I have one, and only one, experience with sailing.

In my senior of college, one of my friends invited a number of us to his family’s lake house near the coast of North Carolina for one last weekend together before graduation. The house sat on a cove tucked just off the ocean shore. Down by the water sat the family’s beautiful (and expensive) two-person sailboat, tied firmly to a post.

The more experienced went out first. Several of my classmates had grown up close to the ocean, and knew how to handle a sail. They raced up and down the cove, making it look easy. When they were done, another first-timer and I stepped up to take the ropes. Once we pushed ourselves away from shore, we swung and tugged, leaned and lunged, stood and sat — and barely moved. The others, of course, took even more joy in our floundering than they had in their sailing. After a while, our titanic struggle left us tired and hungry, so we pulled the boat ashore and went in for dinner.

Early the next morning, a couple of aspiring sailors woke us, asking where we left the boat. “Down by the shore, of course. Where else would we leave it?” “Did you pull it into the grass?” “Umm, no.” “Did you tie it up?” “Umm, no.” “Well, the boat is gone.” Any experienced sailor (or just a man of common sense) knows what I learned that day: the tide rises at night, so you have to anchor your boat or it will drift away. I immediately started counting every dollar I owned. (It didn’t take long.)

A couple of us went out in the motorboat, driving up and down the shore, desperately looking for any sign of the sailboat. Surely it had been damaged, maybe even destroyed, after all these hours. After another hour or two, we’d come up empty. We saw nothing. And no one we saw had seen anything. I still remember the long ride back. I was sick to my stomach.

That boat came to mind again recently when I read Tim Keller describe a tool he used over the years to help him discern the health of a soul (and particularly the health of a person’s prayer life).

Which Boat Describes You?

Keller paints the nautical picture this way: “Imagine that your soul is a boat, a boat with both oars and a sail” (Prayer, 258). Into that scene, he asks four pointed questions: Are you sailing? Are you rowing? Are you drifting? Or are you sinking? In terms of my story, does your spiritual life resemble my master-sailor friends gliding up and down the cove, or the two first-timers working hard and going nowhere, or the empty sailboat drifting aimlessly away?

The tool’s helpful in two directions. First, it helps us assess and maintain our own boats. How often have we assumed that we’re rowing when we’re actually drifting, or that we’re drifting when we’re actually sinking? Second, the tool gives us a window into the boats of others. It’s a simple, vivid question that cuts through shallow places (where we often prefer to swim in our relationships) to the heart of a person, to how he is really doing.

Keller doesn’t attach particular texts to the four different boats, but the Psalms came to mind as potential examples because they model, with unusual vulnerability and emotion, the highs and lows of the human soul. So I’ve attempted to identify at least a few lines that give voice to each of these four spiritual conditions.

1. Are You Sailing?

When you think about your spiritual life right now, do you feel the wind at your back? Does prayer feel easier and more enjoyable than normal? Does daily Bible reading sparkle like a treasure in the field? Do you find yourself on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday actually looking forward to Sunday morning and the opportunity to sing and serve with your local church? Do you find spiritual conversation natural and gratifying?

If you’re currently in the sweet thrill of sailing, you might pray like King David does in Psalm 16:6–9:

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;     indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;     in the night also my heart instructs me.I have set the Lord always before me;     because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;     my flesh also dwells secure.

As we’ll see, David didn’t always feel this kind of spiritual high. He often struggled and had to fight hard for faith. At times, he fell into valleys of despair. In these verses, however, we can almost feel the wind lifting and driving his sails. Anyone who’s riding a spiritual breeze can identify with what he’s describing, and anyone who isn’t would want what he’s experiencing.

2. Are You Rowing?

If you’re rowing, you’re still making progress, but it’s a slower, hard-fought progress. You’re moving forward, but you’re really earning each passing wave. “Rowing,” Keller writes, “means you are finding prayer and Bible reading to be more a duty than a delight” (259). They’re chores you keep doing, but they honestly feel like chores. You keep attending worship, and discipline yourself to listen, engage, and even sing, but you often walk out distracted and tired. You want your heart to be in a different place, and you put effort into feeling differently, but you haven’t felt a strong wind in a while.

If you’re currently in the wearying work of rowing, you might pray like David does in Psalm 63:1:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;     my soul thirsts for you;my flesh faints for you,     as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

“The vast majority of drifters and sinkers drift and sink alone.”

In these verses, he’s not praying from the pleasant places of Psalm 16. Now he’s kneeling in the wilderness — “in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” But as the spiritual winds died down and the ground under him dried up, he didn’t give up and lie down in the boat. No, he kept his eyes on God and started rowing: “Earnestly I seek you.”

3. Are You Drifting?

From a distance, drifting may look and feel like rowing, but swim up closer to the two boats and you’ll notice one massive difference: effort. The drifter stops trying. You stop praying earnestly. You stop reading the Bible regularly. You stop paying attention during church gatherings (or stop attending altogether). Tired and discouraged and maybe even disillusioned, you set your oar aside and passively wait for some gust of wind to come along to save you.

This condition is probably the hardest to pair with a psalm, mostly because the psalms themselves are prayers. So even at their darkest, they model what it looks like to row in the dark — to keep praying, keep gathering, keep seeking. But in Psalm 42, dangerous circumstances have prevented the psalmist from attending the temple (“When shall I come and appear before God?” verse 2), so though he’s still able to pray, he’s cut off from other vital means of grace.

When shall I come and appear before God? . . .These things I remember,     as I pour out my soul:how I would go with the throng     and lead them in procession to the house of Godwith glad shouts and songs of praise,     a multitude keeping festival.Why are you cast down, O my soul,     and why are you in turmoil within me? (Psalm 42:2, 4–5)

The drifter has desires for more, and he can remember times when he experienced spiritual health and community, but he’s lost the will to keep fighting. His soul is cast down, and so his boat wanders aimlessly, from app to app, from show to show, from task to task, from meal to meal, from week to week. He wakes up farther and farther from where he wants to be spiritually, and yet with less and less resolve to change course.

4. Are You Sinking?

Is the boat within you quietly taking on water? You drifted for a time, but then you hit something hard — a job loss, a breakup, an illness, a death — and water started trickling in. Now, weeks or months later, your faith is gasping for air. You’re not longing for former days of stronger, more satisfying faith. You’re questioning whether it was ever real. You’re not thinking about restarting your prayer life, or looking for a Bible-reading plan, or joining a small group. You’re looking elsewhere for answers (or you’re avoiding the questions altogether).

