The first thing on my heart as I come is gratitude. I feel so deeply thankful to God for calling me into a work that would connect me with a ministry like this, and it’s the greatest work in the world. I was here at 5:00 and I was here five minutes ago, and I can hear the echoes of pain in the pastorate. Everybody is highlighting the valley and the mountain, the pros and cons, the pain and the joy, and it’s the greatest work in the world, all things included. I am thankful to be in the ministry. I’m thankful to be a Christian and owe it all to God. So that’s my first feeling as I come among an assembly of pastors who love the grace of God. I am moved to feel overwhelmingly grateful that I’ve tasted it and that I’ve been called to him and called to the work.

Then, I’m thankful to Iain Murray because, first of all, he was willing to graciously come to a little conference that we have in Minneapolis called The Bethlehem Conference for Pastors two years ago, and he ministered to the brothers there. And then he had the courage and the grace to invite me to come here. And I say this is awesome. I just love Iain Murray because I have so profited from his books. Nobody writes a biography like Iain Murray writes a biography, and it just lives. My great hero is Jonathan Edwards. You’ll hear it in every message if you know Edwards. I hope I do him justice. And there isn’t anything better to read on Edwards, Mark Noll notwithstanding. So I love his work and count it as something for which I’m very grateful that he invited me to come. So, thank you.

Then, thirdly, I feel very grateful every time I leave my church for my church, Bethlehem. Minneapolis is about three hours south of the southern tip of Lake Superior. Does that help any? I don’t know. It’s halfway between the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean. Does that help? We have wind chills of minus 60 Fahrenheit in the winter. It’s great for your character. It builds good Reformed theology — it should anyway. But my church — I’ve been there now for 17 years — has graced me with much freedom to leave and do this sort of thing, and they let me take a few extra days even with Noël to be here and see a few things.

When I preached yesterday morning, I told the whole congregation twice — we have two services on Sunday morning — “I’m leaving this afternoon at 6:45. I’ll be back Thursday a week, and here’s what’s happening while I’m gone. Would you please pray for me?” And it makes me grateful just to see on their faces not the begrudging, “Why do you always go away? You speak too much elsewhere,” but rather, “Go. Bless you. Bless you. We’ll be praying for you.” The elders that surround me — we have 19 godly elders at my church — make this a wonderful privilege as they vote and bless my wider ministry. So these things bubble up in my heart as I stand before you with gratitude.

The Great I Am

I want to begin by drawing your attention to the self-identification of God in Exodus 3:14–15. This will seem remote, perhaps, when we get going to the rest of what we’re going to say, but it’s not remote at all in my way of thinking, and I hope that you’ll see why as we move into it. You know the background. The Lord God has appeared to Moses and commanded him to go and release his people from bondage, and Moses is not at all persuaded that he’s the man for the job. He raises objections, and God responds in Exodus 3:12 by saying, “I will be with you.” Then, Moses says, “When I say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ they may say to me, ‘What is his name?’ What shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13). Then, God’s response is one of the most important revelations of the divine reality in all of the Bible, so I want to read it with you here:

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel . . .

Now, you know that this capitalized LORD here is Yahweh, which ties into the verb “I am.” He says:

Say to the people of Israel: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

So it’s God himself who takes that name, which is used hundreds and hundreds of times in the Old Testament — Yahweh. He himself links it explicitly for us with this self-identifying revelation. He says, “Tell them ‘I am who I am’ has sent you. That’s my name. I am who I am. You can shorten it to Yahweh.” That’s the connection God makes before Moses.

My heart burns. There was a reference this afternoon to the Emmaus Road account. My heart burns when I think of this self-identification, that when Moses asked, “Who are you?” God said, “Bottom line, I am.” You have to stop over a phrase like that and linger over the absoluteness of the being of God. I remember as a little boy, 12 years old, we had a spiral stairway to the roof of our house in Greenville, South Carolina. I remember walking up that spiral stairway late at night and lying on my back on the roof looking into the stars and trembling at endlessness. Then, I would think about hell and be so scared, and then I would think about heaven, and then I would go the other direction and say, “He never had a beginning.” Can you comprehend a never-beginning God who identifies himself as “I am?” He does not become. He will never go out of existence. He does not improve. He does not change. He does not develop. He says, “I am.”

When you come into existence, you come into existence to deal with a reality that is given to you. You don’t negotiate the reality. If you don’t like the reality, you change to conform to the reality or you resist it to your destruction. This absoluteness of the reality and the being of God staggers me, warms me, awes me that at the root the self-identification of God is “I am.” He is saying, “I am there. You will deal with me, or you will die.” It’s just an awesome thing that God simply is. If he is, if he never had a beginning, and everything therefore that is not God comes from God, God defines reality. You only know reality in its realness in reference to the One who defines reality. I mean, if you take it seriously and think consistently through the “I-am-ness” of God, everything changes.

