God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

It didn’t make any sense. I read the line again, more slowly this time: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” I understood each of the words in the sentence, but I couldn’t grasp what they meant together. “What does it mean to be satisfied in God?” “How does my satisfaction relate to God’s glory?” These ideas were so foreign to me it was as though the line were written in Arabic or Icelandic.

This single sentence provoked me to wrestle with God’s glory and my joy, and how the two relate. I was confronted, for the first time, with the idea that God cared about my joy. And not only did he care, but he was seeking to advance, maximize, and stir up my delight in him. As I reflected on this possibility, I found it again and again through the Bible — because it had always been there. Soon, the sentence radically reoriented my life from top to bottom.

Do’s and Don’ts

Over twenty years ago, I had just arrived as a freshman at college, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was five hundred miles from home and eager to begin exercising my adult independence. Having grown up in a faithful Christian home and a mostly Bible-preaching church, I had boiled Christianity down to what I thought were its essentials (at least according to 17-year-old me): duty and rules. I knew I was supposed to obey God’s commands, and I knew I was not to embrace immorality.

I had been taught much more, of course, but my teenage mind focused on the rules and prohibitions. Go to church. Pray. Read the Bible. Don’t have premarital sex. Don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs. Don’t dishonor God — glorify him. But glorifying God was all duty and no delight, like doing chores or homework. It was commanded (1 Corinthians 10:31) — and burdensome.

But during this first year in college, at a Christian fellowship, a small-group leader handed me a copy of Desiring God by John Piper. I hadn’t read many Christian books up to this point. I started it, but the first chapter confused me to no end. The author kept speaking about joy and delight in God. I had never considered that my happiness mattered to God, much less that it was commanded. I didn’t grow up with these as categories.

Could Jesus Make Me Happy?

Sure, we talked about obeying God — not breaking his commands and honoring him with our actions. But we didn’t talk about rejoicing in God or delighting in God. We talked about duty. We talked about picking up your cross and following Jesus down a road of suffering and pain. We talked about denying yourself, putting off the deeds of the flesh, and fighting the fight of faith. We talked much about labor, and little about grace. We quoted, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but didn’t finish the sentence: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13).

So, the sentence “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him” was like showing me a five-legged dog or dry water. It didn’t exist in my universe. Christianity is true; therefore I obey. It didn’t matter if I was happy or miserable in that obedience.

Culturally, this approach made a lot of sense. Good grades, hard work, willpower, discipline, and perseverance were drilled into me from a young age. In my cultural milieu, if you got an A-minus on a test, you worked harder next time to get an A or A-plus. I was taught to put in as much time and energy as was needed to accomplish the task. It didn’t matter if I liked it or not. If it was assigned, I needed to do it well.

Yet this mindset was crippling as it bled into my relationship with Jesus, which became mainly transactional. I would read the Bible, hoping for God’s blessing. I’d avoid sin so that I wouldn’t be punished. And when I did sin, my world would come crumbling down around me. How could God possibly love me, much less accept me or forgive me, if I was a wanton sinner?

Treasure Hidden in a Field

This perspective, however, minimized the gospel of the grace of God. It lacked a compelling motivation for my obedience. It lacked substance. Slowly, I began to see that God gives us joy in obeying him, he gives us delight in worship, and he satisfies us with his steadfast love and mercy. My joy is not inconsequential, but rather essential for a life that pleases and glorifies God. Therefore, it’s not just okay to seek joy in God; it’s essential that we find our soul’s satisfaction in Jesus. Or to put it another way, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” And so, we fight for joy in Jesus.

“God gives us joy in obedience, he gives us delight in worship, and he satisfies us with his steadfast love and mercy.”

This idea began to leap off the pages of the Bible. The Psalm 1 man is the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord (Psalm 1:2). The commands of the Lord are not burdensome, but life giving (1 John 5:3). God is the one who makes known to us the path of life; in his presence we experience fullness of joy, and at his right hand we get pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11). Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man discovers and then sells all that he owns in order to obtain it (Matthew 13:44).

And the fact we are commanded to glorify God doesn’t diminish the reward of it. To say, “Your job is to glorify God” is like telling a newlywed husband or wife, “Your job is to delight yourself in your spouse.” It’s like arriving at a long-awaited vacation and being told, “Your job is to relax and enjoy yourself.” The command to glorify God is a command to delight yourself in him, and the command to delight yourself in him is a command to glorify him. Hand-in-hand, one completes the other.

No Better Place to Be

The sentence summary of Christian Hedonism went from incomprehensible to understandable, and then from understandable to wonderful. My life has never been the same.

“There is no better place to be than following Jesus, obeying God’s commands, and experiencing his smile.”

When preaching the Scriptures now as a pastor, my goal is not to demand obedience for the sake of obedience. I don’t guilt or shame our people into following and sacrificing for Jesus. We don’t send missionaries into the hardest places of the world with threats. Rather, we entice people with the superior pleasures of following Jesus. There is no better place to be than following Jesus, obeying God’s commands, and experiencing his smile.

Jesus is better. Knowing, loving, and being loved by Jesus is better than the lesser pleasures of entertainment. He’s better than scrolling endlessly through the swamp of social media. Joy in Jesus is better than illicit pleasures, chemically induced highs, and the riches that our world holds out on a platter of death. Obedience to Jesus, participation in his church, and identification with his body is better than the temporary accolades and acceptance of those around us. Lesser pleasures fade in comparison to the growing and greater pleasure of being satisfied in God. And wonder of wonders, that pleasure glorifies God.

