Podcast: Can Affectionless Faith Be Genuine? (John Piper)

April 25, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Receiving Christ as a Treasure

In today's episode, John Piper discusses how he came to saving faith in Jesus and how his view of that faith has changed over the years.

What Is Saving Faith?

What Is Saving Faith?

John Piper

In this Bible-saturated meditation on the nature of saving faith, John Piper argues that the spiritual affection of treasuring Christ belongs to the very essence of saving faith. If Christ is not embraced as our supreme treasure, he is not embraced for who he is.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:58 - Does Assurance of Faith Depend on My Memory of a Decision of Faith?

Matt Tully
John, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

John Piper
Thank you. It’s a privilege to be here. I’m excited.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to discuss the nature of true faith, faith that saves us. But before we get into that, I was wondering if you could share a little bit about how you came to faith. How did you become a Christian? What was that journey like for you?

John Piper
It might encourage some people to know that I don’t remember becoming a Christian. I know some people who think that’s not legitimate, that you can’t be born again and not know you’re born again. They say that’s crazy. However, here’s what I mean: my mother and father were both precious believers. They’re both with Jesus now. My mother tells me that in 1952, when I was six-years-old, on vacation in Florida at a motel my conscience was evidently working overtime and making me concerned that I was a sinner and I needed a savior, which they had taught me was Jesus. I wanted to make sure that he was my Savior, that my sins were forgiven, and that God would accept me as a little kid and not hold my sins against me. We prayed, she said, and I asked Jesus to be my Savior and declared my trust in him and my allegiance to him. I’ve always taken her word for it that that happened. Here’s the reason it should be encouraging: I don’t think our assurance hangs in the least upon being able to remember our birth. Right now if you said, Prove, Piper, that you’re alive, I would not reach for my birth certificate. I wouldn’t say, Here it is! Proof positive. I got a birth certificate. I would say, Listen: I’m breathing. I’m living. I’m thinking. With regard to Christ, I would say I love him, he’s my Savior, I depend upon him, he’s the treasure of my life. These are the signs of life rather than being able to remember a story. Here’s another little piece of that that really matters in regard to this issue of saving faith. A lot of people think that the people who have been born again out of the most horrific lives of sinning have the clearest idea of what depravity means and what salvation means. I think that’s wrong because I don’t think experience can come close to teaching us about the nature of our depravity that we find in Scripture. I don’t think anybody—no matter how wicked they were saved—will be able to describe the wickedness of their heart without Ephesians 2, that they were dead in trespasses and sins. So, I would just say to all of us that there are no boring resurrections, and therefore no boring testimonies. We have to use the Bible. We have to see in the Bible what our condition was before we were saved, what our condition is after we are saved, and we get from the Bible that line in between, which is what we want to talk about—What is the saving thing that happened in our hearts?

Matt Tully
What do you think it is about the way that we so often think about salvation, and conversion in particular, why are we so prone to want to be able to point to a date, to point to a decision that we’ve made that we can consciously remember? Is there something to that that connects to what you’re arguing for in this book?

John Piper
It’s not wrong to want to do that. Frankly, I wish I could. I wish I remembered it. I think I would be able to give God praise with greater clarity and memory if I remembered. It’s not wrong to want to remember the sweetness of the work of God on the day you were brought from death to life. My goodness! Who would not want to have the fullest possible memory of that miracle? That’s not a wrong thing. What goes awry, I think, is the conception of what happened to us and what we did on that day. There really was a day when we were born again, whether we can remember it or not. It’s like asking a woman, Are you a little bit pregnant, or are you a lot pregnant? Pregnant is pregnant, right? You’re either alive or you’re not. There comes a point in life where by the Spirit you pass from death to life, from blind to seeing. What that line consists of experientially is where we can go off the rails. I grew up in a milieu where the emphasis was so heavy on making a decision for Christ. Billy Graham’s magazine was called Decision. My dad, who was an evangelist, called for decisions. I grew up in a church where you decided for Jesus. I have decided to follow Jesus! I sang that, I taught that, and that was my understanding. I have come to see some limitations of that view, and that’s why I wrote the book.

