We will be most satisfied in God when we know why God himself is most satisfied in God.

If the world is a mess (and it is), and if God is in charge of this mess (and he is), then how is it rational to be satisfied with a God who let things get so messy? If he’s ultimately responsible for all of this, how could we trust in him, much less delight in him?

Several answers come to mind. My own satisfaction with God springs from a number of places, including:

His steadfast love in Christ.
His drawing near to me instead of remaining far off.
His personal acquaintance with my grief and sorrow — in every respect tempted as I am, yet without sin.
His mercies, new every morning, triumphing over judgment and removing his just wrath upon sinners like me.
His ability and willingness to fulfill all his promises, and his appetite for making really pleasant ones to me, despite how little I deserve.

While realities like that are unspeakably savory reasons to delight in God, they’re not the one I uncovered in the sentence above.

Seeing the Universe Through a Sentence

Years ago, I had already embraced the God-centeredness of God — that he does all he does for his glory — but the happiness of God was almost entirely off my radar. Until I read one sentence. I read it thirty years ago now, and I haven’t read the Bible the same ever since:

We will be most satisfied in God when we know why God himself is most satisfied in God. (John Piper, The Pleasures of God, 9)

Could it be true? Could the God I’ve believed in all these years possibly be happy? And not only happy, but the happiest of all?

A sentence like the one I read drives us to ask deeper, simpler questions, like “What is happiness?” It’s not mindless giddiness. God is not drunk or on LSD. Happiness — including God’s happiness — is pleasure in a desirable sense of well-being, a contented joy in all that’s fitting, a delight that seeks expression in pure, unsullied, unblemished, unpolluted, untarnished, unbounded, unrestrained rejoicing.

And if, as Piper claims, my satisfaction in him hinges upon his satisfaction in him, then there’s no more important question than this: “Is God happy?” By setting me on a quest to find what makes God happy, this sentence changed the way I read the Bible and the way I observe everything I observe in the universe. And there’s a lot to observe in this universe. There’s a lot that makes God happy, and his happiness fuels my satisfaction in him.

What Makes God Happy?

The Bible parades a number of God’s pleasures before us. For example (and this is only a small sampling):

He delights in justice (Proverbs 11:1).
He delights in the prayer of the upright (Proverbs 15:8).
He delights in those who hope in his steadfast love (Psalm 147:11).
He delights in choosing a people (Deuteronomy 10:14–15).
He is pleased by all he does (Psalm 115:9).
He is well pleased in his Son (Matthew 17:5).

It’s perfectly reasonable to supremely value the supremely valuable. God is reasonable, supremely so. He is also supremely valuable. So he is perfectly reasonable when he supremely values himself (and he does at all times). God is satisfying to me partly because he is reasonable — consummately reasonable — by supremely valuing the supremely valuable.

To supremely value something that is not supremely valuable is crazy. It is idolatry. But God is not an idolater. Or crazy. Henry Scougal famously wrote, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.” What God loves most is worth the most — namely, himself. All of this may lead us to ask, “What makes something more valuable than something else? What things are most valuable?”

“God is maximally happy, because he is maximally glorious — and maximally happy in that gloriousness.”

Deep down, we know good answers. Things with solidity and lasting endurance. Things that won’t evaporate and poof. Things that overcome other things, instead of being subject to factors and forces they cannot control. Things that are never self-contradictory. Things that are substantial, influencing all other things. The thing from which all other things are derived. Something that is so rare there is nothing like it anywhere, and yet it is profoundly and decisively useful in every context without exception. Something that is inexhaustibly self-replenishing.

God is that kind of valuable, gloriously so. God is maximally happy because he is maximally glorious — and maximally happy in that gloriousness.

If God Were Not Happy

What if God were all-powerful, but a grouch? What if the well-known children’s prayer — “God is great, God is good” — were instead “God is great, but he’s not so good, so ya better watch out!”? If so, he could use that almighty power to grind us all into powder and blow us away — far away, a kind of far away called outer darkness.

