When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy

It has been a while since I read this book by John Piper. I first read it after my sister told me that she had cancer along with her chronic respiratory disease. And about a few months after finishing my failed treatment for liver disease. I traveled by bus to go see her and other family members. I some how heard about this book called When I don't Desire God: How to fight for Joy. So I wanted to read it on the trip. I knew my history of low times and depressed times. Most of all when I do not feel well. I had just recently heard that I was created for God's Glory and not for my own. So I really wanted to show His Glory when I felt sick and miserable. I mean, why not. Is it possible? Why does my Joy for God have to depend on how I physically feel. So I started to read this book. A few months later I listen to the audio and years later I bought the dvd
I would like to share this with you. May this challenge you the way it did my thinking.
Here is a little of the first chapter of the book But I encourage you to get the book an let the scriptures inside transform you into someone that shows joy to glorify God.

HOW CHRISTIAN LIVING BECAME IMPOSSIBLE
This discovery was devastating to me. It still is. I was made to know and
enjoy God. I was freed by the doctrine of Christian Hedonism to pursue
that knowledge and that joy with all my heart. And then, to my dismay,
I discovered that it is not an easy doctrine. Christian Hedonism is not a
lowering of the bar. Out of the blue, as it were, I realized that the bar had
been raised. Manageable, duty-defined, decision-oriented, willpower
Christianity now seemed easy, and real Christianity had become impossible.
The emotions—or affections, as former generations called them—
which I was now free to enjoy, proved to be beyond my reach. The
Christian life became impossible. That is, it became supernatural.
Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God
would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself
do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the
depraved heart desire God. Once when Jesus’ disciples wondered about
the salvation of a man who desired money more than God, he said to
them, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are
possible with God” (Mark 10:27). Pursuing what we want is possible.
It is easy. It is a pleasant kind of freedom. But the only freedom that lasts
is pursuing what we want when we want what we ought. And it is devastating
to discover we don’t, and we can’t.
THE MOST COMMON QUESTION I HAVE RECEIVED
This is why the most common and desperate question I have received
over the last three decades is: What can I do? How can I become the kind
of person the Bible is calling me to be? The question comes from an
aching in the heart that rises from the hope of great joy. People listen to
the biblical arguments for Christian Hedonism, or they read Desiring
God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist.3 Many are persuaded. They
see that the truth and beauty and worth of God shine best from the lives
of saints who are so satisfied in God they can suffer in the cause of love
without murmuring. But then they say, “That’s not who I am. I don’t
have that kind of liberating, love-producing, risk-taking satisfaction in
God. I desire comfort and security more than God.” Many say it with
tears and trembling.
Some are honest enough to say, “I don’t know if I have ever tasted
this kind of desire. Christianity was never presented to me like this. I
never knew that the desire for God and delight in God were crucial. I
was always told that feelings didn’t matter. Now I am finding evidence
all over the Bible that that the pursuit of joy in God, and the awakening
of all kinds of spiritual affections, are part of the essence of the newborn
Christian heart. This discovery excites me and frightens me. I want this.
But I fear I don’t have it. In fact, as far as I can see, it is outside my power
to obtain. How do you get a desire that you don’t have and you can’t
create? Or how do you turn the spark into a flame so that you can be
sure it is pure fire?”

IT WILL NOT BE AN EASY JOURNEY TOWARD JOY
I take this task seriously. Our journey in this book is not across easy
territory. There are dangers on all sides. Spiritual desires and delights
are not commodities to be bought and sold. They are not objects to be
handled. They are events in the soul. They are experiences of the heart.
They have connections and causes in a hundred directions. They are
interwoven with the body and the brain, but are not limited to the physical
or mental. God himself, without body or brain, experiences a full
array of spiritual affections—love, hate, joy, anger, zeal, etc. Yet our
affections are influenced by our bodies and brains. No one but God can
get to the bottom of these things. “For the inward mind and heart of a
man are deep!” (Ps. 64:6); and not just deep, but depraved: “The heart
is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand
it?” (Jer. 17:9).
So the answer to the question, “What should I do when I don’t
desire God?” is not simple. But it is crucial. The apostle Paul said, “If
anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Cor. 16:22).
Love is not a mere choice to move the body or the brain. Love is also an
experience of the heart. So the stakes are very high. Christ is to be cherished,
not just chosen. The alternative is to be cursed. Therefore life is
serious. And so is this book.