When we come to Jesus, we receive everlasting joy that is rooted in a hope that never disappoints. We are promised an eternal hope, a forever home, an incorruptible kingdom, a superior pleasure, and an everlasting joy. This is the reality of following Jesus. Comprehend the incomprehensibly glorious truth that we have been created and designed to find our ultimate joy and satisfaction in Jesus. And as we delight ourselves in him, God is rightly glorified, honored, and praised.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.

Audio Transcript

Pastor John, we have talked a lot on this podcast about personal productivity. And that leads to today’s question from a listener named Paul, who lives in Soria, Spain. Paul writes this: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast! Way back in episode 839, you mentioned the importance of writing out a personal mission statement for our lives with the aim of enhancing personal productivity. I agree completely. And I find this task entirely daunting. So how do I, as an average Christian layperson, go about coming up with a personal mission statement? Should we be strengths/talents-oriented about it? Focus on roles? Should we mostly focus on spiritual needs in the church, both locally and globally? And how do we avoid letting this statement grow so broad that we get overwhelmed to the point that such a statement does nothing to actually help focus our energies? Any help would be appreciated.”

When I read the Bible, I cannot escape the relentless teaching that God has purposes. He has goals in everything he does. He’s not a God who is coasting aimlessly. He’s not going in circles. The God of the Bible is pervasively pursuing accomplishments of his own counsel. So Isaiah 46:9–10 says,

     I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning     and from ancient times things not yet done,saying, “My counsel shall stand,     and I will accomplish all my purpose.”

So there it is: “I will accomplish all my purpose.” God has purposes. He has plans.

As I have planned,     so shall it be,and as I have purposed,     so shall it stand. (Isaiah 14:24)

Have you not heard     that I determined it long ago?I planned from days of old     what now I bring to pass. (Isaiah 37:26)

I don’t think there would be any gospel, any salvation, any eternal joy, if God were not a planner — one who lived with purposes and goals. Because Acts 4:27 says that all the enemies of God were gathered together in Jerusalem at the crucifixion of Jesus “to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”

God-Sized Goals

Now, when I step back from all of that vision of the planning, purposing God, the effect it has on me is to stir me up to really serious questions like, Well, what is God’s ultimate goal, then? I’m sure he has millions of sub-goals and sub-purposes in everything he does. I like to say that God is doing ten thousand things we don’t know anything about. Most of those goals and purposes are hidden from us. But what has he revealed as his main or his ultimate purpose? Where is everything going? That’s the question that has burned in me ever since I was 22 years old and became a lover of the all-ordaining, all-planning God.

And then the next question becomes, Well, if I could discern what his ultimate goal is, how can I join him in it? I want to fit in to his ultimate purpose. I don’t want to strive against it. I want to be right in sync with what God is pursuing in the world. Nothing seems more obviously reasonable to me or hopeful to me than that God’s creatures should gladly fit into his purposes. So surely that’s his call on us. That’s what he’s beckoning us to do: “Find my purpose and join me in it.” So that’s my second question, then: Is there a way I can join the purpose of God once I have found out what his ultimate purpose is?

And then the question becomes, How do I do everything I am doing so that I help that ultimate goal come about, or so that I can be used by God to make it come about? I want everything — not just a few things, but everything I do — to somehow contribute to that purpose. So, that’s why mission statements seem helpful to me. They keep me focused on the great things of life.

Aim for the Big Picture

But let me caution us here: I think the particularities of life are too variable for our mission statement to be very detailed. I know our friend asked that it not be too general. And yet I might disappoint him because I find big, big, general purposes really helpful, if they’re the right kind.

So the more particularities about yourself and about your circumstances that you include, the more short-term your statement is going to be, because so much changes, right? You change. Your job changes. You have kids. You get sick. You move. Oh, my goodness! Life is just so variable that if you make your mission to include things about yourself, things about your circumstances that are going to change relatively quickly, then you’re going to have to be changing your mission statement all the time. And that’s probably not very helpful.

“What goals can I have that are in sync with God’s goals and are so clearly biblical that they don’t change?”

So, if you want your mission statement to last more than a few years, it will need to be high-level and general. And that’s mainly what I have in mind when I think of my own statements that guide my life. I need to be reminded regularly about the big picture of life: What’s everything about? What goals can I have that are in sync with God’s goals and are so clearly biblical that they don’t change?

So let me give you a whirlwind process of arriving at such a statement, and then you can adapt it to your situation.

Discover Ultimate Aims

In those crucial years of discovery for me — the life-changing years from 22 to 25 — what I saw and could not deny, and have never changed my mind on since, was that God is infinitely full of every perfection, and cannot be improved, and is the sum of all excellence, all beauty, all worth, all greatness, so that his purpose never includes people counseling him or adding to him or improving him or providing for his needs, since he doesn’t have any.

Rather, what I saw was that God is the kind of God whose ultimate aim is that his fullness, his completeness, his perfection, would overflow with the communication of all his satisfying greatness and beauty and worth and excellence to me. In other words, God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown (those are my three favorite words for describing it). God’s ultimate purpose is to be seen and savored and shown as infinitely glorious. That’s his ultimate purpose.