Again, even psalmists dealt with sinking moments in the soul. Listen to the heartache and despair in Asaph’s voice when he thinks back on a dark night in his own soul:

All in vain have I kept my heart clean     and washed my hands in innocence. . . .But when I thought how to understand this,     it seemed to me a wearisome task. . . .When my soul was embittered,     when I was pricked in heart,I was brutish and ignorant;     I was like a beast toward you. (Psalm 73:13, 16, 21–22)

He remembers a time when he was living in spiritual peril. Do you feel your heart slowly growing embittered to God? Has your pain crystallized into self-pity? Has confusion mutated into bitterness and resentment? Have your doubts ripened into apathy? Is your boat filling with water?

Obviously, any boat that’s sinking needs some serious attention. One of the blessings of a tool like this is simply putting a sinking boat on someone else’s radar. How many souls sink without anyone ever knowing, at least until it’s too late?

Drifting and Sinking Alone

Later that long day, when we had nearly given up hope finding my friend’s sailboat, a neighbor from down the cove phoned. It had landed on their shore. Amazingly, no damage. The boat had drifted more than a mile.

For all our failures aboard that extraordinarily expensive piece of fiberglass, my first-timer friend and I did one thing right that day: we went out together. When it comes to our spiritual health and joy, the vast majority of drifters and sinkers drift and sink alone. And the vast majority of rowers and sailors row and sail with others.

Keller ends his book on this note:

Those who enjoy sailing might find these nautical images helpful. However, a metaphor used more often in the Bible to describe fellowship with God is that of a feast. . . . Eating together is one of the most common metaphors for friendship and fellowship in the Bible, and so this vision is a powerful prediction of unimaginably close and intimate fellowship with the living God. It evokes the sensory joys of exquisite food in the presence of loving friends. The “wine” of full communion with God and our loved ones will be endless and infinite delight. (260–61)

The image of the feast gets at the satisfying fullness of sailing. It also gets at the togetherness, though. Somebody might eat alone, but nobody ever feasts alone. And, spiritually speaking, nobody sails alone either. Richer communion with God requires richer communion with other souls, in the church.

So, if we feel ourselves drifting or worse in our walk with God, our first step to righting the ship will be to steer our boat into more crowded waters, where the sailors and rowers live.

Part 6 Episode 226 Why must we understand who Jesus is and what he’s done for us on the Bible’s terms? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper looks to Hebrews 4:14–5:3 for the categories Scripture provides for knowing Christ.

The Japanese, the beloved people among whom I live and serve, are the world’s second-largest unreached people group.

The category of “unreached people group” describes peoples where less than 2 percent of the population is evangelical. Unreached peoples are those who need missionary ministry the most. However, while the category is helpful for diagnosing missional need, it never tells the full story of God’s redemptive work among a people. “Unreached” does not necessarily mean there is zero Christian presence, and unreached peoples may indeed have small but faithful churches with their own remarkable histories of God’s sovereign work of salvation. Japan provides an excellent example of an unsung history of redemption that deserves to be remembered.

Psalm 105:1–6 teaches us that making the greatness of God known among the peoples (verse 1) is deeply connected to remembering his wondrous works (verses 2, 5) and responding in thanksgiving (verse 1). As we recall how God has worked mightily in places known for having hard soil, we can be filled with worshipful thanksgiving, which then propels us forward in mission with fresh energy and insight for how to extend the gospel where it seems impossible.

Initial Stirrings

The first Protestant missionaries arrived in Japan in 1859. Japan’s borders had been closed to the West — especially to Christianity — since 1603, when an influential Roman Catholic mission was expelled through extreme persecution. A prohibition against Christianity remained in place when the missionaries arrived in 1859, and it was difficult to even gain a hearing for the gospel. Merely mentioning the name of Jesus could cause Japanese people to slide a finger across their throats to illustrate the danger of the topic. Missionaries nevertheless went to work learning the language and finding creative ways to serve, including through education and medicine.

At the beginning of 1872, missionaries and Christian expatriates hosted a week of prayer in Yokohama, which several non-Christian Japanese students decided to join. Each day, those gathered would read a passage from Acts and pray together. As they prayed, the Spirit began to move in power. The group decided to continue meeting after the week was over. By the end of the second week, the Japanese students, many of them from proud samurai families, were on their knees crying out to God in tears for the Holy Spirit to fall on Japan just as he had done for the early church.

Nine of the students soon professed faith in Christ and were baptized on March 10, 1872, as members of the first Protestant church in Japan. Though two of the nine turned out to be Buddhist spies who quickly fell away, the remaining seven were joined by another wave of newly converted students to form the Yokohama Band, the first of several small movements of Japanese Christians who would help extend the gospel throughout Japan.

Bands of Brothers

Similar stirrings occurred throughout the remainder of the 1870s, most notably in Kumamoto and Sapporo. In Kumamoto, Captain L.L. Janes, a Civil War veteran, was recruited to launch a school for Western learning. Janes did not go with strong missionary intentions. However, after a few years of instruction and bonding with the boys in his school, he began to lead a Bible study, which all the students felt compelled to join. Though Janes preached a gospel mixed with aspirations for Japan’s Westernization, his message still impacted the boys significantly. Several converted to Christianity, and Janes added weekly worship and prayer.

“God has worked in Japan powerfully in the past, and nothing can stop him from doing so again.”

Soon the believing Japanese students were evangelizing their non-Christian classmates, and on January 30, 1876, over thirty of the students gathered on Mount Hanaoka. Together they sang “Jesus Loves Me” — the first hymn translated into Japanese — and made a covenant to proclaim the Christian faith for the enlightenment of the Japanese Empire. They came down from the mountain as the Kumamoto Band, and many went on to become influential politicians, business leaders, and pastors.

Another Civil War veteran, Colonel William S. Clark, helped establish the Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido in 1876. Like Janes, Clark also did not go as a missionary, but during his eight months in Japan, he led students in regular Bible study and experienced personal renewal in his own faith. Many of his students became Christians, and Clark crafted a covenant for all the students to sign that stated their intention to follow Jesus. The students all signed the covenant, some out of zeal for their new faith and others under pressure from fellow students. Unsurprisingly, half of these turned away soon after Clark left. However, the other half were baptized and formed the Sapporo Band, which included notable Japanese Christian thinkers Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō.

The formation of these Christian bands was the firstfruits of a larger movement still to come.

‘A Marvelous Work in our Midst’

In 1883, missionaries from across Japan gathered in Osaka with some Japanese Christians for a large missionary conference. This conference emphasized the power of Christian unity and dependent prayer, which inspired some Japanese Christian leaders to host their own conference in Osaka — which then led to similar gatherings in Kyoto and Tokyo. Each of these conferences spawned numerous prayer meetings in their cities that often lasted for weeks at a time and initiated revival. Japanese Christians cried out like the first converts in Yokohama for the Holy Spirit to fall, and God answered their prayers. Numerous revivals began to spring up throughout Japan, leading to repentance and renewal among Japanese Christians and the mission community.

