Audio Transcript

This week, John Piper’s new book launches. It’s titled: Living in the Light: Money, Sex and Power. A trim, 150-page book, published as a nice little hardcover by our friends at The Good Book Company, available on Amazon, and of course the full digital book can be downloaded at desiringGod.org.

On this podcast we often talk about fighting sin on two fronts, the external front (shield your life from influences) and the internal front (fill your heart with God’s glory). In the struggles against the sinful use of money, sex, and power, these things can seem far more powerful and more dominating in real-life experience than the holy affections of Christ, as you know Pastor John. What would you say to a young believer who feels this is the case? Are you saying God’s glory is more powerful than the lure of Internet pornography, for example? How do you quantify the competing powers of the flesh and the expulsive power of a new affection? Speak to a doubter who doesn’t believe the pleasure in God is stronger than the allure of porn.

Wow! That question really captures my desire for this book. I really want to figure this question out.

I get the difference between the powers of sex and the power of spiritual ecstasies. Those are not the same. So I have got lots to say about this. Where shall I start?

Whenever we talk about money, sex, and power, sex always seems to be in a class by itself. And the reason for that is the physical dimension of the desire. That makes the desire for sex intense and powerful in a way that the desire for money and power do not. I am sure that the desire for money — some activity or toy or privilege that money can buy — may have a physical dimension to it. But I doubt that desire for money and desire for power ever becomes as overpowering in their physical dimension as sex does.

My guess is that, when a new believer or an immature believer compares the power of sex to the power of the beauty of Christ, these can feel like totally different kinds of attraction, and the question becomes whether the kind of attraction that the beauty of Christ has can really counter the kind of attraction that sexual hormones create. And I see that distinction. It is a real distinction. The spiritual joys, even ecstasies, which we can know in personal relation with Christ are, in fact, not the same physical kind as we taste in sexual craving.

“The warfare of pleasure against pleasure is not simply fought in the moment of immediate combat, but over time as we attempt to go deeper and deeper in our knowledge of Christ, in our dependence of Christ, in our enjoyment of Christ.”

So, when I say that the expulsive power of a new desire for Christ can drive out the controlling power of old sinful desires, I realize that this is a battle not between two pleasures measured on the same scale. One pleasure is dominantly physical (not only). And the other pleasure is dominantly spiritual (not only, but dominantly). And this creates a problem for a new believer or an immature believer because spiritual pleasures are so new to them and their capacities for these pleasures may be so undeveloped that they can scarcely imagine that a godly, spiritual pleasure could be intense enough to conquer an ungodly physical pleasure.

Another difference between these combatants is that the desire for sex gets its power from an immediate, narrow, focused, visible or touchable sensation. But the desire for Christ and the enjoyment of Christ is not that way. It is not narrow in the same way. The pleasures that we have in knowing Christ are larger in their focus, deeper in the soul, more lasting and durable, taking in more of your personality — instead of just focusing on your body — and more personal and more relational. And this means that the cultivation of the controlling power of the pleasures that we have in Christ matters.

Now the effort to make them the controlling pleasures happens over time. It doesn’t just happen in that little moment there while we are facing the battle, while the sexual pleasures are arriving — bang! — with such enormous force. Which means that the warfare of pleasure against pleasure is not simply fought in the moment of immediate combat, but over time as we attempt to go deeper and deeper in our knowledge of Christ, in our dependence of Christ, in our enjoyment of Christ.

For example, the shield of faith that Paul says quenches the fiery darts of the evil one (Ephesians 6:16), maybe they happen to be sexual and flaming darts this time. That shield is not something you leave in your arsenal and only whip out when the arrows are flying. The shield of faith represents a daily, ongoing cultivation of growing knowledge and growing trust and growing delight in our friend and King and Savior Jesus Christ, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, growing the effectiveness of this shield when the arrows happen to fly.

So let me try to illustrate practically what I am talking about by the growing and the intensification of this counter desire of spiritual pleasure over against the immediacy of the physical pleasure. Basically the idea is, every day we fix our attention on the beauty of Christ in the way he deals with money and the beauty of Christ in the way he deals with sex and the beauty of Christ in the way he deals with power. And the biblical principle is that beholding — I am getting this from 2 Corinthians 3:18 — beholding, looking at the peculiar glory of Christ, we are transformed into his likeness so that his beauty in relation to money becomes our beauty in relation to money, and his beauty and relation to sex our beauty and relation to sex, and his beauty and relation to power our beauty and relation to power. So here is how it works for me.

I will just give you concrete strategies that John Piper tries to follow.

Jesus and Money

When I drink in the Word about Jesus being so unencumbered by possessions that he had no place to lay his head, my amazement at his poverty, poverty that made many rich, moves me. It moves me. It shapes me. It frees me from my love affair with money. I admire it. And when he says foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58), I love him. I love his simplicity. I love his freedom from the love of money. I love his readiness to risk all for the mission.

And when Paul says, “Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9), I see him. I love him. I am drawn to him and I find him giving himself to me. And his freedom from money starts to give me freedom from money. And his vastly more admirable beauty so far surpasses the tycoons of Wall Street. Why would I want to be like one of them? He is so free, so loving, so bold, so sacrificial. Everything about him is more attractive than all the rich people I have ever known. So that is the way it works for me. Beholding the glory of the Lord I am changed into a person who doesn’t love money. That is the way it works.

Jesus and Sex

Or let’s take sex, for example. When I look at Jesus’s sexual life, the same thing happens. Three decades — well, maybe two, of masculine virility. He had an adolescence first, a puberty. So one and a half or two decades of masculine virility, yet not one single millisecond of a sinful thought or feeling or immoral act. Women were hanging on his words, following him around. Former prostitutes wept over him and wiped his bare feet with their hair.

He lived a life from one angle that you could say was supercharged with sexual temptation — and he never sinned. He never once committed any lustful thought or act. He denied himself perfectly without denying the goodness of sexuality. I watch him. And as I watch him, I love him. I admire him. I stand in awe of his purity of mind and body, and I find myself in that admiration hating my own little compromises and I find myself longing to be pure and to be found holy at the last day and above reproach and glorious in purity. And his purity, sexually, is contagious.

Jesus and Power

Or here is the way I do it with power. Just recently I did this. You can do it in lots of ways, but when I looked at him in Gethsemane recently and he said to his disciples that chopped off an ear to save him, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Well no, a legion is about 3000 soldiers. Twelve legions is 36,000 — 36,000 angels would be enough to rescue him. And he says: I could do this. That is power. That is power. And he didn’t do it. He walked into the jaws of the lion and he was killed. Why? Why did he use power that way? And it is so glorious. It is so beautiful. It is so loving. It is so kind. It is so self-denying. It makes me say: I want to use power that way. I want to lay it down for the cause of love. Or I want to turn it for the good of others the way he did.

So to the young believer or the immature believer or the doubting believer, I would empathize with you that the power of sex in the moment of temptation seems stronger largely because it is physical. And greed and craving look so powerful. You want to crave to look cool or crave to be powerful. They look so powerful in the moment. But I would plead with you to believe and to pursue the Christ who has depths and heights and unexpected dimensions of pleasure for you that if you will go hard after him day in and day out, these dimensions of pleasure will transform your life and they will pull the power plug on those sinful temptations.