 I made a huge mistake and in today's video I'm gonna tell you about it. Here's the thing, let me take you back a little bit. I think it was like four or five years. I just finished up my first year at university, thank goodness I'd been done that, but then I wanted to invest my efforts in making YouTube content. That's what I was passionate about. I wanted to make content about Jesus and what it looked like to follow him and theology and apologetics and all that good stuff. So I started putting out more videos and one time I put out a video, one of the first videos that I put out was called the pursuit of pleasure, a road to destruction or something ominous like that. Within the video, and I'm not going to show it to you, I watched it recently and it's just so bad on so many levels, not just from like the theological concepts in it, but also how it's shot and stuff like that. It's just like painful, so I don't want to subject you guys to that. But basically in the video I paint this picture that you're either kind of on this road of trying to pursue pleasure or you're sucking it up and pursuing Christ and picking up your cross and following him even though it's not fun, it's like what you should do. That might be ringing true for you and it definitely did when I made the video and maybe some concepts in there are correct, but the emphasis was totally off. I was wrong and one of the reasons was that I didn't point out the difference between godly pleasure and worldly pleasure because there is a difference. Here's what the Bible says about worldly pleasure. It says, I do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride and possessions is not from the Father, but from the world. So obviously worldly pleasures are not good. Okay, we can all agree that is not good, but there are godly pleasures. What does godly pleasure look like? Well, this is exactly what I'm learning in this book called When I Don't Desire God by John Piper. The subtitle is How to Fight for Joy and it talks a lot about how we should be finding our delight and our pleasure in Christ and so it's not that pleasure in and of itself is a bad thing that we should just be sad all the time. We'll talk about this in a second, but it's not just like that kind of thing. It's that we should be finding our delight and our joy in Christ and through Christ. So obviously God's not just calling us to ponies and rainbows and just fluffy clouds and, you know, cotton candy. Of course, this joy isn't just all fluffy, right? And we need to pick up our cross. We need to follow Christ. Yes, of course, all that is true. But what I was missing was that my joy was to be made complete in Christ. I was working so hard to try to do the things that God wanted me to do out of duty and out of obligation and to just kind of power through. And it was pretty miserable to be honest. But then I began to come across verse after verse after verse about the joy of the Lord. And I began to think, man, maybe I have this wrong. These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be made complete, John 1511. In some ways, I saw Christianity as this mournful anxiety filled, treading along with no real joy. Yeah, we say we have joy. Oh, you know, it's joy. It's not happiness. It's this, you know, inner thing. And even though I wasn't experiencing that, that was what I would have said. But at the time, was I experiencing any joy? No. And then I began to dig even deeper and explore verses like this, for he satisfies the longing soul and the hungry soul he fills with good things. Or like this, you make known to me the path of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy at your right hand or pleasures forever more. I was missing something that was joy that I was yet to tap into. And I didn't know how. But at the same time, what was evident to me was there are trials and tribulations in this life. So why is the Bible constantly calling us to joy even though we experience so much pain and suffering? And also I began to come across these people and I have for, you know, pretty much my whole life that basically say Christians should always be happy. And those people I could not stand. So I feel like in some ways I went to the other ditch. And it's not true Christians aren't supposed to be happy all the time. We see examples of this in the Bible. David lamented when Saul and Jonathan died. Also the disciples, they mourned. They were sorrowful. They lamented when Stephen was martyred. Think of Jesus himself when his friend Lazarus died. He wept. In Matthew 5.4 we hear Jesus saying, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. Okay, so there is such a thing as biblical sorrow. It's the recognition and the reality that suffering and pain and sin, they do have consequences and we experience those on a very real personal emotional level. We're not just these sticks of bricks. We are walking around. No, we experience this. But this sorrow is seen in light of the Savior's victory. I've said these things to you that you may have peace in this world. You will have tribulation, but take heart for I have overcome the world. Okay, things are getting out of hand. I'm going to try to connect all of this right now. So this idea that Christians are supposed to be happy all the time, that's not true. Yes, we experience suffering. Yes, we experience trials, tribulation. We experience biblical godly sorrow at times. But we also need to understand, okay, our joy, where are we finding our joy in those moments of