to you, O God.” The word you in reference to God occurs thirty times in these verses. What did they do? What did they say? How did they deal with God in great distress? That’s what we want to know. How did they do that?

Under God-Given Distress

Before we ask further, let’s get more specific about the distress, because this will clarify your situation. There are some of you right now who are perhaps arguing with yourself, if not with me, “What you’re about to say is not going to apply to me because you don’t understand how I got where I am.” Let’s see whether that’s true or not.

Back to verse 37. They’re not just in distress. They are in a distress that they deserve to be in because of their sin. And they are in a distress that God himself put them in. Let’s look at verse 37 to see that. “[The land’s] rich yield” — which we’re supposed to inherit as a promise — “goes to the kings whom you have set over us . . .” Slave masters. You put them over us, God, “. . . because of our sins” (Nehemiah 9:37). In other words, the great distress that we are in, we deserve to be in. And not only do we deserve to be in it, but it’s judgment sent from you.

So now we get clarity on this. Some of you might be tempted to say, “The rest of you in here, you can call upon God in your distress, but not me because I sinned my way into the mess I’m in. God put me here as a discipline or a punishment. So the rest of you can go on about your merry way, following this preacher and learning how to call upon God in your distress because it just came upon you. It didn’t just come upon me. I brought it on me.” That’s their situation.

If you’re in that category, you dare not talk like that. Don’t talk to God like that. Do not say to God, “This text is not addressing my need because I sinned my way into the mess I’m in, and you brought it on me.” That’s irrelevant. That’s the whole point of this text. These people are in a distress they deserve to be in, that God put them in. None of you may escape the good news of this text. You have no right to tell God he can’t give you good news.

“You have no right to tell God he can’t give you good news.”

Oh, how many people I have dealt with over the years who try to tell God they are beyond good news. And I get upset with them because they are belittling the cross, diminishing the blood, crying down the mercy, exalting themselves in their self-pity. I won’t have it, neither in this room nor in the counseling chamber. Don’t tell God that he can’t give you good news because you’ve sinned your way into your misery, and God himself brought you under his discipline. That’s exactly their situation. We’re in this together, and we want desperately to know, How do we approach God now? How do you talk to God in that situation? That’s what they’re doing, and I want to learn as best I can how they do it.

Rehearsing Stories of Hope

So what do they do? It’s astonishing what they do. They pray back to God the entire history of the Old Testament. This is the longest — or maybe the right word is that this is the fullest — retelling of the Old Testament in the Old Testament. Jim Hamilton says in his new commentary, “This is the fullest retelling of the Old Testament in a short space in the Old Testament.” And it’s a prayer, so they’re telling God what God did for a thousand years — more than a thousand. That’s a remarkable way to approach God in a deserved, God-ordained distress.

So in Nehemiah 9:6–31 they’re telling the story of the Old Testament. Why would they do that? Here’s why. God does not exist so that we can enjoy Bible stories. Bible stories exist so that we can enjoy God. And they desperately, desperately need to know whether our God is the kind of God in whom there’s any possibility of enjoyment in our great distress — well-deserved and given by God. Is there any hope at all that there’s a God in heaven that would give us hope that he could be enjoyed in this? That’s what they need to know.

And they know where to find the answer. It’s in the story, because that’s what the stories are for: to reveal God. They desperately need to know, What kind of God do we have? Is it over for us? Or is he the kind of God that perhaps there might be some hope in a deserved, God-given distress? That’s why they’re retelling the stories back to God.

Great and Only God

In Nehemiah 9:6–15, the Levites celebrate the power of God, the righteousness of God, and the covenant-keeping salvation of God. Verse 6 says, “You are the Lord” (Nehemiah 9:6). You know what that refers to: Yahweh. That’s his personal name. It’s like, “You are James,” only it’s not James — it’s Yahweh. “You are Yahweh.” And you know where the name came from. “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel, “I am has sent me to you”’” (Exodus 3:14). And the name Yahweh is built on “I am who I am,” which means every time you see big L-O-R-D, this is God saying, “I am God, and I have no competitors, and I depend on nobody and nothing. I had no beginning; I will have no end. Deal with me because that is reality.” That’s God.

“You don’t negotiate with God. He is absolute reality. We are defined, he is definer.”

