Podcast: Enjoying Food, Sports, and the Rest of God’s Good Gifts (Joe Rigney)

May 29, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Delighting in God and in His Good Gifts

In today’s episode, Joe Rigney talks about the biblical command to love God and turn away from idols, and he discusses how to navigate the confusing task of being in the world but not of it.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:08 - How Christian Hedonism Shaped My Theology

Matt Tully
Joe, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

Joe Rigney
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
I think all Christians, at times, wrestle with the tension that we feel between loving God first and foremost and loving and enjoying the things of this world that are all around us, whether that’s good food, a spouse, our children, or even just a favorite hobby or activity. I think it’s probably a universal Christian struggle to some extent, but it seems like in our circles—the Reformed evangelical circles, and maybe even more specifically, those of us who have been shaped by the ministry of John Piper and some of his teaching about desiring God above all else and seeking to honor and glorify God—that maybe this can sometimes feel like a particular challenge to think about. So to start us off, can you share a bit about how you first encountered John Piper’s teachings and this idea of Christian Hedonism and how all that has shaped your own theology?

Joe Rigney
Yeah, absolutely. I think my freshman year of college was when I first really began to listen to Piper. This will date me, but I was ripping Piper sermons off the Internet through Napster. So, that’s where it all began.

Matt Tully
That does date you, but it’s okay.

Joe Rigney
It does. The kids these days are like, What’s that? But Napster was a thing. It was music sharing, but there were also sermons. I was in college in 2001, and somebody had recommended it and said, I think you’ll like this guy, and so I started listening to sermons and I was just blown away. The thing was that I had, in my senior year of high school and into the summer before college, the Lord had done a great work in my life through the word and through pastors in my local community where I had really leaned into the delight yourself in the Lord, as the deer pants for streams of water—that sort of stuff. And so when Piper came along with “God is most glorified when we were most satisfied in him” it was just, Yes! This is it. I was already primed for it, and he just gave it real clear language and categories that I didn’t have and just built it out. You can go off like a bottle rocket spiritually, and that’s what happened. It just felt like the world opened up. The Bible broke open in fresh ways, and God seemed to be much bigger and more satisfying. And so that was where it all began, when I was in college back in 2001 or so.

Matt Tully
Really quick, unpack that a little bit more, because I think we often hear that from many people who talk about Piper’s impact on them, and more than just Piper himself, but some of these doctrines—this big vision of God. What do you think it is about that big vision that was so compelling and has been so compelling and influential for so many of us, if you had to kind of articulate what’s going on there?

Joe Rigney
I think there was a sense in which most of us grew up in church. I grew up going to church, believed the gospel and embraced Christ when I was about eleven or twelve , and then had a typical youth group upbringing in Texas—and a good one. I am very grateful for the way that I was discipled and invested in throughout my high school years. It was all good, and my pastor was actually very influenced by Piper, though it wasn’t the sort of thing that he would quote in sermons. But after the fact realizing, Oh, some of these seeds were planted there without me knowing it. And I think it was honestly the clarity of it. It was the clarity which with John opened the Bible and demonstrated that God really did do everything for his own sake, but that that was not to the exclusion of my joy but was in fact the means of my greatest happiness. I want to be happy, God says I should live for his glory, and how do those relate? And it’s that God is most glorified when we’re most satisfied. And that just registered. By the grace of God, it just registered with the soul. It resonated in a deep and profound way. And then I think, further from that, it’s because it was so biblical. It just sent you into the text and you could see it for yourself. You could see it again and again, from Genesis or Revelation, why God does everything he does and how he’s aiming at our ultimate and highest good and wants to fill us with himself, because that’s what we were made for. And so I think it just fits reality. It was a big and glorious vision that took hold, for me, in my college years, and what led me to come to Bethlehem back in 2005 to pursue seminary.

Matt Tully
How does that big theology of God and his glory as supreme and desirable above all things come into contact with this question of wrestling with how much we love God versus enjoying the things of the world?

