I want to begin tonight in our third session on Christian Hedonism by reading a verse from Matthew 13:44. It was one of the verses that sparked my thinking on these things early on and became a centerpiece in my whole understanding of motivation. It says:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

So you have treasure when you find the kingdom, you know you have found infinitely valuable treasure so that when you sell everything else to have it, you can do it with joy. That’s the link here. He went and he sold everything he had. He sold his house, he sold his car, and he sold his extra clothes. I presume he sold all of the peripherals of life and he didn’t do it begrudgingly; he did it with joy because he had found the treasure that would satisfy him forever.

Vertical and Horizontal Christian Hedonism

Let me try to orient tonight’s emphasis in relation to last time. I distinguished between vertical hedonism and horizontal hedonism. We’ve been talking mainly about vertical hedonism. Now let me summarize what that is and then bend it out into horizontal hedonism tonight. Vertical hedonism is the conviction that everybody longs to be happy, that happiness is found only in God in its fullest and longest lasting dimension, and that, therefore, you shouldn’t try to restrain that desire for happiness, but you should glut it on God and that God in fact is honored when you do that. I just found this week a quote from Spurgeon in his commentary on Psalm 20:5. He said:

If joy were more general among the Lord’s people, God would be more glorified among men. The happiness of the subjects is the honor of the sovereign.

In other words, God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. Or to use the question of the Westminster Catechism, what is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever. I got a letter a few weeks ago from a man doing some research and he wanted to argue that’s exactly what they meant by end. Well, I don’t know for sure if that’s what they meant, but that’s biblical truth to say it that way. God is glorified by your enjoyment of him. And we use different illustrations, and I may use one before we’re done tonight. When you take delight in somebody, like a wife, that person is honored by you and if you only do things with them and for them out of a sense of Stoic duty, they are not as honored. They don’t feel like you treasure them as much, and so it is with God, vertically.

So vertical hedonism argues that we put God at the center of life and glorify him best when we don’t try to restrain our desire for happiness, but give leash and rein to it and feast it on God himself, he’s like a fountain of living everlasting water and the way to glorify a fountain is to get on on your face and to put it in the water and to drink it in and to stand up and say, “Oh, that’s good. I love that. That satisfies my thirst.” The fountain is very, very honored when you do that. That’s vertical hedonism.

Now, tonight I want to bend this vertical hedonism outward into horizontal hedonism and ask this question, is it true that you should pursue your happiness horizontally just like I’ve been commending that you pursue it vertically? I might win your approval by saying, “Yes, when you go to God, you should go to get joy in God from God, which glorifies God.” I might win that and yet have you questioning inside, “But horizontally when you help a person change a tire, or when you go to be a missionary, or if you become a pastor, or if you witness to a friend at work, or if you go visit somebody in the hospital, should you be pursuing your pleasure in that? Is that genuine love when you pursue your satisfaction and your pleasure in the manifold ways of love? Or should we use the old tried-and-true ethical phrase, benevolent disinterestedness?”

That’s an old phrase that theologians used to use, disinterestedness. I wish I had time just to talk about that phrase. I don’t like it. However, I know that some people used it like Jonathan Edwards who did not mean what it sounds like it means. I don’t like it because it sounds like in order for something to be truly benevolent and loving, you must have no interest in it. You must be disinterested. I don’t even know how to put it in a positive light because I feel so negative about it. But somehow, it’s not doing anything so that you get any benefit or joy or satisfaction in it, but only do it because it’s right and because others might benefit from it.

The Pursuit of Pleasure in Good Deeds

Here’s my thesis tonight. I’ve stated it before, but I want to work on it tonight: The pursuit of pleasure is an essential motive for every good deed. And when I say pursuit of pleasure, I do mean the kind of pleasure we’ve been talking about up till now, namely pleasure in God. The pursuit of more pleasure in God through good deeds is an essential motive for those good deeds. If you don’t have that, in other words, they cease to be good.