God’s Being as the Anchor Through Our Troubles

Here’s another piece of gratitude I have for my church. We went through a crisis. I’ll share this with you just to let you know that big churches are very imperfect churches. I have a big church, a thousand people, and it is a broken church and a sick church, and it’s rife with carnal people just like every other church — that I know of anyway. We had an awful immorality here four years ago, and we lost 238 people because of the discipline that we exerted, and it was just one big, horrendous mess. We took a year to cry over that and tried to be reconciled to as many people as possible, and then instead of hiring a new person in that slot right away to get things fixed and on the road like you’re supposed to do if you’re a good successful church, we just said, “Look, we need to step back for a year or so and seek the Lord about who we are, why we’re here, and what’s our unique mission in downtown Minneapolis.” So we did this master planning thing.

At the end of it, we produced a document. It has a little short statement, and then some long statements. The short statement is a mission statement that is my life mission statement. The reason I said I feel gratitude is that at that time I would have been at the church 15 years. When you’ve been at a place long enough and you work with 25 people on a committee trying to craft a statement for who you are and where you’re going, what emerges is a statement that is both a pastor’s mission statement and a church’s mission statement. The statement of mission of our church is my life mission statement, so that I come to you with a totally free conscience to be me and to be the representative of my church.

Let me give you the statement. It goes like this:

We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

That’s our mission statement, and that’s why John Piper exists on planet Earth. If you come to terms with the absoluteness of God’s being, who says, “I am who I am. That’s my identity. Go tell them, ‘I am sent you’. You are dealing with absolute being” — if you grasp that, everything changes. So we talk about the supremacy of God in all things, and then we put this missions spin on it that says, “for the joy of all peoples,” because if you realize the implications of a God of grace who is supreme in all things, you cannot but be a joyful person.

Slipping from the Center

Now, try to move toward my theme here. Let’s get this whole thing. This is an introduction to the theme. This may sound so obvious to you, but it’s not obvious in America. If these things are so, ministry should have to do with God always, and in everything, and at every level. And preaching should be mainly about God whatever the text is. He wrote the book. Therefore, his fingerprints are on every text. His Spirit is behind it. His Spirit is on it. His glory is in front of it. Every text, whether it’s about children, or about divorce, or about sex, or about politics, is about God if you’ve come to terms with “I am who I am” and the fact that all reality is defined by this massive, divine being.

So ministry is about God and the supremacy of God in all things, and preaching is at the heart of ministry. I do believe it’s at the heart of ministry. It must be about God and the supremacy of God. So my prayer as I come is to leave a flavor, to leave a longing, and to leave a passion in you for the supremacy of God that will have this result, that when you die, your people will say, “He knew God. He loved God. He was devoted to God. Every week, he portrayed a great and beautiful, all-satisfying God for us. He was a God-man.” That’s what I’d like your people to say. Whether you die in a month or in 50 years from now, that’s my burden as I come.

Now, there are some subtleties to this in America, and I don’t know the British scene nearly as well, but I will venture a quote and assume that there’s a lot of similarity. I’ll read you a quote here from David Wells. I don’t know if you’re familiar with No Place for Truth, God in the Wasteland, and other things David has done. He’s coming to our conference next year. I love David Wells. He’s British and has been exported for I think 30 years now. I love his demeanor and I love his insight. Here’s what he said:

It is this God, majestic and holy in his being, who has disappeared from the modern evangelical world.

Now, I was reading in Christianity Today. It’s the premier, middle of the road Evangelical magazine in America, and I read there an interview with Lesslie Newbigin. Here’s what he said, and I was struck because it’s the same word. Since he’s British, I assumed that there’s something going on here, too. He said:

I suddenly saw that someone could use all the language of evangelical Christianity, and yet the center was fundamentally the self — my need of salvation — and God is auxiliary to that. I also saw that quite a lot of evangelical Christianity can easily slip and can become centered on me and my need for salvation, and not in the glory of God.

We’ve slipped. Massively, have we slipped.

Diagnosing the Real Problem

Let me use John Calvin here to illustrate the nature of the slip because it had happened in the Roman church in his day, and the way he saw it and exposed it sets my agenda. Then, I will approach it in a way that I don’t know Calvin would have approached it, but at least I think we’re aiming at the same thing. In 1538, you know the situation, he had first come to Geneva. They didn’t like what they got at first, though later they did. They put him out, and he was there in exile, I think in Strausberg, and Cardinal Sadolet wrote a letter to the elders and the councilmen in Geneva, trying to draw them back into the Roman church by showing the follies of the Reformation teaching, but he begins this critical letter of Reformed teaching with a long, positive, lavish description of the beauty and glory of eternal life.

