Fellowship focus 2 - March 1997
One piper piping (happily)
I'd like to say a few words about a book I read a while ago, so that you'll either feel like getting it and reading it yourself, or at least be able to think about one or two main ideas in it. This is because I believe that getting hold of what it says could be a major part in really seeing that God is love. The book is called Desiring God and was first published in Britain (by IVP) in 1989, having come out in the USA three years earlier. The author is John Piper, a pastor of a Baptist church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The main point of the book is something like this:
It is easy for Christians to think that if we are motivated in what we do by desire for our own happiness or pleasure, this is bad. So we think that duty and pleasure are two very different things. If we help someone just out of duty, that is good; but if we hope for some kind of reward or blessing as a result, it is not such a noble deed. If we really long for a certain thing to happen, or to do a certain thing, that probably indicates that it is not God's will. This is how we can sometimes think.
However, God is the blessed, the truly happy God, and he has created us with a natural (not a sinful) desire for happiness, and he wants us to be happy in knowing and loving and serving him, and enjoying the good things he gives us. He not only wants us to be happy, but he wants us to be motivated by a desire for happiness and thus be stimulated to be godly in every area of life - stimulated by the sheer pleasure of God's ways. Of course, we can seek happiness in the wrong things or in a selfish way that disregards God and other people - the sin in our human nature distorts our desire for happiness, points it in the wrong direction - but the desire itself is right.
Our desires for happiness are not too strong; if anything they are too weak, and they are often set on things that will give us very little happiness compared to the joy and satisfaction of knowing God, "my joy and my delight", who lets us feast in the abundance of his house and gives us drink from the river of his delights and in whose right hand are pleasures for evermore (see Psalms 43:4, 36:8, 16:11).
That is a very rough idea of the main thesis of the book. I would not go along with everything Piper says, especially the parts where he appears to be saying that desire for our own true happiness ought to be our only motivation; but I don't think there is much danger of Christians believing him on that one!
The foundation of it all is that God is truly happy (1 Timothy 1:11, 6:15), and that he is love, and so he wants us to be happy. And because he is the great God, he wants us to find him. So if we don't think that God wants us to enjoy prayer or obeying him or singing his praise with other Christians, why not? Don't we believe that God is happy, or is it that we don't believe he loves us?
Now why would a Christian ever think anything other than this? Unless the Holy Spirit has given us a big, deep drink from the river of God's delights, then it is possible to feel bad about wanting to be happy: if we are Christians we have seen something of how wrong and selfish many of our ways of seeking happiness are. Result? "Don't try to be happy. The more it hurts, the better it probably is. Things are suspect if we are enjoying ourselves too much." So duty and joy end up separated. Bring them together in a God centered way says Piper. I think he's right, and I hope you agree!
Chris Bennett.