I believe they become, to use Paul’s phrase, works of the law, legalism. Or to put it negatively. If you abandon the pursuit of full and lasting pleasure, you cannot love people or please God. That’s my thesis now and I want to work on it with you from texts. So if you have a Bible or if you want to reach for one under the pew there, we’re going to look for some evidence of this thesis in Scripture and I direct your attention first of all to 2 Corinthians 8.

What’s happening here in 2 Corinthians 8–9 is that Paul is writing to the church in Corinth to stir them up to be generous in their giving and to motivate them to be liberal with a collection that he is taking for the saints down in Jerusalem. And he has just done that up in Macedonia and he uses the Macedonians as an example to the Corinthians for how to give. So now here’s a model of love. When I read this with you, ask yourself, “What is love?” and, “What are the motives that move a person to be generous with their money in acts of love for other people?” Second Corinthians 8:1–2 says:

We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.

Now I’m going to drop down to 2 Corinthians 8:8 just to show you that he’s talking about love here. He says:

I say this not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others (the Macedonians) that your love also is genuine.

So what he just described in verses 1 and 2, he now defines as love in verse 8.

The Nature of Love

So what is love? It has several parts. Let’s just look at them. Love begins with the grace of God poured out in your life. You can never truly love another person until God’s grace is shed abroad in your heart until you are loved, in other words, by God and his love and his grace are filling you. The next step in the text is that joy overflowed in the midst of affliction and poverty. Now notice the joy that they had that began overflowing for others did not come because their outward circumstances had changed. They were still poor. I don’t believe in prosperity theology. I don’t believe God holds out to Christians that they will get rich. In fact, I think he warns us to beware of the desire to get rich, and he tells us what to do with money if we start to get rich, namely get rid of it fast, become a channel. God may keep pouring it in. You may have a stunningly successful business. There’s no sin in that. Hoarding it is sinful.

Well, these people didn’t have a stunningly successful business. They stayed poor at least for a season. In their extreme poverty, their abundance of joy overflowed. Now here’s the third step, it was in a wealth of liberality to others. So you got God’s grace flowing in, joy rising up and liberality overflowing to meet the needs of the poor saints that Paul is collecting this money for down in Jerusalem.

Now notice something else in 2 Corinthians 8:4. It says they begged Paul earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints. Now when you beg somebody for something, think about it. If my child were to say, “Oh, let me go again on the roller coaster, daddy, please let me go one more time on the roller coaster,” he is not acting out of a sense of duty when he talks like that. He’s not stating a moral conviction: “I really should ride on the roller coaster. It’s God’s will that I ride on the roller coaster. You are a preacher and you believe in the will of God, and I’m your son and all these reasons would persuade you to give me money and I will get on the roller coaster.” That’s not the atmosphere, nor is that the atmosphere here.

They begged Paul earnestly for the favor. They said, “Take another offering, please take another offering.” This is really strange. These are weird people. They are people who have been so unbelievably graced, who are so staggered by the grace of God, who are so willing to let goods and kindred go and live on God in their poverty that they say, “Please let us give a little more.” Isn’t that wild? I just think this is amazing.

The Definition of Love

Now, what’s your definition of love on the basis of those several verses? I would put it like this: Love is the overflow of joy in God which meets the needs of others. Do you think that’s a fair inference from those verses? Grace is coming down (2 Corinthians 8:1), joy is rising up, liberality is overflowing, there is a heart that begs to be more liberal, and then in 2 Corinthians 8:8 he says, “I want to test to see if your love is genuine just like their love was genuine.”

Genuine love operates from impulses like that. It’s not duty-laden, it’s not works-oriented. Genuine, heartfelt love says, “Can I do a little more? Can I do a little more?” God has done so much. So the vertical hedonism of joy in God overflows, and love by definition is the overflow of joy in God extending or expanding to draw others into it. Another way to say it would be this: Love is the grace-driven impulse to enlarge our joy in God by bringing others into the enjoyment of it. Do you get that? Love is the grace-driven impulse to enlarge our joy in God (there’s the hedonism of it) by drawing others into it or by reaching others with it. That’s my definition of love.