It was a strategic move, he thought. Well, the councilmen, when they put their heads together to figure it out they thought, “Well, who should respond?” And they decided that the man they had exiled was the one who could do it best, and so they sent for Calvin and asked him to write the response. He did it in six days in August of 1539, and Luther read this. This was Calvin’s first major contribution in writing to the Reformation. Luther read it and said, “Here is a writing with hands and feet. I rejoice that God raises up such men.” But it’s the way Calvin handled Sadolet that relates to my point here. He did not primarily undertake in the first case to deal with justification by faith, nor the priestly abuses, nor transubstantiation, nor prayer to the saints, nor papal authority. Each of those will come in for its typical Calvinist critique.

What Calvin saw was in the first part where Sadolet thought everybody would agree, and he penetrated to a problem that exposes what I think Newbigin was penetrating toward and what Wells was trying to penetrate to more explicitly, and what I feel all around me in the evangelical church in America. Let me read you the key quote. And let me preface it by saying that as I understand John Calvin — even over against Martin Luther, but certainly over against the Roman church — the fundamental issue is not justification by faith; it is the centrality and supremacy of the majesty and holiness of God. Now, see if you agree with that from this kind of quote. He said to the cardinal:

Your zeal for heavenly life is a zeal which keeps a man entirely devoted to himself and does not even by one expression rouse him to sanctify the name of God.

Now, when you hear that, you say, “Wow, I have to reread Sadolet because it sure sounded good to me,” and you realize Calvin had some God-centered lenses given by the “I am” of the universe that enabled him to see what most evangelicals don’t see. So we give critiques this way and that way, and not many give the critique.

There are precious truths, in other words, in the Christian faith which can be enjoyed and can be spoken of while leaving everything amiss at the root. Here was his closing admonition to Sadolet:

Set before man as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God.

Now, that’s the stepping-off point for me. He says, “Set before man as prime motive . . .” Can I replace the word “zeal” with the word “passion?” It’s a pop word in America today. Even CEOs building great companies use the word “passion” in their AT&T mission statements, but it’s a good word. I like the word. It catches people today where “zeal” might sound a little bit antiquated. It’s a passion to illustrate, demonstrate, manifest, show off, and make known the glory of God.

More than Mere Form

I’ll tell you again my mission statement:

I exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

Now, boil this down to the local church and my theme for this conference on these three times that I am privileged to talk. I believe “passion for the supremacy of God” is a good definition of worship, and what I want to do tonight is analyze with you, biblically and psychologically, the dynamic of authentic worship and what it is as the goal of your preaching. We preach ultimately for worship. We don’t preach after worship. We preach in and toward worship. So the question urgently becomes, what is it at its heart?

I have another message that I have only given once at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, James Boice’s group. Years ago, they asked me to talk about worship, and I came to a conclusion analyzing the uses of worship in the New Testament. I’ll put this lecture in a 15-second nutshell.

The New Testament is radically indifferent to forms of worship. It’s incredible. If you try to build form out of New Testament texts explicitly, you are really hard put to do it. I’m going beyond 15 seconds. Here’s the reason for that: it’s a missionary book. The New Testament is a missionary book for the Sipi people of Uganda. That’s why it is radically stripping away the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices, the temple, and saying, “Christ is the temple. Christ is the priest. Christ is the sacrifice. Where Christ is exalted, loved, cherished, and praised, we have worship.”

You can be in the middle of a field. You can be in a thatch hut. You can have pipes, drums, or an organ. I’ve been to these countries and watched these people where the church has grown up in an indigenous way. Woe to me if I say to the Sipi people — who have 33 churches planted by indigenous missionaries because a pagan got converted, and went back up, and planted 33 churches in the last years with no outside help, whatsoever — that they need an organ.

I got to go visit them. They asked me to come. They said, “Would you come preach? We’ll get people. We’ll get the whole village together on a Tuesday afternoon. Would you come?” I said, “I’ll come.” I didn’t have any notes. I didn’t have anything. I had my sword, so I went. They had been there two hours already clapping, and I clapped for half an hour while they were singing, and my hands were raw. They were still clapping when I left an hour later. It is a book that is radically indifferent, I believe, to form.

The Heart of Worship

Now, all of that is to say that what I’m asking here tonight is not that issue. I’m not dealing with that issue. I’m done with that issue. My issue is, whatever form you’re using, whether it’s this book, or Hymns for the Family of God, or The Living Church, or an overhead, or whatever, it may or it may not be happening. You know that. Worship may or may not be happening, so what is it? At its essence, what is it? At its heart, what is it? That’s what we’re preaching toward. It’s not any form in particular, but what are we preaching toward in the heart?

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is (where?) far from me . . . (Matthew 15:8).

What’s that? That’s form without worship, and that form — what’s coming out of the lips there — could be anything. It could be quotes from Scripture. It could be worship songs, hymns, or whatever, and it can be empty of worship.

