What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.

Audio Transcript

On Wednesday we were in Holland. Today we are in Brazil. We are blessed with many friends in Brazil, and today’s email comes from one of them, a man named Cauã. Cauã lives in Rio de Janeiro. “Hello, Pastor John! I have been debating the following question in my head for a while. Does God command our praise because it glorifies him, or does he command our praise because he wants us to be happy? Does he command our worship for himself, or for our good? Or for both? Can you help me understand, please?”

Well, I will do my best, because this is what I’ve been trying to do for more or less fifty years. I think the answer to this question is just about the best news in all the world. At least in my own experience, to see the relationship between God’s command for praise and my experience of happiness was one of the most important discoveries that I ever made in my life. So I hope I can bring some clarity to it.

Glory at the Center

I don’t think there was any biblical text that my parents spoke to me or wrote to me after I left home more frequently than 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” That command, that duty, was imprinted on my soul from as early as I can remember, and I am so thankful that it was. It was a wonderful thing. Whether you’re young, whether you’re old, to have a short, pithy summary of the purpose of human existence — what a gift! To know why you exist, to know why you are on this planet, indeed, to know why there is anything at all in existence — what a gift! What a privilege!

“God is committed to glorifying God.”

And it became obvious over time that this wasn’t simply my duty — to glorify God in everything I do — but this was God’s design for his own action. All of it. He does everything — he does everything he does — to the glory of God.

He predestines to the glory of God (Ephesians 1:5–6).
He creates to the glory of God (Isaiah 43:6–7; Psalm 19:1).
He guides history to the glory of God (Romans 11:33–36).
He sends Jesus to live and die for the glory of God (John 12:27–28; Philippians 2:9–11).
He sanctifies his church to the glory of God (Philippians 1:9–11).
Jesus is coming back to be marveled at and glorified among his people (2 Thessalonians 1:10).

Everywhere in the Bible, God is glorifying God. He does what he does to make God himself look as beautiful and glorious and great and wise and just and good and loving and gracious as he really is. So the duty that I grew up with expanded into a full-blown view of the universe. I think that’s really there in 1 Corinthians 10:31, because text after text pointed to the ultimate purpose of all things; namely, God is committed to glorifying God.

All to His Praise

And I remember seeing (this was in, I think, 1976 or so) for the first time those three verses in Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14 — all three of them saying, “unto the praise of his glory,” “unto the praise of his glory,” “unto the praise of his glory,” as if Paul were to say, “Hey, did you get it the third time, if not the second, if not the first time?” God does everything — and he saves especially — unto the praise of his glory.

So there’s absolutely no question how to answer the first part of Cauã’s question. Does God command our praise because it glorifies him? Yes. You are chosen, destined, adopted, redeemed unto the praise of the glory of God’s grace (Ephesians 1:6). God plans for our praise, creates for our praise, rules the world for our praise, saves us through the death of Jesus for his praise. And that praise is, specifically, praise ultimately for the glory of God’s grace.

“You are chosen, destined, adopted, redeemed unto the praise of the glory of God’s grace.”

Now that vision of God’s God-centeredness in creation and redemption, salvation, all of history, — that God-centeredness of God himself — left me for a long time perplexed about the place of my happiness in this overarching divine purpose. My perplexity was compounded when I heard preachers — for example, during a call to missions — say things like, “Seek God’s will, not your own. Seek to please God, not yourself.” And I knew there were texts in the Bible that said things like that. But it left me wondering, “Well, will it always be the case that when I’m acting in obedience, I’m acting against my will and against my pleasure?” That seemed hopeless to me — as if you were to grow in your obedience and be condemned to unhappiness the rest of your days, or even for eternity.

Completion of Joy

Then came the great discovery. It came from several sides, but the most shocking and compelling statement of the discovery was in C.S. Lewis’s book Reflections on the Psalms. He not only nailed my confusion, my perplexity, but in doing so, he gave the answer to it. So I want you to hear what I heard. So I’m going to read the whole section, a couple of paragraphs. And remember that what he’s dealing with here is that parts of the Bible, especially the Psalms, sounded to him, when God commanded his own praise, like an old woman seeking compliments, and that really bothered him. So here’s what he wrote. And this was life-changing for me.

The most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. . . .

The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. . . .

I think he’s laughing.

I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value.

Here’s the nub of the matter:

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (109–11, emphasis added)

Glory and Gladness Bound

Do you see where that led me? Every time God commanded me to praise him for his glory, he was commanding me to bring my pleasure in him to its fullest delight. That’s what he was commanding. My pleasure in God is not complete unless it overflows in praise. And my praise of
God is not glorifying to God unless it is the overflow of pleasure in God. God is not an egomaniac when he commands me to praise him. He’s acting in love, because my praising him is the apex of my pleasure in him. What a discovery!

So, the answer to the question is this: We should not, we dare not, choose between praising God as an expression of the glory of God and praising God as an overflow of our pleasure in God. We dare not choose between those or separate those. And after fifty years of pondering this, I don’t know any better way to say it than God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. If we try to choose between glorifying God and being glad in God, we will fail at both. The great discovery is that God has bound them together in his children forever.

The soul is measured by its flights,Some low and others high,The heart is known by its delights,And pleasures never lie.

I was 25 years old when John Piper’s book The Pleasures of God was first released in 1991. My wife and I had been attending Bethlehem Baptist for two years and had read John’s book Desiring God, which unpacked what he called Christian Hedonism. His fresh emphasis on the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him was working its way into our spiritual bones.

But as I read the introduction to The Pleasures of God, the one-sentence poem above crystalized the truth of Christian Hedonism for me, opening my mind to the role delight plays in the Christian life.