This is not megalomania, by the way, because the communication of himself, in all his glory, is what the human soul was made to be satisfied by. So God is the one being in all the universe — and he is the only one — for whom self-communication and self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act.

Bring my sons from afar     and my daughters from the end of the earth,everyone who is called by my name,     whom I created for my glory. (Isaiah 43:6–7)

And so, the very first thing that he teaches us to pray over and over is “Hallowed be your name” (Matthew 6:9) — that is, glorified, treasured, loved, honored, praised, admired, enjoyed. Hallowed be your name. That’s the first and foremost cry of every saint every day: “Make me a means, God — please, make me a means of the communication and the display of your beauty and your worth and your greatness.” That is, “May others hallow your name because I exist.” That’s why we come into being. That’s the essence of every biblical personal mission statement, I think, if it ties into God’s ultimate purpose. So that’s where I start.

Join the Chorus

And then the question becomes, How? How can I live that way? How can I join in to that accomplishment of that purpose? And the Bible just seems to offer countless answers:

Whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).
Give thanks to the glory of God (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
Confess Jesus to the glory of God (Romans 10:9).
Do good deeds that God may be glorified (1 Peter 2:12).
Welcome one another for the glory of God (Romans 15:7).
Be generous to the poor for the glory of God (Romans 12:13).

And on and on. I have other texts listed here, but they’re all over the place. Everything we should be doing with our bodies and our minds and our hearts should be something that makes God look glorious, because he really is. We’re helping people see him, savor him, show him for what he’s really like.

Rely on God

So finally, the question becomes, Is there a common denominator that runs through all those deeds, all those attitudes, all those words, that turn them into God-glorifying acts? How does everything I do become worship? How does everything I do become a display of God’s greatness and beauty and worth? And the answer is given, for example (there are other places),

Whoever serves, [let him serve] by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 4:11)

So, if everything you do is a service, then, he says, let the service be by relying on the all-sufficiency of God’s grace in your life, so that when you accomplish what you just attempted to do, it’s done in his strength, so that he gets the glory. You get the enablement and the power and the guidance and the strength, and he gets the glory. So when we joyfully rely on God in all we do in the service of others, God looks glorious in our lives.

“When we joyfully rely on God in all we do in the service of others, God looks glorious in our lives.”

We see the same thing in 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12: let every work be a “work of faith by [God’s] power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” That’s the same point as 1 Peter 4: we do what we do in glad reliance upon God for everything we need, in order to love people. In other words, we live by faith in the promises of God in the service of love.

Fine-Tune for You

So I would say, build your life mission statement by thinking through this much before you get to the details of your own gifting and your own calling.

God is infinitely glorious.
God means to communicate that glory to his people — to see it, savor it, show it.
He means for us to join him in that purpose.
That applies to absolutely everything we do.
And we do it in humble reliance upon his grace and power, which come through Jesus Christ in the service of others.
That will make him look great.

Then, when you have crafted an overarching mission statement built on those purposes of God, then you can make some short-term mission statements, say for a year: you’re going to write a book, or you’re going to change jobs, or you’re going to pursue marriage, or whatever — some short-term goal that then draws particularities up into that mission statement according to the season of your life.

Several months ago, as my wife’s birthday approached, I was thrilled to discover that a band she likes had plans to play next year in a nearby city. I booked good seats, spending a bit more than I normally would on birthdays, and began anticipating her reaction.

On the morning of her birthday, she opened my gift, saw the concert tickets, and immediately began (to my surprise and consternation) to laugh. Hard. When she could draw a breath again, she reminded me that we had already booked tickets for this exact concert: same night, same venue. At which point I remembered that, oh yes, we had indeed done so months earlier. A long COVID postponement had pushed the concert entirely out of my mind. Now we had four expensive tickets. And — to add insult to injury — the birthday seats I had booked weren’t quite as good as the ones we had already booked together.

Thankfully, my wife was able to laugh at my mistake. But of course, it was also a bit hurtful, given that I had entirely forgotten a special plan we had made together.

Resilient Intimacy

As my wife and I reflected later, we realized that we know married couples for whom my gaffe would have resulted not in laughter but in a blow-out argument — for whom it would have become not an amusing story but a major incident. For the wives, it would have constituted Exhibit A of her husband’s callous disregard, and the story would have been repeated (often) with bitterness, anger, and disgust. For their part, the husbands likely would have doubled down, not apologizing or daring to admit fault.

We wondered what makes the difference in our case, why our marriage can weather small slights, stupid oversights, inconveniences, poorly chosen words, clashes of opinion, and sins of attitude and action against one another. And I think an important part of the answer is marital intimacy. By marital intimacy, I mean a depth of mutual knowledge and affection between a husband and wife, a marriage in which both spouses enjoy sharing experiences, emotions, ideas, and sexual romance with one another.

Our own marriage is certainly a work in progress, and I’m not half the husband I ought or want to be, but through God’s goodness we have tasted this intimacy and desire more.

Obstacle to Intimacy: Busyness

Despite the beauty and blessedness of true intimacy, I’ve encountered numerous obstacles to it — both in my own marriage, and in years of counseling married couples. One of the most common is busyness.

If intimacy involves shared experiences, emotions, ideas, and sexual romance, it’s going to require significant time together. You can’t fit it into fifteen-minute increments here and there. For many married couples, however, time is in short supply. Work commitments, household chores, church involvement, transporting kids to their activities — all these good responsibilities fill our lives and keep us traveling in different directions. When a husband and wife pass like ships in the night, there’s not sufficient time to go deep beneath the surface.