So the issue, the supremacy of God issue, is what it is in the heart. There, we can work together, so let me begin with that question and let you know my starting place. I’ll give you my answer first, but sometimes it works to have a mystery and preach towards that and give you the answer at the end. I’m going to give you the whole answer in a sentence here at the beginning, what I think the answer to that is, and then we’ll tackle the Scriptures to see if it is so like the Bereans. The essence and authentic heart of worship is being satisfied with God.

Here’s the reason for that: God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. That’s my thesis. That’s not an assumption. That’s now to be argued for for the next half hour or so. Okay? So if it sounds lopsided or unbiblical, let’s look at the Scriptures together to see if it is. My root conviction and the place where I get this is the radical God-centeredness of God.

The God-Centeredness of God

I grew up in an evangelist’s home, and I was taught from the time I was a boy, whatever you do, whether you eat or whether you drink, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31). But my dad and the church I grew up in never said to me, “God does all to the glory of God.” When I saw that in 1968, it put a megaton of power behind First Corinthians 10:31 because I saw then that the command to glorify God was a summons to join God in God’s glorification of God, and the person who opened it for me was none other than Jonathan Edwards. We’re working at my church right now on a copy of his book because right now you can’t get it, except in the big, fat two volumes of Edwards or the $75 Yale volume. So we’re going to edit that. It will be about 60 pages, single spaced on a typewriter.

I’m going to write an introduction for it, and I’m going to publish it myself if I have to to make that one document available to people because it so revolutionized my theology. Because what Edwards did in his Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World was pile argument upon argument, and then in the second half, after he had reason taken care of — Edwards always did things with reason — was to do things with Scripture. That’s the way he did it. In the second half, he gave hundreds and hundreds of passages of Scripture just piled on top of each other to show that God is God-centered, that God does everything for the glory of God. So let me take you in just a little teeny whirlwind tour of what I saw there.

Creation, Election, and Salvation

God creates for his glory. Isaiah 43:6–7 says:

Bring my sons from afar
     and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name,
     whom I created for my glory . . .

You were made for the glory of God. Or consider election. Jeremiah 13:11, in the call of Israel, says:

I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory . . .

He chose these people for himself that they might be his glory, his demonstration in the world. He saved them from Egypt for his name’s sake. Psalm 106:7–8 says:

Our fathers . . . rebelled at the Red Sea (note that, they don’t deserve to be rescued).
Yet he saved them for his name’s sake,
     that he might make known his mighty power.

Paul picks up on that in Romans 9, and makes it the centerpiece of his argument for the sovereignty of God in the election and salvation of sinners. He refrains his hand from anger over and over again. Why? Because they deserve it? No, it’s for his glory. Isaiah 48:9–11, I think, are probably the most relentlessly God-centered verses in the Bible if you could pick. It says:

For my name’s sake I defer my anger;
     for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you . . .
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
     for how should my name be profaned?
     My glory I will not give to another.

So you ask, “What is the source of mercy?” God’s love for his glory is the source of mercy.

The Incarnation and the Gospel

Why did he send Jesus Christ into the world? Romans 15:8–9 says:

Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

My mind goes back to yesterday’s sermon. God really met us yesterday. You have some Sundays where you wonder, “Were you down the street at the other church? Where was God? Nobody was listening. It seemed to be restless, and there was no quiet, no solemn movement.” Yesterday, I have never seen for years my people with tears, and with stillness, and on the edge with a silence. The text and the Spirit responsible for this. It was Hebrews 10:26–31, which says, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For you who go on sinning willfully, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sinning.” I mean, that’s a terrifying text. However you interpret it, it’s terrifying.

So they were solemn, but in the middle of it, to relieve some of the weight of the moment, I said something. I don’t tell jokes in the pulpit. I’ve never told a joke in 17 years. I don’t relieve stress that way. I said, “You know, while this is a weighty text, the gospel, the good news, is being made intelligible here because if you don’t get the wrath of God, you can’t get the gospel.” Then, I used this sentence. Now, it’s one of my favorite sentences. I used it in my book The Pleasures of God, so it sticks in my mind.

If you have a big church like this, people like to sneak in and out who are unbelievers, and they’re safe, and they can be anonymous. They sit in the back, and you know they’re always there. I said, “You who probably are in the church for the first time today, you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, and you who are hardened to what I’m saying here, let me sum up the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ in one sentence, and it goes like this: the love of God has made an escape from the wrath of God by sacrificing the Son of God to vindicate the righteousness of God in forgiving sinners who have trampled the glory of God.”

The reason I love that description of the gospel is because it shows how radically God-centered the gospel is, and it keeps the wrath of God where it has to be. In America, and I suppose it’s the same here, the gospel is scarcely intelligible today because it has been turned into a psychological massage to fix people’s conditions who don’t know anything about their real problem. The gospel has to do with realities out here being dealt with by God: sin, holiness, hell, Satan, condemnation. All have to be dealt with before my poor little dysfunctions ever enter the picture at Calvary, at the resurrection, and at the ascension. Massive objective realities are being established by God.

