One of the clearest and most central truths in the Bible is that God is infinitely glorious, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely majestic. And it follows from that that his supreme goal in all that he has done, is doing, and will do in creation and in redemptive history is to uphold, display, and magnify that glory. That has the ripple effect for you, according to 1 Corinthians 10:31, that you are to do everything you do whether you eat or drink to the glory of God, which means you are to so speak, so eat, so drink, so live, so preach, so counsel, so marry, so bury, and so play racquetball or ultimate frisbee that God looks glorious in your life, that he looks beautiful in your life, that he looks satisfying in your life. That’s your reason for ministry and your reason for being.

Here’s my life thesis. I have one shot at Dallas, so I will give you my whole package in 25 minutes. My thesis is that if God is infinitely glorious, and if God does everything that he does from creation to redemption and consummation to uphold and display and magnify that glory, and therefore calls you to join him in that great enterprise of God-centeredness, then this is true: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. This means that you should make it your lifelong vocation to maximize your satisfaction in God above all things. That is your job above all things — to maximize your joy in God. Now, since this is Dallas Theological Seminary, take your Greek New Testaments, please, and turn to Philippians 1.

Christ Magnified by Life or Death

I have high expectations. I don’t do this at every seminary. In Philippians 1, I want to just argue very briefly exegetically for that thesis from two verses, maybe we’ll read three. We’ll start with Philippians 1:19–20. I’ll read it very literally. You can follow along there:

I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always (here’s the key phrase) Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.

Now let’s collapse that down, paraphrase it, and get it clear. This is Paul’s high expectation and grand hope for his life, this is why he lives. This is the message I preached in January 1980 when I candidated at Bethlehem Baptist Church to say, “This is what I’m about,” and I hope it’s what you are about. “I want,” Paul says, “More than anything that Christ will be shown to be great.” Surely, that’s the meaning of this word here megalynthēsetai. He is saying, “I want Christ to be mega in my life. I want him to be shown to be magnificent, glorious, beautiful, and all-satisfying in my life and in my death through my body.”

Now, how does that happen? How does it happen so that you live and die in a way that makes Christ look great, which is the only reason we exist? The reason is given in Philippians 1:21 with this great explanatory clause here, this gar clause. The most important words in the Bible are oun and gar. He says, “For to me to live . . .” Correlate the word live there with the word life in Philippians 1:20. He said, “I want Christ to be seen as magnificent in my life,” and now he says, “For to me to live is Christ.” And then he says, “and to die” — correlate the word die with the word death in Philippians 1:21 — “is gain.”

Now, let’s just work for a moment with the die pair. He is saying, “I want Christ to be seen as magnificent in my body when I die.” How does that happen?

For to me . . . to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).

Now, you finish the message. You build the theology on that. What is that saying? Christ will be seen as glorious, magnificent, and all-satisfying to the degree that when you lose all your family, all your health, all your job, all your future on earth, you say, “Gain.”

The Greater Gain of Having Christ

Now, why will that show Christ to be gain? Philippians 1:23 says:

My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

He’s going to go and be with Christ, and that will be pallō mallon kreisson. When he dies, he says he’s going to go to be with Christ, which is infinitely better than everything he loses here. Correlate these two great realities. The goal for Christ to be magnified in your body is accomplished in the heart state of dying that says, “Christ is all. Christ is better to me than my wife. Christ is better to me than my grandchildren. Christ is better to me than more books. Christ is better to me than ministry. Christ is better to me than that longed-for retirement. Christ is better to me than preaching in chapels. Christ is better to me than sex. Christ is better to me than money. Christ is better to me than motorcycles or whatever else.” I just visited his office and saw a motorcycle simulator in there. Whatever it is, if you can lose it at the moment of your last breath and feel gain, you glorify him.

You get the gain, he gets the glory. Does that feel like a contradiction? Everywhere I go, people say that’s a contradiction — that to pursue your gain is unbiblical. I just read it again in a notable American theologian whose name, if I said it, everybody in this room would know. He said, “The fundamental motive of Christian obedience is always the heart of gratitude and never the hope of gain.” That’s wrong, and it’s ruining the church. It hangs in the air of America like a gas, that to pursue your own joy contaminates virtue and ruins worship, and I’m here to say the exact opposite is the case. To the degree that you undertake to deny this pursuit of gain in Christ, you will ruin worship, destroy your church, and contaminate virtue. Now, to defend that in the next 15 minutes, I have eight points. Let’s see how many we can do.

God Glorified in Our Joy

What I want to do, first of all, is let Jonathan Edwards have a say here. Jonathan Edwards, bless you. It’s wrong, however, to say that he is most influential dead teacher in my life. He is the most influential extra-biblical dead teacher. Let’s get that straight here. It would be Paul, because Jesus isn’t dead. The apostle Paul is the most influential dead teacher in my life, and Edwards is a very distant second, but here’s what he said. If it helps any to have another authority besides this Johnny-come-lately, here it is.

God glorifies himself towards the creatures two ways: (1) by appearing to them, being manifested to their understandings; (2) in communicating himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying the manifestations which he makes of himself.