Obstacle to Intimacy: Lack of Effort

A closely related obstacle is a lack of effort invested in cultivating intimacy. Perhaps this is, in part, a function of our culture’s misguided idealization of relationships, in which the dream scenario is to find our soul mate and experience an instant, magical, effortless depth of relationship. We’re disillusioned when we find it doesn’t work that way.

A more realistic guide for marriage comes from Hebrews 10:24, which speaks generally of relationships within the Christian community. The English Standard Version translates the verse as, “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” But a more literal translation would be, “Let us consider one another, unto the stirring up of love and good works.” Note the subtle but significant difference.

The author of Hebrews urges us to consider not mainly a project (how to stir up others) but people (“one another”). The word consider suggests direct observation of something, together with deliberate thought about it. Since Christian community requires such careful thought toward one another, surely marriage does all the more. We’re to consider our spouse, to observe and ponder this person, to become world experts so that no one knows him or her better. Like any field of research, this long-term course of spousal study requires energy, focus, and attention. Failure to put in the work rules out the reward of intimacy.

Obstacles Under the Obstacles

Although lack of time and lack of effort are both significant obstacles, they’re not the only ones, and certainly not the deepest. In general, barring other factors, we allocate time and effort to the pursuits we really care about. If we’re passionate about the latest Netflix show, the model railroading club, or the soccer league, we make time and engage deeply. So what prevents this same investment in our marriage? I’ve found that there are usually obstacles under the obstacles.

One of the deepest is selfishness. True intimacy with a spouse requires time, work, vulnerability, and sacrifice. It’s a whole lot easier to avoid those costs, particularly if they obstruct our other aims and desires. Sometimes, at the end of a day, when I’m tired of talking and prefer to be silent, the best way to serve my wife is through conversation. At other times, the situation is reversed, and I’m the one who needs a listening ear. Our responses in such moments (and in thousands of other ones) will move us either toward or away from intimacy.

“True intimacy with a spouse requires time, work, vulnerability, and sacrifice.”

Ignorance also cripples intimacy. We may long for emotional, relational, and sexual intimacy in marriage, but we’ve never seen such intimacy modeled or learned about it from others. To many, intimacy is a mystery, a foreign land, and we have no map, no idea of how to get beneath pleasantries or functional conversations in order to explore another person’s heart. When we find time alone with our spouse, we remain in the rut of “calendar and kid” conversations.

Or perhaps the obstacle we face isn’t ignorance but insecurity; we’ve been badly hurt in other relationships and have walled off certain areas of emotional intimacy as no-go zones in order to protect ourselves. We’re not sure how (or if) we could ever open those corners of our lives to another person again.

Finally, one of the most serious obstacles to intimacy is a lack of forgiveness. When one or both spouses have been hurt by the other, and that hurt hasn’t been addressed, repented of, and covered with grace, resentment rankles. Each subsequent interaction is freighted with past pain, interpreted through a lens of suspicion. Bitterness accumulates, undercutting intimacy.

How to Pursue Marital Intimacy

So then, in the face of several significant obstacles, how might we move toward marital intimacy?

Vision for Intimacy

A crucial first step is seeing and celebrating intimacy in marriage as a precious and desired goal. We would do well to remind ourselves that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church, and that therefore the emotional, intellectual, experiential, and sexual intimacy of husband and wife reflects and expresses the intimate love between Christ and his people. Ephesians 5:28–31 teaches that Christ “nourishes and cherishes” the church, that husbands are to “love their wives as their own bodies,” and that husbands and wives become “one flesh” with one another. These are attractive and compelling visions of intimacy.

Source of Intimacy

Once we desire this intimacy, how do we attain it? We can start by asking God for help. He is glorified when our marriages express the intimate love between his Son and his people. So, when we ask him for help in this area — sincerely and persistently — he will answer. Sometimes he’ll grow us in pleasant ways, and sometimes in painful ways. Seasons of suffering can deepen and sweeten our relationships.

“God is glorified when our marriages express the intimate love between his Son and his people.”

Early in our marriage, my insecurities and anxieties were exposed to my wife in a particularly painful way over the course of months, and she consistently responded to my vulnerability with tenderness and compassion. Her patient love set a tone for our entire marriage that continues to this day.

God will act on our behalf, but he also calls us to action. It may seem paradoxical, but one of the most important means of pursuing marital intimacy is surrounding our marriages with other people. True marital intimacy requires an inner core of the gospel and an outer context of Christian community; intimacy must be sourced by good news and surrounded by church.

In community, our sins of selfishness and unforgiveness are lovingly identified, prayed for, and challenged. In community, we’re given examples of healthy, intimate marriages from which we can learn, and that we can imitate. Those marriages provide a road map for ours. Marriage counseling with a wise and godly couple is great, but so is simply spending time with them and observing their interactions in everyday life. We can see for ourselves how communication happens, conflicts are resolved, courtesies are extended, and collaboration in ministry is enjoyed. If your marriage is stale and superficial, why not commit to diving deeper into the gospel and into a gospel-saturated community of believers?

What’s Wrong in My Marriage?