One Sentence Begets Another

John wrote that life-changing sentence as a kind of exposition of another life-changing sentence he had read four years earlier. In fact, the whole sermon series that birthed the book was born of his meditation on that sentence written in the seventeenth century by a young Professor of Divinity in Scotland named Henry Scougal.

Scougal had actually penned the sentence in a personal letter of spiritual counsel to a friend, but it was so profound that others copied and passed it around. Eventually Scougal gave permission for it to be published in 1677 as The Life of God in the Soul of Man. A year later, Scougal died of tuberculosis before he had reached his twenty-eighth birthday.

John Piper describes what gripped him so powerfully:

One sentence riveted my attention. It took hold of my thought life in early 1987 and became the center of my meditation for about three months. What Scougal said in this sentence was the key that opened for me the treasure house of the pleasures of God. He said, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.” (18)

John realized that this statement is as true of God as it was of man. The worth and excellency of God’s soul is measured by the object of its love. This object must, then, be God himself, since nothing of greater value exists than God.

John previously devoted a whole chapter in Desiring God to God’s happiness in himself — the God-centeredness of God. Scougal’s sentence, however, opened glorious new dimensions of this truth for John as he contemplated how the excellency of God’s soul is measured. And John’s sentence opened glorious new dimensions for me as I began to contemplate that a heart, whether human or divine, is known by its delights.

Pleasures Never Lie

It was the last line of John’s poem that hit me hardest:

The heart is known by its delights,And pleasures never lie.

Pleasures never lie. This phrase cut through a lot of my confusion and self-deceit to the very heart of the matter: what really matters to my heart.

“Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie.”

“Pleasures never lie” doesn’t mean things we find pleasurable are never deceitful. We all know, from personal experience as well as the testimony of Scripture, that many worldly pleasures lie to us (Hebrews 11:25). Rather, it means that pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart. Pleasure is our heart’s way of telling us what we treasure (Matthew 6:21).

When we take pleasure in something evil, we don’t have a pleasure problem; we have a treasure problem. Our heart’s pleasure gauge is working just like it’s supposed to. What’s wrong is what our heart loves. Our lips can lie about what we love, but our pleasures never lie. And we can’t keep our pleasure-giving treasures hidden, whether good or evil, at least not for long. What we truly love always ends up working its way out of the unseen heart into the plain view of what we say and don’t say, and what we do and don’t do.

My heart, like God’s heart, is known by its delights. I found this wonderfully clarifying. It resonated deeply; all my experience bore out its truth. And I saw it woven throughout the Bible. The more I contemplated it, however, the more devastating this truth became.

Devastated by Delight

It’s devastating because if the worth and excellency of my soul is measured by the heights of its flights of delights in God, I find myself “naked and exposed” before God, without embellishment or disguise (Hebrews 4:13). No professed theology, however robust and historically orthodox, no amount of giftedness I possess, no “reputation of being alive” (Revelation 3:1) can compensate if I have a deficit of delight in God. And to make sure I understand what is and isn’t allowed on the affectional scale, John says,

You don’t judge the glory of a soul by what it wills to do with lukewarm interest, or with mere teeth-gritting determination. To know a soul’s proportions you need to know its passions. The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil. (18)

As I place my passions on God’s soul-scale, my deficits become clear. I’m a mixed bag when it comes to my passion for God. I can savor God like Psalm 63 and yet still sin against him like Psalm 51. I have treasured God like Psalm 73:25–26, and questioned him like Psalm 73:2–3. Sometimes I sweetly sing Psalm 23:1–3, and sometimes I bitterly cry Psalm 10:1. At times I keenly feel the wretchedness of Romans 7:24, and at times the wonder of Romans 8:1. I have known the light of Psalm 119:105 and the darkness of Psalm 88:1–3. I’ve known the fervency of Romans 12:11 and the lukewarmness of Revelation 3:15. Many times I need Jesus’s exhortation in Matthew 26:41.

“We must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth.”

It is devastating to stand before God with only what we passionately want revealing the state of our hearts, measuring the worth of our souls. But it is a merciful devastation we desperately need. For we must know our spiritual poverty before we will earnestly seek true spiritual wealth. We must see our miserable idolatries before we will repent and forsake them. We must feel our spiritual deadness before we will cry out, “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6)

That’s all true. However, the longer I contemplated John’s sentence over time, the more I realized the devastating exposure of my spiritual poverty is meant to be a door into an eternal world of delight-filled love.

Pleasures Forevermore

I made this discovery in the story of the rich young man (Mark 10:17–22). When Jesus helped this man see his heart’s true passions (when he exposed his spiritual poverty), the exposure wasn’t Jesus’s primary purpose. Jesus wanted the man to have “treasure in heaven,” to give this man eternal joy (Mark 10:21).

And Jesus knew the man would never joyfully sell everything he had to obtain the treasure that is God unless he saw God as his supreme treasure (Matthew 13:44). So he tried to show him by calling the man to the devastating door of exposure and knocking on it. And he grieved when the man wouldn’t open it, because the door led to a far greater treasure than the one he would leave behind.

God created pleasure because he is a happy God and wants his joy to be in us and our joy to be full (John 15:11). When he designed pleasure as the measure of our treasure, his ultimate purpose was that we would experience maximal joy in the Treasure. And that the Treasure would receive maximal glory from the joy we experience in him. It is a marvelous, merciful, absolutely genius design: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

If God has to expose our poverty to pursue our eternal joy, he will. But what he really wants for us is to experience “fullness of joy” in his presence and “pleasures forevermore” at his right hand (Psalm 16:11). And so it is a great mercy, even if at times devastating, that our pleasures never lie.