More Than an Action

Now I want to raise a question that I raised and dealt with a little bit last time, namely this whole issue of feelings. Remember I referred to Joseph Fletcher and his argument that love couldn’t be a feeling because love is commanded and feelings can’t be commanded, and therefore, love can’t be a feeling. I rejected that argument on biblical grounds, namely that feelings are commanded in the Bible. Many of them and I listed off a dozen or so in the last talk. What you can see is that love the way I’ve defined it has a strong emotional component, a strong heart component. Mere acts don’t get called love in my vocabulary. And I’ll try to show you from Paul that they don’t get called love in his either.

For example, why did Paul say in 1 Corinthians 13:3, “If I give away all that I have (that sounds like what they were doing in Macedonia) and if I deliver my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing.” So you can give away all that you have and you can give your body to be burned and be a loveless person. That’s scary. Love is not mere action. Even the most radical sacrifice of laying your life down may not be love. Why not? Because love has a God component (grace flowing in) and it has a heart component (overflowing in liberality) — “Please let me do more.” Love has to do with what’s going on in the heart with God and delight and satisfaction in him as well as what’s going on out here when you give away all your goods to feed the poor and give your body to be burned.

To Be a God-Besotted People

There’s a God-centeredness to all of this that I want to kind of stick a parenthesis in here to emphasize. My burden in these talks — in fact, my burden in all of life and ministry — is to put God back at the center, and I have a feeling that in evangelicalism across America, perhaps around the world, our intellectual force is not as strong as it could be, and our purity of life is not as strong as it could be, and our power in mission is not what it should be, and our authenticity and intensity in worship isn’t what it should be because God isn’t where he should be in our lives. I think in evangelicalism in general — and this is just a broad generalization with no fingers pointed at any particular ministry — it seems to me that we are a fairly man-centered, technique-oriented group of people. We’re not ravished with God, bent on delighting in him above all else.

It seems to me that we are not as centered on him in our preaching as we should be. It tends to be very relational, I think, in many, many churches. Our counseling tends to be self-esteem-oriented rather than God-esteem-oriented. Our Sunday school curricula tends to be moralistic, like you take the story of the boy with the fishes and what’s the point you get? Share your lunch. That’s not the point of the story folks. The point of the story is that Jesus Christ takes little and by miraculous, sovereign power multiplies it for the smallest, most insignificant person to do wonders. But we’re not God-centered enough to see that or to say that for our kids.

Our mission strategies tend to maximize anthropology and all kinds of techniques. Our social agenda with justice and equality doesn’t seem to be as Godward to me as it should be. Our church growth efforts seem to ignore the supernatural and the miracle of conversion and talk about all kinds of sociological dimensions. Our gospel tends to be decisionistic and man-centered rather than emphasizing the glory and power of God in producing converts. We are not by and large a God-besotted people.

My aim in these talks may not seem as clear to you as it does to me — I hope it will before we’re done — is to put God back at the center. So when I define love as the overflow of joy in God, I have tried to put God at the center of the definition of love. Do you see that? So many people try to define horizontal love, the experience of love, without ever putting God in the equation. So he just vanishes in all our good deeds. And when he vanishes, they cease to be good. Acts that are not Godward, rooted in God, resting in God, defined and guided by God for God’s glory are not good. They’re not ultimately valuable. So I hope you can see one of my agendas in this whole enterprise of Christian is to put God back at the center of all of our motivation.

God Loves a Cheerful Giver

Now I want to move to another text to try to undergird what we have seen. I’m arguing that an essential motive for every good deed is the quest of your own pleasure. And I hope you can already see that in the definition of love. You want more of God, it’s floating and you want to let it out, let it expand, draw others into it and enjoy him more. Now, stay right here in 2 Corinthians with me and drop down to 2 Corinthians 9:7.