So they began, “You are Yahweh.” It’s a good place to begin. You are absolute God. There’s no negotiation going on here at all. You don’t negotiate with God. He is absolute reality. We are defined; he is definer. We are dependent; he is totally independent. Our being comes into being; his being has always been, as inconceivable and glorious as that is. We begin here. This is a place of reverence and humility and lowliness. You begin your dealing with this God in your great distress by saying, “You are Yahweh, the great and only and absolute God.”

Verse 6 in the middle says, “You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you” (Nehemiah 9:6). You made everything; you uphold everything. Therefore, “the host” — I like the translation army — “the [army] of heaven worships you” (Nehemiah 9:6). You are exalted. “Your glorious name . . . is exalted above all blessing and praise” (Nehemiah 9:5).

That’s where you begin, right? In dealing with God, just lift him up. Now remember, these are people who are totally guilty, under distress given by God, okay? You lift up your soul in your guilt, and you lift up your soul in your distress, and you lift up your soul under the mighty hand of God, and you say, “You are God.” That’s a great place to begin.

Audio Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to this special episode of the podcast. I just returned home from Brazil. There we launched my new technology book in Portuguese at a conference hosted by our friends at Fiel. In fact, I discovered that thousands of Brazilians listen regularly to this podcast. There’s even a Portuguese version of APJ. So hello to all of you listening right now. It was a delight to meet so many of you in Atibaia, and to receive your gratitude for APJ, which you wanted me to pass along to Pastor John, which I do now. So on behalf of at least the hundreds of Brazilian Christians that I met, thank you, Pastor John, for your decade-long investment in this podcast.

While I was in Brazil, big news broke here in the States. Roe v. Wade has been overturned by the Supreme Court. On Friday, the SCOTUS ruling was made official. We knew it was coming. Back on May 2, a draft opinion of the decision was leaked. I texted you immediately when that news broke, Pastor John. That’s now official. Roe was overruled Friday, on June 24.

This is not the end of abortion. This simply turns the legal status of abortion back to individual states. The work of defending the unborn is far from over. Discerning Christians will continue to ask, “What should Christians be doing?” Our work is urgent. And our work is now more local. So it might be helpful for our listeners to know something of what you have done, Pastor John, over the past four decades. As the work continues, what has been your answer to the question “What should I do?” How have you answered that question in your own life and ministry?

Well, I don’t see myself as the ideal pro-life person because I am fallible. I am sinful. There are things I’ve left undone in the last forty years. Things could have been done better. But as you and I have reflected on this, and as I’ve thought about my own life, looking at imperfect examples has often proved very helpful, very inspiring to me in my Christian walk. So I will go ahead and venture to say some things that I’ve done, imperfect though they have been. And hope that they will be a help to others. So here are the sorts of things that I’ve done in the last forty years or so, and I think they are the sorts of things that will probably need to be done now for years to come, long after I’m gone.

Thirteen Pro-Life Efforts

Beginning in 1987, I preached at least one explicitly pro-life message every year — with, I think, two exceptions along the way in my pastoral trek — until my stepping away from pastoral leadership in 2013. The last one I preached was January 2021 because the church invited me back for that Sunday. It was called “Doing the Right Thing Never Ruins Your Life.” I looked at it the other day, and I’m really persuaded that message is super important. It’s there at Desiring God. That’s about 25 morning messages on Sanctity of Life Sunday over my pastoral life. I recall the very first pro-life sermon I preached was from James 4:2: “You desire and do not have, so you murder.” I still think that text is one of the most penetrating biblical texts about the origin of abortion in the Bible.

Second, I tried to spread those messages by putting a few of them in a little book called Exposing the Dark Work of Abortion, which I think is free at Desiring God. Then when Desiring God came into existence in the mid-1990s, we put all these sermons online, where they are today.

Third, I wrote articles for Desiring God and for other outlets. The one that I think is still about the most helpful is “Fifteen Pro-Life Truths to Speak,” which I think is available there at Desiring God.

Fourth, since we started this podcast ten years ago, there are at least ten episodes related to abortion.

Fifth, I love to write poetry about the things that move me — and I mean move me positively and move me negatively. I’ve written two relating to the pro-life cause. One is called “It?” about a young woman who goes in for an abortion and they keep referring to her baby as “it.” Then after the procedure, she lifts up her head and sees this little tiny torso on the tray and notices it’s unmistakably female. And this overwhelmed her. This is not an “it.” This was not an “it.” Experiences like that, hearing things like that, have moved me over the years to write poetry about the cause of life.