Joe Rigney
What it did, and you didn’t realize it at first, but what some of what John said was like it went off in the soul, and then the question is, Okay, I was made for God, I was made to know and enjoy him—and not his gifts. You’re made for him, not his gifts. And so then the question became, Well, then what am I supposed to do with them? And this was a slow burn question, I would say, because John addresses it in some of his books, for sure. He talks about marriage and earthly life and some things like that, and so it was there. But I know for me, there was just this tension that I felt between the God-centeredness—Whom have I in heaven but you, and on earth there’s nothing I desire besides you—and then just the simple and inescapable fact that I did, in fact, desire other things. It was, How do I reconcile that? I do love my friends. I do need food, and I enjoy it. I have hobbies. I’m surrounded on every side by delightful things that God made. How does this work? And so I think that those tensions began to come into play. For me, my own thing was that John was very insistent on a biblical approach to wealth, generosity, and a wartime mentality—This life is war. God is sovereign. And so how do we steward the things we’ve been given towards the war effort—the advance of the gospel. So that idea of war time, for me at least, became what I would describe now as very narrow. I didn’t know how to engage with things that I couldn’t immediately and intuitively see how do these go to the war? And so that was causing some dislocations in me. It was causing dislocations in my early marriage. There’s a story I tell in The Things of Earth about one of my first classes here at Bethlehem. I had just got married and went to introduce myself to one of the pastors here. I said, I’m Joe. I just got married. Things are going pretty well. I can’t figure out why candles are so important. My wife and I were having these discussions about them. We had lights in our house and lamps, but she would buy candles and light them. And I was like, Why are we doing this? You can see the distortion here. Why are we wasting money on candles? And so we had these kind of jokes, and I made a joke about it and said, I don’t get why candles are so important, but here we go. And the pastor—Pastor Sam Crabtree here at Bethlehem—just looked right back at me and said, You don’t know why candles are important? And I was taken aback a little bit and said, Uh, no. And he goes, Because she is. I can still feel the bomb that was there. It was unearthing that something, as I had received it, had kind of gone wonky. I’d missed something. So all of that was churning in that experiential tension. I saw it in the Bible because you do have the nothing I desire besides you and then that God gave everything for our enjoyment. Nothing needs to be rejected if it’s received with thanksgiving—1 Timothy 4 and 1 Timothy 6. And so there was this kind of low-grade guilt when I would enjoy things because I wasn’t enjoying God “enough.” All of that was kind of running in the background, and then somewhere around probably 2010 or so, a couple of things came together for me. That’s where all of my own working in the Scriptures, seeing more how God reveals. It’s actually revelation. The world is revealing. It’s not that just the Bible is revelation. The Bible is special revelation. Everything is revelation. Everything is telling us what God is like. And so at that time, I think I was also reading Jonathan Edwards and C. S. Lewis. I remember at one point reading a section from a book by Fred Sanders, Deep Things of God, in which he kind of described the difference between a reductionist approach to Christianity that took the points of emphasis—Bible, cross, salvation, heaven—and it made those points of emphasis the whole story. His commendation was that that’s reductionistic. Instead, what you want is that that is the main point of the story, but that means that if there’s a main point, it means there are all of these other background points that really help to support and make the main points. And so all of that was happening around 2009–2012 in me that eventually became the wrestling, that produced The Things of Earth and then later Strangely Bright.

10:48 - Is It a Good Gift or a Potential Idol?

Matt Tully
It seems like one of the other things that can be in the air for Christians is this constant fear of idolatry. That’s part of this story. I think back to times in youth group when we’d be reading through the Old Testament, and we come across all these stories of Israel’s idolatry—turning to the idols of the land and God rebuking them for that. And so often, even wrapped up in our interpretation of the Bible, is this desire to learn from that and apply those examples to our own lives. Most of us are not really being tempted to worship Baal on some little monument somewhere, so instead we take that and we look at all of God’s good gifts and we talk about how those can be idols. Do you ever wonder if we’ve trained ourselves to actually look at the good gifts around us less as good gifts from God and more as potential idols? Is that part of this?

