http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14841541/indulge-diet-repeat
As any discerning Christian knows, sin doesn’t stay outside — it gets into the house. Sexual immortality creeps into the bedroom and must be fled (1 Corinthians 6:18). Sluggishness slumps on the couch and must be starved to death by mission and meaning (Colossians 3:23–24). Slander and grumbling air through our vents and must be forced out by prayer and praise (Philippians 4:4–6). And one of the most subtle sins walks in through the door and sits at your table: gluttony.
Some of us may associate the word gluttony only with morbid obesity. But as a pastor of a young, relatively fit church, I would not only say that I have known the sin of gluttony, but I would estimate that nearly half of our members would say they struggle with habitual overeating, excessive dieting, food obsession, or another food-related issue. Forms of gluttony can tempt both men and women, whether obese or thin, sedentary or active.
Indulge, Restrict, Repeat
To be clear, when I talk about gluttony, I’m not talking about having a second (or third) helping at a party, or during a holiday celebration, or while hosting close friends for dinner. Jesus’s ministry began with a feast (John 2:1–12), and history will be consummated with a feast (Revelation 19:7–10). Throughout redemptive history, God has invited (and commanded) his people to regularly and rejoicingly feast.
When I use the word gluttony, I’m talking about overeating, not because it’s a feast, but because it’s Friday — or because of any other reason among the many we use to justify our extra helpings.
Many of us begin the day with fresh resolve to “eat better,” only to find ourselves reaching for something we shouldn’t — a kind of forbidden fruit — within mere hours. We have another bite, another piece, another portion, and immediately following the deliciousness comes the bitter aftertaste of shame and regret. From here, we may starve these feelings with redoubled efforts to restrict again (“My diet starts tomorrow”), or we may comfort them with more food. By the end of the night, we go to bed bloated, but deflated; stuffed, but far from satisfied.
“What if the problem isn’t that we enjoy food too much, but far, far too little?”
Those familiar with this pattern may be tempted to think they enjoy food — or at least certain foods — too much. But what if the problem isn’t that we enjoy food too much, but far, far too little?
Decade of Dieting
I know the cycle well. Since high school football, I’ve counted calories, cut carbs, and codified more personal food laws than the Torah has commandments. I have declared foods that are free of fat, sugar, gluten, dairy, and cholesterol as “clean,” and foods that contain high amounts of salt, sugar, fat, carbs, or preservatives as “unclean” — or at least as “bad.”
Countless mornings, I set out with fresh resolve to restrict what would enter my body, and if I transgressed any of my food laws, I felt guilt, shame, and regret. This was classic legalism, and it led to where all legalism leads: “down a path of grinding effort, at the end of which there is no God — only insecurities, mental anguish, and more labor,” as Knute Larson puts it, commenting on 1 Timothy 4:3 (HNTC, 1 Thessalonians–Philemon, 204).
As I have worked through my own sinful relationship with food, and as I have now walked with many down the same path, I’ve learned that deep down, beneath the calorie-tracking apps and diet attempts, beneath the fear of being fat, even beneath the desperate desire to gain control of life by controlling our diet, at the bedrock of our food issues is a vision of God — a severely malnourished one.
To Those Who Restrict
Judging by the size of the diet industry (now valued at around $200 billion a year), many of us are well acquainted with dieting. Go to any gathering with food, and surely someone will not partake because he or she is currently cutting the item being offered. To be sure, much dieting can be good and healthy. But as Tilly Dillehay argues in her superb book Broken Bread, our tendency to excessively diet often comes from a form of asceticism, which she defines as the “belief that God is stingy as we are.” Such a view of God leads us to distrust anything that is “too enjoyable, too luxurious, too free, too unstructured” (13).
For those of us who feel a constant need to diet, we can have a hard time believing that “food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). We struggle to receive the good news that Jesus declared all foods morally clean (Mark 7:19), and that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4–5). Instead, like Peter, we can find our identity in our refusal to eat foods we have deemed unclean (Acts 10:14).
We are, in J.I. Packer’s words, “too proud to enjoy the enjoyable” (“How I Learned to Live Joyfully”). And oddly, our inability to enjoy the enjoyable often leads us to the sin of gluttony.