Charles F. Warren of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) described “showers of blessing which God has graciously granted this year in different parts of the country” and a revival leading to greater unity and love in the Japanese church (A History of Protestant Missions in Japan, 108). Robert Maclay, who oversaw the American Methodist Episcopal Mission, offered another account: “A spirit of religious revival, bringing seasons of refreshing through the presence of the Lord, is spreading in Japan, both in the community of foreigners and among Japanese Christians. . . . I am sure we are about to become witnesses of visible, divine manifestations of grace in the conversion of souls” (109).

C.S. Long of the CMS likewise described “a glorious work in Nagasaki” — where an atomic bomb would be dropped a little over sixty years later — in which “multitudes are genuinely converted and testify to the truthfulness and power of the new religion. . . . The Lord is certainly doing a marvelous work in our midst. The news is spreading throughout the city, and hundreds are flocking to the church. . . . It is indeed marvelous. I have never seen anything more striking at home” (109).

Japanese Harvest

Japanese pastors shared similar testimonies. Kozaki Hiromichi, who came from the Kumamoto Band and was a major leader in the Kumi-ai (Congregationalist) Church, shared how a great revival began in Yokohama following a week of prayer. Joseph Neesima, founder of Dōshisha University, described a revival that started in the small town of Annaka in Niigata. It began with a congregation in repentance and tears until they became overwhelmed by joy and love.

Reports of revival came from across Japan, including Sendai, Fukushima, Kobe, and Okayama. Missionaries and Japanese evangelists began renting out theatres to host preaching and teaching events for hundreds at a time. In May of 1883, preaching services were held in the Hisamatsu Theatre in Tokyo for several days, with a total attendance of four thousand. Revivals also sprang up in several Christian schools throughout Japan, including Dōshisha University, where two hundred students were baptized during a single prayer meeting in March 1884.

As a result of the revivals of the 1880s, the average church membership in Japan doubled, churches were planted in new regions, local funding for ministry increased, and Japanese Christians began to take the reins of leadership for the church. The season was so fruitful that some missionaries pronounced expectations for Japan to become a Christian nation within the century.

From Memory to Missions

It is sobering to realize that such expectations were never met, and while God has brought other seasons of growth, the number of Japanese Christians remains small. It is also amazing to see how God has worked in the past, and there are several lessons missionary senders and goers can learn from this history.

First, even though Japan may seem persistently cold to the gospel, God has worked here powerfully in the past, and nothing can stop him from doing so again.

Second, like the early church in Acts, the Japanese church was born more out of prayer than any evangelistic method or charismatic leadership. We have reason to hope that God would hear and respond to such fervent prayers again.

Third and finally, these movements all swept over the missionary community as well as the Japanese community. Missionaries cannot create revival in the Japanese church, but we can prayerfully seek it with Japanese brothers and sisters as we together remember how God has worked marvelously in the past.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. In our Bible reading this week, we hit Psalm 43. And within Psalm 43 we find one amazing little verse that unfolds into all sorts of implications, leading to a wonderful question from a pastor named Robert, who lives and ministers in Wisconsin. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for the way you have served and encouraged pastors like me, from a distance, over the decades through your faithful labors. I love Psalm 43:4, a life verse for me, and one I want to better understand. I know you love this text as well. ‘Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.’

“If I remember correctly, somewhere I heard you translate the Hebrew of this text like this: ‘Then I will go to the altar of God, to God the joy of my joys.’ God is the joy of our joys. I cannot find where you said this, but you’re not the only one, as I have come to see this in other interpretations of this verse from Puritan Thomas Goodwin in the seventeenth century (Works, 4:392), to William de Burgh in the nineteenth century (A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 380), to classic Hebrew scholars today (David J.A. Clines, Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 8:166).

“So, can you walk us through the Hebrew briefly, and then explain what this means that God is the joy of our joys? I’ve historically thought of this text as saying what the ESV here implies, that God is the most exceeding joy above all other joys — a comparison. But you seem to indicate that this text is speaking of source — God is the joy, that is, the giver of all other joys. That changes the text completely. If so, expand on this. This seems like a huge discovery!”

Well, that’s not quite what I mean. I totally love what he loves here and want to get at it, because there is something really quite right. I don’t mean source when I say, “joy of our joys.” What I mean is, God is the essence of our joys. God is the substance of all our joys. He’s the best part of every joy if we are enjoying things rightly. So, he’s not only supreme joy — which is what the ESV brings out: our “exceeding joy” — but he is also the best part of all other joys. He is to be what makes all our joys most enjoyable. That’s what I mean.

‘Joy of My Gladness’

Let’s see if that’s so, and get the verse in front of us here. The psalmist is crying out to God, and he says,

Send out your light and your truth;     let them lead me;let them bring me to your holy hill     and to your dwelling!Then I will go to the altar of God,     to God my exceeding joy. (Psalm 43:3–4)

So, the psalmist identifies God as his exceeding joy, which the ESV, the NASB, the King James Version all translate “exceeding joy.” The Hebrew (śim-ḥaṯ gî-lî) has two different words for joy or happiness or pleasure. Literally, then, the phrase could be translated, “the joy of my gladness,” which in fact is exactly what’s in the margin of the old King James: “the joy of my gladness.” So, the question is, What does that literal phrase — “the joy of my gladness” — mean?

The ESV and the other versions take it to mean that, at least, he’s my best gladness. “The joy of my gladness” means, of all my gladness, he’s the best. And surely that’s right. I mean, at least it means that. God is supreme. God never made anything more valuable or more enjoyable than himself. So yes, God is our exceeding joy. That’s what it means to be God, I think, and that’s what it means to love God. But the question remains, Is that all the phrase means? Is there more implied in the phrase “joy of my gladness”?

Avoiding Idolatry

So, way back — I’m guiding our friend to where I actually said that (he said he couldn’t find it). Well, on February 26, 2006, it’s on the DG website on this text. I preached on this, and I remember it so clearly because it was twelve days after my prostate-cancer surgery. I chose this text precisely for that. So, way back on February 26, 2006, I preached on this, and here’s what I argued. I’ll quote two sentences:

God, who in all my rejoicing over all the good things that he has made, is himself, in all my rejoicing, the heart of my joy, the gladness of my joy. Every joy that does not have God as the central gladness of the joy is a hollow joy and, in the end, will burst like a bubble.

