Come Ready to Be Filled
I used to chastise pastors for criticizing their people for not coming to give but only to get. If you people would just come here to give instead of just get, get, get on Sunday, there’d be some life in this church now! And my response to that now is that’s sheer baloney. That’s not true. I don’t want my people to come to give God anything but to get everything from God.
And my job as a pastor and a worship team is to put that feast before them and show them how to eat so that when they leave they go, Ah! God is good! If you believe that the goal of worship is to glorify God by enjoying him, and you know that 90 percent of your people are coming into the room tired, not exuberant for God, not overflowing (you wish they were, but they’re not, so that’s why they’re coming), you’re going to be okay with that and you’re going to say, My job is to fill you up. My job is to feed you with the finest of food from the Bible and do everything I can with truth to quicken your affections for God. I want you to come hungry for God.
John Piper’s influential work on Christian Hedonism, Desiring God, challenges the belief that following Christ requires the sacrifice of pleasure. Rather, he teaches that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”
So I’m going to teach my people that hunger for God is one of the best worship modes that can possibly be. It really does alter the way you worship. It will alter the kinds of songs you sing and how you sing them. My definition of preaching is expository exultation—truth and affection. That’s exultation with a u meaning I’m exulting.
I’m exulting in the pulpit in God with the belief that there’s a contagion in the exultation that draws people into it so that my passion for God rubs off on them and they have a greater passion for God.
And as that collective passion rises in song and prayer, that’s authentic worship. Jesus said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” What does that mean? “In vain do they worship me.” Vain is zero.
If you sing the songs, pray the prayers, do the confessions, make the motions, even raise your hand, but your heart is far from God and the affections are not in God, that’s a zero. In fact, it’s worse than a zero. Amos said God holds his nose when we try to worship like that. So, Christian hedonism is revolutionary for how you preach and how you worship.
John Piper is the author of Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist.
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