Joe Rigney
Absolutely. One of those catalyst moments for me is I remember a distinct story where we talked about kids on Christmas. If a parent gives a child a gift and if a parent knows his kid really well and gives the kid just the right gift and says, If I give my son a gift, I know he’s just going to love it. He’s a real wonky kid. He loves to engineer stuff. You give him a Rubik’s cube and he’s going to be play with that for hours and just be delighted. And it would be like if you did that, and then the kid tossed the gift away and said, But Dad, what I really love is you. I’m glad for that. I want that acknowledgement. That is what this is about, ultimately, at some level is the relationship. But what would’ve delighted me as a dad is that you would play with the toy and be delighted by the gift. What that led me to was, in throwing me back into the Scriptures, was that in Romans 1, the two great sins that Paul describes there as fundamental to our truth suppression—“What can be known about God is evident to us in the things that have been made”—the made things make him visible; his invisible power and his attributes. But then he says, “but we don’t honor God as God or give thanks.” And what struck me in all of these wrestlings was there are two sins there, and they’re both important. One of them is idolatry, which I think you’re articulating there. We’re aware and we see how the gifts can become idols. We can elevate them and make them the main thing. We can not pursue them back to the source. So, that’s the idolatry. That’s a real danger, and we ought to be fearful of it. “Take care, brothers, lest there be any of you with an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” But the other thing there is ingratitude. Ingratitude presumes that I don’t need the gifts, I don’t want the gifts, and I’m not going to say thank you for the gifts. So if you flipped it around and you said, So what does God want from us, given that he’s revealed himself in the things that have been made? He wants us to worship him—to honor God as God because he’s ultimate—and to give thanks, which means receive the gifts, enjoy the gifts, and then give thanks to him for the gifts. And it was that picture that filled out for me personally, and then now I hope for others in these books, that both of those are essential to honoring and glorifying God. If you lose either of them, it’s going to be twisted and distorted.

Matt Tully
That’s a helpful articulation of maybe the two ditches that we can fall into—idolatry on the one side and ingratitude on the other side. I wonder if you could help us see what that might look like. What are some of the warning signs that we are falling too in love with the world, that we are falling into idolatry, in light of the things that God has given us?