Now, the reason that insight is so important is because, without it, all our enjoyment of God’s gifts — the things that he’s made — would not honor God the way that enjoyment should. Or to put it in the form of a question, What keeps our enjoyment of pizza or friendship from being idolatry? That’s the question. Now, you could answer, “Because we always enjoy God more than pizza, and we always enjoy God more than friendship, and that keeps it from being idolatry.” And that’s true and that’s crucial. God is our exceeding joy, supreme joy.

“God is the best part of every joy if we are enjoying things rightly.”

But I think God intends to be glorified not only by being enjoyed more than pizza and more than friendship, but by being enjoyed in the very enjoyment of pizza and in the very enjoyment of friendship. I think God intends for us to enjoy his sweetness in the sweetness of chocolate, his saltiness in the saltiness of french fries, his juiciness in the juiciness of a sizzling steak, his friendship in the company of our friends, his brightness in the sunrise, and so on.

When Paul says in 1 Timothy 6:17, “Set [your hope] . . . on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy,” I don’t think he meant only, “Make sure you enjoy God more than everything he made,” but rather, “Make sure you enjoy God in everything he made” — under everything as the source of joy, over everything as superior joy, and in everything as the best part of the enjoyment of everything.

Thankfulness Is Not Enough

Now, you could also say that — and this is true — thankfulness for God’s gifts is another key to keep the enjoyment of God’s gifts from becoming god, to keep ourselves from becoming idolaters. To be consciously thankful that every legitimate pleasure in this life is a gift of God is a good thing. That’s a right thing. By all means, we should be thankful. It’s a sin to be ungrateful for every good thing God gives. Paul said in 1 Timothy 4:4, “Nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.”

But here’s the issue. I want to push into this. Thankfulness is not enough to keep the enjoyment of God’s gifts from becoming idolatrous. Think with me about this. Why is that? Why is thankfulness not enough to keep God’s good gifts from being idols to us? It’s because we all know that someone may give us a gift we enjoy more than we enjoy the person who gave it. We know this.

Being thankful to God or anyone does not mean we love the giver more than the gift. It doesn’t. A cranky, mean-spirited old man may give you the gift you’ve wanted all your life, and you’re thankful. Yes you are. But you don’t like him. He’s cranky. He’s a mean-spirited old man. You’re not sure why he gave it to you, but he gave it to you, and you’ve wanted it all your life, so you’re thankful for it. If we’re going to glorify God in the enjoyment of his gifts, we have to go beyond thankfulness.

Taste and See, Smell and Feel

So, back to Psalm 43:4. “God is the joy of my gladness” means not only that he is better than the gladness I have in other things — that is, “my exceeding joy” — but that he is the best part of the gladness I have in other things. He’s the joy of my gladness. He is what makes the enjoyment of those other things more enjoyable.

When the psalmist says in Psalm 73:25, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” — wow, what a statement — he might mean, “I desire nothing above God.” He might mean that. But it sounds like he means, “I don’t desire anything on earth of which God is not the chief part.” “I don’t want to enjoy anything,” he’s saying, “which is not also an enjoyment of God.” I want to enjoy God in friendship. I want to enjoy God in eating. I want to enjoy God in the pleasures of the marriage bed. I want to enjoy God in music and reading and rising early to see the dawn.

Now, if we’re onto something here, let’s see what some other significant Christian thinkers have said about this. Here’s the way Thomas Traherne put it: “You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God: And prize in everything the service which they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your Soul” (Centuries, 13–14). That’s not mere thankfulness. This is enjoying God in our enjoyment of what he has made. Every part of creation is designed by God to communicate something of God. And when we enjoy that part of creation, we are to savor God in it.

Here’s the way Augustine put it in his prayer: “He loves thee too little” — speaking to God — “who loves anything together with thee, which he loves not for thy sake” (Confessions 10.29.40). Now, “for Thy sake” I take to mean this: we love what is not God properly by loving it for what we taste of God in it — not just out of thankfulness, but what we taste and see, smell and feel of God in it.

So, let us go with the psalmist to the altar of God — that is, to the cross of Jesus Christ — and enjoy the forgiveness of sins that he purchased there. And through that gift, let us know and enjoy God as our exceeding joy — yes, and as the gladness of all our joys.

Mary Oliver once said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion” (Upstream, 8). Yet we struggle, don’t we, to set our minds on “the things of the Spirit” and “the things that are above, where Christ is” (Romans 8:5–6, Colossians 3:1–2)?

We know the mind attentive to the Spirit is “life and peace,” yet we’d blush to admit how often we reach for the empty stimuli of social media and news feeds. And it’s easy to wring our hands and declare that we’re uniquely handicapped by our Age of Distraction and the relentless competition for our attention. Are we really defenseless, though, doomed to distracted, ever-scrolling minds?

In my own war against distractions, I find hope and help in saints who lived centuries before our digital age. Read slowly these words of Augustine, describing “the bridegroom who is beautiful wherever he is”:

He was beautiful in heaven, then, and beautiful on earth: beautiful in the womb, and beautiful in his parents’ arms. He was beautiful in his miracles but just as beautiful under the scourges, beautiful as he invited us to life, but beautiful too in not shrinking from death, beautiful in laying down his life and beautiful in taking it up again, beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb, and beautiful in heaven. (Essential Exposition of the Psalms, 131)

If we had a time machine and could pull this man taken by the beauty of his Beloved into our digital age, would the wild horses of iPhones and earbuds drag his attention from God? By no means. The way Augustine talks about Christ convinces me that he could not not be captive to God’s beauty. He’s held firm and undistracted by the same one-thing passion that captivated David:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,     that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lord     all the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. (Psalm 27:4)

Jonathan Edwards, another undistractable saint, found God not only beautiful but “the foundation and fountain of . . . all beauty” (Works, 8:551). In his sermon on “God’s Excellencies,” he told the congregation,

God is every way transcendently more amiable, than the most perfect and lovely of all our fellow creatures. If men take great delight and pleasure in beholding and enjoying the perfections and beauties of their fellow mortals, with what ecstasies, with what sweet rapture, will the sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God be beheld and enjoyed! (Works, 10:429)

Like Augustine, Edwards was enthralled by God’s beauty in Christ and would surely never trade those “sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God” for the empty cisterns of clickbait. The question is, would we? Can we ordinary saints living in the Age of Distraction be so captured by God’s beauty that we grow increasingly undistractable?

Beauty of All Things Beautiful

Before we answer, we should clarify what we mean by God’s “beauty.” Philosophers love to ponder the idea of beauty. When they meditate on what is truly beautiful, they are (perhaps without knowing it) granted glimpses of the God who is beautiful.

Beauty is the good, and God is most good (Psalm 119:68). Beauty delights and arouses desire, and God is our delight and the desire of our hearts (Psalm 37:4). Beauty displays perfection, and our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Beauty shines with radiance and splendor, and Christ is the radiance of our God who is clothed with splendor (Psalm 104:1; Hebrews 1:3).

