by: John Park, November 30th, 2010
Quote from John Piper’s book, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy. 
Available for free here in pdf format at Desiring God ministries.
[P]rayer and meditation are inseparable. The fight for joy always involves both. Prayer without meditation on the Word of God will dis- integrate into humanistic spirituality. It will simply reflect our own fallen ideas and feelings—not God’s. And meditation, without the humility of desperate prayer, will create proud legalism or hopeless despair (p. 144).
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by: John Park, November 29th, 2010
Quote from John Piper’s book, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy.
Available for free here in pdf format at Desiring God ministries.
[P]rayer is the revealer of the heart. What a person prays for shows the spiritual condition of his heart. If we do not pray for spiritual things (like the glory of Christ, and the hallowing of God’s name, and the salvation of sinners, and the holiness of our hearts, and the advance of the gospel, and contrition for sin, and the fullness of the Spirit, and the coming of the kingdom, and the joy of knowing Christ), then probably it is because we do not desire these things. Which is a devastating indictment of our hearts. (p. 134)
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by: John Park, November 29th, 2010
Quote from John Piper’s book, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy.
Available for free here in pdf format at Desiring God ministries.
What do you do when you don’t desire the Word of God? Or when you read it and don’t see anything that gives you joy? Or when your joy is weak and disintegrates before the allurements of the world? What do you do if you are not satisfied in the God of the Bible, but prefer the pleasures of the world? Did Paul or the psalmists or the celebrated saints of history ever struggle with this? Yes, they did. And we should take heart. We all struggle with seasons of lukewarmness and spiritual numbness of heart. There are times in the lives of the most godly people when spiritual hunger becomes weak, and darkness threatens to consume the light, and everything but the vaguely remembered taste of joy evaporates. (p. 132)
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by: John Park, November 29th, 2010
Quote from John Piper’s book, When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy.
Available for free here in pdf format at Desiring God ministries.
I have the profound sense that many people who complain of not being able to rejoice in God treat the knowledge of God as something that ought to be easy to get. They are passive. They expect spiritual things to happen to them from out of nowhere. They don’t grasp the pattern of the Bible expressed in Proverbs 2:1-6 (p. 121).
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by: John Park, November 23rd, 2010
For the last few days, I’ve been reading through John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God (available for free here in pdf format). I thought it’d be a good place now (having read through over half of it) to write down some observations in bullet-point in order to keep stock of what I’ve learned so far. As is the case for most of the Piper books I read, this has been another paradigm-shifter; a must-read for Christians and non-Christians alike.
1. Subjective Joy (in the Lord) is not only recommended, it is commanded. For otherwise, Christianity becomes a religion of external religious activities. If there is no experience of joy in the Lord, then all the religious activities we perform are dead and faithless. Therefore, there is no authentic saving faith.
2. The only one who is able to produce such joy in our lives is the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we are helpless. If the Holy Spirit does not awaken our hearts to the joy found only in the Lord, then we remain under God’s wrath (and God is not unjust for this – nobody deserves joy in the Lord/salvation).
3. Yet, as helpless as we are, we are still called to fight for joy through the appointed means (reading Scripture, prayer, fellowship, hearing the proclamation of the Gospel, etc.) and plead with the Holy Spirit to give us affections/emotions of joy in the Lord.
4. He (the Spirit) – if willing – does so by opening the eyes of our hearts to see and savor the glories of Christ in the Gospel.
5. If and when the Spirit does, in fact, open the eyes of our hearts to see the glories of Christ in the Gospel, thereby producing joy in our hearts, this is not time, then, to relax, for our sinful hearts, Satan, and others will work extremely hard to make ship-wreck of our faith by questioning the authenticity of that joy.
6. Therefore, we are to fight everyday (once again, through the appointed means) and plead with the Holy Spirit to open up our eyes to the reality that the joy in Christ that we experienced is better than the joy offered by the deceitfulness of sin.
7. There are those who have tasted this joy – but who, have not heeded Scripture’s exhortation to fight and make war and plead with the Holy Spirit to maintain that joy – and therefore, they are either extremely weak in their faith (or never had faith/joy in the first place).
A more detailed list with Scripture references to come later. I highly recommend all to read this book.
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