Joe Rigney
In the reflections that led to the book, and it shows up in both of them, is a recognition of our creatureliness, and the fact that we live in time and we can’t do everything all at once. And so just an ownership and embrace of that led me to develop these two categories of direct godwardness and what I call indirect godwardness. And this is, I think, probably one of the best ways to test—the first ways to test anyway—whether you’re doing it. Direct godward is when your attention—your mental, emotional attention—is directed to God directly. So, that would be when you’re praying, when you’re reading and meditating on the word, maybe when you’re listening to a sermon, or when you’re singing praises. Those sorts of things are what I would call direct godwardness. He’s the direct object of your attention. Indirect godwardness is all of the other stuff. It’s what you and I are doing right now in having a conversation. It’s what you’re doing when you’re eating your food. It’s what you’re doing when you’re playing with the kids, when you’re doing your work. I say it’s indirect godwardness because the idea is you’re going up to God directly when you pray, you read the word—you go to him directly as ultimate and supreme. And then what he’s doing is sending you back out into the world that he’s made—he’s put you in it for a purpose and designed you to make him known and to raise your kids and all that sort of stuff—and he sent you there, and it’s indirect. So he’s present with you even if he’s not the immediate object of your attention. And so the way that I gauge this is asking how both of them are doing. So when I think about testing, it’s asking, Is there a real richness, and do I want to pray? Do I want to go to God directly? Do I bring my concerns to him? Do I praise him? Do I read his word for edification and correction and teaching, reproof, correction, exhorting, and all the things that the Bible’s supposed to do for me? Do I read it as food to eat? And then pray. Am I regularly going to him with prayer in the mornings when I wake up, when I go to bed at night, and then all throughout the day. For example, before I do an interview like this. Lord, help me. Give me words. So, am I going to him? That would be one test, and that’s the test of, Am I falling into idolatry? Because idolatry would be relying on my own strength. I don’t need God. I don’t want God. He’s not in the picture. That’s idolatry. But the flip side is what does that do to everything else? How am I with my kids? How am I with my wife? How’s work going? Am I throwing myself into it? Am I enduring the hardships? And so is it having that effect? Am I grateful? Am I walking around just going, Look at all of the good things in my life. This is amazing. How good is God? Am I drawing on the strength of my devotional and direct engagement with him for these other things? Is there a real joy and hope in the midst of all the stuff? So, that’s the baseline way of what I call rhythms of godwardness—up to God, out in the world; up to God, out in the world. That’s kind of the basics of how it’s supposed to go. Now, the other big piece here, I would say, and maybe there’s two, that I would say in terms of tests would be generosity. This is a test of are you loving the things too much and you’re just hoarding them for yourself? Or are you gladly spending and being spent for others? That could be your family, and it should spill the banks of your family into your church and into the world, but are you generous with what God has given you? You’re receiving it, and you’re receiving it not as an evil thing, like God’s blessing you and you’re like, No, get it away! I don’t want it! That’s not it. You’re receiving it. You’re enjoying it. That’s why he gave it. But then you’re sharing it. This is the 1 Timothy 6 where Paul says we don’t wanna set our hope on riches but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. And then he says we’re to be generous and eager to share and be rich in good works. And so it’s supposed to be that we enjoy it and then it overflows from us to other people. So, there’s generosity as a test of whether or not we’re hoarding and loving the things of earth too much. And then the last one is suffering, because suffering is when the good things that God gives are taken away or not given. The longings that you have that God doesn’t meet or is not meeting right now, or the things that are good that he removes. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. And what you do in that moment tells you where your heart is. I’ll put it this way: when I’ve heard feedback about both of these books, the chapters on suffering really resonate with people, partly because what I’m saying is that the depth of the grief that you feel when your parent dies—I lost my dad in the middle of writing all of these books years ago. My dad died of dementia and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Losing my dad was incredibly painful. And so we’ve faced loss in our community and among our friends. And so Christians who love God and know that he’s supposed to be supreme sometimes can really struggle with the guilt over their grief, because they’re like, It hurts too much. Is the depth of my pain at the loss of my dad an indication of idolatry? That question is just kind of running in the back, and a big part of what I was trying to do is to say, no, it hurts as much as it’s worth. My dad was valuable because God made him and gave him to me as a gift, and therefore to feel the depth of grief is a good thing. It’s a sign of love, and it leads me back to God, who is my heavenly Father and who gives and takes away. And so how do we grieve? We grieve deeply, but we don’t curse God. And so this is where Job becomes actually a great model for us. I think that this is what the book does for us, at least those first chapters especially, where we say Job clearly loves his family, his wife, his kids, and then he loses everything. He says, The Lord gives, the Lord takes away. He’s grieving in sackcloth and ashes, but he doesn’t curse God. Even when his wife says to curse God and die, he says, That’s foolish. I’m going to receive both from the hand of God. And that’s what I’m trying to commend. That’s the suffering counterpart of the enjoyment of the things of earth—what do you do when they’re lost? And both are there—the supremacy of God, but the pain over the loss.

20:59 - How Do I Know If I’m Generous Enough?

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful way that in some ways it really feels freeing because it embraces the pain and the suffering. It gives us permission to feel that and not stuff that down, because it actually does testify to the gift giver, not just the gift itself. I want to go back briefly to your comments about generosity being a helpful test as well. We often think of generosity in terms of money, but there’s also, as you said, time and our talents and our abilities. But one of the challenges that I think I’ve felt at times, and I know my wife and I have felt, is we want to be generous, but sometimes we struggle to know what that looks like. Where is the limit? When it comes to our money, it’s a zero-sum game. We have to put it somewhere. And so we could be more generous. We could always be more generous, say to our church or to starving children in Africa, and not go on that family vacation that we’re looking forward to that will be a huge blessing to our family and enjoyable for all of us. And so how do we know when we’re being “generous enough”? Is that even the right question that we should be asking when it comes to testing our own desire for enjoying good things?