If Christian community is the nurturing context for marital intimacy, the gospel is the necessary core. Only the gospel can fully address our in-built selfishness, lack of forgiveness, and insecurity — those obstacles under the other obstacles. The gospel draws our hearts to Christ, who surrendered himself to death for our sake and took our punishment upon himself. As we soak in that good news, we experience the magnificence of God’s love and the magnitude of our own sin.

I once asked a warring couple to identify the main problem in their marriage, and then listened for 45 minutes as each spouse pinpointed the failings of the other. For each, their spouse’s sin was the real problem. The other’s failings were big; theirs were small. The gospel devastates that warped view, because it tells us that the Son of God had to die for our sin. But the gospel also announces that, in Christ, we’re forgiven, cleansed, and treasured by God. God sees, knows, and loves us. So maybe it’s possible for another human being to do the same.

True marital intimacy is a precious jewel to be prayed for, prized, and pursued. It’s worth the work.

I thank God for Thanksgiving. Particularly this year, as a father of four, ages 11 to 4, I feel a fresh sense of awe, and gratitude, that my generally unbelieving nation pauses for a weekday each November formally dedicated to giving thanks.

It may seem like a trifle to most people. But for those with eyes to see, this is a dazzling ray of God’s common kindness in our day, however much we grieve the public commendations of sin and unbelief that surround us in other ways. Our heavenly Father “is kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). To his common kindnesses of beautiful days, human minds and bodies and words, friends and family, food and shelter — the everyday divine kindnesses we take for granted until they’re threatened or gone — add this annual mercy: Thanksgiving Day.

Whatever conversations it might prompt with neighbors and coworkers, the Thanksgiving holiday is also an especially rich opportunity for moms and dads. To be sure, if practicing thanksgiving happens only once a year in our homes, then our children will not be much better for it. But if this one day is a marker, a springboard, an annual emphasis and re-kindler that feeds a regular theme and habit in our families, then we have an occasion, in this one day, to highlight one of the most important realities God calls us to teach our sons and daughters.

Thanksgiving Honors God

When we ourselves give thanks to God, out loud for our children to hear, we model for them something very basic and profound about being human: we are created by God, for God.

God made us in his image (Genesis 1:27), and what do images do? They image. They reflect, display, make visible. They ensure the one being imaged is remembered and honored. God made us to reflect him and display him in the world around us. We image him through our visible actions and our audible (or written) words that give meaning to our actions. This fundamental purpose and calling makes thanksgiving essential to life.

Sin, however, mars our imaging. In Romans 1:21, the apostle Paul gives us a revealing glimpse into what has gone wrong in the human race: “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.”

We Did Not Give Thanks

At one level, our plight in this world is remarkably simple: God made us, and surrounded us with a world teeming with good, and we failed to thank him as we ought.

God showered us with warm sunny days, beautiful blue skies and green grass, stunning cloud formations to dazzle the eye and provide shade, trees bearing mouthwatering fruit, and the greatest wonder of all in the created world: each other and the marvels that are human bodies and brains. Our world, even now under the sway of sin, still abounds with God’s goodness and kindness. And we ourselves have been given life and countless blessings, even in our most trying of times and disabilities.

Our first response to God’s lavish provision, very simply, should have been to give him thanks. To do so honors the one who made us and provides for us. But we did not give thanks — whether from indifference or contempt — and so we dishonored him. We rebelled against one of the most basic purposes for our existence. To give God thanks honors him, and to honor him — our very design and calling as humans — includes giving him thanks.

Ingratitude, then, is no minor vice. And thanksgiving is no insignificant act for a creature designed to image God.

Feel God’s Pleasure

We were made to give God thanks. And when we do — and model it for our children, teaching them to do the same — we taste one of the great pleasures God made us to enjoy. As Olympian Eric Liddell (1902–1945) memorably said that God made him to run, and he felt God’s pleasure when he ran, so we all were made to give God thanks, and feel God’s pleasure when we do.

“Will our children grow up in homes that thank God daily, regularly, spontaneously, gladly?”

Yet we find ourselves, as fathers and mothers, with a call to raise the next generation, while living in times that celebrate pride, rather than humility. Our generation’s sense of entitlement is off the charts, and rising. Will thanksgiving be a trifle for our children? Will they assume grace, assume God’s provision, assume blessing, assume resources, assume ability, assume community? Or will they presume little, and learn to thank much and express it?

Will our children grow up in homes that thank God daily, regularly, spontaneously, gladly — even as Thanksgiving Day adds its annual exclamation point?

Jesus Gave Thanks

In the end, despite our many failures, we want to model for our children what it would be like for God himself to live as human. And when he did come as man, he gave thanks. Even as God himself, Lord of heaven and earth, Jesus embraced the fullness of the humanity he took at that first Christmas, all the way down to the basics of our flesh and blood — including thanksgiving.

He thanked his Father in prayer (Matthew 11:25–26; Luke 10:21), not just privately but out loud for his disciples to hear. When he fed the four thousand, “he took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds” (Matthew 15:36; Mark 8:6). And when he fed five thousand, he began the same way (John 6:11). So memorable, in fact, was his giving thanks that later John refers to the location where the miracle occurred as “the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks” (John 6:23).

“Jesus was the supreme human, and the supreme giver of thanks.”