Paul is still arguing and motivating about money. If you ever thought, “Oh, we shouldn’t talk about money so much or whatever,” the Bible talks about money. I don’t think we do talk about money a lot at Bethlehem. We probably should talk about it a lot more if we were to be balanced in a biblical way. These two chapters are all about money. They’re as God-centered as you could ask money talk to be, but they are all an effort to motivate the Corinthians to give generously. It says:

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver (2 Corinthians 9:7).

Now, I take that to mean that God is not pleased when people act benevolently, but don’t do it gladly. God is not pleased when people act benevolently, when they do nice things for other people, without gladness in it. Now this comes right to the heart of my thesis. This means if you are indifferent to whether you experience gladness in and through and because of an act of justice or kindness or love, you are indifferent to what pleases God, and that is sin. To be indifferent to what pleases God is sin and what pleases God is your gladness in giving. To say, “It isn’t important what I feel when I give, it’s only important that I give” is simply to say that you are indifferent to sin.

When you see something like that, it just blows you away. It blows me away. To come into the church on Sunday knowing there’ll be an offering and to say to yourself, because you’ve been taught by Immanuel Kant or picked it up from the atmosphere of the air or wherever, “It doesn’t really matter here what I’m feeling in the service, what matters to honor God is that I do the will of God and the will of God is that I tithe, and therefore, I put my check in and God will be pleased with me.” Well, that just totally ignores the Bible. That’s philosophy. That’s what Paul meant when you talk about vain philosophy. It’s bad philosophy. There is good philosophy, but it’s not biblical. What happens is as you see the offering coming and I bow up here and I ask God to come and make this an act of worship. I’m always meaning the same thing.

You should be saying if you don’t feel any desire to give, “Oh God, I am so sorry. Forgive me for my lack of heart engagement with what I’m about to do.” The next thing you should do after repentance is plead for a kindling of your heart. Ask, “Lord, come, give me a heart like you did the Macedonians. You poured out your grace upon them. I know you’ve been gracious to me. Open my eyes to it. Help me to see and feel how wonderful you’ve been to me in my life and how many good things have come my way and what a great hope I have in heaven. Release me from this disinclination to give right now and help me to want to as well as to be able to.” That’s their second prayer. And then when you act and you do it, whether the feeling comes or not, you bow and you thank the Lord that he gave you the grace to do at least as much as you could do. But to settle for glad-less giving is to settle for what displeases God.

Laying Ourselves in the Way of Allurement

I found today a copy of something that I had forgotten that I received in the mail years ago from a friend of mine named Don Westblade who teaches at Hillsdale College. Don used to work at the Beinecke Library in Yale on the Jonathan Edwards manuscripts. There are probably 1,200 sermons of Edwards that have never been printed. They’re all in this little tiny scrawl in the basement of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. They are slowly chipping away at these, getting them transcribed and edited and Yale plans to publish three volumes of these sermons. One of them is a sermon on Song of Solomon 5:1, which closes with these words:

Eat, O friends and drink. Drink deeply, O lovers.

Now can you imagine what Edwards does with that? Here’s the doctrine. Edwards always begins with a doctrine and then he unfolds the doctrine and he applies it. Here’s the doctrine that he states on the basis of that verse:

Doctrine: That persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites.

Then let me just read you a couple of choice paragraphs. If you ever wondered if Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian that this country has ever produced, was a Christian Hedonist to the core, you will not doubt it, I hope, after I read you a couple of paragraphs:

Men may be as covetous as they please, if I may so speak, after spiritual riches and as eager as they please to heap up treasure in heaven, or ambitious as they please of spiritual and eternal honor and glory, or as voluptuous as they please with respect to spiritual pleasures.