trials and tribulations? Because for me, it was often looking to the world to try to appease me or satisfy me or turning to the world to delight in social media or movies or videos, something to distract me as opposed to turning to Christ. Here's the thing, our joy ought not be contingent on our specific circumstances. See, you might hear that a lot from Christians. They say, you know, joy is just kind of something that's there and you just kind of always have it and happiness goes and comes and, you know, but joy, it's always there. Why is that? Why would that joy always be there? Well, actually, for me, the joy is not always there. It's not just like the intellectual reality that God won and that's joy, because joy is also a feeling. It's also like an experience that you feel. And so this idea that, oh, you always experience it. It's like, no, like I understand what people are talking about. They're like, there's just something deeper. And I get that at the same time, though, how do we find that? How do we find that like experience of joy? Because it seems so elusive. I know a lot of people, they're looking around. They're like, how do I find this? And they look to other things other than God because when they look at God, their desires aren't stirred up. They're not delighting in Him. They're not finding joy in Him. Why is that? Well, you know, it's mainly because of sin. It's mainly because we don't enjoy and find pleasure in the best things. We've been so trained and our minds have been distorted to take in counterfeit pleasures and delights, like, you know, movies, TV, you know, social media that has like, you know, oh man, it entertains us for a little bit. We're consuming this stuff, but we've lost sight on who should be our primary affection and our primary delight and our primary, you know, joy. It should be Christ. And man, I don't know how to change your mind and your thoughts. Like, this is pretty much what the whole book is about. It's like, okay, well, we recognize that Christ should be our primary delight and we should find joy in Him and through Him. How does that happen? Well, it's through God's sovereignty in enacting transformation in our hearts. So then we actually desire Him. So we actually find pleasure in Him. So we actually can find joy because joy is a gift. You can't just manufacture it out of nothing. That comes from God. So what do we do? Well, for me, it's like, okay, I'm going to go to prayer. I'm going to get in the Word. I'm going to come to know and taste and see that the Lord is good. That's what gets me excited because, look, if I'm not in the space where I'm delighting in the Lord, if I find, oh man, other things so much more attractive and I just continue to feed myself that garbage, man, nothing is going to change in my life. I'm just going to be satisfied and apathetic to the things of God. But if I truly desire that I would come to delight in the Lord, look, I'm going to pursue Him. And Jeremiah, God says, if you seek me, you will find me. And so that's pretty much the calling of a Christian is to recognize our own shortcoming and humble ourselves to realize that we haven't been delighting in the things that we ought to be delighting in. And for some of us, man, we just believe that there's no joy to be found whatsoever in Christianity. We just think, ah, man, it's just going to be, you know, we're connected with the truth. You know, Christianity is true, but it's not the fun road. It's the sad kind of miserable road. And look, there are trials and temptations. Look, you are going to be subject to persecution and perhaps even martyrdom. That's what the book talks about, like John Piper is like clarifying. He's like, hey, I'm not saying that this is going to be all ponies and rainbows when all of a sudden you realize that your primary objective as a Christian is to light in the Lord and enjoy Him and, you know, find your joy in Him. It's like, that doesn't mean that your life is going to be yippy-skippy, but it does mean that you're actually like focusing on the main point, like you're actually living out what God has called you to. And that's so exciting, but it's not going to be easy. And so how can we even in the midst of trials, tribulations, suffering, realize that there is so much delight and pleasure to be found in Christ? I love this quote from John Piper. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Are we satisfied in Him? Are we? Are we turning to the things of this world? I think for me, my main objective is to stop chewing on the junk food of the world and begin to taste and see that the Lord is good, to seek Him with my whole heart and to have my joy be made complete in Him, to rejoice in the Lord always. And I say again, rejoice, to have that dwelling in my heart richly, like, that's the goal, man. That's the goal. That's what it's all about, is to enjoy God and see His glory reign over the earth and through believers. And that is just so exciting to me. Thank you so much for watching this video. I know this is a new set we got going on here. Well, a little bit different setup than usual. So I hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoy this video, please give it a like and subscribe because I'm putting out new videos all the time. This video is made possible, possible. This video is made possible by my patrons on Patreon. It is only because of your guysport that I can continue to make this Christ-centered content. 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