Sixth, I’ve tried to pray and lead our people in praying against the sin of child-killing and for the spiritual miracles that will have to happen in people’s lives so that it is overcome in what they want, not just what they do.

Seventh, I mobilized our people to be part of major rallies, and I participated in them myself, like the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) rally at the capitol here in Minnesota every year. Usually, it’s below zero. It’s just absolutely unforgettable to march with five thousand or ten thousand other people when the wind is howling and everybody is bundled up like Eskimos, and you’re walking in the cause of prayerful support for the opposition to child-killing in this country.

Eighth, there was a season of about three years where I was part of direct action and civil disobedience, sitting in front of abortion clinics to block the way into the place of death. I was arrested several times and spent one night in jail.

Ninth, I encouraged and shared in sidewalk counseling, where you simply stand peacefully outside abortion clinics and offer literature and conversation to anyone entering, in the hopes that perhaps one last obstacle to overcome would help and might change their minds.

Tenth, I took an abortionist doctor out to lunch. This is one of the most memorable things in my life. I felt so inauthentic not dealing directly with abortionists. So I found a way to contact a local abortionist doctor about four blocks from my house. I took him out to lunch. I told him, “I’m a local pastor. I’m pro-life. I want to understand you. Would you go out to lunch?” And he was willing. I went with my ten points to make the case that he was killing children. And he disarmed me immediately by saying, “I know I’m killing children. It’s the lesser of two evils. The other evil,” he said, “is that it’s unjust that men can have sex and bear no consequences, but women can have sex and have to bear all the consequences. That’s unjust. Killing the child is the solution to that injustice.” He really was unbelievably honest with me. He said, “I wouldn’t be doing it except my wife pressures me to do it. She believes it’s the path of justice.”

Eleventh, I give financially, regularly, to several pro-life organizations.

Twelfth, while I was a pastor, I tried to cultivate a life-affirming culture, which included things like a strong, positive view of adoption as a beautiful and normal thing, and a strong ministry to the disabled to combat any notion that it would have been better if they’d been aborted. I tried to encourage the most pro-life-engaged people so that they didn’t feel like they were marginal in this church, but crucial. And generally, I tried to create the atmosphere that this church community is unashamedly pro-life and anti-abortion, without any fear that this would have offensive effects on some people. I’m sure those people just migrated to other churches where this issue was completely neglected. And that was sad. I would rather have them change their mind. But we weren’t going to mute this crucial reality.

And finally — and this may be the most important thing, Tony — we did not turn the church into a political or social think tank or action group for the sake of any earthly cause, including the cause of pro-life. For the sake of preserving the power and effectiveness of our prophetic witness, we did not make the pro-life cause the main thing. The main thing is the glory of God — and under the glory of God, the salvation of sinners from the wrath of God through the glorious substitutionary work of Jesus Christ dying for sinners on the cross. The glory of God — shining through the salvation of sinners by the blood of Jesus — is the main thing.

Far greater than the danger of abortion is the danger of hell. Rescuing people for eternal life is more crucial and more loving than rescuing babies from abortion. In other words, we care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering. I think it is precisely this maintenance of spiritual proportion that keeps in clear view that our citizenship is in heaven, and we’re rescuing lost people as we wait for our Savior. That spiritual proportion, that maintenance of spiritual priority and proportion, is what gave us Christian credibility over decades in the cause of life, rather than simply sinking down to the level of being a world-oriented band of do-gooders.

“The aim for us is not just the end of abortion, but the eternal joy of forgiven sinners.”

We are Christians before we are pro-life. We are Christ-exalting before we are life-exalting. We want to save souls, the souls of mothers and fathers, as much as we want to save the bodies of the babies. The aim for us is not just the end of abortion, but the eternal joy of forgiven sinners.

Unknown Future

Amen. You’ve been in the fight against abortion for a very long time. So now the court has effectively struck down Roe v. Wade, making it possible for states to legally protect the unborn. Many states are doing that very thing right now. So what’s your own reaction to the SCOTUS decision and this most recent news?

I am thankful. And the reason I am thankful is mainly because this was the right thing to do. A federal law that prevents the legal protection of children from being killed is an evil law. An evil law has been in place for fifty years. It is a good thing that the evil law is gone, and I am thankful to God — thankful to God in his glorious providence — that it is gone.

