So it has definitely been a while now since I have last posted which is due in part to many reasons. Probably the most honest of which would be that I have just not been spending as much time with the Lord, and it turns out that when you're not spending time with the Lord you don't have as much to say or discuss that is really worthwhile. This has been my predicament. Even now I'm still not spending enough time with the Lord but through these last few weeks or so of being in that predicament I have been mulling over a lesson that God has been teaching me...namely...that we must fight for joy and delight in Him, and in Him alone.
I have been reading Desiring God by John Piper (very slowly) and this is one of the main ideas that he is expressing and getting at. The book is about Christian Hedonism which is a term that he seems to have coined, which he formulated from people like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards...something about Johns and being awesome. Anyhow, the premise of it is that we as humans are lovers and we are filled with desire, as we were made to be, and we long to pour out our love and praise and worship onto something...the problem comes in that as C.S. Lewis has so famously expressed...."we are far too easily satisfied". It is not that we have too much desire but rather not enough, for we are quick to exchange the glory of the One True God for idols and to worship the created rather than the creator who is to be forever praised. Christian Hedonism plays off of this fact that we are filled with desire and that we long for that desire to be satisfied and that we long to be happy and fulfilled....the issue comes in how we are satisfied. We must...can be satisfied only in the Lord, anything else is compromise and settling for far less than what we are made for. The beauty of it is that God is not at odds with our desire for satisfaction and love and joy and happiness, in fact He is all about it...actually He commands it. He just simply commands that we rejoice in Him, that we love Him, that we enjoy Him, that we praise Him, and that we long for Him, anything else is sin and slight at His worth and beauty and honor.
The good news here is that God is a never ending always flowing fountain of delights, love, peace, joy, hope, and satisfaction. "In your presence oh, God, there is fullness of joy, and at your right hand oh, God, there are treasures evermore." He longs to satisfy us, and to be enjoyed by us. We were made for Him. Made to glorify Him, to worship Him, and He is not after our begrudging submission to that purpose and that calling. He wants us to see Him as true bread, true drink, and true life and to come to Him and to find rest for our souls, and to find joy and satisfaction for our hearts. We were made for God and every desire that we have ever had for anything has been a shadow of a desire for Christ that was meant to draw us to Him and to cause us to return to him and to find satisfaction in Him. Only He can satisfy us, only He was intended to, only He brings joy, only He brings fulfillment, and as John Piper says so often "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." God is honored and glorified in our desire for Him and in our coming to Him for satisfaction for every desire we have, and He will fulfill those desires, if we come.
So....all of that was said to preface this lesson I have been learning of "fighting for Joy" in God alone. My heart, and I have reason to believe your own as well, is so prone to find satisfaction for my desires in things that are not God. I mean, I will in a heart beat with out so much as a second thought or glance dive head long into idolatry...usually self-idolatry, which I would argue is all idolatry because typically the only reason we would idolize someone or something else is for what it can give us...what it can do for ME....because I can easily be all about me. And so out of a love for self I end up going to things other than God to find satisfaction for the desires that I'm not finding fulfillment in God for because I refuse to go to Him. The ironic thing is that self-love is really a lot more like self-hatred, at least when this is what it looks like. Because in my self-idolatry I allow myself to replace God and in doing so I leave myself discontent, frustrated, bound in sin, and dissatisfied because I am looking to myself or other things to fulfill the desires in me that God placed there to be filled by Him alone.
So when i say that we must fight for joy I am not referring to an arbitrary we must fight to be happy sort of idea, but rather I am saying that we must fight our flesh and crucify it walking the long, hard, narrow path that Jesus set for us, carrying our cross and enduring it for the sake of the joy set before us, just as Jesus did, and that joy set before us is Him, and in Him the fulfillment of everything we have ever longed for and at the end of that path we find that in His presence is fullness of joy. One of the beautiful things about the Gospel is what I have heard people refer to as the "now-ism" of the Gospel. Theologians describe that we live in the "Already, but not yet." period, meaning that we are already sons of God, but not fully, we know Jesus but not face to face, we have been freed from sin and are no longer obligated to it but we still feel it effects and its temptation, we have been made new, and we are being made new, and one day we will be new. Yet, the now-ism of the Gospel is that we still live in the already clause of the Gospel, and though we have the promise of fullness of joy in his presence if we endure to the end holding onto the confidence that we had when we first began, we also have the promise now that He will satisfy us if we come to Him....now. This is why Jesus stood in the middle of crowded streets and proclaimed "Whoever comes to me....will....find rest....streams of living water will flow from within Him....will find life....etc" so right here, right now, we have the promise that God will and wants to delight us and satisfy us and not just our physical desires but the desires of our heart and soul.
In Psalm 34, it says, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.", the word "give" there can actually be translated as "exchange" which gives it a very different twist that God will exchange your desires with you. We often look at this verse and cite as an example that if you just force yourself to delight in God then He will concede and hand you the thing that you are really longing after, and so God becomes merely a means to another end, but God is the end, there is not other. He is the first and the last, the beginning and the end. If God were to do this it would not bring Him glory, it would not put on display the worth of His character and His name, and God has said that He will not share His glory with another or allow His name to be defamed. However, if the word is exchange then it becomes that if we delight ourselves in the Lord then we will find that the very thing we desire is the object of our delight and so God will exchange with us, happily, our desires for other things that would be temptations and sources of idolatry by giving us a new heart to love and desire Him, and in so doing He alone is made much of, and then the other things that we once desired are freed up to be given to us as tokens of His love and as gifts that we can receive with thankfulness, rejoicing in the one who gave rather than the thing given.
We by sheer force of will cannot work up this delight in the Lord or just concentrate hard enough to cook up some joy in the Lord, and so we find ourselves as always dependent upon God who changes our heart, and so I have found that if I am lacking this desire for God, the last thing I should do is try harder, forcing myself to rest or long or delight or rejoice, but rather I should ask God who gives us the Holy Spirit and He is faithful to answer and to give me the kingdom and His Spirit which is His great delight to do. Love, faith, hope and joy are all gifts and God will give them to those who ask.
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