Audio Transcript

Hello and welcome back to the podcast on this Thursday. Well, what is love? That’s a timeless question. As you know, Pastor John, from time to time we get questions about the nature of love — God’s love for us, our love for God, our love for each other — and what it means that “God is love,” as 1 John 4:8 tells us. On top of this, we get questions about how joy relates to love, too, which is part of what we mean by Christian Hedonism. You mentioned a while back that you were working through 2 Corinthians recently and saw something that relates to all of these questions that I just mentioned and ties them all together in a surprising way. Can you summarize your discovery from 2 Corinthians and explain how it touches on all those questions about love and joy?

I can try. And it was surprising not only because, for being so simple, it has vast implications for the very nature of God himself, and how he loves himself, and how we love him, and how he loves us — but also, it was surprising because what I saw was not found in some high-soaring part of Paul’s writings, but rather in a very down-to-earth, practical interaction with the Corinthians about his travel plans. You don’t expect to find vast implications about the nature of reality as somebody’s talking about their travel plans.

Paul’s Joy and Theirs

Let me read 2 Corinthians 2:1–4 and make three observations as we go through this text. And these three observations are just mind-blowingly vast in their implications.

1. Their joy is his joy.

Here’s what he wrote: “I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you.” And then he gives the reason for why he’s not going to make a sorrowful, painful visit to them. He says, “[Because] if I cause you [sorrow], who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have [grieved]?” (2 Corinthians 2:1–2).

“In the fellowship of the Trinity, before there were any people to love, God was love. God was loving God.”

So, the first observation I make is that the reason Paul decides not to make a painful visit is because, if their joy goes down, Paul’s joy goes down, which implies that their joy is in some measure Paul’s joy. He finds his joy in their joy. If theirs goes up, his goes up; if theirs goes down, his goes down. That’s observation number one. Paul’s joy is in some measure theirs, or theirs is in some measure his, so that if theirs goes down — which a painful visit would cause — his would go down. He doesn’t want that, so he doesn’t go.

2. His joy is their joy.

He goes on, “And I wrote as I did” — so he’s writing this letter instead of going — “so that when I came I might not suffer [sorrow] from those who should have made me rejoice.” Now, why did Paul not want to be made sorrowful? I mean, you might think, Well, that’s obvious. But no, it’s not obvious. Listen — why did Paul not want to be made sorrowful? He says this: “[Because] I felt sure of all of you, that my joy would be the joy of you all” (2 Corinthians 2:3).

So, my second observation is that the reason Paul wrote a letter instead of making this painful visit is that his joy was their joy. That’s what he says. I’m not even drawing it out as an implication. He just says it: “my joy would be the joy of you all.” So, if his joy goes down by a painful visit, their joy is going to go down, because his joy is, in some measure, he says, their joy. That’s my second observation.

3. Love finds joy in others’ joy.

Now, here’s the rest of the text, 2 Corinthians 2:4. He describes the same desire now — not to make a painful visit, but to write instead — only this time in terms of being motivated not by joy but by love. Here’s what he says: “For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you [sorrow] but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.”

So, my third observation is that, in Paul’s mind, love means finding our joy in the joy of the other, the beloved. He didn’t want their joy to be undermined because their joy was his joy. And he didn’t want his joy to be undermined because his joy was their joy. And then he steps back and says, “That’s what it means to love you.”

We know Paul is writing as a Christian and, from other things that he says even in this book, that Christian joy is joy that has God in Christ as its focus. So, the definition of love that he gives here is this: love is finding our joy in the joy of the beloved in God. When they have joy in God, that’s our joy, and we’re willing to lay down our lives to bring about their joy in God. God is willing to lay down his life to bring about our joy in God.

Love Within the Trinity

Now, we need to step back and test this, to see if we’re onto something here, and I think we’re onto something vastly significant.

