Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.
We've all seen the cartoons. The devil whispers in one ear and an angel whispers in the other. The implication? Choosing sin means happiness and saying no means a humdrum existence. Today we'll combat another lie about God. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. We're in a series on ten lies about God and why you might already be deceived. Pastor Lutzer, the choice you're talking about is lie number nine that we must choose between God's will and our happiness.
Does it have to be one or the other? Dave, let's think about this for a little while. Isn't it true that oftentimes people, young adults, even older adults, they look at the world, if they are Christians, they look at the world and think that they have been shortchanged. They think to themselves if they could just have the pleasures of the world, which involves sexuality and money and the way in which we sometimes define success, that they would really, really have a good life. Well, you know that the answer is this, that God even has something much better for us.
I love the verse in the book of Psalms that talks about the pleasures of God. And so one of the lies is that what we have to do is follow our own will rather than God's will in order to find true happiness. That indeed is a lie. And that's why I encourage people to listen to this message carefully. But at the same time, I have to remind you that this is the last week we're making a special offer available for you. It's my book entitled 10 Lies About God. And today we are discussing lie number nine.
And at the end of this broadcast, I'm going to be giving you some contact info as to how this book can be yours. You know, here at the Moody Church, we have a committee that investigates those who would join what we call the executive committee. Some of these positions are for elder or for deacon or for other important places of leadership in the church. And the Constitution requires that we ask them a series of 10 questions. One of those questions is whether or not they are willing to renounce worldliness. And worldliness is defined as that which leads us into sensuality and various sins. We asked someone that question and his response was, oh, yes, I can say yes to that. My wife and I don't do any of those things.
In fact, we live a very boring life. Now perhaps others would have put it more diplomatically, but sometimes we think this to ourselves. If I really serve God and give him pleasure, one thing is sure, I can't give myself pleasure at the same time. There's a conflict there, we think. The conflict is between pleasure and boredom, between my happiness and my duty, we think. Well, I want you to know today that I think that that is a very false, a very false choice.
And the purpose of this message today is that we might understand that we do not need to make that choice. As a matter of fact, first of all, God, as we shall see, is filled with pleasures. God enjoys being God. He's full of pleasure and therefore he does not deny us pleasure. He in fact commands that we have pleasure.
Delight thyself also in the Lord and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Well, as you know, this is a series of messages titled 10 Lies About God and Why You Already Might Be Deceived. We've talked about lies such as that God takes no responsibility for natural disasters, lies that he can be whatever we want him to be, or that he can be approached in many different ways.
Last time we spoke on the lie that the fall actually ruined God's plan. And today we come to lie number nine. Number nine is that we must choose between God's will, between God's pleasures and our own pleasures.
We do not need to make that choice, as I will show in this message today. What we're going to do is to actually look at five statements that link together this business of God's pleasures and ours. At the end of the time, if you have listened carefully and I know you will, I believe that your life is going to be changed. You know, that is my philosophy of preaching, to preach in such a way that hopefully our lives as a result of it will be changed forever. Sometimes that may happen, sometimes it may not, but that's the goal to which I always strive. And I want you to not judge where we are going until we've gotten there.
In other words, don't draw any conclusions until all five statements have been properly linked together. And then you will understand what God's desire is for us and the wonderful privilege that we have of finding joy in him. Are you ready? I need to give you a moment to make sure that you are. I see your heads are nodding.
And so with that permission coming from you, I shall begin. Number one, that God himself has many pleasures. God himself has many pleasures. Just think about it for a moment. Just imagine that you were God.
Use your lively imagination. All powerful, nothing can possibly defeat you. All knowledge, nothing can outwit you.
All presence, nothing can possibly outlast you. And, and you've got all of these resources. Don't you think that God has resources, enough resources to be happy?
I would think so. Owning everything, being everything, creating everything. I think he has enough resources to be a happy God. You've heard me say it before, but I have to say it again because it fits so beautifully. Wouldn't it be terrible?
And some of you know where this is going. Wouldn't it be terrible if God were moody? Wouldn't it be terrible if sometimes he was just totally upset, so upset that there would be no way we could possibly delight in him? How could you delight in a frustrated, unhappy God? What is God delighting in, may I ask?
First of all, in the Lord Jesus Christ. And here I'm going to give you just a lot of verses that you already know. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. In Isaiah, God says regarding him, he is the one in whom my soul delights. Colossians chapter one, verse nine, it pleased the father that all fullness would dwell in him. Now when the Bible says thou shalt have no other gods before me, that applies to God too. If God were to delight in his creation, in a sense that he would not delight in himself, he would be committing idolatry.
He would be putting some other God before him. Is God committing idolatry when he delights in Christ? No, when he delights in Christ, he is delighting in himself. Jonathan Edwards says the infinite happiness of the father consists in the enjoyment of his son. God delights in his son. God also delights in creation.