Beauty resounds in harmony and unity, and the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the eternal perfection of harmony. Beauty is gratuitous, the way the dazzling colors of the sunset aren’t needed to mark the transition from day to night; and nothing is more gratuitous than the love of God in sending his Son to die for us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). In short, beauty reminds us of God, “the Beauty of all things beautiful” (Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.10).

God’s beauty is a quality of his glory, and when we experience that quality, we are filled with delight and desire. We find him irresistibly lovely in our eyes, beyond compare (Psalm 89:6), and so we faint to be with him (Psalm 63). His beauty is what, when we have him, fills us “with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8).

Who Can See Such Beauty?

Not everyone sees God’s beauty. Some are “haters of God” that have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:23, 30). That’s why Samuel Parkison says there is an aesthetic component to salvation: when the Spirit regenerates us, he enables us “to behold the beauty of the Trinity mediated in Christ.” This new ability to see God’s beauty isn’t mere intellectual perception; it “includes the affections,” so we are stirred and drawn by his beauty (Irresistible Beauty, 15).

John Piper clarifies, based on Ephesians 1:18 and 2 Corinthians 4:4, that this new capacity to behold God’s beauty is with the eyes of our hearts, our “spiritual eyes” (Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ, 9–10). And as with other gifts and capacities we receive from the Spirit, we are “to fan into flame the gift of God” (2 Timothy 1:6). Our spiritual eyes must be sanctified, must mature and develop, must be tuned and calibrated, until we find Christ irresistibly beautiful wherever we see him. Therefore, cultivating our ability to “see and savor” the beauty of God in Christ is a means of grace in the war for our attention.

How to Cultivate Eyes for God

Because this power of the new heart is aesthetic, we could learn some things about attending to God’s beauty from those who teach art appreciation. Museum docents and artists could train us in “slow looking” and “immersive attention,” and those skills, reapplied to our meditations on God’s word, could help hone our gaze on the beauty of the Lord.

But God is not a painting or a statue. He is both beautiful and personal; his beauty leads us through and beyond appreciation and admiration to affection and devotion. We must unite the aesthetic and the personal, the way Georgia O’Keeffe did when she said, “To see takes time like to have a friend takes time.”

So, when I suggest that one of the best ways to grow in our appreciation of God’s beauty is to read theology, you might immediately do a double take. But after you stop scratching your head (and before you stop reading), listen to C.S. Lewis:

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. (Introduction to St. Athanasius on the Incarnation, 10)

“The heart sings unbidden” when we work our way through the best theology because theology lays before us the goodness and perfections of God so that we see them — see him, our Beloved — more clearly.

Recommendations in Beauty

At its best, theology opens our eyes to the beauty of God in the Scriptures, elevating our Bible reading into an act of communion and love with our Lord as he pulls back the veil so that the eyes of our hearts behold the beautiful glory of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:18).

But, of course, not all books of theology make our hearts sing. Some are written by Dr. Dryasdust, with a specialized vocabulary and attention to subtle controversies that can keep the veil over our eyes. But there are theological writers, the heirs of Augustine and Edwards, who see the beauty of God and show it beautifully. J.I. Packer’s Knowing God and R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God filled my heart with music when I first read them. John Piper intentionally and faithfully follows in the footsteps of undistractable saints like Augustine and Edwards.

And then there are the English Puritans. Their seventeenth-century prose sometimes tests us, but they are expert guides to God’s beauty. John Owen summarized the goal of all their counsel and practice: “To encourage our hearts to give themselves up more fully to the Lord Jesus Christ, consider his glories and excellencies” (Communion with God, 59).

Read, Pray, Encounter

As exhilarating as theology at its best can be, it isn’t an end in itself. It is never meant to replace a direct encounter with God, the very subject of theology. To admire triune beauty in Christ is personal experience — it is to commune with him. So, when we read theology, let our reading be immersed in prayer, as the writing of it most surely was.

Let us learn to love our beautiful God in his personal revelation, for “love alone makes it possible for contemplation to satiate the human heart with the experience of supreme happiness” (Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 82). And in that communion with God, we will be satisfied and find the undistracted “life and peace” that Paul calls us to (Romans 8:6), a daily foretaste of our eternal happiness, basking in the beauty of Christ:

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 3:2)

I stood at a friend’s kitchen sink, surprised and somewhat disturbed. My friend’s wife had taped a notecard on the wall behind the sink with some spiritual reminders. That in itself was nothing new: though still a young believer, I had seen such cards posted to desks, doors, bathroom mirrors, and the like. No, what surprised me was one particular reminder this young woman had chosen to write.

The exact words escape me, but the sense still burns in my memory: “You deserve hell.”

You deserve hell? On the one hand, I had no intellectual objection to the statement. I myself had recently come to see the darkness of my native heart. I had realized that I was not just mistaken or in need of occasional forgiveness, but actually hell-deserving — and hell-destined apart from the grace of Jesus.

But the notecard still disturbed me. Yes, we deserve hell, but should we recall the fact as often as we wash our hands? Should the reality of hell, and the remembrance that we once were headed there, stay warm in our minds?

I can certainly imagine someone thinking too much about hell. The unspeakable sorrow of eternal punishment, dwelt on overmuch, could overwhelm the sense of joy pulsing through the New Testament. But a recent survey of Paul’s letters leads me to think my friend’s wife was closer to his apostolic heart than my instinct to recoil.

We may not post reminders above our sinks, but somehow the thought needs to become more than passing and occasional. We deserve hell, and only one thing stands between us and that outer darkness: Jesus.

Remember Hell

When we turn to Paul’s letters, we actually notice something even more startling than the notecard over my friend’s sink. Regularly throughout his writings, the apostle not only reminds the churches of their formerly hopeless state; he also warns them of their ongoing danger should they drift from Christ. He says not only, “You deserve hell,” but also, “Make sure you don’t end up there.”

Consider just a few of Paul’s bracing warnings to the churches:

“If you live according to the flesh you will die” (Romans 8:13).
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” (1 Corinthians 6:9).
“Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 5:6).
“Put to death . . . what is earthly in you. . . . On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Colossians 3:5–6).
“The Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you” (1 Thessalonians 4:6).

The situation becomes even more surprising when we consider Paul’s overall posture toward the believers in these churches. Paul was “satisfied” that the Romans were “full of goodness” (Romans 15:14). He was confident the Corinthians were “sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:2). He saw the Ephesians as already seated with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–6); he rejoiced in the firmness of the Colossians’ faith (Colossians 2:5); he knew God had chosen the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 1:4).