Let’s start by testing it with ultimate love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Before there was creation, God was God, and God was love. Which means that in the fellowship of the Trinity, before there were any people to love, God was love. And in the fellowship of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — God was loving God. In Matthew 3:17, God says to his Son, “This is my loved Son” (my translation). And then he says, “With [him] I am well pleased” — that is, delighted, joyful. That’s what it means for the Father to love the Son. “I enjoy my Son infinitely. He is perfectly enjoyable, and that’s what it means to love him.” It says the same thing in John 14:31 about the Son loving the Father.

So, within the Trinity, to love is to be infinitely pleased, infinitely delighted, infinitely joyful with each other. And what makes them pleasing? What is it that makes the Father pleasing to the Son and the Son pleasing to the Father? What makes them pleasing is that they are the kind of person — each one of them is the kind of person — who is perfectly pleased by what is perfectly pleasing. That’s what it means to be righteous, holy, just, good — namely, God. They find their joy in the joy of the beloved in God. The Father delights in the Son because the Son is perfectly delighting in the Father (and vice versa). So, the definition that Paul used works eternally in the Godhead.

Love Between God and Us

Now, what about God’s love for us? Here’s Psalm 147:10–11: “[God’s] delight . . .” Get that fixed in your mind: God’s delight. What delights God? “[God’s] delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man, but the Lord takes pleasure . . . in those who hope in his steadfast love.” Now, if hope is longing for and expecting something in the future that you delight in — that would make you happy — then this psalm teaches that God delights in those who delight in him. That is, divine love for us is God’s finding his joy in our joy in him. And we may add then, acting: God acts to secure our joy in him, and he acts at the cost of his own Son’s life, which is what the Bible underlines about the amazing aspect of this love.

“Love is finding our joy in the joy of the beloved in God — and our willingness to die to bring that about.”

What about our love for God? First Timothy 1:11 says that God is a happy God, a blessed God (makarios). And we’ve seen that, in the fellowship of the Trinity, God is a happy God. He’s delighting in the fellowship of the Trinity. God is an eternally happy God. So, for us to love God is to be glad that he is God. To love God is to say, “God, you are God, and I am glad, and you satisfy me. You are wonderful. You are perfect. I adore, I treasure, I am satisfied in you.” And our love for God, then, is to find our joy in God’s joy, which is joy in God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Love Between Us and Others

One more application. What about our love for each other? In 2 Corinthians 8:2, Paul says that the Macedonians had an abundance of joy in the grace of God. It was abundant; it was overflowing. And then he calls it love in 2 Corinthians 8:8 when this joy — this joy in grace, in God’s grace — overflows in generosity to the poor saints in Jerusalem.

And what is generosity? Generosity is the eagerness to give so that others experience more joy. That’s what you do when you’re generous. You want people to be bettered. You want them to have more joy, more lasting joy, deeper joy in what should give them the deepest joy — in this case, more joy in life (they were poor, they were suffering, they were dying). He wants more joy in life and more joy in God as they live. So, love is the overflow of the Macedonians’ joy as it expands to include the poor saints in Jerusalem in that very joy in God’s grace.

So, to my amazement, Tony — and I’m still blown away by this — a simple definition of love, turning up in Paul’s explanation of his travel plans in 2 Corinthians 2, turns out to be just about as profound and far-reaching as it can possibly be. Love is finding our joy in the joy of the beloved in God — and our willingness to die to bring that about — which proves to be the essence of love in the Trinity, love in God for us, our love for God, and our love for each other. And it shows how central joy is in defining ultimate reality.

Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).

How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).

On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.

‘She Can’t Breathe’

In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.

The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.

Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.

Waiting and Praying

Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.

“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”

Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.

Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.

Amazing Providence

My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.

Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.

Oncology Expert

We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.

Bone-Marrow Expert

Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.

VOD Expert

Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.

Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.

He Holds Every Breath

I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?

“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”

First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.

At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).

Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.

A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.