To Those Who Indulge
Dillehay describes gluttony as a “kind of tastelessness” that doesn’t really enjoy the first bite, and so keeps eating more and more in an effort to grasp the missing pleasure (40, 44). In other words, the reason we must have another bite is because we didn’t fully enjoy the one before it. She continues:
Perhaps it’s not that pie got ahold of you, but that you never properly got ahold of pie. It’s that, perhaps, you never learned to think of life as waves coming toward you directly from God, waves that you must embrace as they come and then put behind you, readying yourself for the next wave. Waves cannot be repeated at will. Neither can the first bite of pie. (42)
“The best way to overcome overeating is to eat — slowly, mindfully, worshipfully.”
And there’s the breakthrough: gluttony reflects not an excessive enjoyment of food, but a deficient enjoyment of food as God’s gift — and of God as the giver. When you binge, the problem isn’t that you’re enjoying what you’re eating too much; the problem is that you’re not enjoying God in and through what you’re eating, and therefore you must have another bite.
For ten years, I thought the way to overcome overeating was to redouble my efforts to restrict. Surprisingly, I’ve learned that the best way to overcome overeating is to eat — slowly, mindfully, worshipfully.
Eating in God’s Presence
Practically, this means put the food on a plate. Sit down. Put your phone away and turn the TV off. And pray. Before you eat, let your eyes look to God, for the food has come from him (Psalm 145:15).
Then, as you relish the contours of texture and manifold layers of flavor, praise him from whom all blessings flow. As you sit and savor, remember what Edwards taught us: the greatest earthly gifts, food included, “are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean” (Works, 2:244).
Freedom from both over-restriction and over-indulgence comes from focusing not on what we eat, but on how we eat — enjoying God in every bite. Again, Dillehay helps us here:
The true answer to gluttony has much more in common with feasting than with dieting. . . . It is becoming more and more a child who receives, and less and less a parent who withholds (from ourselves and those around us). It is sitting quietly and with full presence of mind, glorying in tastes that were created by a good God, instead of fearing and distrusting tastes that were made too good by a good God. The answer to gluttony is knowing when enough is enough, learning the feel of a wave passing, and growing in the wisdom that looks to the next wave from God with satisfaction, contentment, and readiness. (50–51)
Come and Eat
Many of us make food laws, break those food laws, feel immediate guilt, shame, and regret, and then either starve those emotions with redoubled restriction and dieting, or comfort those emotions with food. If we continue down this path, the end result will be hunger — physical and spiritual.
Freedom will come not only in learning how to fast, but in learning how to truly feast (Isaiah 55:1–3). As Michelle Stacey writes, “The true cure for our dietary sins may lie in an almost opposite direction to that prescribed by the nutrition cognoscenti: not in claiming more control, but less; not in taking power away from food, but giving it back; not in fear of death, but in love of life” (Consumed, 206).
If dieting has become a way of life, and overeating has become routine, God is inviting you to slow down and feast — for “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof” (1 Corinthians 10:26). Slowly, mindfully, worshipfully eat, enjoying the goodness of God in every bite. Jesus, the bread of life (John 6:35) and living water (John 4:10), won’t only fill your stomach; he will satisfy your soul.
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Is God Above Being Grieved? Ephesians 4:30–32, Part 1
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.
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Who Helps You Enjoy God? Christian Hedonists in Honest Community
Jesus did not come into this world to save isolated individuals scattered here and there. He came to gather to himself a new community — a new kind of community, a beautiful community, set apart by God’s grace, here in a world driven by idolatry and seething with rage.
Of course, Christianity is more than communal. It’s also personal. For example, in Psalm 23, David uses the first-person singular pronouns I, me, and my seventeen times in six verses. And Psalm 23 never uses we, us, and our. But who would accuse David of having written a narcissistic psalm? The gospel rightly leads us into a personal relationship with Jesus, for his glory, our salvation, and the good of others. If our Christianity is not deeply personal, then it is nominal, which is unreal and no good to anyone.
“Jesus is enough to pull people closer together than we would ever be without him.”
But what I’m emphasizing in this article is this: original, apostolic, authentic Christianity is, in the wisdom of God, richly communal. Our relational solidarity together is not an optional frill for extroverts. How dare we trivialize what Christ values? “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). It’s our overt love for one another that makes him more visible in the world today (John 13:34–35). Jesus is enough to pull us closer together than we would ever be without him.