Joe Rigney
That’s a great question, it’s a common one, I think wisdom and prudence are always a part of this. There’s no one size fits all. The first thing is you really do have to have a full-orbed view of it, which is part of what I think I was missing in my early years, thinking of it very narrowly and not recognizing that giving my time to things is a form of generosity. It is an actual resource. Generosity is about all that you have, not just the dollars in your pocketbook. That’s one thing that you have, and that can be a particular snare. The love of money is the root of all evil, right? That’s a biblical teaching, but it’s also true that it can be a great blessing. And so when you look in the Bible and you think about how Jesus said to the rich young ruler that he needed to sell everything he had, and that was a part of showing where his idols were. But when Zaccheus was saved, he only gave half of his goods to the poor. Barnabas, in the book of Acts, sells a field that he has and puts the money at the feet of the apostles. The poor widow only puts her two pennies in the offering box, and Jesus said, That’s amazing. And so the particulars are always about the person and what God has given you. But one of the tests I use frequently is, and C. S. Lewis used this, he said, “We ought to give until it hurts.” So, give until it pinches. I think he’s particularly talking about financial giving there. You ought to be giving, and giving doesn’t just mean to the church or to missions, as important as those are. In all of your giving, are there things that you are saying, These would be nice to have, but I’m going to go without them because I want to do good to others? That’s the more fundamental question. And that could be a whole lot of different things, even if you don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have enough to give in that sense, so what else do you have that you can give? The standard is to be as generous with others as God has been with you. Just be a conduit of that kind of grace in whatever. You mentioned it’s a zero-sum game. What I think you meant is I have a budget—there’s a certain amount of money coming in and a certain amount going out—so at one level, all of it’s got to be accounted for. It would be foolish, at some level, to sit there and say, Well, I don’t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage. I’m just going to give all of this away. And unless God gives you a special grace for that where you’re a George Mueller who’s like, That’s how we’re going to live. I’m going to say to God, ‘This is how we’re going to live, and, God, you’re going to have to supply’. I think for most of us, the actual standard is you have obligations. You’re giving to your family by paying your mortgage. You’re putting a roof over their head. That’s a part that you shouldn’t put in the “I’m not giving” category. You are giving. You’re giving something to your family. And then it’s just overflow, overflow, overflow. And you should just be the sort of person that tries to give in every direction and watch if God doesn’t make that pie bigger, because he knows, Okay, , that’s a person that if I give more to him, it’s going to get more places. That’s what God is after. He wants you to be the channel of grace, which means you’ve got to receive it, enjoy it, and then be rich with it. Open-handed generosity. That’s the more fundamental thing. You can pinch pennies and your heart can be wrong even as you’re trying to do the right thing.

25:39 - Ingratitude and Idolatry

Matt Tully
Maybe a final serious question and then a couple of fun ones at the end here, Joe. I wonder if someone listening right now might be thinking, yes, I can see how there could be some Christians that are so worried about idolatry and so single focused on God and his glory that they might actually be in danger of spurning God’s good gifts. They might be in danger of ingratitude. But they would say to take a step back and look at where we live. We live in America where we have so much at our disposal. We have so much wealth and so much time, and we spend so much on entertainment. The real problem facing the vast majority of Christians is decidedly on the idolatry side, that we are often tempted to idolize, and this other temptation is just a minor thing. Do you agree with that? Is there truth in that? Is one of these two ditches just way more prevalent and dangerous for us than the other, or do you think it’s more complicated than that?