THE AIM IS NOT TO SOFTEN CUSHIONS,
BUT SUSTAIN SACRIFICE
The misunderstanding of this book that I want most to avoid is that I
am writing to make well-to-do Western Christians comfortable, as if the
joy I have in mind is psychological icing on the cake of already superficial
Christianity. Therefore let me say clearly here at the beginning that
the joy I write to awaken is the sustaining strength of mercy, missions,
and martyrdom.
Even as I write this sentence Christians are being hacked to death
outside Kano, Nigeria. Yesterday a twenty-six-year-old American businessman
was beheaded in Iraq by terrorists. Why him? He just happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This kind of death will
increase especially for Christians. In Sudan water is systematically withheld
from Christians as they die of thirst and malnutrition, while desperate
attempts to visit wells are met with murder, rape, or kidnapping.
Fresh reports come every month concerning the destruction of Christian
churches and the arrest of pastors in China. In the last decade over five
hundred Christian churches have been destroyed in Indonesia.
Missionaries are at risk all over the world.
When I address the question, “What should I do if I don’t desire
God?” I am addressing the question: “How can I obtain or recover a joy
in Christ that is so deep and so strong that it will free me from bondage
to Western comforts and security, and will impel me into sacrifices of
mercy and missions, and will sustain me in the face of martyrdom?”
Persecution is normal for Christians. “All who desire to live a godly life
in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). “Beloved, do not be
surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though
something strange were happening to you” (1 Pet. 4:12). “Through
many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).
In the New Testament this sobering truth does not diminish the
focus on joy—it increases it. “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that
suffering produces endurance” (Rom. 5:3). “Blessed are you when others
. . . persecute you. . . . Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great
in heaven” (Matt. 5:11-12). “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you
meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith
produces steadfastness” (Jas. 1:2-3). “They left the presence of the council,
rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the
name” (Acts 5:41).
The fight for joy in Christ is not a fight to soften the cushion of
Western comforts. It is a fight for strength to live a life of self-sacrificing
love. It is a fight to join Jesus on the Calvary road and stay there with
him, no matter what. How was he sustained on that road? Hebrews
12:2 answers, “For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the
cross.” The key to endurance in the cause of self-sacrificing love is not
heroic willpower, but deep, unshakable confidence that the joy we have
tasted in fellowship with Christ will not disappoint us in death. Sacrifices
in the path of love were sustained in the New Testament not by
willpower, but by joyful hope. “You had compassion on those in prison,
and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you
knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one”
(Heb. 10:34).
The aim of this book is not to salve the conscience of well-to-do
Western acquisition. The aim is to sustain love’s ability to endure sacrificial
losses of property and security and life, by the power of joy in the
path of love. The aim is that Jesus Christ be made known in all the world
as the all-powerful, all-wise, all-righteous, all-merciful, all-satisfying
Treasure of the universe.
This will happen when Christians don’t just say that Christ is valuable,
or sing that Christ is valuable, but truly experience in their hearts
the unsurpassed worth of Jesus with so much joy that they can say, “I
count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). Christ will be glorified in the world
when Christians are so satisfied in him that they let goods and kindred
go and lay down their lives for others in mercy, missions, and, if necessary,
martyrdom. He will be magnified most among the nations when,
at the moment Christians lose everything on earth, they say, “To live is
Christ, and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21).
“Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach
he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is
to come” (Heb. 13:13-14). This we will do for the joy that is set before
us. And this joy will hold us and keep us, if we have tasted it and fought
to make it the supreme experience of our lives. Christ is supremely glorious
and supremely valuable. Therefore he is worth the fight.