The Severity of God and the Second Coming

I have to tell you this illustration, too. I’m going to keep my eye on that clock. I’m going to keep my eye on you too because the text two weeks ago said, “Study people to stir them up to love and good works.” If I see you going, I’ll stop, but here’s an illustration. A man called me on Friday and said, “I have to talk to you. I want to come to Minneapolis. I have a couple hours. I’m going through the darkest time of my life.” I said, “Where do you live?” I won’t tell you the place. You wouldn’t recognize it anyway. He would’ve had to drive 12 hours. I said, “Why do you want to do that?” With tears, I could hear the breaking in his voice, he said, “I have sought out every counselor and person I know to ask here about my tragedy, and all of them begin with the assumption, ‘Oh, well, God didn’t have anything to do with that.’”

God doesn’t have a severe side in America. I mean, there may be little pockets of people who still believe in the wrath of God, but God is a warm, intimate, friendly counselor who fixes you. He never condemns and never shows a severe, tough side. I used that illustration yesterday morning, and I said, “If that’s your God, you cannot comprehend the gospel. You can’t even get to first base with the gospel.” All that is just to illustrate this point.

Why did he send Christ? He sent Christ to vindicate his glory. Romans 3:25–26 says:

God put [Christ] forward as a propitiation by his blood . . . This was to show God’s righteousness . . .

Until you love that above all things, you have a universe where God is attractive because he makes you the center of the universe. If God is only attractive because he makes you the center of the universe, you don’t love God for God. Now, I’m getting ahead of myself, but let me finish this little Jonathan Edwards survey.

Why is Christ coming again? This is the last point from Edwards. Second Thessalonians 1:9–10 says:

[Those who do not obey the gospel] will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.

He’s coming to be marveled at. That’s why he’s coming. He’s coming to be glorified. So, in other words, the second half of the book of Edwards and this survey of hundreds of texts that show the God-centeredness of God are why I believe we make God central in preaching, and it is a step toward my defense of the statement that the heart of worship is being satisfied in God because what we are seeing here is a God who is overflowingly satisfied with himself. He’s so satisfied with himself that the impulse is to let it overflow and draw other beings he creates into the enjoyment of it. You all believe in the Westminster Confession and Catechism. It says:

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

All I’m doing is changing that and — I don’t think it’s a change, though I’m not the historian that might prove it. I am interpreting the “and” as a “by”. That’s my thesis tonight. The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

An Objection to God’s God-Centeredness

Now, here’s the next step in the argument. When I develop this God-centeredness of God, wherever I go — and I say one thing wherever I go, so you won’t want to ask me back because I don’t have anything to say but what I say here — I find that it is met with incredulity among young people and older people alike. I see questions all over their faces. I can tell I’m speaking to a different kind of breed here because you’re not taking offense at this. God’s God-centeredness is so obviously biblical to the Reformed faith. It’s the essence of the Reformed faith, but most Americans don’t have a clue about the Reformed faith or the biblical faith.

So when I spoke these things to 2,000 students in Austin, Texas last January, I just looked out there on the most blank faces, and what they’re saying inside is, “It doesn’t sound like John 3:16.” This is a very serious objection because what those who are articulate enough mean is, “Now, wait a minute. You have just said that God does everything for his own glory, and loves his glory, and esteems his glory above all things. But 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, ‘Love seeks not its own.’ So God is not loving. If you’re right, God is not loving.” That’s what they’re feeling. This God-centered God does not feel loving.

Now, that’s a serious objection. You can’t blow that off. So as I have wrestled over the years with my own convictions and theologies growing out of Scripture and out of Edwards, every year I’m wrestling with new objections. Every year, I’m trying to think through the tentacles of this God-centered theology out into all the pieces of church life, emotional life, and psychological life.

Here’s the way I have thought that one through. If God loves me and you, which he does (God is love), then what would he give you if he loved you as much as an omnipotent, all-wise God could love you? You know what the answer to that question is? He would give you God for your enjoyment forever. When I thought that, C.S. Lewis sprang to my mind from something I’d read years ago in one of his books. Lewis had an immense impact on me from 1966 to 1969 as a college and seminary student. What he said provided a key to bring the God-centeredness of God and the love of God together in harmony rather than discontinuity. I’ll read you the quote from Reflections on the Psalms. In my edition it’s on page 93.