The God of the Bible, however, does something remarkable because he is something remarkable. Rather than grumble or rage, he delights. God relishes. His highest and deepest gladness is in being God, and so he delights in everything he does. He doesn’t do anything poorly or wrongly. His workmanship is without error, and therefore when he does something — anything — he can step back and say, “That’s good . . . really good. I like it. I’m rightly happy with myself for doing it that way.” Even his wrath ends up pleasing him, for it ultimately carries out perfect justice, thereby glorifying him in his righteousness.

“Each day, I want to move toward becoming as happy about God as God is happy about God.”

What does this happiness mean for me? As the infinitely wise, unchanging, always-happy God, he never regrets anything he does. Therefore, I shouldn’t regret anything he has done, but instead trust him that he is working all things, without exception, for the good of those who love him. And then, beyond trusting him, I thank him, love him, praise him, enjoy him. I delight in who he is and what he’s done, just as he delights in himself. His happiness is not secondary, but primary. Each day, I want to move toward becoming as happy about God as God is happy about God.

God’s Happiness with Messiness

How can the farmer end his long hot day and glance with satisfaction at the sod all torn up by plowing? Here’s how: he’s not done with that field, and he enjoys the plowing in anticipation of the glorious crop to come. It was a good day of dusty, sweaty plowing, though at the moment the land looks like a scarred mess.

Vicki and I experienced the death of two children. To shake the fist at God as though he has failed is to wrongly assume that he is done with those children — or with us. He is not done. Ever.

I took a ceramics class with my middle school daughter. Together we labored for hours over projects that made a dusty clay mess of the studio and our clothes. How could we be satisfied in the toil and trouble? Answer: even though our creations had not yet come out of the kiln, they were on the way to something attractive and useful. God can be pleased with mid-stream projects, because plowed fields, bodily ailments, entirely flooded planets, and this broken, groaning universe are well on their way to glorious outcomes.

God is happy with everything he does because he infallibly produces immeasurable good through everything he does. He never shrugs his shoulders and mutters, “I wish I could have done better.”

His Happiness and My Existence

What difference has it made to me whether God is happy to be who he is and do what he does?

His happiness has differentiated him from man-made gods who are cranky and temperamental, like the human race that invents them. From the capricious and cruel thunderbolts of Zeus, to the unpredictable anger of Poseidon, to the Artemis who demands human sacrifice during the Trojan War, to the abortion-promoting self-deified morality police of today’s cancel culture, man-made gods are unlike the happy God who promises pleasures at his right hand forever.

His happiness has injected all of history with purposefulness. The happy God is not wasting one single event but working all things together for the good of those who love him. That changes the way I read my current circumstances. Through them, God is taking me somewhere good, very good. The happiness of God has also changed the way I read the Bible. His delight in his being and his works is everywhere in the lines and between the lines.

This life-changing happiness of God is a kind of deep happiness without any regrets whatsoever. When the Bible says God regrets or repents (and it does say that, for instance in Genesis 6:6 and 1 Samuel 15:10), it means he laments over the sad belittlement of his glory. But if he had to start all over again, he would act exactly the same way. Everything is going according to his deep plan to bring maximum glory to his Son and maximum pleasure to his people in the end, and he’s happy about that. So am I.

Two weeks before Christmas, my heart stopped.

Seated next to me in a congregational meeting, my wife sees me close my eyes and slump. After a few seconds, the old ticker providentially revives “on its own.” It happens four times during that meeting. Maybe I’m just too inactive, I think. Perhaps if I get up and walk around a bit, I can get the juices flowing, and whatever is going on will clear up.

While I’m pacing in the church lobby, one of the elders says he doesn’t think I look quite right. I call my physician, and he recommends that I get to the emergency room for an evaluation. I’m not to drive myself.