Oh, Edwards is good. He continues:

They may indulge those appetites as much as they will in their thoughts and meditations and in their practice. They may drink, yea swim, in the rivers of spiritual pleasure.

And then he concludes with these four points:

First, endeavor to increase spiritual appetites by meditating on spiritual objects. Second, Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. Third, watch the first beginnings of the exercise of these inclinations and promote them. We are to note the first beginnings of lustful inclinations to suppress. But we here are to do the contrary. Fourth, live in the practice of these inclinations.

To be indifferent to what pleases God — namely, cheerful giving — is to be indifferent to sin. The opposite is to be like Jonathan Edwards. Don’t be indifferent to whether you have a heart desire to give. When you detect the slightest little glimmer in your life that the Holy Spirit is working such a generosity, fan it, blow on it, stoke it, pour gas on it, oil, do anything to raise those affections. We are not to be indifferent and that’s where I get my thesis, namely that the desire for pleasure in God is an essential motive for every good deed, not an optional one.

God Loves a Cheerful Pastor

Now, let me take you to several texts that are designed for vocational Christian leaders, elders, missionaries, and pastors. They are not uniquely adapted to us, they are relevant for you, but it just so happens that the New Testament seems to put some store by talking to people like me that I ought to have a certain kind of motive in my ministry. You can apply it to your ministry and your motives, but the Bible is especially eager that pastors and elders and missionaries have right motives. First Peter 5:2 says:

Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain (not for money), but eagerly . . .

Now take those two words, “willingly” and “eagerly.” Don’t you think that’s Peter’s way of saying the Lord loves a cheerful pastor? Paul said, “The Lord loves a cheerful giver.” Peter says to pastors and to elders, “Don’t do your work under constraint. Do it willingly. Don’t do your work for money. Do it eagerly.” In other words, you should want to do it. Like your job, love the ministry, and delight in it. Let me read you this quote from Phillips Brooks. He’s the pastor who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem” about 100 years ago. He worked in Boston. Here’s a great quote. I remember reading it when I first came to Bethlehem and it stirred me to want to be a good pastor and to love the ministry. It still does:

I think again that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it overall his disgusts, but he cannot work at it year after year and day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure; count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in the standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all.

Now I think that is a paraphrase of 1 Peter 5:2, and therefore I commend all of you who have any measure of leadership at all that if you are indifferent to whether you’re happy in that, you’re indifferent to what displeases God. To do the work of the ministry in a gutting-it-out, begrudging, dutiful, and joyless way does not honor the Lord, and it also doesn’t make for healthy church. Let me show you that from Hebrews 13.

To Be an Advantage to the Church

Let me read you Hebrews 13:17. Now this is an address to the church, but really it comes back on the leaders and describes the way they ought to do their work:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.

Now think about that for a minute. He is saying, “Let pastors, leaders, elders do their work with joy, not with sadness,” why? Because then they would be unhappy and quit and go to another church? No, it’s because that would be of no advantage to you. Therefore, love in the heart of a pastor demands that he not be indifferent to whether he does his work sadly or gladly. If it is no advantage to his people when he does it sadly, and he says to himself, “It doesn’t matter whether I do my work sadly or not, what matters is that I do it,” then he’s not caring about his people because the Bible says they get no advantage when he does it sadly. And if he’s for their advantage, he must be for his joy. Get it?

He can’t be indifferent to his joy in the ministry if he’s not indifferent to their advantage. If I love you, I must love the ministry. I must delight in my ministry. Why would that be? I wonder. It’s really not hard. A church with a happy pastor is a healthy church, by and large. You don’t find many churches with a thriving, happy pastor or pastoral team that’s not a healthy church. It rubs off. A murmuring pastor who uses his pulpit to constantly be whipping up on the people that criticized him the week before, or who’s manifesting his self-pity because they’re not giving enough, or because they don’t witness enough all comes through and people can hear that. They think, “This guy is not happy and he doesn’t like us, and therefore, I’m not happy and I think this is not a good place to be.” It just pays in numerous ways to be an authentically happy, happy leader.

