http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15402177/dont-make-ministry-a-pretext-for-greed

Audio Transcript

How do I decode the point of a whole chapter of the Bible? How do I summarize the main point of a whole psalm? Welcome back to the podcast. That’s the question we need answered today. And if you’re reading your Bible along with us, using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, our reading schedule hits January 8 today. That means we’re reading Psalm 8 together. Psalm 8 is rather hard to make sense of, hard to summarize, so it’s a good time in our Bible reading to pause and ask Pastor John how he summarizes it and other whole chapters and whole psalms.

Philip asks this very question: “Dear Pastor John, I’ve really enjoyed the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly by breaking them down and explaining each part. I understand that meditating on small parts of Scripture can help us really suck all the nourishment from it, but sometimes my problem is in understanding entire chapters or larger sections of the Bible.

“I read something like Psalm 8, and although I can understand small parts of these texts, I really get lost and fail to follow the entire flow of argument or where the chapter is going. I’m often confused by a whole psalm. It seems disjointed to me, and I can’t follow how one line leads to the next. Could you help me to figure out ways to understand large sections of Scripture as a whole, rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts? Thank you.”

Let me see if I can help, first with an analogy — namely, an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle — and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter. Then I’ll give an example from my own experience.

Scripture as a Puzzle

Think of a larger unit of Scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters — think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. There are five hundred pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them, they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box. They are just one big jumble.

That’s how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible when you try to think of the chapter as a whole. They’re just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things, but my oh my, they don’t make one big picture.

How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of five hundred scattered pieces? Of course, the Bible doesn’t have a picture on the top of the box. You’ll work a little harder here. How do you see a chapter as a whole, with a main point, with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point, instead of just seeing sixty or seventy scattered clauses and phrases? That’s the goal.

You take one piece, right? (I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out.) You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully. You don’t just keep scanning your eyes over the five hundred pieces superficially while saying, “Oh, let me see something. Oh, let me see something.” No, no, no, no. You get nowhere that way.

You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully. You notice that half of this piece is solid red and the other half is gold, solid gold, and you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half. Half of it is gold and half of it is red. From this you infer, with careful thinking, that there is another piece somewhere here, somewhere, that will be half red and half gold, and instead of a protrusion there’s going to be an indention in the bottom of the piece, leading up into half red and half gold.

Now you’re looking very specifically for that piece. As you scan the five hundred pieces, this time you’re looking specifically for it. You find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red and half gold, and you slide them around, looking for how they can fit together.

You push them off to the side of the table in a corner, and you find one or two that fit, and then another and another, and pretty soon you realize that you’ve got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together. You notice, “Oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne. So, that’s going to go here, probably.” You set that midsize unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again with another piece and its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.

That’s how you build little pieces into midsize units. We might call those two or three verses, or a paragraph, and we’ve got maybe five paragraphs to fit together. Now you’ve got several — maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight — midsize units, and you should be able to ask of those three, four, five verses in each unit, “What’s the main point here?” because of how they fit together.

Resist the Urge to Quit

Now, here’s my exhortation. One of the reasons we don’t move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible is because it is very hard work. It is hard work to fit all the midsize pieces together so as to see the whole. For most of us, and I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our heads. There’s where people run into trouble. They’re reading devotions, and they’re trying to do this in their head.

Well, I can’t even begin to do this in my head. We have to do it on paper. We have to write it down. We have to jot down the main point: “The red-and-gold midsize unit means ‘robe over the arm of a throne’” — that kind of a thing. And then we jot down the next main point of the next midsize unit, and so on, until we’ve got on our piece of paper six, seven, eight sentences, each one now summing up the midsize unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we’re trying to understand. Finally, we try to go about seeing how those midsize units relate to each other.

And my exhortation is simply this: Don’t give up on that. Use a pencil and a paper. Draw lines between them. You just have no idea how they might all fit together. You’ll be amazed at what you’re able to see by trying to fit those midsize units and their main points together to make the larger piece.

Unpacking Psalm 8

Now, I’ve been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8. It seems like the main point is the phrase “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” because it begins with that and it ends with that (verses 1, 9). That’s a wonderful structural thing to see.

But in the middle, you have these babies who cry out, and God who gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants (verse 2). So, I jotted that down: “Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the psalm, just the first couple of verses, seems to be that God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things.” And I have no idea how that works — none. That’s just what it says, so I jotted that down.

And then I move on to the next unit, which seems just totally different: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers . . . what is man that you are mindful of him?” (verses 3–4). And through this man, who’s just “a little lower than the heavenly beings,” God governs the whole world filled with fish and birds (verses 5–8). Now, what’s the main point? I’ve put a few pieces together here. I wanted to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this midsize unit, so I jotted down, “God exercises dominion over his earth through insignificant man, who, compared to the stars, seems like nothing.”

And as soon as I wrote it, I thought, “Oh, I get it. The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies. Man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man.” And the psalmist ends by essentially saying, “How great is his glory and his majesty?” Surely, then, the point is this: one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty and glory of God is that he gets his victories, and he exercises his dominion, through the use of weak and insignificant things.

Amen. Praise God. And that’s exactly the use that Matthew makes of it on Palm Sunday, as Jesus enters the city where the babies are crying out, “Hosanna!” (Matthew 21:15) — and he’s on a donkey, of all things.

Look, Write, Pray to See

So, the point is to look at the pieces very carefully, to fit them together in midsize units, to jot down the main points of the midsize units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to organize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all together until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the midsize units are in a flow that make one big overarching point. You will be surprised, if you take up pencil and paper and do this, what you will see.