Matt Tully
You go further than that in the book. You say that a will-only view of saving faith, a volition-only view of what’s happening when we believe is “deficient and, for many, deadly.” Unpack that for us.

John Piper
I mean it when I say “deadly.” I mean deficient, not a little bit, but inadequate. In other words, if you stress a will-decision—I now will to follow Jesus or I now will to trust that he has forgiven my sins and I won’t go to hell but I’ll go to heaven—that can happen without any new birth, without any change in the heart, without any alteration of the affections for Jesus. What I’ve come to see is that I think the church, especially in certain parts of it, has many unbelievers who think they’re saved. It’s why the church is weak, it’s why the church is ineffective in so many ways, it’s why worship is so flat—because there are a lot of unregenerate, non-born-again people in the church who have been taught that they are to make a decision, so they decide to believe some doctrines, to believe that they are going to heaven, and nothing has changed in their heart. I have tried to scour the Bible to find out, Is that saving faith? Jesus said in Matthew 15:8, “This people honors me with their lips but their heart is far from me.” If we can be praising him with our lips (singing hymns in church, discussing the Bible at a Bible study) and our hearts be far from him, he says it’s empty. I really think that means it’s not worship, and I would say it’s not faith. I’m very concerned for myself. I don’t want to be an unbeliever thinking that I’m a believer, and I don’t want the church to have people in it who are unwittingly false brothers because they think they’ve believed when they really haven’t believed because they’ve been taught a wrong view of saving faith. Namely, you can simply will your way into new birth and new life. Maybe a verse here would help. I’ve been so moved in recent years, just controlled in a certain sense, by 2 Corinthians 4:4–6 where Paul says, “The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing”—hear these crucial phrases—“the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” That’s what Satan keeps unbelievers from seeing: the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Then, the remedy is in verse 6 where he says, “God has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” I think what that means is when you become a Christian, a miracle happens in a blind, dead heart, and the essence of the miracle is that when you look at the gospel—when you look at the cross—what once looked boring or mythological or foolish now looks like glory. It looks sweet, it looks precious, it looks valuable, it looks like the most wonderful thing in the world. That’s the miracle that happens. If you teach that you can just decide for that, you’ve missed it. It’s a miracle. God has to raise the dead. He has to open the eyes of the blind for us to see the gospel as glorious.

Matt Tully
I want to dig into what you call those affectional elements of saving faith. That’s central to what you’re saying here, but before we get into that, maybe just one clarification: In your mind, is the will involved in saving faith? Or is that completely misguided?

John Piper
No, no, it’s not completely misguided at all. “Choose you this day whom you shall serve” is a biblical command, and there’s nothing wrong with telling people they must choose Christ. However, if you leave it at that, it’s going to be misleading. Here’s my understanding of the will: I think the will is the faculty of the human soul that inclines, or that prefers, one thing over another. It can choose something that it doesn’t like at all and that it doesn’t admire. That’s an act of will. The will, when it inclines vigorously with all of its force, we call affection. I prefer my wife over all other women. That’s not a small preference. I prefer life over death. In other words, the will can act without affection, and the will can act vigorously with affection. I’m arguing in this book that if we try to turn saving faith into a will power religion minus its more vigorous exercises of preference, delight, treasuring, desire, admiration, then we are gutting the very essential element of faith that makes it saving.

13:56 - Saving Faith Involves Spiritual Affections

Matt Tully
Let’s get into the affections side of things. You use that word in the book and you’ve already used it in this conversation a couple of times—our affections. It’s a word that those who know you and have read you over the years will be familiar with. They’ll know where you’re getting that word. But for those who are less familiar with that term, why do you say affections? What do you mean by that? Why is that important?

