Fix Your Eyes
The question about suffering and the pursuit of joy in suffering is relentless because suffering is relentless. And the Bible is just so helpful because it’s so realistic. There’s nothing superficial, trivial, or silly in the Bible at all. It’s all blood earnest. And that’s good news for sufferers.
Paul says, “We do not lose heart. Though this outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day, for this slight momentary affliction”—now, for him that’s year after year of pain, thorn in the flesh, whippings on the back, rods, persecutions, shipwrecks, dangers, stoning.
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.”
“This light, momentary affliction is working for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, for we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.”
So, that means a sufferer should take his heart’s eyes and fix them on the unseen, eternal weight of glory, not on the momentary affliction. He doesn’t deny it. He knows he’s hurting like crazy, but he diverts his attention to God’s fatherhood—treating him like a beloved child, even if there’s discipline in it—and on the hope to come.
Jesus said, “Blessed are you when they persecute you and revile you and say all kinds of evil against you. Rejoice in that day, for great is your reward in heaven.” In other words, look to the unseen promise of happiness with me. That’s the long-term eternal perspective of how you fight for joy in suffering.
There’s nothing superficial, trivial, or silly in the Bible at all. It’s all blood earnest. And that’s good news for sufferers.
There are other short-term ways, because you know from other texts in the Bible that suffering produces effects for good now, not just in the future. The most common teaching about suffering is that it is sanctifying, it’s purifying.
But I’ve had to deal with people who are dying in pain. Dying. They’re not going to have another year to be sanctified. They’re going to go to heaven in thirty minutes, and I want to help them get there. And the Bible has—as I quoted it from 2 Corinthians 4:17–18—a perspective on eternity that sustains us right now in our suffering with a kind of joy that isn’t a Rah! Rah! Praise God anyhow! kind of superficial joy, but a deep abiding contentment that doesn’t turn on God.
John Piper is the author of Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist.