God is glorified not only by his glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it; his glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that he might communicate, and the creature receive, his glory, but that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of God’s glory (get this now because there are many who get only half the truth here to the great hurt of their churches) doesn’t glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it.

In other words, you give God half the glory he is due when you only understand and preach him accurately. The other half comes from the exuberance of your soul’s delight in his glory, and therefore preaching is expository exultation. You exult over a text. That’s what preaching is. And if your heart is not pursuing delight in God, you won’t consider that pursuit a contamination of preaching. You will be a half-preacher and produce a half-people, and they will be sick. There are so many sick churches who are preached to by half-preachers because they have been lured into this crazy, Kantian, stoic ethic that says the pursuit of your own joy contaminates and ruins virtue and worship, and it is thoroughly unbiblical.

You insult text after text to believe that ethic. It blew me away in 1968 when I first saw it, and I’ve been trying to understand it ever since, so here are my eight points. We’ll get as many as we can in.

1. The Necessary Pursuit of Joy

First, this truth that you are to pursue your joy to the end that God would be glorified in your being satisfied in him is taught by the fact that we are commanded to pursue our joy.

Delight yourself in the Lord (Psalm 37:4).

Serve the Lord with gladness (Psalm 100:2).

This is not an option; this is a command. Tell me if you should not obey commands. You should pursue the obedience of commands, and if one of the commands says, “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4), to say you shouldn’t pursue that joy is wicked.

2. Threats Against Joyless Christianity

Second, the Bible threatens us if we will not be happy in God. Listen to this. Deuteronomy 28:47–48 says:

Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart . . . therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you . . .

Do you consider joy an option, icing on the cake of Christianity, a caboose at the end of the train? Wrong. If you do not serve the Lord your God with gladness, you will serve your enemies. He threatens terrible things, Jeremy Taylor said, if we will not be happy in him.

3. The Nature of Faith

Third, consider the nature of faith. What is faith? We’ll take two texts. Hebrews 11:6 says:

Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe (1) that he exists and (2) that he rewards those who seek him.

I can’t believe it says that. And people deny that that’s the nature of faith. Faith is coming to God for reward, period. You cannot please God if you don’t come to him for a reward, and he is the reward. I could defend that from the book of Hebrews because the new covenant coming to fulfillment in this book describes God saying, “I will walk among you. I will be your God, and you will be my people.” The essence of this reward is God with us, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore (Psalm 16:11).

Let me bring in the other text. In John 6:35, Jesus says:

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

What is believing in that verse? It is a coming to Jesus so as to be satisfied with him — or better in the full picture of John’s theology — so as to be satisfied with all that God the Father is for us in Jesus. So my third argument is the nature of faith commands that we pursue our joy in God as a means of honoring God.

4. The Nature of Evil

Fourth, consider the nature of evil. What is evil? I wonder what would happen if we had different definitions of evil offered in this congregation. If the first definition that comes to your mind is acting contrary to the authority of God, you’re one kind of Christian; and if you answer with Jeremiah, you’re another kind of Christian. Jeremiah 2:12–13 says:

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
     be shocked, be utterly desolate,
     declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
     the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
     broken cisterns that can hold no water.

He is saying, “Be shocked, universe, I offer the world a fountain, and even their theologians rise up and say it’s wrong to pursue drinking in this fountain. Even their ethicists say it’s wrong to be motivated by the desire to glut yourself on this fountain.” Be absolutely shocked Dallas, that anybody would ever teach that or believe that or act on that. God is saying, “I hold out a fountain of living water. I do not mean for you to deny your desire to be happy in that water and turn away to anything else. I mean for you to come and fall on your face and drink from me, and drink and drink and spend eternity drinking so that when you look up every now and then, you will say, ‘Ah,’ and that’s worship.”

Worship is not bringing buckets of your labor into the service on Sunday morning and dumping them into the fountain, as so many pastors tell you that you should. They say, “The reason we don’t have life in the service is that you don’t come here to give, that’s the problem. You just come here to get.” Wrong. That is not the problem. The problem is they’ve gotten up and watched television and stuffed their face with the white bread of secularism so that they’re not hungry for God when they come, and you have to spend the first half of the sermon with an emetic. It’s called conviction, and you’re trying to get them to vomit out the world so that they’re hungry for God, because when they’re hungry for God and they drink in God and they taste God and they’re satisfied with God, I tell you he is mightily glorified.

5. The Nature of Discipleship

Fifth, the nature of discipleship. Let’s just take Matthew 13:44. It says:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up . . . (I’ll leave out a phrase) and he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

What phrase did I leave out? It says from joy he goes and sells everything that he has. I tell you it was seeing little Greek phrases like apo autou tēs charas years ago at Fuller Seminary that just blew my mind away. I was reading ethicists and I was saying, “No, if it’s Jesus versus ethicists, I’ll take Jesus any day.”