John Piper
What I don’t mean by “affections” is physical responses to bad or good news, like trembling or sweaty palms or knocking knees or fluttering eyelashes or butterflies in the stomach. None of that is of any spiritual significance, and that’s important to say. The second thing to clarify is that the way I’m using the word “affections” in my theology and in the book is not merely natural emotions. They are emotions, they are feelings, but they are spiritual; meaning, the Holy Spirit awakens them. They’re the fruit of the Spirit. They happen when we behold truth, when we behold Christ and the gospel. The Holy Spirit enables us to respond with our hearts in a way that is somehow coherent with, or fitting, the worth of what we are feeling or seeing. So, affections are spiritual emotions in response to more or less correct sight of Christ and his worth and his work for us. Affections go beyond mere will power and beyond mere decision; they involve the heart. It’s what Jesus meant, I think, when he said, You’re worshiping me with your lips, but your heart—that is, your affections—are far from me.

16:09 - Faith Is a Receiving

Matt Tully
I think the most common way that Christians would understand faith, if you were to ask them on the street and out of the blue, would be something along the lines of faith being a cognitive belief in the truth of the gospel and what Jesus has done. There’s a will power dynamic to that as well—I’m choosing now to follow Christ. They would say that those affections that you just explained—the idea of loving God, delighting in God, treasuring is a really key concept that you raise in the book—those are the fruit of that faith. Those are the results of that faith rather than integral to it itself. But you want to make the case that those are not merely fruit of faith; those are actually part of faith. Is that right?

John Piper
Yes. There are fruits of faith, which are affectional. I’m not denying that. Faith does result in many changes in our minds and hearts that are affectional. However, I’ve come to see from numerous texts in Scripture that you cannot make that distinction and say, Here is faith stripped of all affection and it is still saving faith. And then, it produces something. What is saving? I see that it is a believing. It’s defined in John 1:12 as a receiving: “To those who received him, who believed in his name . . . .” So, faith is a receiving. Receiving as what? Receiving as Savior. Receiving as Lord. Receiving as bread from heaven. Receiving as living water. Receiving as light. Receiving as friend. Receiving as my righteousness. Receiving as wisdom. Receiving as treasure. With every one of those glorious realities that Christ is, I ask now, What is it like to receive him as that treasure? I’ve come to the conclusion that that phrase—receive Christ as . . . .—involves an actual affectional dimension to the receiving. It’s not added on. It is the way we receive. Maybe it would be helpful to say I don’t talk about Christ as a treasure as another reality, like he’s Savior and he’s Lord and he’s treasure, and you receive him in those three offices. No, no, no. I don’t take treasure as an office. Rather, treasure is what marks his Saviorhood, his Lordship, his being bread, his being living water, his being my righteousness, his being wisdom. I receive him as a treasured friend, a treasured righteousness, a treasured Savior, a treasured Lord. If you leave out that treasured and say, You can receive him minus treasuring that reality, I think you’ve become utilitarian and you’re using him. You’re using him. You’re not receiving him for what he is; you’re receiving him as a tool to get out of hell, to get some relief from guilty feelings, or to get rich because he offers himself as a prosperity giver. You’re just using him. If there’s no dimension of treasuring Christ for who he is—in his being treasure, his being Lord, his being Savior—I don’t think it’s saving faith. I haven’t been able to go that way of saying you’ve got this thing called faith, and then you’ve got these fruits called treasuring him, admiring him, delighting in him, taking pleasure in him, or being satisfied in him. I don’t think it’s possible to slice it that way. Let me give you one more verse that’s on the mind right now that might help. Jesus says in John 6:35, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger. Whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” There’s a parallel: comes to me/shall never hunger; believes in me/shall never thirst. That parallel says believing, in Jesus’s mind here, is a coming to him so as to drink from him and never thirst. Here’s John 7:37: Jesus cries out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture says, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” I think the connection between “Come to me and drink” and “Believe in me and rivers will go out” are the same thing. I think in John’s vocabulary if you say to somebody, Come! Believe! Believe on Jesus! I want you to be saved!—what you mean is there is a fountain here. It’s flowing with all-satisfying, living water. Come! Drink! That’s the way you do evangelism.

22:07 - Does Assurance of Faith Depend on How I Feel about God?