And yet he warned. In fact, Paul places his warnings near the heart of his apostolic calling: “[Christ] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28). So, amid his encouragements, and throughout his doctrinal instruction, and even as he exulted in the hope of glory, he would sometimes grow solemn and still, lower his tone, and turn his ink black.

“Dear brothers,” he would write in effect, “Christ is gloriously yours. But until you see him face to face, don’t imagine yourselves out of danger. Hell still awaits any who forsake him.”

Why Did Paul Warn?

Why did Paul warn his beloved churches, sometimes with unsettling sternness? A closer look at his warnings sheds some light. Among several purposes Paul had, we might consider three in particular that rise to the surface.

These three purposes are not limited to Paul’s apostolic calling, or even to the pastoral calling today. Pastors, as God’s watchmen, may have a special responsibility to blow eternity’s trumpet, but Paul and the other apostles expected all Christians to play their part in admonishing, exhorting, warning (Colossians 3:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:14; Hebrews 3:13).

So, as we consider when and why Paul warned of hell, we (pastors especially, but also all of us) learn when and why we should too.

1. To Alarm the Presumptuous

First, Paul warned of hell to alarm the presumptuous. Hell was a siren to awake spiritual sleepers, a large “Danger” sign for those drifting off the narrow way, a merciful thorn for feet too comfortable near the cliff of sin.

“We are never more in danger than when we think we are not.”

Despite Paul’s overall positive posture toward the churches, he knew that some in these communities were in danger of spiritual presumption. In Corinth, for example, some acted arrogantly when they should have felt fear and trembling (1 Corinthians 5:2). Some treated sexual immorality with frightful indifference (1 Corinthians 6:12–20). Some did not hesitate to haul their brothers to court (1 Corinthians 6:1–8).

They were growing numb and didn’t know it. So Paul sounded the warning:

Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6:9–10)

If a brother seems spiritually presumptuous; if exhortation and entreaty seem to land lightly; if his sin has become habitual, and his hand seems lifted higher and higher — he may need to hear a word about hell. At first, such a word may sound as unwelcome as an alarm awaking him from a deep and comfortable slumber. But if he is in Christ, then such a warning will have its God-intended effect in time. His initial offense or displeasure will give way to the dreadful realization that the house is on fire; he must escape.

By all means speak wisely, carefully, with the kind of trembling that fits so fearful a topic. But take courage from Paul, and believe that sometimes, love alarms.

2. To Protect the Vulnerable

Often when Paul warns of hell, however, he does not have presumptuous people in mind. Usually, these stern words come to beloved brothers and sisters whose faith seems firm, to churches like the Romans, the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Thessalonians. Why does he warn such saints? He does so, in part, because as long as we are in this world, we are vulnerable to becoming deceived with what Paul calls “empty words” (Ephesians 5:6).

First-century societies, just like ours, had their broadly acceptable sins, their celebrated evils. They also had scoffers and false teachers who shrugged off the judgment to come. And Paul knew that, over time, such a society could subtly dull the Christian conscience. God’s people could slowly become swayed by “plausible arguments” (Colossians 2:4): “You really think God cares about what we do in our bedroom?” “How could so many people be wrong?” “You seriously expect God to judge something that so many do?”

Such questions, spoken or merely suggested by a pervasive societal mood, can create an atmosphere where hell sits uncertainly on the soul — where eternity becomes a vague, weightless idea, a peripheral thought that holds little power against the most popular sins of the day. That is, unless we regularly hear Paul (or a pastor or friend) say, “Let no one deceive you” (Ephesians 5:6). No matter how common, no matter how lauded, “The Lord is an avenger in all these things” (1 Thessalonians 4:6).

We need such warnings today, perhaps especially from our pulpits. What sins are so normal throughout our cities, so typical in entertainment, so characteristic of our own pasts that we are in danger of becoming numb to their hell-deserving guilt? Pornography and fornication? Casual drunkenness? Love of money and luxuries? Internet reviling?

If the vulnerable among us (and to some degree, we’re all vulnerable) are going to see the deep pit at the end of such well-traveled paths, then someone needs to point it out — and not only once.

3. To Humble the Mature

Finally, and maybe most surprising of all, Paul warned of hell not only to alarm the presumptuous and protect the vulnerable, but also to humble the mature. No matter how strong others seemed, Paul did not think they were too strong for danger, too firm to fall. He knew the most established believer stands just a few yards away from spiritual peril, and just a few more yards from spiritual ruin. So, he writes, “Do not become proud, but fear” (Romans 11:20).

Remarkably, Paul counted himself among those in need of such warnings. Hear the great apostle admonish his own soul: “I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:26–27). Can you imagine Paul disqualified? Can you fathom the mighty missionary, the bold church planter, the zealous apostle barred from heaven? He could.

I recently encountered this rare apostolic spirit in a letter from Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813–1843), who wrote to a friend and fellow minister,

I charge you, be clothed with humility, or you will yet be a wandering star, for which is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever. . . . If you lead sinners to yourself, and not to Christ, Immanuel will cast the star out of His right hand into utter darkness. (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, 130)

Why speak so to a fruitful, faithful, mature minister of Christ? Because M’Cheyne (and Paul before him) knew the paradoxical nature of Christian perseverance: We are never more in danger than when we think we are not. And we are never safer than when we feel our weakness, distrust our strength, and lean hard upon the arm of our Lord Jesus. “He that walketh humbly walketh safely,” John Owen writes (Works, 6:217). And he who remembers hell walks humbly.

Him We Proclaim

Consider again Paul’s description of his apostolic calling in Colossians 1:28: “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” We have focused here on Paul’s warnings, but we dare not miss the context in which they come.

Hell was not the main theme of Paul’s ministry. Unlike some fire-and-brimstone preachers, he did not thunder forth the judgment to the neglect of other doctrines or in ways that sunk others into all-consuming fear. He did not write, “Hell we proclaim,” but “Him we proclaim” — Christ.

Why, ultimately, did Paul warn of hell? Because Jesus was too wonderful, too marvelous not to use every righteous means available to “present everyone mature in Christ,” to win people to him and keep people near him. Others needed to know the danger of hell because they needed to know the danger of missing eternal life with him. Warnings were his way of casting us into the arms of Christ, the safest place in all the world.

And so he warned. And so the wise remember, in one way or another, that we deserve hell, and that we are not (for now) beyond the danger of hell. Read it in Scripture; say it to your soul; write it over your kitchen sink if you must. Think of hell long enough and often enough to keep you close to Jesus, humble and happy and hoping in him.

One of the more controversial issues in missions today is speed. How quickly do we expect the lost to be saved? How soon will new churches plant new churches? How fast should a new believer move into a leadership role? How long should cross-cultural missionaries work on learning a language?