Audio Transcript

Is joy a choice, or is joy just a feeling that comes and goes? That is a great question, one our culture asks all the time. And if our joy is a choice, whose choice is it ultimately? That actually was the question I attempted to answer in my book The Joy Project. I know a number of you have read that book. I think joy is a better way to frame the essentials of Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism: God’s sovereign joy in pursuit of us.

But here’s the specific question on the table today, as it comes to us from Susan in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast. My question is pretty straightforward. Can you tell me if joy in God is a choice that we make? Or is our joy in God a feeling that comes to us after we do a certain something else first that will lead to joy?”

Here’s an amazing fact to start off with. If you consider all the forms of the word choose or choice or decide or decision, the New Testament never applies those words to the act of choosing God or choosing Christ or choosing Christianity. I think that would come as a shock to a lot of people. (One near exception is Mary choosing to sit at Jesus’s feet while Martha did the housework, but Mary is already a follower.)

In fact, the one place where choosing Jesus is mentioned, it’s denied. In John 15:16, Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” In other words, when the disciples chose to follow Jesus, it wasn’t ultimately their choice. It was God’s choice. He was decisive in that event. God’s choosing us is mentioned over and over and over in the New Testament, but our choosing him is not mentioned, not with the words choose or decide.

Incline Your Heart

Now, if you go to the Old Testament, there’s that famous statement of Joshua 24:15, “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua is happy to call for a choice to serve God or not.

But then a few verses later, he says this (in Joshua 24:22–23): “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord, to serve him. . . . Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel.” Now, why did Joshua add the command to “incline your heart”? He said it because there is such a thing as choosing to serve God while the heart is far from God.

And Jesus said that. He said it in Matthew 15:8, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” They choose to go to church on Sunday morning. They choose to sing, and they choose to pray. They choose to go to the synagogue, or they choose to give tithes. And on the outside, they look like they’ve chosen God.

They have not chosen God. They have chosen religion to hide the fact that their heart wants something else besides God. That’s why Joshua said, “It’s not enough. This is not enough to choose to serve God. Your heart must incline to the Lord. The Lord must be your treasure — not the praise of man, not health, not wealth, not prosperity.”

Deeper Than a Choice

Now, the way all of this relates to Susan’s question is that this inclination of the heart, which both Joshua and Jesus refer to, is deeper than a choice. It’s a kind of joy in God. Joshua was saying what Psalm 100 says; namely, if you’re choosing to serve God, then let that choice be acceptable to God — let it be honoring to God by “[serving] the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2). That’s a command: “Serve the Lord with gladness!” That is, have your heart incline to God; don’t just choose to serve him. Serve him with gladness.

For a choice to be pleasing to God and honoring to God, it must be rooted in the heart’s taste for God, in gladness in God. In other words, a choice for God or a preference for God that honors God must be rooted in the heart’s experience of God as preferable. What makes a choice to serve God real is that the choice expresses the fact that the heart has found God to be preferable, desirable, valuable.

When Jesus said that the people had chosen to honor God with their lips but not with their hearts because their hearts were far from him, he meant that their hearts did not taste God as desirable. They didn’t taste God as valuable. They didn’t taste God as preferable. Their taste was for the praise of man, not God.

So, my answer for Susan is no, joy is not a choice. It is deeper. It is the gift of an experience of God as desirable, preferable, valuable. It’s not a mere choice. It is the God-given, spontaneous response to seeing God as desirable — tasting him as good, as preferable to other satisfactions.

Joy by Looking

That’s what it means in 1 Peter 2:2–3 when it says, “Long for the pure spiritual milk . . . if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Tasting is not a choice. If you put a lemon in your mouth, no amount of choosing can make it taste like sugar. It’s not a choice. It’s the way your taste buds are designed. And there are taste buds on the soul that are either ruined or alive — which brings us then to the other part of Susan’s question about how our spiritual taste buds might be changed.

She asks, “Is joy in God a feeling that comes after we do something else that leads to joy in God?” Now, the very fact that we’re talking about joy in God — not just joy generically, but joy in God, or experiencing God as our joy — implies that we need to have some knowledge of God in order to have authentic joy in God.

This means that any steps we can take to put ourselves in the way of true knowledge of God may prove to be the very action that leads to joy in God. So, in that sense, yes. Joy in God is a feeling that comes after we do something else that leads to joy in God; namely, listening to the truth about God.

If joy in God is the heart’s experience of preferring God, desiring God, treasuring God, then it’s not surprising that the main thing we can do in order to experience this is look intently at God’s greatness, God’s beauty, God’s worth in his word. Faith and the “joy [of] faith” (Philippians 1:25), Paul says (and I would say), comes by hearing, and hearing (or reading) by the word of God (Romans 10:17).

Joy by Praying

And there is another action — I’ll just mention one more — that we can do and should do in the pursuit of joy in God. We should pray. Pray the following two prayers with the psalmists. They prayed like this because they had the same experience of sometimes feeling what they ought to feel and sometimes not feeling what they ought to feel in regard to the joy we should have in God.

Open my eyes, that I may behold     wondrous things out of your law. (Psalm 119:18)

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,     that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. (Psalm 90:14)

We should pray to have eyes to see and hearts to feel. So, in summary, Susan, joy in God is not a choice. It is a God-given, spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth, greatness of God. But there are choices that we can make that may lead to that experience, because the Bible says, “Look. Look and pray. Look at the Lord in his word, and pray for eyes to see and a heart to feel.”