Matt Tully
One concern that someone might have in this is that this view of faith locates our assurance of salvation squarely on how we’re feeling about God day by day. How would you respond to that concern that if someone embraces this that they’re then constantly taking their temperature in terms of their affections for God and maybe always wondering, Today I feel cold towards God. Does that mean I don’t really have faith? How would you answer that?

John Piper
I would answer that in numerous ways. The first thing that comes to my mind is that the problem of the ups and downs of emotions is the very same problem as the ups and downs of faith, for a person who doesn’t agree with me. A person says, Piper, I think you’re all wrong. I don’t think faith has any of that affectional stuff because that makes it too volatile. I would say, You’re telling me that your faith doesn’t go up and down? You get up every morning and you feel totally trustful of Jesus? Your faith is strong and growing and it never wavers? If they were honest I think they would say,Well, no. Actually, there are weak faith days and strong faith days. Okay. We’re on the same page. We’ve got the same problem. You and I have the same problem. Your faith goes up and down; my affections go up and down. We’re both fighting the same battle. I’m going to say then that that fight for assurance is a fight for joy. It is just like the fight for faith. It’s a fight for strong faith. I don’t like the way you described my view, or described the statement that assurance rests squarely on . . . or something like that. I want to say that it does rest on faith. Faith is affectional, and so it does rest on knowing and believing that I have a treasuring of Christ that ranks him above mother and father, because Jesus said, If you don’t love me more than your mother and father you don’t belong to me. I can’t get away from that. That’s real. I have to fight for that. I have to treasure him more than I treasure my wife and my children and my mother and father. Otherwise, I’m not a Christian. That’s truth from Matthew 10:37. So, I’m going to say please don’t say it just like that because the fight for assurance is not just fought by taking my temperature—whether the temperature is the temperature of faith or the temperature of affections. It’s not. It’s fought by looking at Christ, the cross, and the sufficiency of his work for me. It’s fought by crying out for the work of the Holy Spirit. In Romans 8 where it says that the Spirit bears witness with my spirit, that I am a child of God. God is my Father. When I cry out, Abba! Father! it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with my spirit that I am a child of God. Paul said that nobody can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. So, I cry out, Oh God! Grant me to say Jesus is Lord with all the intensity and authenticity I can have! The battle for assurance is the same battle, I think, for all of us. Namely, we have to look away from our bellies. We’re not navel-gazers. That will never work, whether we’re staring at faith or staring at affections, it won’t work because if you take your eyes of Jesus, you’re going to go down. So you stare at the cross and you pray for the work of the Holy Spirit. And in the end—oh, goodness! I suppose in my ministry—after preaching and before I went home for lunch, when I stood there for an hour praying with people—the most common issue was assurance. I think in thirty-three years I can say that. They would tell me all kinds of stories about how it’s hard for them to maintain assurance. When I’ve given them all the objective evidences I can point them to for their refreshment and authentication of their faith, I said to them, In the end, it is a gift. It really is a gift. You should ask for it. By all means use the means that God has given for the maintenance of faith and assurance. But in the end, you can’t make yourself feel anything. You can’t make yourself feel assured. So, we plead to God to work that in us. I pray that to this day. I’m an old man, I won’t live forever, and I know that in those last days when I get sick and my mind can’t do all that it needs to do to maintain a fight of faith, I’m going to need some miracle work of the Holy Spirit to preserve my assurance when Satan says, You’ve been a fake all along, Piper.

27:45 - Is Saving Faith a Choice or a Gift?

Matt Tully
I was going to ask if that is part of why, going back to earlier in our conversation, why we so often conceive of faith as a decision, as a choice that we make. Is there something to the fact that we don’t really believe that faith is a gift, that this is something that God is working within us and it’s not something we’re doing?