In our times, we will do well to carefully interrogate our assumptions about speed and pace. Our internal speedometers are being conditioned to the quickening pace of modern life with its rapid flow of technological innovations. So, in our “age of accelerations,” pressing questions relate to speed — not only for effective Christian mission but simply for healthy Christian lives. Will we be driven by the hurried pace of our world? Or, with the help of God’s word and his Spirit and his church, will we find a more timeless (and human) pace for life and mission — a pace that has produced health and fruit across the ages?

In his book Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, Andy Johnson says this: “The work of missions is urgent, but it’s not frantic” (67). That’s good, and the same is true of the Christian life and of the health and growth of our own souls.

Unhurried Habits of Jesus

So, let’s sit together at the feet of Jesus, and consider the pace and patterns of his life and ministry. He was not idle. Nor was he frenzied. From all we can tell from the Gospels, Jesus’s days were full. I think it would be fair to say he was busy, but he was not frantic. He lived to the full, and yet he did not seem to be in a hurry.

In Jesus, we observe a human life with holy habits and patterns: rhythms of retreating from society and then reentering to do the work of ministry. Even as God himself in human flesh, Jesus prioritized time away with his Father. He chose again and again, in his perfect wisdom and love, to give his first and best moments to seeking his Father’s face. And if Jesus, even Jesus, carved out such space in the demands and pressures of his human life, what might we learn from him, and how might we do likewise?

Now, we have only glimpses of Jesus’s habits and personal spiritual practices, but what we do have is by no accident, and it is not scant. We know exactly what God means for us to know, in just the right detail — and we have far more about Jesus’s personal spiritual rhythms than we do about anyone else’s in Scripture.

And the picture we have of Christ’s habits is not one that is foreign to our world and lives and experience. Rather, we find timeless and transcultural postures that can be imitated and applied by any follower of Jesus, anywhere in the world, at any time in history.

So, what might those be? Let’s look at three.

1. Jesus retreated and reentered.

Jesus made a habit of withdrawing from the world (and the engagements of fruitful ministry), and then reentering later to do more good.

So too, the healthy Christian life is neither solely solitary nor constantly communal. We learn to withdraw, like Jesus, “to a desolate place” to commune with God (Mark 1:35), and then we return to the bustle of daily tasks and seek to meet the needs of others. We carve out a season for spiritual respite — in some momentarily sacred space — to feed our souls, enjoying God there in the stillness. Then refilled, we enter back in to be light and bread to a hungry, harassed, and helpless world (Matthew 9:36).

For Christ, “the wilderness” or “desolate place” often became his momentarily sacred space. He got away from people. He regularly escaped the noise and frenzy of society to be alone with his Father, where he could give him his full attention and undivided heart.

There is, of course, that especially memorable instance in Mark 1. After “his fame spread everywhere” (Mark 1:28) the day before, and “the whole city was gathered together at the door” (Mark 1:33), Jesus took a remarkable step the next morning. He was up before the sun and slipped away from town to restore his soul in secret communion with his Father. “Rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

Given the fruitfulness of the previous day, some of us might scratch our heads. What a ministry opportunity Jesus seemed to leave behind when he left town! Surely some of us would have skipped or shortened our private spiritual habits to rush to the demands of the swelling masses. How many of us, in such a situation, would have the presence of mind and heart to discern and prioritize prayer as Jesus did?

The Gospel of Luke also makes it unmistakable that this pattern of retreat and reentry was part of the ongoing dynamic of Christ’s human life. Luke 4:42 tells us that Jesus “departed and went into a desolate place” — not just once but regularly. Luke 5:16: “He would withdraw [as a pattern] to desolate places and pray.”

So also Matthew 14:13. After the death of John the Baptist, Jesus “withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself.” But even then, the crowds pursued him. And he didn’t despise them, but here he puts his desire to retreat on hold and has compassion on them and heals their sick (Matthew 14:14). Then after feeding them, five thousand strong, he withdraws again to a quiet place. “After he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray” (Matthew 14:23).

This leads to a second principle — and not just that he withdrew but why. What did Jesus do when he withdrew?

2. Jesus withdrew to commune with his Father.

He got away from the distractions and demands of daily life to focus on, and hear from, and pray to his Father. At times, he went away by himself to be alone (Matthew 14:23; Mark 6:46–47; John 6:15). His disciples would see him leave to pray and later return. He went by himself.

But he also drew others into his life of prayer. The disciples had seen him model prayer at his baptism (Luke 3:21), as he laid his hands on the children (Matthew 19:13), and when he drove out demons (Mark 9:29). And Jesus brought his men into his communion with his Father. Even when he prayed alone, his men might be nearby. “Now it happened that as he was praying alone, the disciples were with him” (Luke 9:18; also Luke 11:1).

3. Jesus taught his disciples to do the same.

Jesus didn’t only retreat to be alone with God. He also taught his disciples to bring this dynamic of retreat and return, communion and compassion, into their own lives (Mark 3:7; Luke 9:10).

In Mark 6:31–32, Jesus invites his men to join him, saying, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.” Mark explains, “For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves.”

So too, in the Gospel of John, as his fame spreads, Jesus retreats from more populated settings to invest in his men in more desolate, less distracting places (John 11:54). And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches all his hearers, including us today, not only to give without show (Matthew 6:3–4) and fast without publicity (Matthew 6:17–18), but also to find our private place to seek our Father’s face: “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). The reward is not material stuff later but the joy of communion with God there, in that moment, in the secret place.

Your Pace and Patterns

Jesus made a habit of retreating from the demands and pressures of everyday life and ministry, and he did so to commune with his Father, to hear his voice, and respond in prayer. And then Jesus reentered society to bless and teach and show compassion and love and do good. And he also invited his disciples into this pattern and taught them to do the same.

So, let’s close by asking about your pace and your patterns. First about pace, ask yourself, How deeply do the world’s assumptions and expectations about speed and productivity affect my life and ministry? How hurried is my life?

And your patterns. How about rhythms of retreat and reentry? Do you get away daily to commune with God in his word and prayer, in an unhurried, even leisurely way — resting, restoring your joy, feeding your soul in the grace of his presence? And what are your patterns or rhythms of life for retreating from the noise of the world to focus on and hear from the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent, and then come back to meet the needs of others?

Is the God you think of day to day much happier than you? Do you think the Father bright and abundant or rather frownful and displeased? Does he enjoy his Life? Or is he just a tad bored, waiting for you to cheer him up a bit? What is your God like? We smile less than we might, because we feel little warmth from the smiling God.