More Blessed to Give

Now, here’s the third text related to elders. It’s found in Acts 20:35. You know this. This is one of the most famous verses in the New Testament I think, but you might not have noticed one or two words in it in their connection. Paul is speaking to the elders at Ephesus just before he leaves them at that poignant moment and they kiss on the beach and he never returns, perhaps. 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 the word I want you to see in this text is the word remembering, because there are so many philosophers who have drawn their ethics out of the air of their speculations rather than out of exegesis of texts. They will tell you that if you desire reward in an act of love, you destroy its moral beauty. The desire for reward wrecks your love. Now, if that were true, Paul would have to have written, “In all things I have shown you that by so doing one must help the weak, forgetting the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, ‘It is more blessed to give than receive.’”

Did I miss you there? What he would have to say is, “We all know that Jesus said it’s more blessed to give than receive. But we know that it wrecks morality to think about such things because he’s promising the reward of blessing when you do good to people. And of course, that promise ruins everything. So by all means forget what Jesus said, and then you will be able to love purely without any desire to be blessed in loving.” Well, I don’t think that’s exegesis. That’s philosophical manipulation of texts. What the text does say is that if you’re hard put to love somebody, like if it’s 11 p.m. and you’re getting ready to go to bed and the phone rings because somebody just went into the hospital, a car accident maybe, you remember about that text.

It’s your day off and you get the phone call, “Lily Harding has just been in an automobile accident.” You say, “How serious?” They say, “Well, we’re not sure.” Now at that point as you’re wrestling with whether to do something like go to Ramsey Hospital or not on your day off and you don’t feel like it, you remember what the Lord said. You say, “Do I believe you Lord, that for me to go and spend a couple hours with John and Leah praying would hold out to me vastly more happiness than what I’m doing now?” You argue with God’s word and promise, saying, “It’s going to come back to you.”

Seeking Joy in the Moment of Crisis

Now, let me tell you this. It took me five minutes to get into the room when I got there. I said, “Well, I’m a preacher. I’m a pastor. They want me in there, let me in.” So finally they let Dean and me in there. If I had said to them, “At first I didn’t really feel like coming, and it’s not an admirable confession, but I didn’t. But I prayed and the Lord brought to mind Acts 20:35, that there’s tremendous blessing in this, and it just flooded over me, Leah, that my joy would be tremendously increased by coming and spending time with you. And I’m so glad that I’ve come.” Do you think she would say to me, “You are so selfish? All you ever think about is your own happiness.” I don’t think she would. In fact, if I had said, “Leah, I didn’t feel like coming, but I realize feelings don’t matter. It’s my duty to be here and I’m here as a pastor. I don’t feel anything particular right now at all, but I’m here.”

In other words, a person feels loved more when that love is from overflowing joy than when it is the demonstration of duty, merely. They really do. To walk into a hospital room and have a person look up in your face and say, “Oh, pastor, you didn’t need to do this. Why’d you come?” and to answer them, “I really enjoy coming to talk to you. It brings me pleasure to see you. I hope I can be used by God to strengthen your faith. I get kicks out of strengthening people’s faith who are hurting.” Nobody’s going to take offense at that and call you a selfish person, even though it is raw hedonism. It is more loving to go joyfully to a hospital room than to go merely dutifully to a hospital room.

My conclusion so far in what we’ve seen is that the hindrance to loving people is the same hindrance that we saw to worshiping God, and it isn’t that everybody in this room and everybody in this church and around the world wants to be happy. That is not the obstacle, that everybody is pursuing their own happiness. That’s not the obstacle. I will never criticize you as a church for pursuing your own happiness. I will only criticize you for pursuing it in the wrong place. And what we’ve done this week is add the horizontal dimension that if you really want to maximize your joy in God, you will draw others into it. You will let it spill over to other people.