Then, on the night before he died, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples (Luke 22:17; 1 Corinthians 11:24). So too, after supper, he took the cup, gave thanks, and they all drank to the spectacularly gracious new covenant in his blood (Matthew 26:27; Mark 14:23; Luke 22:19). So pronounced was Jesus’s thanksgiving during that Last Supper that some traditions call the rite of remembrance “the Eucharist,” from the Greek for thanksgiving.

For Jesus, the God-man, giving thanks to his Father was no trifle. Jesus was the supreme human, and the supreme giver of thanks. Nor should thanksgiving be small for us, or for our children. What an honor, and pleasure, to not only taste for ourselves the joy of giving God thanks, but also share this joy with our children. Thank you, God, for Thanksgiving.

John Piper is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Providence.

Men professing faith in Christ have been walking away from him since the church began.

“Some have made shipwreck of their faith,” the apostle Paul reports in his first letter to Timothy. In fact, the language of leaving is all over 1–2 Timothy: men were wandering away from the faith, departing from the faith, swerving from the faith, being disqualified from the faith (1 Timothy 1:19; 4:1; 5:12; 6:10, 20–21; 2 Timothy 3:8). There seemed to be something of a small exodus already happening in the first century, perhaps not unlike the wave of deconversions we’re seeing online today.

We shouldn’t be surprised; Jesus told us it would be so: “As for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8:14). Those same thorns are still sharp and threatening to faith in our day. In fact, with the ways we use technology, we’re now breeding thorns in our pockets, drawing them even closer than before.

This context gives the charge in 1 Timothy 6:11–12 all the more meaning and power, both for Timothy’s day and for ours:

As for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

“Men professing faith in Christ have been walking away from him since the church began.”

Who are the men who will fight the good fight of faith? Who will stay and battle while others fall away? In the words of 1 Timothy 4:12, which young men will step up and set an example for the believers in faith?

Fight of Faith

That faith is a fight means believing will not be easy. It won’t always feel natural, organic, or effortless. We could never earn the love of Christ, but following him will often be harder than we expect or want.

“If anyone would come after me,” Jesus says in Luke 9:23, “let him deny himself and take up his cross” — and not the light and charming crosses some wear around their necks, but the pain and heartache of following a crucified King in the world that killed him. If we declare our love for Jesus, God tells us, suffering will expose and refine us (1 Peter 4:12), people will despise, slander, and disown us (John 15:18), Satan and his demons will assault us (John 10:10), and our own sin will seek to ruin us from within (1 Peter 2:11). If we refuse to fight, we won’t last. The ships of our souls will inevitably drift, and then crash, take on water, and sink.

The verses before 1 Timothy 6:12 give us examples of specific threats we will face in the fight of faith, and each still threatens men today.

Enemy of Pride

When Paul describes the men who had walked away from Jesus, specifically those who had been teaching faithfully but had now embraced false teaching, he points first to their pride. These men, he says, were “puffed up with conceit” (1 Timothy 6:4). Instead of being laid low by the grace and mercy of God, they used the gospel to feel better about themselves. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, they seized on the love of God to try to make themselves God. Many of us do not last in faith because we simply cannot submit to any god but ourselves, because we do not see pride — our instinct to put ourselves above others, even God — as an enemy of our souls.

Enemy of Distraction

Pride was not the only enemy these men faced, however. Paul says they also had “an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people” (1 Timothy 6:4–5). It’s almost hard to believe the apostle wasn’t writing about the twenty-first century. Were these distractions really problems thousands of years before Twitter, before the Internet, before even the printing press? Apparently so. And yet the temptation explains so much of our dysfunction today.

In our sin, we often nurture an unhealthy craving for controversy. Faithfulness doesn’t sell ads; friction does. As you scroll through your feeds or watch the evening news or even monitor your casual conversation, ask how much of what you’re allowing into your soul falls into 1 Timothy 6:4–5. How much of our attention has been intentionally, even relentlessly, steered into passing controversies and vain debates? How much have we been fed suspicion, envy, and slander as “news,” not realizing how poisonous this kind of diet is to our faith?

Enemy of More

Greed is a threat we know exists, and often see in others, but rarely see in ourselves — especially in a greed-driven society like ours in America. The insatiable craving for more, however, can leave us spiritually dull and penniless.

Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. (1 Timothy 6:9–10)

When you read “those who desire to be rich,” don’t think elaborate mansions in tropical places with pools beside the ocean; think “those who crave more than they need.” In other words, this isn’t a rare temptation, but a pervasive one, especially in wealthier nations. The temptation may be subtle, but the consequences are not. These cravings, the apostle warns, “plunge people into ruin and destruction.” Their life is choked out not by pain or sorrow or fear, but by the pleasures of life (Luke 8:14) — things to buy, shows to watch, meals to eat, places to visit.

“The more we see how much threatens our walk with Jesus, the less surprising it is that so many walk away.”

Do we still wonder why Paul would call faith a fight? The more we see how much threatens our walk with Jesus, the less surprising it is that so many walk away. What’s more surprising is that some men learn to fight well and then keep fighting while others bow out of the war.

How to Win the War

If we see our enemies for what they are, how do we wage war against them? In 1 Timothy 6:11–12, Paul gives us four clear charges for the battlefield: Flee. Pursue. Fight. Seize.

Flee

First, we flee. Some have been puffed up by pride, others have been distracted by controversy, and still others have fallen in love with this world — “but as for you, O man of God, flee these things” (1 Timothy 6:11). Spiritual warfare is not fight or flight; it is fight and flight. We prepare to battle temptation, but we also do our best to avoid temptation altogether. As far as it depends on us, we “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14). If necessary, we cut off our hand or gouge out our eye (Matthew 5:29–30), meaning we go to extraordinary lengths to flee the sin we know would ruin us.

