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

Preferring anything above Christ is the very essence of sin. It must be fought.

Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.

Well, God does not mean for us to be passive. He means for us to fight the fight of faith—the fight for joy. And the central strategy is to preach the gospel to yourself. This is war. Satan is preaching for sure. If we remain passive, we surrender the field to him.

DOING is often God's remedy for despair.

God does not mean for us to be passive. He means for us to fight the fight of faith--the fight for joy. And the central strategy is to preach the gospel to yourself. This is war. Satan is preaching for sure. If we remain passive, we surrender the field to him. So Lloyd-Jones gets specific and gets tough: The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself... You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: "Hope thou in God"--instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way, and then you must go on to remind yourself of God, who God is, and... what God has done, and what God has pledged himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the help of my countenance and my God." [from Psalm 42:5] Of course, the "self" is not the only one who talks to us in our head. So does the devil, and so do other people as we replay their comments in our memories. Therefore, when Lloyd-Jones tells us to preach to ourselves, he knows we must be addressing all these joy-killing messages. That's why he talks about defying self, Satan and other people. When we preach the gospel to ourselves, we are addressing every word of every enemy of every kind.

Jesus calls for violence against our own lust because he loves our true and lasting joy.

God is glorified in his people by the way we experience him, not merely by the way we think about him. Indeed the devil thinks more true thoughts about God in one day than a saint does in a lifetime, and God is not honored by it. The problem with the devil is not his theology, but his desires. Our chief end is to glorify God, the great Object. We do so most fully when we treasure him, desire him, delight in him so supremely that we let goods and kindred go and display his love to the poor and the lost.

We can draw no deadlines for God. He hastens or He delays as he sees fit. And his timing is all-loving toward his children. On, that we might learn to be patient in the hour of darkness. I don't mean that we make peace with darkness. We fight for joy. But we fight as those who are saved by grace and held by Christ. We say...that our night will soon- in God's good timing- turn to day.

Absolute statements of our unbelief that we make in the darkness are notoriously unreliable.

conversion is the creation of new desires, not just new duties; new delights, not just new deeds; new treasures, not just new tasks.

God and God alone is the final, ultimate goal of our quest. All that God is for us in Jesus is the Object of our quest for joy. When I speak of fighting for joy, I mean joy in God, not joy without reference to God. When I speak of longing for happiness, I mean happiness in all that God is for us in Jesus, not happiness as physical or psychological experience apart from God.

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.

Don't make peace with the sin in your life.

Richard Foster is justified in writing: I am concerned that our reading and our writing is gravitating to the lowest common denominator so completely that the great themes of majesty and nobility and felicity are made to seem trite, puny, pedestrian. . . . I am concerned about the state of the soul in the midst of all the cheap sensory overload going on today. You see, without what Alfred North Whitehead called “an habitual vision of greatness,” our soul will shrivel up and lose the capacity for beauty and mystery and transcendence. . . .

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.

Desire for and delight in God's Word are inseparable.

The discipline to rise early is not as difficult as the discipline of going to bed. This did not used to be so. Before electricity and radio and television and the Internet, going to bed soon after dark was not so difficult. There was not much to do. Today the strongest allurements to stay up and be entertained are against us. Therefore, the battle against weariness, which makes us drowsy as soon as we open our Bible in the morning, has to be fought in the evening, not just in the morning.

Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is. . . . The struggle to submit . . . is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest. FLANNERY O’CONNOR The Habit of Being

Indeed the devil thinks more true thoughts about God in one day than a saint does in a lifetime, and God is not honored by it. The problem with the devil is not his theology, but his desires. Our chief end is to glorify God, the great Object. We do so most fully when we treasure him, desire him, delight in him so supremely that we let goods and kindred go and display his love to the poor and the lost.

In other words, when all the supports of human life and earthly happiness are taken away, God will be our delight, our joy. This experience is humanly impossible. No ordinary person can speak in truth like this. If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.

By nature, we get more pleasure from God's gifts then from Himself.

God uses means to awaken joy in himself,

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose . . . ! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood, you who outshine all light, yet are hidden deeper than any secret in our hearts, you who surpass all honor, though not in the eyes of men who see all honor in themselves. . . . O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.

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.

If we were perfect—if there were no remaining corruption in our hearts—there would be no fight. There would be no obstacles to overcome. We won’t fight for joy in heaven. But we are not there yet.

There would be no obstacles to overcome. We won’t fight for joy in heaven. But we are not there yet.

We desire the wrong things, and we desire right things in the wrong way. And both are deadly—like eating pleasant poison.

Word corresponds to hearing, and glory corresponds to seeing. Ultimately God has spoken in order to reveal his glory for the enjoyment of his people. Therefore we must hear what he says in order to see what he reveals. The Bible does not speak of hearing the glory of God, but seeing it. Hearing is the means. Seeing is the goal. The aim of all our hearing of God’s truth is the seeing of God’s glory.

God's work in us does not eliminate our work; it enables it. We work because he is the one at work in us. Therefore, the fight for joy is possible because God is fighting for us and through us.