In the emergency room, the surgeon hooks me up to a bunch of wires and asks a whole battery of questions to diagnose what’s going on.

“Are there heart problems in your family?”“Yes, my dad died of a heart attack at 60. So did his dad.”“But do you feel pain?”“None.”“Did you feel dizzy?”“Not really. The room wasn’t spinning. I wasn’t nauseous.”“Did you pass out?”“Not really. I could still hear, sort of.”“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”“I was uninterested in it all, like it was all background noise.”“Did you break into a sweat?”“Nope.”

The surgeon is puzzled. Maybe he is dealing with a hypochondriac.

While he goes off to another room, it happens — another episode. Before I slump into semi-consciousness, I glance at the monitor: my pulse registers a big giant zero; I have flatlined. A few seconds later, as I revive “on my own,” the surgeon comes running in from the other room, thinking he may have to do CPR or call a Code Blue or something. He exclaims, “Your heart completely stopped for about eight seconds!”

I’m not having a heart attack from plugged arteries, causing oxygen-starved muscles to die in pain. It’s just that my internal cardio-electrical circuitry is taking a break. Which it will do five more times that evening in the hospital. Pacemaker, here we come.

Sitting on the gurney, I say to Vicki, my wife, “I might see Jesus before Christmas.” We pray. We cry. She affirms that she knows where all our important documents are. She adds, “If you go, I’ll be right behind you.” In sudden concern, I ask, “Why? Are you having a medical crisis too?” Then she says something untrue, but very endearing: “I can’t live without you.”

When Your Heart Fails

Since the word heart is in our English Bibles over nine hundred times, the heart is, apparently, a big deal. It’s common knowledge that heart has more than one meaning. It’s bad if your physical heart fails, like mine did. It is worse if your spiritual heart fails. What does spiritual heart failure look like, and what can be done when, as several biblical writers experienced, you sense your spiritual heart at zero?

I know this pain (or gloomy numbness, as the case may be). If our heart has failed, it will do no good to deny it. We may as well admit it. And we should expect heart challenges. It’s an unfortunate and painful aspect of life in a fallen world that sometimes our hearts fail — even if you are more stable than most. Even Superman encounters his kryptonite. Heart failure is not novel or strange, so don’t be caught unaware.

Even simply admitting spiritual heart failure is a step in the right direction. As Paul puts it,

He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses [like a failed heart], so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses [like a failed heart], insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10)

Spiritual heart failure can take several forms. Let’s consider three.

Heart Failure of Discouragement

Hearts can fail when the obstacles seem too impossible. Big adversity puts big holes in our little courage buckets. For example, the heart of Saul’s entire army failed when taunted by a single giant (1 Samuel 17:11, 32). The spies returning from the promised land were discouraged when they thought they seemed like grasshoppers in the eyes of their enemies (Numbers 13:31–33). David’s heart failed when “evils encompassed [him] beyond number” (Psalm 40:12).

Mountains of foreboding discouragement loom large — war, sleeplessness, unfortunate genetics, failed diets, relational pressures, natural disasters, financial burdens, and even ordinary weather. Our hearts are not impervious to such blitzes.

Heart Failure of False Feelings

Doubts send assurance toward the drain, morphing into miserable dread. Like weeds, the seeds of doubt germinate in the thought life and multiply, overtaking one’s feelings, producing a vague sense of nagging guilt and that God has turned against us. Waffling belief and theological confusion can cause me to feel like God is against me. Key word: feel.

Feelings make a bad chief executive, yet they often speak with the loudest voice. They can be, and typically are, shortsighted and short-lived. They demand that gratification be immediate, and once appeased still make more demands. Instead of listening to the siren song of feelings, wise souls listen instead to a more reliable, still small voice: the voice of the Spirit. The failed heart needs faith, and faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17) — sometimes found in the mouth of a wise Christian friend.

“Ask God for the enabling grace to do what your feelings tell you can’t be done.”

