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When I don't desire GodHow to fight for joyWHEN I DON’T DESIRE GOD John Piper’s most famous book is Desiring God published in 1986, in which he argues passionately that man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him forever. But what do you do when you have little or no joy in God as a Christian? This book sets out to answer this question. It is about ‘how to fight for joy’. The author tells us that joy in the Lord is both the command of God and an impossibility for the sinful heart so it must be a gift of God’s grace. The fight for joy is actually a fight to see Christ’s glory which is the fountain of joy. The fight is necessary because the idols of this world have made us blind. There is a strong plea in this connection for the need for biblical preaching and grasping the truth of justification by faith alone. To confuse justification with sanctification is deadly to joy in the Lord. As ever with Piper’s books much is owed to the work of the great 18th-century US theologian and pastor, Jonathan Edwards. Piper then dwells on three helps to joy. The first two are the use of the Bible and of prayer, and here much excellent practical advice is given about daily routines in seeking God. The third is learning to ‘wield the world’ in the fight for joy — that is learning to see the glory of God through 21st-century everyday life. Here the author is heavily dependent on C.S. Lewis and Clyde Kilby. The book closes with a chapter on what to do when the darkness does not lift. Here some space is given to straying on to the ground of clinical depression and as ever with this difficult subject I am not sure whether he has said too much or too little. But the chapter is wider than that and is really an exposition of the idea of waiting patiently upon the Lord. This is a very worthwhile book and perhaps could do for this generation what Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s Spiritual Depression did for the 1950s-60s generation of Christians. Joy in God is indeed the key to so much in personal, family and church life. My only quibble is that I wish this book had been written much sooner following the publication of Desiring God. Though not necessarily the author’s fault, I think many people who struggle for joy actually felt condemned rather than helped by that book and I think nearly 20 years in waiting for the answer to the obvious question which that book provoked is rather too long a wait. John Benton© Evangelicals Now - June 2005 |