We have heard the good news of the holy God, the just God, the three-in-one God, the mighty and compassionate, the faithful and all-wise, the loving and prayer-hearing and covenant-keeping God — but what of the happy God, the blessed God? If we look forward to “enjoying him forever,” do we not first need to be convinced that he is enjoyable? And can a King who stifles song or laughter really satisfy our souls (though he be otherwise strong and wise and good)? Do we color the God of Beauty grey, imagining him who makes the seraph burn and the bird warble to be the Sovereign Eeyore in these Hundred Acre Woods?

Gospel of God’s Happiness

Again, the inescapably personal question: Is your God happy? Is he deeply pleased, eternally bright, the waterfall cascading the edges and satisfying your adopted soul, if born again you be? Can you join to sing,

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,God of glory, Lord of love;Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,Opening to the sun above.

I want my heart to unfold more sweetly, more fully. So, let’s gaze up at the brilliance of the divine happiness together. As with the apostle John, if everything were to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books (John 21:25). Most must be omitted, but even as a little honey can brighten the eyes, a few glimpses of his happiness can freshen our joy in him.

His Pleasure Precedes Us

Mercifully, the Arkenstone jewel of God’s happiness is not the creature — his perfect, holy, complete joy precedes us. God’s happiness is infinite and eternal and untainted precisely because it is independent — he draws from wells we knew not of, that which always was and always will be.

Survey the pantheon of gods, and here alone we find the only Being that can satisfy the soul forever. A fulsome ocean surges within himself — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — waters of bliss that he invites the redeemed to swim within. God has never been needy or lonely or bored. The salvation of man is a subplot, a minor theme, within an eternal drama of Trinitarian love. Baffling man-centric theologies, John Piper writes,

Within the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), God has been uppermost in his own affections for all eternity. This belongs to his very nature, for he has begotten and loved the Son from all eternity. Therefore, God has been supremely and eternally happy in the fellowship of the Trinity. (Collected Works, vol. 2, 48–49)

Here we find our glad tidings: His happiness does not depend upon us — thus he can satisfy us. None can pickpocket his pleasure. Not Satan, not the world, not our sin. “It should delight us beyond all expression,” writes Henry Scougal, “to consider that the one who is beloved in our own souls is infinitely happy in himself and that all his enemies cannot shake or unsettle him from his throne” (Life of God in the Soul of Man, 83). The triune God’s delight cannot sag or wobble; his cheerful crown cannot topple from his brow. He does not sink into despair.

Gladness Who Creates

If eternity were an apartment, God did not need a pet to keep him company. The triune God needed nothing upon which to dote or depend. His golden existence never borrows from other suns.

Yet we read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) — why? If he is so happy and blessed, why create anything at all? Because God delights to share his fullness, his happiness, his life, his love, his glory — not to complete that fullness, but to extend it to others.

“There is an expansive quality to his joy,” writes Piper. “It wants to share itself. The impulse to create the world was not from weakness, as though God were lacking in some perfection that creation could supply.” To quote Jonathan Edwards, “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow.” Again, Piper writes, “All his works are simply the spillover of his infinite exuberance for his own excellence” (Works, 49).

In the beginning, then, God created the heavens and the earth freely, bountifully, happily. He looked down as an artist painting — stars, fish, mountains, man — “Oh, that is good!” He creates and admires and gives and fills and blesses from a full cupboard.

Delight Comes for Us

The God who didn’t need you to be happy, the heaven within himself that needed not angels or humans, sacrificed to include us in that happiness. He came for us.

The God who did not need us chose us — and at total cost to himself. The blessedness of God increases the gospel’s voltage. If God had thrown all into the lake of fire, downed Adam and Eve in a flood, and moved on, God would have lost nothing. But the great I Am — rising from his own good pleasure as Giver, for his own great name of Love, growing from the everlasting heart of a Father — authored a story, perilous and splendid, full of darkness and light, to communicate himself more fully, and exalt his Son, and so fill our cup to overflowing.

“God’s happiness does not depend upon us — thus he can satisfy us.”

Ours is not just the gospel of God, but “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11). Rightly do angels longingly gaze after it. When time ripened, the eternal Son came. Begrudgingly? Reluctantly? Indifferently? “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19–20).

Glimpses of eternal rays pierce through at Jesus’s baptism and transfiguration. The Father’s supreme delight shone down upon his Son: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased” (Matthew 12:18; 3:17; 17:5). “Father,” Jesus prayed on the eve of his death, “I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

The Son’s whole drama — sung to us as good news — plays out in a theater of eternal love: The Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit lifting the elect to dwell in those clouds.

Happiness Brings Us Home

The God who does not need us to be happy himself promises to make his people happy forever. At the end of our weak service, the Master says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23). Enter into the paradise of triune bliss, the Promised Land of milk and mirth, of honey and happiness.

Does your God invite you into his own joy? I find the unfaithful servant of the story instructive. The Master gave him one talent, and he went and buried it. Why did he bury it away?

Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours. (Matthew 25:24–25)

He did not know the Master who invites into his own joy. The Master who smiles and says, “Well done.” He harbored hard thoughts, buried his talents under hard ground, and received a hard wage: “You wicked and slothful servant! . . . Take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. . . . And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:26, 28, 30).

How vital it is to know God’s heart. How many talents hide beneath mounds of dirt in our backyards? Do you believe you serve a hard and extorting God? Believer, come to the open window and gaze through Jesus’s words: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Stir at your God’s vow: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:41). Quiet under his singing:

The Lord your God is in your midst,     a mighty one who will save;he will rejoice over you with gladness;     he will quiet you by his love;he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Orthodox of Heart

Brother or sister in Jesus, the God you serve from day to day, is he happy? Not just holy, powerful, righteous, or wise, but happy? Not flustered, standoffish, or unimpressed, but happy?

“Is it not a pity,” asks Richard Baxter, “that our hearts are not as orthodox as our heads?” Yes, it is a pity. Oh, how our hearts would burst. How fiercely his happiness would arm us against worldliness. How carelessly we would laugh off lesser pleasures of lust and pride. How we would dare to take greater risks with our talents, empowering evangelism and world missions.

When we see the heights and depths of God’s happiness, how can commands such as “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” seem unreasonable (Philippians 4:4)? How can we resist the psalmist’s summon, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!” (Psalm 100:1–2)? How can we not endure unwanted trials knowing that we shall soon be before our Lord in whose “presence there is fullness of joy” and at whose “right hand [there] are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11)?

A few more days, a few more sorrows, a few more disappointments, and then . . .

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.

Part 1 Episode 221 Why does it matter that Jesus is called both the apostle and high priest of our confession? In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper turns to Hebrews 3:1–6 to show how these two titles meet our two greatest needs.