So here’s a call to discipleship: leave everything for the sake of the kingdom. What’s your motive? The motive is apo autou tēs charas. The motive is, “I want joy. God, you’ve made me to long for joy. Thank you for not telling me that I have to deny that in order to get to you, but rather you are presenting the kingdom and king Jesus to me so that from joy in him I can count everything as rubbish.” That’s the way Paul paraphrased it in Philippians 3:8 — “for the surpassing value of knowing Jesus, my Lord.” Since I’ve brought up self-denial, let that be the sixth argument.

6. Self-Denial and the Pursuit of Joy

Sixth, what about self-denial? You might be sitting there saying, “Whoa, this is really weird. This sounds like hedonism.” It’s pure Christian Hedonism. It is pure, unadulterated Christian Hedonism, no apologies. I define hedonism as a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. That’s all I’m about in God. So what about self-denial? Mark 8:35 says:

For whoever would save his life will lose it . . .

Someone might say, “Piper, you are commending suicide.” Read the rest of the verse. I always say, read the rest of the verse. Ninety-nine percent of the objections that are brought up against good theology should be answered by, “Read the rest of the verse,” or the chapter. And the rest of the verse says:

But whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it (Mark 8:35).

Now, what’s he appealing to? He is saying, “You don’t want to lose your life, do you?” And we say, “No.” And Jesus says. “Well, lose it then.” What does that mean? The way Jesus said this in John 12:25 makes it a little clearer what he means:

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

So what is Jesus arguing in these two texts, John 12:25 and Mark 8:35? What’s he arguing? He’s arguing, “You want your life. You want it forever. You want maximum joy.” Listen, I don’t want 80 years of joy, and then hell. No, thank you. I don’t want 99 percent pleasure in this world and then hell. I want 100 percent proof pleasure for 10,000 ages of ages, and anything else you offer me, I’m saying, “No, thank you.” That’s all my hedonism means because Jesus is appealing to that. Hate your life, students. Go to the hard places. Lay down your life for your congregations so that you will keep it forever.

7. Joy for the Sake of Love

Seventh, where does love fit in? Someone might say, “It sounds like you’re telling us to be so pursuant of our own pleasure that you can’t possibly commend people to be loving people and talk to them like that because it says in 1 Corinthians 13:5, ‘Love seeks not its own.’” Well, there’s no time to exegete that text, but I think it means that love seeks not its own immediate gratification, its own material pleasure, or its own earthly enhancement — but love seeks its own eternal joy big time. And I have a couple of texts that’ll prove it.

Let’s go to Acts 20:35. I checked it out in Greek again this morning just to see how this participle in the English version works. Paul is saying farewell to the Ephesian elders and he says:

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Now, mark this. When I was doing my doctoral dissertation in Munich on Love Your Enemies and working month after month on the motivation of love, I fell out of love with scholarship in Munich, Germany, and fell in love with the Bible. That’s strange. My dad was worried. He thought, “Oh, my son going from Fuller to Munich, he’s going to lose his faith.” God is so good because I could have, a lot of people do. God is so good. God did this. God opened the Word to simply say, “If it says in the Word, ‘It’s more blessed to give than to receive,’ don’t you let any New Testament scholar, or any big, highfalutin ethicist with lots of degrees after his name, tell you that to do something for the blessedness there is in it contaminates the love and turns it into selfishness and not love.”

Here’s the key word in this verse; it’s the word remembering. Paul said, “When you serve the weak, toiling with your own hands, remember the words of the Lord, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” Now, the ethicists have to say, “Forget what he said, because the blessedness will contaminate the love as a motive if you remember it.” I tell you, do your exegesis carefully here because if Paul says to keep the blessedness in your mind as you go to the hospital wishing you were home playing with your kids, and you’re on your way to the hospital of a late night, and you’re tired and you need rest, and they haven’t had you for a few nights, and you’re wondering what should motivate you here, and you try to deny your desire for joy, you will contaminate virtue.

But if you say, “Jesus has said it, and Paul said, ‘Remember it.’ I will remember it. Jesus said, there’s more blessedness in this.” You will walk in that room and you take that dear lady by the hand who’s just had cardiac arrest, you look into her eyes and she opens her eyes and says, “Oh, pastor, you didn’t have to. You’re so busy.” This is what all old ladies say. They’re so deferential. Young people don’t say that. Young people say, “It’s about time.”

But she says, “Oh, pastor, you’re so busy you didn’t have to do this.” Now, if I replied, “I know I didn’t have to and I didn’t want to, but it’s my duty and I’m here,” she’d be hurt. But if I say, “I know, and it’s late, but you know what? As I was driving here, I was praying and the Lord reminded me of the blessing I’m going to get here, and as I look into your eyes, there’s no place I’d rather be than here giving you a word of encouragement and receiving back echoes of appreciation and love and faith from you.” When you tell her, “I’m here because I delight to be here,” she feels honored. Love is not contaminated by the pursuit of joy in love and ultimately in the God of love.

I will end with this final word. The goal of all things is to glorify God. That is, to show him to be magnificent in your life whether by death or by life, and the way to do that is to be maximally satisfied in him and to pursue that satisfaction in everything you do.