Now, let me preface it so you get it, because it may sound disconnected. Lewis really stumbled in his pre-conversion days, as he was coming to read the Bible before he was converted, over “the vanity of God”. That’s the way he described it in Surprised by Joy. He said that God seemed so vain to be always commanding people to praise him. It sounded to him like an old woman seeking compliments. That’s the way he struggled. He heard God saying, “Praise me, praise me, praise me.” That’s all he ever read in the Psalms: “Praise me, praise me, praise me.” Here was his solution to that:

The most obvious fact about praise strangely escaped me. I had never noticed that all enjoyment (that’s going to be a keyword, and it comes from the Westminster Catechism and the Bible) spontaneously overflows into praise. The world rings with praise: lovers praising their mistresses, readers praising their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game, praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians and scholars.

My general difficulty about praising God depended on my absurdly denying to us as regards the supremely valuable, what we delight to do, indeed, what we can’t help doing about everything we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment.

That was a fateful sentence in my theology. I’ll read it again, and if you’re sharp, I think you’re ahead of me here and you get where I’m going in this love thing already. Lewis says:

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers go on telling one another how beautiful they are. The delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

God Gives What Is Best

Now, let’s back up a minute. How does that help me help these students in Austin, Texas saying, “God’s God-centeredness and his ‘vanity’ to always want our praise for his glory is the most unloving description of God I’ve ever heard in my life?” How does Lewis help with that? It goes like this. If he loves us, he must give us what is best for us, and what is best for us is God. If he gives me all the money in the world, all the health in the world, the best relationships in the world, the best church in the world, and withholds himself, I am destitute. It’s God that I must have.

Whom have I in heaven but you?
     And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.

So, God, if he is a God of love, must give me God, if I will have him, for my enjoyment. But Lewis just taught us that enjoyment comes to its completion and its consummation in praise of what it enjoys. Therefore, God, knowing that, must seek my praise, must he not? If God were indifferent to whether I praised him, he would be indifferent to the consummation of my joy, and that would be unloving.

Now, the reason you can’t play off 1 Corinthians 13:5 against the God-centeredness of God is this: God is unique. He is not a man. If I were to go throughout the world saying, “My goal in life is to make my glory known, and if you really want to be happy, share my joy in me and praise me,” I would be wicked. But God, if he did anything else, would be wicked because he would be an idolator. He would be elevating something besides God above God. In other words, God is, I say it reverently, stuck with his glory. He’s God. He says, “I am who I am. I must be all-glorious. If I were to cease to be all-glorious and cease to commend myself as all glorious for your enjoyment and praise of glory, I would be a liar, I would be an idolator, and I would take away from you the one thing that can satisfy your longing, namely me.”

Only God can talk that way. You can’t talk that way. I can’t talk that way. We must not imitate God in that way. Adam and Eve tried to imitate God. Satan was so clever. He said, “You will be like God.” Do you know what they should have said to him when Satan said, “You will be like God”? They should have said, “We’re already like God in the way we’re supposed to be like God. You’re trying to get us to be like God in a way we’re not supposed to be like God, and anybody who puts themself at the center of the universe and commends other people to praise them are trying to be like God in a way that is blasphemous.”

So I say back to those students, not that the God-centeredness of God is contrary to love, but that it’s the foundation of love. If God did not preserve his glory and display it for my enjoyment and my praise, he would not love me. He’s sui generis, without any peer and in a class by himself. Now, that helps them go a long way over the hump of saying that the God-centeredness of God is the booster behind doing everything for the glory of God and God being glorified by my being most satisfied in him, but we haven’t quite completed the argument yet.

God Honored in Our Hunger for Him

An illustration from my wife’s relationship to me and mine to her completes it. I’ll be married now 28 years this December. I have five kids ranging from age 24 to one. Yes, I said one. I’m 51 years old. We adopted a beautiful little girl a year ago. So this December 21st, suppose I do this. I’ve got 28 long-stem red roses behind my back, and I come home, and I ring the doorbell, which I don’t ever do, and she opens the door, looks puzzled, and I pull the roses out and say, “Happy anniversary, Noël,” and she says, “Oh, Johnny, they’re beautiful. Why did you?” And I say, “It’s my duty.”

I prayed this afternoon that you’d laugh. That’s as close as I come to a joke. It’s no joke. You know why I prayed that? It’s because it means you get it. I could stop right now. You’ve got it. You know what I’m trying to say tonight. It’s built right into your heart. You come to worship on Sunday morning, and God says, “Why are you here?” If you say, “It’s our duty to be here,” he’s going to shut the door on you. Let’s run the video back. I ring the doorbell and say, “Happy anniversary, Noël.” She says, “Johnny, they’re beautiful. Why did you?” Now, what’s the right answer? The right answer is, “Noël, I don’t know what it is, but I really enjoy doing things to show how much you make me happy. In fact, I’ve arranged for a babysitter for Talitha. You go change clothes because I’ve got a plan for tonight. We’re going out because there’s nothing I’d rather do than be with you.” Never in a million years would she say, “Oh there’s nothing you’d rather do. All you ever think about is yourself. Why don’t you think about me sometimes?”

