Audio Transcript
Last time, we looked at God’s God-centeredness: “We get the grace; he gets the glory. We get the pleasure; he gets the praise.” God does everything for his glory. Many people who hear that ask, “If God does everything for his own glory, doesn’t that make him selfish? Do we exist just to boost his ego a bit? Maybe we get some joy on the side as a sort of byproduct of what is basically a transaction between us and God. And if that’s the case, then what worth do we have in ourselves?” Today on Ask Pastor John: the God who gives you worth.
About a month ago, we were reading 2 Corinthians 1:24 together, that incredible text where Paul’s ministry was set forth as “we work with you for your joy.” Horizontally, ministry works toward a mutual joy in God, a shared joy among us. A young woman named Alexi writes in who is trying to figure this out in her vertical relationship with God.
She writes, “Hello Pastor John, I really appreciate all that you do at Desiring God. I grew up in a Christian home, and I first encountered the idea of Christian Hedonism two years ago when I first read your book Desiring God. I wanted to understand how God can still be good toward us if he does everything for his own glory. I know and understand that he is supremely valuable, and that the best thing he could ever give us is himself, so in doing everything for his glory, we also receive the greatest good. It’s a win-win situation. He gets the glory; we get the joy. However, I think I’m missing something, because this doesn’t make me rejoice in how much God loves me. It sounds more like a transaction. We seek our joy, and God gets glory; God seeks his glory, and we get joy. As I understand it, both sides act for themselves, and it just so happens that the other side benefits. Could you please help me grasp how this reflects our love for God and his love for us, rather than selfishness on both sides? Thank you!”
Random or Personal?
That is a well-put question. I very much appreciate somebody reading that carefully and asking a question that penetrating. But there’s a problem in the very way that Alexi poses the question. She says, “We seek our joy, and God gets glory; God seeks his glory, and we get joy. . . . Both sides act for themselves, and it just so happens that the other side benefits. Could you please help me grasp how this reflects our love for God and his love for us, rather than selfishness on both sides?”
And the problem with this is that Alexi omits the very thing that keeps our quest for joy and God’s pursuit of glory from being selfish. In fact, she doesn’t just omit it. She excludes it with the words, “It just so happens that the other side benefits.” So, the way she has restated Christian Hedonism is this: “I seek my joy and then it just so happens, as it were, randomly, that God is glorified. And God seeks his glory and then it just so happens, as it were, randomly, that I am made glad.”
But you can’t expect an argument to work if you treat as random what is in fact purposeful, personal, and essential to the argument. So, what’s been left out? Alexi describes Christian Hedonism like this: “We seek our joy, and God gets glory; God seeks his glory, and we get joy. . . . Both sides act for themselves.”
What’s missing is this: We seek our joy in God, in the goodness and wisdom and power and grace and beauty of God. And God, thus, gets glory because we find in God so much satisfaction. God seeks his glory by saving us, working for us, transforming us, revealing himself to us, making us beautiful, conforming us to the likeness of his Son to reflect his glory like his Son reflects his glory. And thus, we experience joy in God. You can’t just say, “We seek joy, and God seeks glory — period. It’s a transaction,” and make the argument work. It won’t.
“God loves us by sending his own Son to die for undeserving, ungodly enemies — and thus gives us worth.”
Lots of joy-seeking is selfish; lots of glory-seeking is vain. Christian Hedonism is deeply aware of this. We don’t just talk in terms of people seeking happiness and God seeking glory. We talk of people seeking happiness in God, and we talk of God being glorified in us. When she sets up Christian Hedonism like this, I think it’s understandable why Alexi would say, “This doesn’t make me rejoice in how much God loves me,” which is perhaps the same as saying, “I don’t see why this is not selfishness.”
With Him Forever
Let me see if I can help. Because I do feel loved by God because he is this way, and God wants me to feel loved, and he wants all of his children to feel loved. He wants you, Alexi, to enjoy being loved by the Son and by the Father.
So, let’s consider Jesus’ prayer in John 17:24 and see if we can get at the nub of the problem. Jesus prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.” Now, I wonder if Alexi would feel more loved if Jesus stopped after the words “with me.” Father, I desire that Alexi, whom you have given me, may be with me. I want you to be with me, Alexi. I certainly feel loved when Jesus says that to me, and my guess is that Alexi does too. We both say, “Jesus wants us. He wants us. He wants us to be with him.” That’s one of the greatest realities of salvation.
He died for us so that we could be with him forever. I say 1 Thessalonians 5:10 to myself virtually every night: “[He] died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him.” And “with him” means fullness of joy, pleasures forevermore, according to Psalm 16:11. Ephesians 2:4–7 says in great love God made us alive “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, Christ died for us, God regenerated us, so that he might have us with him and spend immeasurable ages lavishing kindness on us. That’s breathtaking.
Love That Creates Value
So, why would it be that when Jesus adds the words, “[I want you to] be with me . . . to see my glory” (John 17:24), or when Paul adds the words in Ephesians 1:6, “to the praise of his [God’s] glorious grace,” it somehow feels as though we’re not being loved anymore? And now, God has become selfish by adding the words “to see my glory” or “for the glory of my grace.”
Now, I don’t want to assume the worst here. I really don’t. I don’t believe Alexi is guilty of what I’m about to say, this warning, but let me sound a warning to all of us. I have met people who cannot feel loved by God, it seems, unless their own worth as a person is the basis of God’s love for them, and therefore, my whole theology is anathema to them. It makes me weep.
The Bible does not teach that God loves us because of our worth. He loves us by sending his own Son to die for undeserving, ungodly enemies — and thus gives us worth. And that worth consists in the beauty of our conformity to his Son (Romans 8:29). He loves us at the cost of the life of his Son, in order to display the greatness of his grace in our beautification for his Son’s bride. This is what it is to be loved — for the glory of God.