The failed heart is helped by doing what it doesn’t feel like doing. Get up in the morning. Work out (tell your feelings to take a hike — literally). Aim your eyeballs at the pages of the Bible. Ask God for the enabling grace to do what your feelings tell you can’t be done. Then act the miracle. Say with Jesus, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Then be a doer, not a hearer only (James 1:25).

Heart Failure of Exhaustion

When your heart fails, it won’t work for someone to say, “Snap out of it!” Affliction, perplexity, and persecution are tiring, heart-depleting. You are out of gas. The sleepless children have left you downright exhausted. The sun rises, and you sit there, bent over in a motionless lump.

But when your heart is failing, consider Jesus.

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted [that is, lose heart]. (Hebrews 12:3)

Look at Jesus (for a model of stoutheartedness), and look to Jesus (for enabling grace to persevere). God has not abandoned you. For example, he has given you sufficient enabling grace to read this sentence. There’s more grace where that came from.

Accordingly, don’t do anything drastic. Don’t quit your day job. Don’t binge on something regrettable. Slow down. Rest where you can. When Elijah despaired of life and asked that he might die, he was helped by some common ordinary sleep (1 Kings 16:5).

Strength of My Heart

When your heart is failing, perform a simple self-inspection. A spiritually failing heart may be evidence that we are treasuring the wrong object. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21).

“My heart may fail, but God’s heart never does.”

What is it I really love? Am I supremely valuing the supremely valuable? What was I expecting? How biblical are my expectations? Am I perceiving reality realistically?

Whatever the cause, my heart may fail, but God’s heart never does. Asaph put it this way:

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:26)

God loves his children whether their hearts are thriving or failing. Remind your failing heart that your sins were completely cancelled at the cross, where Jesus took them.

In the emergency room that night, though my physical heart was intermittently failing and reviving, my spiritual heart was raring to go. One day, I expect my ticker to quit ticking altogether. And when my physical heart finally stops completely, I expect my other heart to exult in Jesus, the one who will carry on to completion what he has begun.

My wife and I raised perfect children.

By the time they were ten years old, they had memorized the New Testament. They came each morning to the family breakfast table with cheerful songs on their tongues, the melodies caressing their freshly brushed teeth. At an early age, they volunteered to launder their own clothes and never once complained about their studies.

They never used a whiny tone of voice with their mother, and they affectionately call me “dearest father” to this very day. I can’t recall correcting them. They were thrilled to share their belongings with each other. We never heard a mumbling word.

Yeah, right.

There are no perfect children. Vicki and I didn’t raise any, and my parents didn’t raise any either. Neither did yours. We live on a fallen and cursed planet. You are a sinner, and your children are too. They not only fall short of the glory of God, but they fall short of the expectations of their inglorious dads.

“Don’t give up on fatherhood just because perfection seems continually out of reach.”

But all is not lost. Fathers, don’t give up on fatherhood just because perfection seems continually out of reach. God extends more than enough grace to compensate for our shortcomings as dads. Children of defective parents — your children — can end up relishing God.

When Dreams Hit Reality

Expectations breed strong emotions, and unmet expectations even stronger ones. When our expectations collide with real life, the mismatch can erupt in a whole range of emotions — from dismay to sorrow to fuming anger. Mostly fuming anger. That’s what happens when people do what you don’t expect them to, or don’t do what you do expect them to.

Desires launch assumptions, which are then fueled by narratives we have subtly adopted. Such as:

Unlike other children, my children will never make a big mess or be fussy in church.
I will lose standing in the community if my kids don’t go to college.
My children will replicate only my good traits and not my flaws and sinful attitudes.
My kids will be spiritually advanced for their age.

Acting wisely and avoiding emotional hijacks requires winning the crucial battle — an unceasingly ongoing one — to align your expectations with reality. Those children you love dearly will sin dreadfully. As you have. Observe the one reality you cannot avoid in your parenting: you and your sinful nature. Your children not only live with your sin — they inherit it.