Now, why wouldn’t she say that? I’ve just spoken like a classic hedonist. I do call my philosophy in some circles Christian Hedonism, but I know it’s a stumbling block, and so I say it with trepidation. I have just said to my wife, “There’s nothing I’d rather do than be with you. What makes me happy is buying you roses. What makes me happy is spending the evening with you.” Why doesn’t she accuse me of selfishness at that point? The reason is that she is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in her. That’s just a little snapshot of worship on Sunday morning or anytime. If God says, “Why are you here?” You say, “I’m here because I’m desperate for you, God. I want you. I’m hungry for you. I can’t get satisfied anywhere else. I’ve tasted it all. I’ve tried it all, and there is only one fountain of life. There’s only one bread of heaven. Everything else is broken cisterns. I want you. Would you satisfy my heart this morning?”

Pastors, that’s the way you want your people to come to church. Don’t stand up and beat them up. I’ve heard pastors get up and say, “The problem with this church is that everybody comes here to get. If you just came here to give, then we’d have a life and we’d have ministry.” That’s a bad thing to say. Even if there’s an element of truth in it, it’s not the right diagnosis. The right diagnosis is that your people got up, and they watched something on television or read the newspaper and stuffed their stomachs with white bread, and they’re already full. Therefore, they feel no hunger when they come. You need to cultivate starvation in your people for God.

Implications of Worship as Satisfaction in God

Now, I’m getting ahead of myself here to tomorrow’s talk, but let me give you just a few brief closing implications of this. Maybe I should summarize where we’ve come. If you feel adrift and lost, it’s been a complicated process. I want to live for the supremacy of God. I want you to preach for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. I believe that God’s supremacy is most magnified and glorified when you as preacher and your people as listeners are most satisfied in him. Therefore, I believe that you should preach for that satisfaction. Spread a banquet every Sunday.

Can God spread a table in the wilderness? (Psalm 78:19).

The psalmist asks because it looks so impossible. He did it with manna and quail, and their shirts didn’t wear out on their backs. God can spread a table in your wilderness, but you are called to do that. Make it so delectable that they turn off the television, so delectable and satisfying that they turn away from the bubbles that this world offers. That’s a challenge folks.

Thomas Chalmers will be a hero tomorrow night. He has a sermon called The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. That’s my theology in a nutshell. I’m aiming at worship tonight. Tomorrow night, I’m going to be aiming at holiness of life.

So let me close with just a couple of applications practical to our situations, I hope.

1. The Duty of Delight

Number one: If I am right so far in what I’ve said, the pursuit of joy in God is not optional. Sometimes people say, “Well, which is more important, duty or delight?” I answer, how can you ask that question when the Bible says it is your duty to delight? Psalm 37:4 says:

Delight yourself in the Lord . . .

It’s a command, just like, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Delight yourself in the Lord. It’s a command. It’s a bad question. You can confuse your theology by asking categorically wrong questions. They put up categories that you can’t answer. They’re confused. That’s a bad question. There are millions of Christians all around the world who have embraced more of Immanuel Kant than the Psalms and the Apostle Paul, and they have been taught to the degree that you receive or even pursue your benefit in a moral act, you destroy its virtue. That’s wicked. Immanuel Kant taught a profoundly destructive error. It has destroyed worship in many places. You don’t have to teach your people this. It’s built-in if they’ve grown up in many churches that if they pursue their delight in this high and noble act, it ruins the virtue of the act because virtue rises as duty rises, and duty rises as delight diminishes. That’s in the air, and it’s wicked because it destroys worship and it dishonors God.

If the heart of worship, as I’m maintaining tonight, is being satisfied with God because he’s most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him, then to have the mindset that the pursuit of that satisfaction and that glory is defective, you can’t worship. There’s a built-in contradiction in your life. I’ll tell you, for 20 years I have watched people come alive when I’ve told them this, and they’ve said, “Really? Really? You’re not tricking me with some language prestidigitation? What you’re saying is that I can actually want to be happy?” And I say, “Just read your Bible again through these lenses.” When I left Jonathan Edwards behind and opened the Psalms, I said, “Here’s another book that I used to read.” The Bible says:

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

Rejoice in the Lord (Philippians 4:4).

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

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
     so pants my soul for you, O God (Psalm 42:1).

Whom have I in heaven but you? (Psalm 73:25).

Oh, that we would have the heart of David. That’s the first implication. Our duty is to delight in God, and we should teach our people to pursue it with all their might.

2. A Holy Fixation on God

The second implication is that this view of worship keeps worship radically God-centered. That may sound like a paradox to you since I’m pursuing my joy. It sounds like I’m pretty much at the center. Wrong. You have already made the center of your life what you take most joy in. Everybody makes a center somewhere, and it’s what they delight in, not themselves. When you are delighting in adultery, you’re not at the center. You’ve made sex the center of your life or lust the center of your life. When you look at pornography on the internet, you’re not at the center. You’re making something the center. When you love God, delight in God, and pursue your joy in God, God becomes the center, and this built into the corporate life of a church will function to make a radically God-centered event on Sunday morning and elsewhere in the week.