The Communion of Saints
The New Testament repeats and deepens this emphasis. We are “joined together” as “a holy temple” in the Lord, “being built together into a dwelling place for God” (Ephesians 2:21–22). Together we embody his kingdom counterculture, a radiant “city set on a hill” (Matthew 5:3–14). We are like the parts of a human body, vitally interconnected (1 Corinthians 12:12–13). I could go on and on.
No wonder, then, that the Apostles’ Creed teaches us to declare, as essential to Christian orthodoxy, “I believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.” If we are not pressing more deeply into this sacred reality together, then our Christianity is not just deficient; it is defective.
Sometimes I wonder about us. What keeps our generation of serious-minded, Reformed Christians from a more life-giving experience of community? Does our wonder stop at the familiar doctrines we keep returning to? Maybe it’s just me, but the relational vitality of real Christianity seems underdeveloped among us. Where are the Calvinists who are known for prizing and nurturing and guarding and enjoying and spreading the relational glories of our shared life in Christ?
Are lasting, deep, and honest friendships included in what we really, really care about? Good preaching, yes. But beautiful community? I don’t know a single Christian anywhere opposed to it. But then I wonder why we often seem to be busier with other concerns.
God Is More Glorified in Us
The central theme of Christian Hedonism is wonderfully stated with words many of us know and respect: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” So many of us embrace that vision, and we rejoice deeply in it.
“Christian Hedonism shines most brightly when it not only fills one heart but a whole room.”
But at a practical level, how does that bold conviction work best? We gain an insight when we focus on two words in there: us and we. Obviously, we wouldn’t be wrong to say, “God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him.” But there is wisdom in articulating Christian Hedonism in terms of us and we. Consistent with the whole of authentic Christianity, Christian Hedonism shines most brightly when it fills not just one heart but a whole room.
Yes, delight in the Lord can be seen in me or in you as individuals. But it is seen more captivatingly in us together. When Christ is visible not only in you, and not only in me, but also in the relational dynamics between you and me, then we are more prophetic. Then we might compel the attention of our generation.
Where Weakness Belongs
Personally, I can’t imagine trying to walk this earthly path to glory except shoulder to shoulder with other fainthearted, weak-kneed stumblers like me. Here’s why. Sooner or later, we all discover that our hearts can go insane with impulses opposite to the gospel we revere.
And it isn’t preaching and books and articles alone that get us back on track. We need those helps, for sure. But a big part of our own theology is pointing us, over and over, toward the life and walk we can share together. How wonderful! It is so great not to be alone in our weakness and failures. God has mercifully located us in among his people, where aspiring Christian Hedonists who are sometimes lousy at Christian Hedonism still belong. Christian Hedonism doesn’t exist to keep the weak out; it exists to draw more sinners in — and keep them in, and keep them growing, by keeping them encouraged.
Here then is how all of us can grow. We come together, thanks to our God-given, grace-sustained belonging. We take it on faith, and we come on in. Then, again thanks to God’s grace, we dare to face our weakness. We dare to walk together in courageous honesty. Abstract ideals cannot help us, no matter how admirable they might be. But consistent honesty about our actual shortcomings does help.
Who Hears Your Confessions?
How do we start moving into that kind of community? James 5:16 leaps off the biblical page as a realistic path forward: “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” That simple command raises a personal, practical question: To whom do I confess my sins?
Of course, if you and I are always fully glorifying God by being fully satisfied in him, then we don’t need James 5:16. But we do need it. We love Jesus, we delight in him, we long for him. He has won our hearts, way down deep. But sadly, we get complicated. Sometimes we get bored and “blah” with him, or restless to run from him, or proudly resentful toward him, and so forth. So much foolishness, so many contradictions, within! We are serious sinners. We are deeply flawed. We are pervasively weak. Aren’t we?
That is a big part of the reason Jesus put us in his church, where we’re all serious sinners, deeply flawed, pervasively weak. Let’s get real about it together, with concrete specifics, among the people we belong to in our own churches.
That We May Be Healed
I respect the realism of Martin Luther:
May a merciful God preserve me from a Christian Church in which everyone is a saint! I want to be and remain in the church and little flock of the fainthearted, the feeble and the ailing, who feel and recognize the wretchedness of their sins, who sigh and cry to God incessantly for comfort and help, who believe in the forgiveness of sins. (Luther’s Works, 22:55)
With Luther, we long for saintliness. But he understood that true saintliness gets traction in the fellowship of sinners who come out of hiding and start confessing. They live in James 5:16. It isn’t rocket science. It’s basically simple. We confess, we pray, and we start healing.