If someone says to me — which I thought they might, so I say it — “Aren’t you thankful, John, because lives are going to be saved? You seem distressed. ‘It’s the right thing.’ Aren’t you thankful that lives are going to be saved?” My answer is that I hope they are, and I will be thankful if they are. But there are too many variables at play here for me to know what is really going to happen in America as far as the loss of life goes.

For all I know, we may be entering an era of such visceral rage, and coldness of love, and multiplication of wickedness — both on the right and on the left — that a civil war right here in America could take hundreds of thousands of lives. It happened just 160 years ago. The issue of killing millions of children is as explosive as the horrors of slavery.

Or another upshot could be, over the next ten or twenty years, that the morning-after pill — or some new pill for weeks after or months after — becomes so cheap, so effective, so free from side effects, that abortions may double, triple, quadruple in their frequency over what they are now, with no need for Planned Parenthood at all. I don’t know whether that’s going to happen or not. It could.

Or another possible scenario is that this kind of freedom from consequences of pregnancy unleashes a new tidal wave of premarital sex, and some new lethal strain of venereal disease arises with hundreds of thousands of young people dying every year. That’s an easy possibility.

In other words, I don’t know. I don’t know if the overturning of Roe v. Wade will save lives. I hope so. I pray so. It was absolutely the right thing to do, whether more lives are saved or not. But the wickedness afoot in America is very deep. Where it will take us as a culture, I do not know.

Lives are destroyed by sin. Abortion, whether with suction or a pill, is only one kind of sin that destroys life. There are so many more. Over 100,000 people, for example, just recently now are dying every year from drug overdoses. And most of those people are not people on the street anymore; they’re middle-class opioid users who can’t find meaning in life. There will, I don’t doubt, arise other new ways of destroying ourselves as wickedness multiplies.

New Birth Needed

Yeah, the dark side of our potent technologies, amplifying our self-destructiveness. And this leads to my last question as we wrap up this special episode. I heard you say recently, in a meeting, that the real post-Roe challenge will not be how to make abortions hard to get, but how to make them hard to approve of in the human heart. Explain that. What did you mean?

I meant that the main battle for human righteousness is not fought at the level of human behavior but at the level of human desire. Jesus said in Matthew 15:19, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”

“An evil law is gone, and I am thankful to God in his glorious providence.”

Now, at least four of those sins relate directly to abortion. “Murder”: that’s what abortion is. “Adultery and sexual immorality”: at least 85 percent of abortions are owing to sexual immorality, because 83 percent of abortions are done on single women, not counting the cases of rape and incest. Those women and their boyfriends sinned by having sex, which God has protected by putting it in the happy bounds of covenant-keeping marriage. “False witness”: that too comes from the heart, and the entire abortion industry is built on false witness — namely, that the unborn are not human persons.

We can build legal dams to keep the river of sin that pours out of the human heart from flooding the world with actual behaviors like abortion. And that’s a good thing; that’s a good thing to build those dams with laws. That’s what all good laws do — they make it harder for the sinful heart to overflow in outward crimes. That just happened with the overturn of Roe v. Wade. It was a good thing.

But we should remember that if the river of sin that flows from the human heart is simply dammed up, and nothing changes the heart, that river is going to build behind the dam until the reservoir is so deep and so heavy that no legal dam, no mere law, can hold it back. And a tidal wave of wickedness will overflow the land.

So what I meant — and I’m thinking of Christians now, especially pastors — is that’s our job: preaching to change those hearts. That’s our job: to portray the glories of Jesus Christ so clearly, with such spiritual power, that people will see and their hearts will be changed. Second Corinthians 3:18 describes that miracle. It says, “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed . . . from one degree of glory to another.” Our main job is not new laws, good as they may be, but new hearts. That’s our main job. If that doesn’t happen, new laws will collapse under the pressure of unchanged hearts. It’s only a matter of time.

But even that way of saying it bothers me. It skews the reality in an unbiblical direction. It gives the impression that we want to change hearts mainly to preserve good laws. That’s not the main reason. The main reason, to quote Jesus in John 3:3, is this: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Without a Christ-exalting heart change, people perish. We perish.

It is a loving thing to work for good laws. It is more loving to help people enter the kingdom of God. The overturning of Roe v. Wade will have its greatest effect if its limitations give life to the Christian truth “you must be born again” (John 3:7).