Pursue

Spiritual warfare, however, is not only fight and flight, but also pursuit. “Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness” (1 Timothy 6:11). We could linger over each of the six qualities Paul exhorts us to pursue here, but for now let’s focus briefly on faith. Are you pursuing faith in Jesus — not just keeping faith, but pursuing faith? Are you making time each day to be alone with God through his word? Are you weaving prayer into the unique rhythms of your life? Are you committed to a local church, and intentionally looking for ways to grow and serve there? Are you asking God to show you other creative ways you might deepen your spiritual strength and joy?

Fight

Third, we fight. “Fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12). We avoid temptation as much as we can, but we cannot avoid temptation completely. Whatever wise boundaries and tools we put in place, we still carry our remaining sin, which means we bring the war with us wherever we go. And too many of us go to war unarmed. Without the armor of God — the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit — we will be helpless against the spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:11–12). But having taken our enemies seriously and strapping on our weapons daily, “we wage the good warfare” (1 Timothy 1:18).

Seize

Lastly, men of God learn to seize the new life God has given them. “Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called” (1 Timothy 6:12). This is the opposite of the spiritual passivity and complacency so common among young men — men who want out of hell, but have little interest in God. Those men, however, who see reality and eternity more clearly, know that the greater treasure is in heaven, so they live to have him (Matthew 13:43–44). Their driving desire is to see more of Christ, and to become more like Christ. They may look like fools now, but they will soon be kings. They wake up on another normal Wednesday, and seize the grace that God has laid before them.

Some men will lay down their weapons before the war is over, even some you know and love. But make no mistake: this is a war worth fighting to the end. As you watch others flag and fail and leave the church, let their withdrawal renew your vigilance and fuel your advance. Learn to fight the good fight of faith.

Audio Transcript

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone — or, I guess, technically, happy Thanksgiving Eve. On this holiday built around gratitude we can learn a lot from the apostle Paul, a man who loved to celebrate God’s grace in others with heartfelt thanks. As we’ve seen several times on this podcast, Paul says learning to speak thanks is what cleans up the mouth — cleans it up from using crude and vulgar language. Thanksgiving has a powerful, cleansing effect on our lives. Paul’s life models gratitude. He mentions “thanks” about fifty times in his epistles, leading to one of my favorite quotes, a claim by New Testament scholar David Pao, who once wrote (quoting Paul Schubert), “The apostle Paul mentions the subject of thanksgiving more frequently per page than any other Hellenistic author, pagan or Christian” (Thanksgiving, 15). Wow. A high claim, but a claim that explains a text like 2 Thessalonians 2:13–14, where Paul writes,

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, [why?] because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In this text, we see four truths that motivate our thanksgiving. Here’s Pastor John, at the end of 2001, to explain.

The first one is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:13. Paul says, “We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers.”

Dangerous Duty

Now notice: that’s prayer — prayers in the form of thanks. He says we should do this, so it’s a duty: should implies duty. However, it’s the kind of duty that, if you experience it as burden, you haven’t experienced it yet. If you experience gratitude as a burden, you don’t know gratitude, because true gratitude is not an exertion of the will; it’s an overflow of a sense of being treated better than you deserve.

“Gratitude is the kind of duty that, if you experience it as burden, you haven’t experienced it yet.”

A kid who gets black socks for Christmas from his grandmother when he wanted a fire truck might be told by his mother, “Say thank you to your grandmother.” And he might say, “Thank you, Grandmother, for my socks.” He does not experience gratitude at that moment. The words “thank you” are a burden and a duty, and it feels like hypocrisy for one simple reason: the emotion is not there.

However, had he opened the fire truck first (maybe that’s coming next; Grandmother’s not done), he might exclaim, “Oh, yes, woo-hoo! Thank you, Grandma.” That’s not a burden. That’s not a burden. You don’t know gratitude yet if this should here lands on you like law. You need to know him. You need to come to the end of this year, and look back over this year, with all of its horror, and feel something really freeing about how good he’s been to you, way better than you deserve — and me.

Reason to Rejoice

So it’s a duty here, but look at where it comes from. Look where gratitude comes from in verse 13, when he says, “We ought always to give thanks to God.” Here is a prayer happening called thanks. But where does it come from? It comes from four reasons — which come from knowledge, which come from the word — about how God saved the Thessalonians.

You are “beloved by the Lord” (verse 13).
God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation, “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief” (verse 13).
“He called you through our gospel” (verse 14).
The aim of this call was “that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (verse 14).

“True gratitude is not an exertion of the will; it’s an overflow of a sense of being treated better than you deserve.”

Do you see where his thanks are coming from? God loved them. God chose them. God called them. God will glorify them. That’s what he knows in his head, and it produces the emotion of, “O God, how good you’ve been to the Thessalonians.” It just bubbles up. “Look what you have done for the Thessalonian church. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And that’s the way I feel about Bethlehem over and over again, for reason after reason. But there have got to be reasons. Why? So that God will get the glory, not the Thessalonians. God has chosen you. God has called you. God is going to glorify you. God loved you. Praise God! Thank God for you!