What chance does the holiness of Christian Hedonism have, then, if we hide our private failings while waving a public banner of theological correctness? Our own private willpower fails us. We need to get together, in our churches and small groups, and, with no coercion or shaming, come clean about how we aren’t living faithfully.Then we can bow together. We can pray for one another. And the promise of Scripture is that we will experience healing, renewal, and joy, all to the glory of God.
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Everything in God Is God: How to Think About His Attributes
Does theology serve doxology? It ought to. God means to be worshiped, but not in ignorance. He wants to be known and enjoyed and praised for who he is. Which is why he doesn’t just demand the worship of his creatures, but first reveals himself to us so that we might know him, and therefore delight in him. Theology, our study of God, serves doxology, our worship of God.
Jonathan Edwards, known for both his Reformed orthodoxy and his creative expression of it, helps us with a fresh way to approach God’s attributes, in service of our worship. From a few basic truths — God is simple, God is incomprehensible, God is happy, and God creates — we see more of what God is and, by his grace, are freed to marvel at him even more.
God Is Simple
Begin with the statement, “God is simple.” Understanding divine simplicity is not simple; it’s complicated. Think of it this way: created things are made up of parts; we can break them down into things more fundamental than they are. A person is composed of body and soul. We can distinguish what you are (your essence) from the fact that you are (your existence). We can distinguish things that are essential to what you are (like being a rational creature) from things that are non-essential or accidental (like having red hair). We can do the same sort of composition with all sorts of attributes and qualities.
Divine simplicity essentially says, “God is not like that.” That is, he is not composed of parts. You can’t break him down into things that are more fundamental than he is. There is nothing behind God that makes God what God is. He simply and absolutely is. Even his old-covenant name, revealed to Moses at the burning bush, testifies to this: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).
A popular theological way to express divine simplicity, both in Edwards’s day and our own, is “everything that is in God is God.” In other words, God doesn’t have attributes in the way that you and I have attributes. He’s not composed of attributes or qualities or excellencies or perfections. Whatever God has, God is.
God Is Incomprehensible
Now, this is difficult for us to comprehend. That’s why theologians also say that God is incomprehensible. Simplicity and incomprehensibility go hand in hand. Because God is simple (and we are not), we can’t comprehend him. That is, we can’t wrap our minds around him. Our knowledge of him is always creaturely — finite, limited, and partial.
“We can know God truly, though not fully.”
Of course, we can know him, because he reveals himself to us. And he reveals himself to us in ways appropriate to our creaturely limitations. To put it simply, God speaks human to humans, and humans always speak about God according to our way of conceiving. We can know God truly, though not fully.
God Is Happy
Not only is God simple and incomprehensible; God is also happy. In fact, he is infinitely, eternally, unchangeably, and independently glorious and happy. He is free from all need, want, and lack.
This happiness is an infinite happiness in himself. From all eternity, God has perfectly beheld and infinitely rejoiced in his own essence and perfections. He has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.
“From all eternity, God has known himself with perfect clarity and loved himself with perfect delight.”
Thus, God has always beheld a perfect, full image of his perfections. This image is so perfect and full that a second person stands forth in the Godhead. In other words, God’s knowledge of himself is so rich that by eternally thinking of himself, a second person is eternally begotten. This is the Son of God, the image of the invisible God and exact imprint of his nature (Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3), the eternal Word who is with God and is God (John 1:1), the eternal Son who is always at the Father’s side (John 1:18).
More than this, the eternal and mutual love between Father and Son is so rich and full that this love stands forth as a third person in the Godhead. In other words, God’s love for himself is so rich that by loving and delighting in himself, a third person eternally flows forth from the Father and the Son. This is the Holy Spirit, the breath of the living God (Psalm 33:6), the supreme joy and delight of God in God (Luke 10:21), the infinite river of his eternal delights (Psalm 36:8).
And each of these persons is truly and fully God. The whole divine essence truly and distinctly subsists in each, and yet there is only a single, simple divine essence. This too is incomprehensible: one glorious and happy God eternally subsisting in three distinct persons.
God Creates
Thus far, we have spoken of the simple, incomprehensible, and triune God as he is in himself. The triune God lives in himself, knows himself, and loves himself, and thus possesses unchangeable happiness in himself. But the living and triune God did not remain by himself. In his perfect freedom, he chose to communicate himself outside of himself by creating the world from nothing.