So I just cry out to America, “You’re not nearly hedonistic enough. Come on, lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, sell your possessions, give alms. Lay it up there where there’s no moth or rust to corrupt and no thief that breaks in and steals. All your joys down here are going to fade.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

So we have good news. Let me take you to a few more texts. I think we’ve got a little more time here. There are some absolutely stunning texts in Hebrews 10–12, which just undergird this thesis that an essential motive for good deeds is the pursuit of your own joy. And if you try to abandon that pursuit, you will wind up not pleasing God who loves cheerful givers, and you will wind up not loving people who know that they are most loved when you come to them with joy rather than begrudgingly.

A Better and Abiding Possession

If you have a Bible, turn with me to Hebrews 10:32–34. And we’ll just read how the early church was motivated to lay its life on the line in love. How was it motivated to lay its life on the line in love? Hebrews 10:32–24 says:

But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property (how in the world?), since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

So here’s the situation. Some of the Christians had been arrested and put in jail. It was a dangerous question. They thought, “If we go to visit them, they might throw us in jail. Should we go underground or should we go public?” Now, how did they make that choice? It says they thought about their reward. It says, “Since you yourselves have a better possession and an abiding one” (Hebrews 10:34). They looked at their own lives and they said, “The steadfast love of the Lord is better than life.” And then they looked at their possessions and they said, “We have a better possession in heaven.” And then they looked at their children and they said, thinking ahead to Martin Luther, “Let goods and kindred go this mortal life also the body they may kill, God’s truth abideth still, his kingdom is forever.” And they went and when they went, people plundered their property and burned their house or threw their furniture out.

They plundered their property and when they turned and saw it. What did the text say they did? They rejoiced. It says, “You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property” (Hebrews 10:34). Now, if you would ask me then tonight, “Whence, Pastor John, is the source of power to risk your life in the cause of love?” I would say, “Get real clear the source of joy in the kingdom. Get real clear how glorious your reward is. Get real clear the promise of Jesus that it is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Forsaking the Treasures of Egypt

Look down at Hebrews 11:24–26. Watch Moses. He does the same thing. This author is very consistent in this hedonistic motivation:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt (why?), for he was looking to the reward.

So he denied himself the fleeting pleasures of sin in Egypt, he embraced abuse for 40 years with this recalcitrant people, and he got his strength by looking to the reward that God had promised him. And that’s where you’ll get your strength too. Moses did not cease to be a loving man toward Israel when he looked to the reward because the reward was God. What he was offering Israel was God. And the more he could have of God, the more he could give to them. It’s all one.

For the Joy Set Before Us

Then, Hebrews 12:2 says:

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross . . .

The greatest act of love for people that was ever performed by any human being, namely, the death of Jesus was performed in the strength of hope for joy. And if you are not going to criticize Jesus for that, then don’t criticize yourself either.

Let me close with just an illustration or two of how this has driven the missionaries who have sacrificed most. Howard Taylor was the son of Hudson Taylor. Here’s a quote from what happened to him and his wife. In the province of Hunan, the Taylors opened two mission stations. Life was sometimes difficult. At one of these stations, they were robbed and beaten. Later Geraldine, his wife, wrote:

After a riot, when our lives had been saved by a miracle, when we were sitting, bruised and bleeding amidst the ruins of our home, in that hour, heaven itself was open to us and we tasted then and afterwards a joy so marvelous that I scarcely like to speak about it here as we realized we had been permitted to suffer something for Christ’s sake.

That’s the way those who have suffered most have spoken. Jonathan Edwards wrote in his Resolutions:

Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the world, to come as I possibly can with all the power, might, vigor, vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert in any way that can be thought of.

He was driven by his hope in God and in the pleasures of a world to come. And that does enable you to make tremendous sacrifices, although both David Livingstone and Hudson Taylor came to the ends of their lives and said, “I never made a sacrifice.” I hope you could unpack why that is on the basis of tonight’s message.