Spirit and Truth

And if you need to see where I got the essential structure of this sermon, look at verse 13 and notice the word Spirit and the word truth. God saves us, it says, “through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.” Now there you have Spirit and truth, Spirit and truth — Spirit and word brought together.

How do you get changed? How do you get changed? Everybody in this room needs to change — and ought to want to change to be more like Jesus, more like Jesus, more affections like him, more behavior like him, more attitudes like him, more change. “Oh, make 2002 change city.” How’s that going to happen? Answer: Spirit and truth. Spirit and truth. And prayer corresponds to our reliance upon the Spirit, and meditation corresponds to our faith in the truth, and so we will bring the two together.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14889298/giving-grace-with-our-mouths

“It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). The words of Jesus, quoted in the book of Acts, are some of the most famous in the Bible. They celebrate the goodness and blessing of generosity. The Christian virtue of generosity, however, is surprisingly nuanced, involving both receiving and giving, and doing so in particular ways.

To understand generosity, we might begin by considering the opposite vice — greed or avarice. Dante’s treatment of this sin in Inferno shows us how greed corrupts both receiving and giving.

When Dante arrives in the fourth circle of hell, he sees two mobs rolling large stones at each other and jeering. Both are greedy, but the form of their greed is different. On one side are the misers, those like tightfisted Scrooge, whose philosophy is best summarized as “Get all you can; can all you get; and sit on the can.” Opposed to them are the squanderers, those who fritter away their goods in wastefulness and luxury. Dante’s keen insight is that while these two groups may outwardly look different, at heart they are the same. Both are in the grip of greed, since greed can either manifest as ill-receiving or ill-giving.

In both cases, the greedy have gone cross-eyed in the mind; they can’t see reality rightly since they are fixated on earthly goods.

Receive, Don’t Take

Recognizing that both our receiving and our giving can be corrupted helps us to see the wisdom and beauty of the biblical virtue of generosity.

Perhaps surprisingly, generosity begins with receiving. And not just any kind of receiving, but a particular kind. We can grasp it if we consider the difference between receiving and taking. In both cases, we end up with some good, but there is a difference between gratefully receiving the good and sinfully seizing the good. Thus, one of Paul’s many exhortations to generosity begins with, “Let the thief no longer steal” (Ephesians 4:28).

“The first step toward Christian generosity is to receive what God has supplied with deep and heartfelt gratitude.”

But theft is only one form of taking — or rather, there are many kinds of theft. The obvious kind involves plundering your neighbor’s goods, but we also can steal from God. When we refuse to receive his gifts with gratitude, but instead act as though the things we have are ours by birthright, we rob him of his rightful glory as the Giver. So Paul can rebuke the Corinthians by saying, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Thus, the first step toward Christian generosity is to receive what God has supplied with deep and heartfelt gratitude.

Receive to Give

It’s not enough, however, to merely gratefully receive. Grateful reception can quickly turn into ill-keeping or ill-giving. The thief who stops stealing must now labor honestly in order to have enough to share with others (Ephesians 4:28).

Here we consider the difference between sharing and wasting, between well-giving and ill-giving. James 4:3 warns of the danger of asking God for blessing with the wrong motives: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Desiring wealth in order to selfishly spend it on our passions is wasteful. God loves a cheerful giver, not an indulgent squanderer.

Wealth is a gift from God for the sake of his mission. He gives to us that we might give to others.

As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life. (1 Timothy 6:17–19)

God has richly provided us with everything for four purposes. First, for our enjoyment; it is good for us to gladly receive what God supplies and to enjoy it for his sake. Second, he provides so that we might do good, that our wealth might serve the joy of others. Third, he provides so that we would be rich in good works. Not just rich in wealth, but rich in deeds of charity and mercy. He meets our needs so that we can gladly meet the needs of others. Fourth, he provides so that we would be generous and ready to share.

This readiness is crucial. It challenges the greed in our hearts. When we have good gifts, are our eyes locked onto the gifts alone? Like the avaricious, have we gone cross-eyed in our fixation on earthly goods? Or are our eyes up, looking around for opportunities to share what we’ve received? Is there an eager readiness to be generous, or is there a selfish miserliness on our part?

Christian generosity begins with grateful receiving and then moves to ready giving. We receive in order to give.

Give to Receive More

This isn’t the end of the story. Christian generosity doesn’t terminate in the giving of our goods; it terminates in the good we receive from God in the giving of our goods. We must not lose sight of the fact that it is more blessed to give than to receive. Receiving is a blessing. Receiving and then giving is a greater blessing.

“Receiving is a blessing. Receiving and then giving is a greater blessing.”

But what is this blessing? Our giving is also a storing up. Paul puts it clearly in 1 Timothy 6:19: “They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life.”

The key word is thus. In doing good and being generous with God’s provision, we are, in that very act of giving, storing up treasure for ourselves. Giving here and now stores up treasure for the future. This is the treasure in heaven that Jesus promises. This is the “better possession and abiding one” that gladly fortified the early Christians in the face of the plundering of their property (Hebrews 10:34–36).

Christian generosity isn’t simply receiving in order to give. It’s gratefully receiving in order to generously give in order to gladly receive more in the future. Our hope is ultimately in God, not in our wealth. What we take hold of is not the fleeting pleasures of this life, but the eternal pleasures of the life to come.

And we are taking hold of true life when we loosen our hold on the goods of this life. This is Christian generosity.