With creation in view, we can now speak of God in himself and his triune being (as we’ve done above), as well as God in relation to his creatures. This relation to his creatures generates a myriad of attributes, perfections, and excellencies, according to our human way of conceiving. Thus, God’s “absolute (or real) attributes,” as Edwards calls them, flower into God’s “relative attributes.”
In this way, we may now speak of God’s power, which is simply the fullness of divine being in relation to the things God does and can do. God’s wisdom is simply God’s own knowledge directed to finding appropriate means to accomplish God’s purposes. God’s love for his creatures is simply God’s love for himself as it is brought in relation to the creatures who reflect and image him.
Flowering of Divine Excellencies
This flowering of relative excellencies continues as God creates, sustains, and governs the world. God’s faithfulness is his love as it bears upon the promises that he makes. God’s righteousness is his knowledge and love as they rightly order and structure reality in fitting proportion, according to the proper value of every created thing. God’s mercy is his supreme love for himself as it encounters weak, pitiable, and broken sinners. God’s wrath is this same supreme and holy love as it collides with stubborn, stiff-necked, and idolatrous rebels.
Again and again, God’s absolute excellencies — his being, his knowledge, and his love — are brought into relation to all aspects of the world, its creatures, and its history, and thereby generate God’s relative excellencies, according to our way of conceiving.
Many of these relative excellencies identify the perfection of qualities that we know in and from creation. Thus, as creatures, we come to know goodness in the world and then follow this created goodness back to the God who is the Supreme Good. So with wisdom, majesty, mercy, grace, faithfulness, justice, power, and other positive relative excellencies. We see the creaturely echoes of these divine properties all around us, and we follow them back to their ultimate source, where they dwell in their fullness and eminence.
Negative Attributes
On the other hand, some of God’s relative excellencies are “negative attributes.” If “positive attributes” take creaturely goods and trace them back to their infinite divine origin, negative attributes take creaturely limitations and deny that God is limited in this way. Consider the negative terms that we ascribe to God: infinite, immutable, eternal, and the like.
Each of these speaks of God by denying to him some creaturely property. Divine infinity denies that God is limited and finite as creation is. Divine immutability denies that God changes the way that creation does. Divine eternality denies that God is bound by time. Divine ubiquity (or omnipresence) denies that God is limited by space. Even the two attributes that began this essay — simplicity and incomprehensibility — are negative attributes, the first denying that God is composed of parts, and the second denying that the infinite God can be contained by the finite mind of man.
God and No Other
God’s attributes aren’t merely qualities that he happens to have. They are essential to him. They are our descriptions of his being, his essence, his very nature, his God-ness. Because he simply is who he is. Everything in God is God.
God is light — pure, simple, white light. God is. God knows. God loves. More specifically, God is himself, God knows himself, and God loves himself. He is the triune God, absolutely full and happy in himself.
Then, this God, the living God, freely creates the world. And when he does, the pure, simple, white light of his being, knowledge, and love shines through the prism of his creation. The white light is refracted into all the colors of the rainbow, as God himself is brought into relation to every aspect of the world he has made. This refracting is what enables us to know him. The flowering of God’s relative excellencies in creation is so that clay pots can have some idea of what the Potter is like. Like Moses, we see the glory of God “from the back.” We grope and we strain and we labor to find words to describe our Lord, who is God and there is no other.
Infinity Clothed in Flesh
And then, wonder of wonders, this God — infinite, eternal, and unchangeable; simple, incomprehensible, and happy — does the unimaginable. The God who lacks every creaturely limitation freely chooses to clothe himself with such limitations, uniting his infinite and eternal being to finite and temporal human nature.
If the excellencies of the simple, incomprehensible, and happy God blow our minds, how much more when this God takes on flesh and dwells among us? And not only dwells among us, but loves among us, suffers among us, dies among us?
The heights of God’s absolute and relative attributes, and his positive and negative attributes, lead us to the depths of his love as the Son comes down from heaven for us and for our salvation. The glorious excellencies of his deity are united to the diverse excellencies of his humanity so that, in Christ, the full range of perfections, both human and divine, are united in one person, Jesus of Nazareth, who is worthy of all worship.
And so, our theology — careful, rigorous, and detailed — leads to doxology — full, overflowing, and abounding with joy.