John Piper
Absolutely. If you were to ask me, Why does this book feel so urgent to you? One of the primary reasons would be that we live in a world—and we’ve lived in this world for a couple hundred years—we live in a world where the air we breathe is now called “expressive individualism” (that’s the current phrase). It is awash in the right and power of the human will to make ourselves what we want to be. I can make myself a woman—that’s the most lavish, crazy, insane, recent idea. I can just make myself another sex. But it’s always been there—I can make myself a Christian! I must have the power within me to make myself a Christian. America is a free will driven culture, meaning I have ultimate control over my destiny. I’m the captain of my fate! That’s all heresy. We don’t have ultimate control over our fate; God does. I think the whole milieu—since Charles Finney especially—has been, I got to control this! I’ve got to control whether I become a Christian, and I have to be able to control in my evangelism to be able to make Christians. That means you have to reduce it to a decision because if you take Piper’s idea (which I hope is biblical) and include affections in it, you lose control because you can’t make it happen. I can make myself walk down an aisle, I can make myself sign a card, I can make myself ascribe to a confession of faith. I can do all that; it’s in my power. Americans believe reality and destiny should be in our power, so if you come along with this crazy notion that it’s a miracle and a gift that I am a believer, you’re going to get a lot of resistance and a lot of twisting there. I think one of my desires for the book is to really make clear that it is a miracle. What praise and glory goes to God when people wake up to that! You can’t praise God for amazing grace the way you should if you think you were the decisive power at the moment of your conversion.

30:56 - What Does Scripture Teach about Saving Faith?

Matt Tully
One of the things it seems like you take pains over in the book—it was very evident to me that you were working hard to make this come through, and it’s come through in our conversation today—is that you are trying to synthesize what you’re seeing in Scripture, what Scripture teaches about saving faith. Speak to where the impetus for this emphasis is coming from as you look at Scripture.

John Piper
Let me go back to Matthew 10:37. When Jesus says, “Anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me . . . Anyone who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” I’m just flabbergasted. I’m just stunned because what he’s saying there—he uses the word love—he’s making discipleship an issue of love. If my affections for Jesus—and it is affections; it’s not obedience. It’s affections because he’s talking about loving son, loving daughter, loving mother, loving wife. Those are not just like, Obey them, but rather, I cherish them! They’re me family! You have to cherish Jesus more than you cherish them, or you’re not worthy of him. You’re not a Christian. Those are the kind of texts that over time made me realize, Can you just paste that on to this thing called saving faith? No. I read in Matthew 13:44: the kingdom of heaven is like a man who found a treasure hidden in a field. In his joy, he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field. I think that parable says that coming into the saving reign of Jesus as your King, Lord, and Savior, coming into that reality is like finding a treasure and with joy selling everything you have. Which means something really dramatic has happened in your heart. So, it’s text after text like that. The ones in John 6, John 7, and John 4—the woman at the well when Jesus is talking to her about living water. All these texts present saving faith in varied descriptions of receiving treasure. You’re receiving living water, the bread of heaven, the light of the world, a treasure hidden in a field, a Savior who forgives you for all your sins, a Lord who fights for you and brings you home safely—on and on and on through the New Testament, saving faith is a receiving of all that God is for us in Jesus. In fact, that phrase—“being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus”—is the phrase I used over and over again in the book Future Grace. I published Future Grace in 1995. What I’ve been doing since then is trying to defend that statement. This book is the end of that pilgrimage.

34:33 - A Growing Understanding of Saving Faith

Matt Tully
I was going to ask about that. Has your view of saving faith changed over the years?