Joe Rigney
I think it’s probably more complicated than that. We don’t choose the era in which we live. In relation to most of human history, every single person in America, in relation to the vast majority of human history, everybody—rich and poor—are unfathomably wealthy. We have indoor plumbing. That’s a form of wealth. I live in Minnesota in the winter. It’s almost impossible if we didn’t have the kind of heating that we have. And so these are all background kinds of wealth that we just sort of assume and that we ought to give thanks for. And I do. I regularly remind myself, I’m sitting in here, it’s twenty degrees outside, and I can do everything that I would normally do. What a gift! I’m not shivering in the cold, trying to make sure that the fire stays lit so that I can get some work done or something. And so there’s massive, what I would call, background wealth. And if your mentality is, I’ve got to get rid of all of the background wealth and the foreground wealth in order to live faithfully there’s something missing. Instead, it’s gratitude to God for all of it, and then eyes up, looking for opportunities to distribute it, to share it—open-handed and eager to share. And so, yes, the danger of worldliness and idolatry, of only thinking of yourself, or of only thinking of the gifts is a real and pervasive danger in a wealthy society. But God’s way of fixing that and addressing that is not guilt trips and always looking under everything for the idol trap or trying to divest yourself entirely of the things of earth, because that’s not how he made the world. He made it a different way, and so you want to cut with the grain of how he made it. So there is a real need to be generous, but you’re not going to get to generosity and you’re not going to get to openhandedness by trying to close your heart to all of the blessings that God gives you. You receive them, and then you give them. And so that would be more the counsel. So I would say, yes, there is a real and pervasive idolatry that runs through the world and that can infect Christians, where we begin to take things that we must have if we’re to keep up with the Joneses. That’s a real danger in every generation. And the Joneses are just different in every society. But we’re not going to get rid of that. Instead, it’s worship God, love God, remember that everything ultimately comes from him and comes back to him. He is the Father of lights, and every good and perfect gift is from him. And it’s meant to lead you back to him. You start there. Let that go off like a rocket in your soul, and then out of that, receive him in everything he’s made and give him in everything that he’s made.

29:34 - Rigney’s Favorites

Matt Tully
In keeping with talking about the good gifts of God in this life—the good earthly gifts that he’s given to us—I want to hear some of your favorites in some of these categories. First, what’s your favorite food?

Joe Rigney
I really like a good steak. If you’re talking about a main meal, a good, well-cooked (not well done), well-prepared steak. I start thinking, and then there’s another one. Everybody asks what your last meal would be before you die. There’s a Cajun restaurant on the Texas coast that I went to every year growing up called The Boiling Pot. And you have a lot of these places everywhere now. They’re Cajun boil, so it’s crawfish and shrimp and potatoes and sausage and corn, with a kind of spicy Cajun thing, and then they come and dump it on the table. That’s by far my favorite.

Matt Tully
Delicious. Favorite sport?

Joe Rigney
Baseball. Not close, because it’s God’s favorite sport.

Matt Tully
That’s in the Bible somewhere I think.

Joe Rigney
That’s right.

Matt Tully
Genre of music.

Joe Rigney
I would say folkish. Andrew Peterson and The Gray Havens sort of stuff. There are some guys doing psalms in that mode nowadays that have a little bit of that flavor, so I’d say that kind of thing would be what I would listen to just for fun.

Matt Tully
Andrew Peterson is a great example of what we were talking about before, where some of his music celebrates the earthiness of our lives and the goodness of God in those things.

Joe Rigney
Absolutely. His music definitely was one of the influences in producing all of this.

Matt Tully
Favorite vacation spot?

Joe Rigney
That would be the same place I mentioned with the restaurant. Growing up, my family went down to the Texas coast every summer. My grandparents had a house down there, and so we would go there every summer for 18 years of my life, and then actually into college. We don’t get back there as much because we live really far away, but we do periodically. And so that was always the vacation. And I’m a creature of habit. I’m not a big I gotta go see all the things, all the places. I’m going to go to the place that feels like home away from home.

Matt Tully
All right, last one: your favorite hobby, And you can’t say writing.

Joe Rigney
I don’t know that I would. I don’t know if it counts as a hobby, but the thing that I enjoy doing in the downtime right now is coaching my kids in baseball. I have three boys, but two of them are old enough to play baseball—they’re thirteen and eleven. For the last six or seven years, with my oldest, I’ve had the joy of coaching their teams. And now since they’re both in it, I assistant coach both teams so that I can get to all of them. And I would say from about right now, and this is the time of year when it picks up and runs through the end of July here in Minnesota, that’s what I spend all of my—not all—most of my non-working hours are spent doing that. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

Matt Tully
Joe, thank you so much for talking us through these difficult tensions that we sometimes feel in our hearts, but hopefully offering us a breath of fresh air and a bit of calm as we think maybe more biblically about some of these things and how we can honor God with our lives.

Joe Rigney
Thanks. I was so glad to talk about it.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.