We Christian Hedonists have a complicated relationship with duty. On the one hand, with our emphasis on the centrality of affections and desire in glorifying God, we are at war with duty-driven approaches to the Christian life that regard the affections as optional add-ons. To do a righteous act purely from a sense of obligation — because it is the right thing to do — is not morally superior to performing the same act with a deep sense of desire and gladness. Desire does not ruin the moral worth of good actions. Indeed, the right kind of desire establishes the true moral worth of our actions.

On the other hand, we Christian Hedonists, far from setting duty and desire at odds, instead bring them together by insisting that we are obligated to delight in God. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Philippians 4:4). We are called and commanded to desire God, to treasure God, to want God, to find our highest joy in God.

So again, we have a complicated relationship with duty. And as such, it’s worth taking a few moments to consider this relationship more carefully. The question is this: Is there a good, wise, and Christian Hedonistic way of celebrating the value of duty in the Christian life?

What Is Duty Anyway?

To answer this question, let’s first untangle a potential ambiguity. What do we mean by duty? On the one hand, duty might simply be a synonym for obligation. Anytime we use the word ought, we are dealing with duty. In this sense, duty and delight, far from being at odds, coincide. We ought to delight in God. We ought to love him with all of our heart. Included in all of our obligations is the duty to find our highest satisfaction in God. Thus, if we equate duty and obligation, then Christian Hedonists clearly value duty. That’s why we talk about “the dangerous duty of delight.”

“Duty refers to fulfilling one’s obligations in the face of obstacles.”

But duty often has a more particular and narrower meaning. Often, duty refers not merely to obligations, but to obligations that we find difficult to fulfill for one reason or another. In this sense, duty refers to fulfilling one’s obligations in the face of obstacles. When obligation meets impediments, then we talk about duty. Put another way, duty (in this narrower sense) is when the want to and the ought to don’t match.

That’s why duty has so often been praised as a virtue. To do the right thing in the face of the various obstacles that hinder us, to persevere in willing the good even when it’s hard, even when we lack the spontaneous delight that would make doing the right thing enjoyable — these have led many to praise duty as not merely virtuous, but as the pinnacle of virtue. The moral effort involved in overcoming impediments seems to give duty a beauty and luster and value that unimpeded, spontaneous goodness seems to lack.

What do we, as Christian Hedonists, make of this seeming superiority of arduous moral effort that overcomes all obstacles to doing good?

Impediments of Various Kinds

First, let’s understand what we mean by impediments. It seems to me that impediments might be either natural or moral, and either internal or external. Natural, external impediments are the high mountains and long distances we endure to fulfill our obligations. The time it takes, the monotonous repetition of our obligations, the heavy loads we must carry, and the inconveniences we undergo — all of these lie outside of us and are simply features of living in a finite (and fallen) world.

Natural, internal impediments are those bound up with our finitude and embodiment. Any impediment flowing from bodily weakness and natural aversion to pain and suffering would be included here. Sometimes duties are heavy, not because the obligation is so heavy, but because we are so weak. To do the right thing when we are tired or hungry or sick, or when the consequences of doing the right thing will be pain, discomfort, and even the possibility of death — this is what it means to do our duty in the face of natural, internal impediments.

Moral, external impediments include the evil that we must overcome in others. Loving my neighbor who is kind and pleasant is easy. Loving my neighbor who is quarrelsome, bitter, envious, and ungrateful is harder. Their ingratitude and bitterness are impediments that I overcome to fulfill my obligation. The same is true of the mockery, scorn, and rejection by others that sometimes occur when we do the right thing and maintain our integrity. So also with the obstacles posed by dark spiritual powers, which seek to undermine our obedience (though frequently the obstacles they erect take the form of the other kinds of impediments).

“Even the simplest of obligations can feel impossible in the face of our own pride, anger, sloth, and fear.”

Finally, we have the moral impediments that lie within us. Our besetting sins and disruptive passions — these are the impediments that we most frequently have to overcome. Even the simplest of obligations can feel impossible in the face of our own pride, anger, sloth, and fear. Or we might consider how our desires for other good things turn our obligation to love others into arduous exertions. The love of money (and all the desires it could fulfill) kept the rich young ruler from doing the one thing Christ called him to do. That inordinate love was his greatest impediment, and he went away sad (Mark 10:22).

In our daily lives, these impediments are almost always mingled. Making a time-consuming meal for a bitter neighbor when you are tired after a full day’s work brings three of the impediments together in one major obstacle (and no doubt presses on our own abiding sinfulness, thus bringing all types of impediments together). So we must not artificially divide the kinds of obstacles that we face.