John Piper
Oh my, yes! I grew up in a milieu of decisionism. Only over time did that change. It came in stages. For example, one of the stages was the Lordship Controversy way back in the 80s where John MacArthur writes the book The Gospel According to Jesus. I thought it was a great book. In it he defended that you cannot be a Christian if Jesus is not your Lord. You had this whole crowd say, No! That’s not grace, that’s works! I looked at that and I thought, No, that’s what the Bible says! Which means I had to make some adjustments in just deciding that he’s my Savior. So, my first step is to decide that he’s my Lord. But now, I’ve kind of reduced saving faith to a mixture of doing what he says. But that’s not the idea at all. So I came through various steps of looking at the text to see this: the reason God chose faith as the path into justification is because faith is the unique act of the soul which receives Christ. It doesn’t do anything for Christ. There are no works mingled in our saving faith at all. No works. How can that be? Christ is my righteousness. Christ is my perfection, my obedience. He offers himself to me. What do you do when you have an offering? You receive it. That’s John 1:12: “To as many as received him . . . who believed in his name.” So, believing is a receiving. My heart is a receiving heart, and thus Christ gets all the glory for being my righteousness because I’m receiving him, not performing for him. That’s why God ordained that faith be the instrument of justification. What I’m saying is yes, and Christ also wants to be glorified in the act of saving faith not only as my righteousness but as my treasure. My receiving is a treasuring receiving. It doesn’t cease to be a receiving, but it’s a treasuring receiving. Thus, I call attention to the worth of Christ and not just the usefulness of Christ in getting me out of hell, but the worth of Christ as my all-satisfying treasure. My understanding of faith and my experience of it, I think, has grown over the years. Let me say this because it might sound like, Oh, you really weren’t a Christian at age 6. Here’s the amazing thing, and we really need to say this: J. I. Packer said it so well that we are saved by justification by faith, not by the doctrine of justification by faith. Meaning, if I trust in Christ, my conception in my head of what’s happening in that could be all screwy because I was taught by somebody in a wrong way. The reality in my heart might not be right. I think that’s true about me. I was a Christian from age 6 to age 76. I think my understanding of that reality has gone through changes, but the reality was reality all along.

Matt Tully
Do you view what you’re saying now about saving faith as a pressing in or a pressing further along the same line as the Lordship Salvation Controversy? Do you see this connection there?

John Piper
Yes. I think there’s an organic connection. I think I’m saying something more than MacArthur said in his book then and more than Wayne Grudem has said, because he’s written strongly against this Free Grace Theology. I think I’m going beyond by stressing that it’s not yet clear when we say to somebody, Jesus must be your Lord, as well as your Savior—it’s not yet clear that that embrace of Lordship and embrace of Saviorhood is an affectional reality. I’ve not talked to either of those brothers—well, actually I have. I sent Wayne my manuscript and Wayne said, You have to be careful now because this could be construed in the wrong way. I think he would be okay with what I mean, but he’s just worried that there might be some misunderstandings—which, no doubt there will be because I’ve seen them already. So yes, I think there’s a continuum. It’s a good step in the right direction to insist on the Lordship of Christ and not simply treat Jesus as a deliverer from sin but not a good counselor for your life. The way I used to say it to young people that would help them grasp what I mean is, Do you think you have a saving relationship with Jesus if you embrace him as a very competent and loving rescuer, deliverer, savior from sin and hell, but you think he’s a really lousy, incompetent, foolish counselor with regard to your sex life? Are you willing to trust him as a counselor with your sex life? I’ve had people say, Hmm. That doesn’t sound like saving faith to say I trust him to get me out of hell, but I don’t trust him to guide my sex life. No, it’s not. I’m going further to say that trust of him as a counselor for your sex life has in it a treasuring. He is a good and satisfying friend and counselor when it comes to all the aspects of my life.

Matt Tully
For those who have read the book, and maybe friends of yours who have expressed concern or hesitation, would you say that the issue there would be they’re not really understanding what you’re saying? Or maybe they’re quibbling with how you’re saying something, but the substance is there in agreement?