“Those children you love dearly will sin dreadfully. As you have.”

But parenting is not to be dreaded. To dread parenting exposes a misplaced love that you perceive to be in danger — like a love for your reputation if your kids mess up, or a love for your schedule if your kids make a mess when you’re already running late. The steadfast love of God is never in danger, and if your aim in parenting is to draw attention to his love, you have nothing to dread on that score.

Safe Expectations

Some expectations, however, will certainly come to pass.

You can plan on the fact that your parenting will never go exactly according to your plan. Your parenting plan isn’t perfectly wise, because you are not perfectly wise. My wife has a placard that says, “Man plans. God laughs.” In contrast to our plans, God’s plan for your parenting is perfectly wise. You are not sovereign. He is. And in his perfection, he assigned your children their father — namely, you.

Parenting is nevertheless a humbling experience. Your parenting won’t be flawless any more than your marriage has been without disappointments. You will face regret — regret that you weren’t a better parent, that you passed on your imperfections to your children, that you displayed anger at them for being like you, that you didn’t know as much as you had hoped you would.

My kids are now middle-aged themselves, all of them parenting their own unique God-given brood. And one of the disappointments I didn’t expect early on is that they haven’t passed along to their own children some of the lessons I insisted on giving to them.

For example, when my children were still living at home, I led family discussions about everything from Charles Finney’s approach to confessing sin, to how eye traps work (seductive clothing), to the value of singing together. As a grandparent, I don’t hear those lessons emphasized in the same ways in their homes. Meanwhile, they love their children deeply, and point them to Jesus in other ways I never did.

So there’s another side to this expectation coin. God provides occasions when your children exceed your expectations, times when you wish you were like them. Some of our children treat every day as a new day, forgiving yesterday’s offenses. Some are generous to a fault. Some seem impervious to peer pressure.

In a crucial sense, your children grow you. That is, they are God-sent instruments for your growth in maturity, your sanctification, your alignment with God’s plan for your Christlikeness.

Questions for Fathers

With some safe expectations in place, what steps might dads take to remove some of the imperfections from their imperfect parenting?

Fathers who rightly relate to God are on firm footing for rightly relating to their children. So how is your own relationship with your heavenly Father? Do you “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” trusting that “all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33)? Would people who know you best say that you truly want what God wants for your children? Would you say it about yourself? Would God say it about you?

How do you parent today in relation to how you were parented? Are you replicating the errors of your own mom or dad? Are you motivated to avoid repeating the same errors? Once grace enables you to become aware of their errors, that same grace can enable you to break from those errors in your own parenting. Generational sins can be broken: “Now suppose this man fathers a son who sees all the sins that his father has done; he sees, and does not do likewise” (Ezekiel 18:14).

Ask God to help you seek his kingdom first in your family, especially in those places where you are tempted to repeat the errors of the past.

Humble Fatherhood

Perhaps most of all, however, we dads need humility. Even if your way of raising children is a good way, beware of concluding your way is the best way, much less the only way. In other words, remain teachable. One day it dawned on me that my small children could teach me a few lessons about my parenting. That was God whispering to me through my children.

Fathers, your offspring won’t admire everything about you. They’ll learn stuff you didn’t teach them. They’ll be better than you at some skills and more developed in certain character qualities. Your personal flaws will exert lingering influence on them. Pray for mercy.

They may or may not follow your preferred career for them. They will not develop uniformly without setbacks, nor be identical to their siblings. Recognize individuality.

Even though you work at it — and you are wise to do so — you will not always have your wife’s enthusiastic support in every aspect of parenting, from bedtimes to how much should be spent on gifts. Be gentle. Be humble. Seek God for more grace. Although not all of your expectations will be fulfilled in fathering, you can continue to grow and step into God’s great privilege of being their dad.