What, then, do Christian Hedonists say about duty in the narrow sense in the face of these kinds of impediments?

1. Duty exists to be transcended.

The narrow sense of duty is owing to the various natural and moral impediments that we face, and these are owing to our pilgrim condition in a fallen world. Someday, most of these impediments — at least the moral ones and the natural, internal ones — will pass away. It seems possible to me that natural, external impediments may still have a place even in the new heavens and new earth; heaven may have its ardors and exertions, its severities and steep ascents. However, in our glorified condition, our natural limitations will not in any way hinder our joy in doing good; indeed, they will increase our joy.

When that day comes, goodness will flow from us spontaneously, like songs from a lark and water from a fountain. Unhindered delight in doing what we ought will be the crowning bloom on our moral actions.

2. Humans have levels of will.

In the meantime, in our pilgrim condition, we embrace the worth and value of overcoming impediments in our efforts to do good. That worth and value will be embraced rightly if we recognize the different levels of “willing” that we are capable of as humans.

We see these two levels in Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane: “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). “Not my will” — this means that, at some level, the race set before Jesus was an unpleasant one, filled with various impediments: a long distance up Calvary’s road, a heavy cross upon his back, the natural weaknesses of a beaten body, the hatred, scorn, and mockery of wicked men, his abandonment by his friends, and the surety of an excruciating death. Jesus beheld all of these impediments to his calling to love his people and, at one level, said, “I don’t want to.”

But only at one level. At another, deeper level, his human will embraced the divine will. “Yours be done.” Despite all of the impediments in his way, Christ still fundamentally desired to do the will of his Father. And thus he did what he ought in the face of the external and internal obstacles in his way.

What can we say about this deeper willing and desiring that Christ displayed? First, it was animated by joy: “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Second, his experience of joy while enduring the cross differed markedly from his experience after his ascent to God’s right hand. The sufferings were neither pleasant nor enjoyable; they were horrific and painful. Nevertheless, we all know that there is a kind of satisfaction in doing one’s duty in the face of obstacles and in the midst of great pain, by looking forward to the reward (Hebrews 11:6, 26).

3. Even duties can become joys.

The two levels of our willing enable us to speak truly about the value of the narrow sense of duty. At one level, the want to and ought to don’t match; thus, we can talk about duty. But at another, deeper (or higher) level, they do match, because we actually persevere in doing the good, despite the lack of want to at the first level. Our desire or commitment to doing what’s right overcomes all external hindrances and internal reluctances.

This desire is what enables us to “count it all joy . . . when [we] meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2). The fact that we have to “count it” joy highlights the gap that we are exploring. We don’t have to count pleasant experiences as joy; they just are joy because we enjoy them at both levels. It is the trials, the unpleasant moments, the impediments that must be counted as joy because we know what the testing is producing for us — steadfastness, maturity, and completeness (James 1:3–4).

4. Some impediments require repentance.

Recognizing the different types of obstacles that the narrow sense of duty overcomes enables us to evaluate them rightly. When facing natural impediments or the moral evil in others, we need not feel guilt for the struggle. We can lament our bodily weaknesses and grieve over the evil done to us by other people, but we need feel no moral responsibility or conviction for having to overcome such obstacles.

When facing our own inner, moral obstacles, however, such as the passions that hinder our pursuit of godliness, we must both lament and repent for our remaining sinfulness. In such cases, we do our duty with a humble brokenheartedness because the gap between the ought to and the want to is owing to our own abiding corruption.

5. Doing our duty strengthens our will.

We labor to strengthen the deeper level of willing by cultivating habitual holy affections at this level. Seeking to do our duty in the broader sense (i.e., fulfilling our obligation to delight in God above all things) is what strengthens our ability to do our duty in the narrower sense (when the want to and ought to don’t align at every level). We want the fundamental inclinations of our will to be enduring, stable, and strong enough to overcome the temporary disruptions of our passions in the face of external impediments.

So, we Christian Hedonists do not disparage duty. Instead, we put it in its proper place. It is a crutch in our pilgrim condition, a deep and abiding resolve to overcome the various obstacles that keep us from fully rejoicing in doing good with joy unhindered. In this sense, doing our duty in the face of impediments is a crucial expression of our deep and enduring satisfaction in all that God is for us in Christ.