Teach your people that not money, nor prestige, nor leisure, nor family, nor job, nor health, nor sports, nor toys, nor friends satisfy, but God satisfies. And then they come on Sunday morning going hard after God. That’s one of the phrases we use. We say, “We’re going hard after God this morning. Give me God.” And then every sermon, every song, every prayer, every moment of silence, every element of a liturgy is either a vehicle by which God draws near to impart himself or by which hearts draw near to enjoy him. Back and forth it moves, but you have taught them, “Here is the fountain. Come to the fountain.” Isaiah 55:1–2 says:

Come, everyone who thirsts,
     come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
     come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
     without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
     and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
     and delight yourselves in rich food.

Who said that? God said that. I admit it’s the RSV. I got hooked on it when I was a junior in college, and I still memorize the RSV with all of its defects. It’s closer to the truth than the NIV. That’s another issue. Leave that aside. Did you hear God invite your people to worship in that passage? He is saying, “Oh, thirsty people, come. Are you thirsty? Come to drink.” So it keeps worship God-centered. It is so glorious to see a God-centered worship. I have seen people use another kind of language, a kind that highlights giving to God — that kind of language — rather than receiving joy, blessing, and the gift of his own self through the Holy Spirit to us for our enjoyment. I’ve seen effects of it in churches that are supposed to be God-centered, and they aren’t.

If you say that we must give constantly — or always communicate that we should give to God — not only do you become God’s benefactor, which is heresy, but the quality of your giving starts to rise as of paramount importance. Was the instrument played fittingly? Was the sermon worthy of the Lord? Did the soloist sing in the right way? Little by little, though you’re using the language of giving something worthy to the Lord, the focus is shifting off of our desperate need of the all-satisfying God onto whether we have measured up to what he should get from us. Oh, that’s so subtle. It is so subtle, and I personally have made some choices in my life about the kind of emphasis I’m going to have in my ministry. I know that every emphasis has its risks, and I risk cultivating up people who are hungry for God and come to eat and drink God.

3. Worship: An End in Itself

Here’s a third implication. I’ll try to wrap this up quickly here. The third implication of saying that the essence of worship is satisfaction in God is that it protects the primacy of worship as an end in itself. In America, Sunday mornings have become the biggest time of recruitment and sales, meaning that the event is calculated to grow the church. Now, I believe churches should grow, but worship is terminating on God or it isn’t worship, and the protection of that truth is in saying that the essence of worship is satisfaction in God, and the reason is this. You cannot say to your wife, “I delight in you so that you’ll fix me a good supper tonight.” That sentence has a built-in corruption. You’re saying with the first half of the sentence, “You are the place where my delight terminates,” and with the second half of the sentence, you’re saying, “Become a means to what I really enjoy, food.”

You can’t say to your son, “I love playing ball with you so that you’ll wash the car tomorrow.” He hears immediately, “You don’t enjoy playing ball with me. You enjoy getting the car washed.” And that’s what’s becoming of worship in many places. The protection of it is, do you come here and do you gather in a small or a large group with a terminating affection on God so that when you see God in his glory, his holiness, his wrath, his mercy, his wisdom, his justice, his goodness, and his truth? That’s the end of your quest.

That’s as close to heaven as you’ll ever get, and he moves in on you and satisfies the deepest recesses of your aching heart, and you don’t think, “How’s this going to play into church growth?” or, “How is this going to play for building morale?” or, “How is this going to save families from divorce?” or, “How is this going to get kids off drugs?” or all those good things. We use Sunday mornings subtly to make all those good things happen. Now, just so you don’t misunderstand, where worship happens, good things happen that are not that. But if you make those the goal of engaging with God, God will feel like your wife when you say, “I really love you so that you’ll fix me supper.” Or something like, “We really love coming here to engage with you so that we can recruit a lot of people for the outreach event on the weekend.”

4. All of Life as Worship

Here’s the last point, and this is a transition to tomorrow night. I’ll be very brief. The implication of saying that the heart of worship is being satisfied in God is that not just the Sunday morning event of formal public worship, but all of life can be seen as worship. Paul said:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship . . . (Romans 12:1).

Why is it that bodily life is worship in the mind of the Apostle Paul? My answer is — and I’ll stop with this and unfold it tomorrow night — all horizontal behavior, not just vertical communion, is also driven out of and toward satisfaction in God. All acts done among each other in this conference should be done with a view of savoring, increasing, and displaying our satisfaction in God. How that works itself out and relates to preaching will take up tomorrow night.