John Piper
For some, that’s the case for sure. I think we would see eye to eye if we spent long enough clarifying terms. I used J. I. Packer as an example of that at the beginning of the book when I say Packer doesn’t even like the word “experience” to describe saving faith. Well, I said I’m going to use the word “experience” all the time! I think, if Packer were here and we could talk it through, he would understand my use of the word “experience” and his use of the word “experience” are different. If we could decide on the same definition then we wouldn’t have a substantial disagreement. I think a lot of people who are going to furrow their brow when they read, if they penetrate through to what I mean, we would not be in disagreement. However, that’s not true for everybody. I know that in enough conversations that I’ve had. There are going to remain differences. Some are going to say, for example, Look. If you insist on using the word “love” for what is included in saving faith, you have inevitably contaminated faith with works because the demand for love is a demand from the law. That would be the simplest way to put the argument. My answer to that is no, I’m not contaminating faith with works because the word love is used so many different ways in the Bible, and the way I’m choosing to use it—and I could point to numerous texts—is as treasuring. I’m not loving Jesus in the sense of , Whoever loves me must do everything that I say. Now you’ve got obedience to all his commandments included in faith. That’s ridiculous. No way am I saying that or implying that or drawing people into that. I’m saying what Jesus said: “He who loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me.” What that word means is treasure them, cherish them. If you treasure humans more than you treasure Jesus, then you are not a Christian. So, that treasuring dimension of love is what I mean when I say that love for Jesus, or God, is an integral component. Frankly, for those who have read the book, they know that’s not the word I choose to key on because of that very possible misunderstanding. Rather, I settled on my definition of saving faith as a receiving of Christ as a treasured Savior and a treasured Lord, and treasuring all that God is for us in him. I am making explicit that treasuring is the key word. The reason I did that is not just to avoid misunderstanding but because there are two texts: the parable of Matthew 13:44 where to be a Christian is to find a treasure hidden in a field, and the other one is in 2 Corinthians 4:7 right after he says that God enlightens our hearts to see the light of the gospel of the glory of God in the face of Christ. He says, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” Jesus and Paul give me warrant to use the noun “treasure” for the gospel and the glory that we embrace, and then to simply turn the noun into a verb when we describe how one embraces or receives that.

46:09 - Saving Faith and Christian Hedonism

Matt Tully
Core to your understanding of the Bible, your work as a pastor for over three decades at your church, and even the ministry that you founded—Desiring God—is this idea of Christian hedonism, that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. So, as a final question, how would you say that core idea of your whole life fits with what you’re saying now about saving faith?

John Piper
What I mean by Christian hedonism is a philosophy of life that grows out of the biblical insight that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. What grows out of that conviction, that God gets glory by our being satisfied, is that we ought to pursue satisfaction in him, which is why I call it hedonism because the basic historic meaning of hedonism is a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. That’s exactly what my life is. Psalm 16:11 says, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” God said that to beckon us in to pursue him as the source of full and lasting pleasure. I’m on a crusade to get people to stop settling for two bit yields of pleasure in this world and to go for broke and live their lives for maximum pleasure with God forever in heaven—which might cost you your life here on earth. He who hates his life will keep it, Jesus said. I want to keep it because I want to be happy forever with God because he gets glory when I’m happy in him. That’s Christian hedonism. What I’ve done in this book is show that God is so committed to that principle—he gets glory for finding him as satisfying—he baked it right into the Christian life from the beginning. He didn’t say, Oh, that reality will kick in ten years after you get saved. No, it doesn’t kick in ten seconds after you get saved. It is the miracle of salvation. Second Corinthians 4:6 says that what happens in conversion is my blind eyes that regarded the jewel of the gospel as worthless, my blind eyes are opened and I see in front of me a treasure, a jewel, and it is precious. It is satisfying. I’m at the end of my quest. He who comes to me will never thirst. I’m at the end of my quest. I find satisfaction in Christ crucified, risen, reigning, coming, saving, befriending—that’s my life. That’s my treasure. That, I’m saying, is right at the heart of what saving faith is. So, I think I said it a minute ago but I’ll say it again that God ordained from all eternity that faith would be the means, or the instrument, by which we are reckoned righteous. When we believe and do not work for our justification, we glorify the grace of God. We glorify grace by looking away from ourselves to the all-sufficiency of his justification by imputing Christ’s righteousness to us. However, God aims to get more glory than being a sufficient sin-forgiver, or an efficient righteousness-imputer. He means to get glory for being an all-satisfying treasure, so he built that into saving faith as well. Saving faith embraces Christ as my righteousness, embraces Christ as my Lord, embraces Christ as my treasure. In doing that it is satisfied in him, and so we arrive at the basic statement of Christian hedonism: God is most glorified in me when I, in my saving faith, am most satisfied with all that he is for me in Jesus.

Matt Tully
Thank you so much, John, for taking the time today to explain this vision of saving faith that you have and show us from the Bible where you see it. We appreciate it.

John Piper
Thank you. It’s a privilege to be here.

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