In Genesis chapter one, God saw that it was very good. It says in the Psalms, may the Lord rejoice in all of his works. It even has a verse where it talks about the sea creatures, all those little things that you sometimes see and there have been videos made of them. God delights in all those things. In Job chapter 38, verse seven, the scripture speaks about the morning stars shouting for joy. I need to tell you that many of the ideas of this message today comes from two books by John Piper.
One is entitled Desiring God and the other is The Pleasures of God, books that I commend to you, very excellent books. And Piper suggests that the reason that the angels were created before the universe is that God would have somebody on hand to enjoy it. Can't you just imagine him lining up all the angels just before he creates the universe? And then he says to all of them, just watch this. And suddenly, boom, all of these stars are flung into existence.
And you can imagine the morning stars. That is the angels shouting for joy and saying, wow, God is great. That's what creation does. It says God is great. God is great.
God is great. If you haven't been blessed yet in this message, if you're sitting there saying, well, pastor, I'm waiting for a blessing and it hasn't arrived yet, maybe this will do it for you. God delights in his people and the choir especially should be delighted in this. It says in the book of Zephaniah, amazingly chapter three, verse 17, God delights in doing good for all those who hope on him and he exalts over them with singing. Choir, I want you to know today that it is astounding to me that even God sings when he is supremely happy. And the scripture says he exalts over his people with singing. God delights to do good things in your life.
Now the question is, is that idolatry? The fact that he delights in creation? No, because creation sings his praises. Is it idolatry for him to delight in us? No, because we are created for his glory. Everything contributes to his glory and God delights in being God. You say, well, is he always happy?
Isn't he sometimes angry? Aren't there some things happening in this world? We hope that there are some things happening in this world in which he does not delight. The Bible says he does not delight in the death of the wicked.
Jonathan Edwards solved that dilemma in this way. And again, here I rely on Piper's interpretation. He says that if you look at what is happening in the world with a narrow lens, there are many things that are happening in which God does not delight and God is angry over. But if you see the full scope of what God is about, when you begin to understand that virtually everything contributes to his glory, he then is delighting in everything and knowing how it is going to end up. In fact, did you know that there's a verse in Deuteronomy that says this? I will delight, God says, in judging you when you are disobedient.
I read that and I say, really? God says, yes, because I will even delight in my justice. So though in a narrow sense, God does not delight in what is happening on planet Earth in many instances, looked at from the standpoint of eternity and his purposes, he is a delightful, happy God knowing that it will all turn out according to his plan. God has many pleasures. That's the first link in our quest for joy.
Let me give you a second. The second link is that we were created to seek pleasure. We were created to seek pleasure.
You can deny it, you can argue against it, but I know you better than that. You were created to seek pleasure. In fact, wouldn't it be strange if God himself had all these pleasures, all these delights, and then he denied pleasure to us and said, I don't want you to enjoy anything.
No pleasure to you, thank you. What a God that would be. Pascal said it, perhaps as well as anyone. All men seek happiness.
This is without exception. Whatever different means they may employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and of others avoiding it is the same desire in both attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object, namely the seeking of happiness. This is the motive of every action of man, even those who hang themselves.
C.S. Lewis said, if there lurks in the modern mind of the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly hope for enjoyment of it is a bad thing, if you think that, he says, I submit that this has come to us from Immanuel Kant and the Stoics, not the Christian faith. If you consider the unblushing promise of reward promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with sex and drink and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. Like a child, an ignorant child who makes mud pies because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. Lewis says we are too easily pleased.
Now think about it. Why do people get married? I've performed quite a few marriages. I have yet to hear a couple to say, well, our goal is misery. And what we'd like to do is we're so happy, single, but we would like to be miserable.
Would you marry us? You know, those kinds of people, by the way, even those who know they should not get married to a certain person, you know why they do it? They do it actually because they think that the whole pain, the pain of pulling out of the relationship is going to be greater than the pain of going through with the marriage. Of course, they're wrong, but that's what they're thinking. Because we are so constituted that we always act to maximize our joy and to minimize our pains. And that's right.
Pascal was right. That's why people commit suicide is because they're trying to minimize their pains. They may not do it, but that is the minimization of pain, that they think that they are because you and I are so constituted that we seek delight and happiness and we can't help it. And we're created that way by God.
That's the second point. Now we come to the third link in this chain. God has many pleasures. We are created for pleasure. Number three, our temptation, our temptation is to seek lesser pleasures. Our temptation is to seek lesser pleasures. Listen to this wonderful passage of scripture from the 11th chapter of Hebrews.
Just listen for a moment. By faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God. You say, well, he sure wasn't seeking pleasure. Why in the world would he have become the leader of these rebellious Jewish people if he was seeking pleasure?
Well, let's read the rest of the text. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead to the reward. Moses says, look, I've got two different kinds of pleasures before me, the pleasures of sin, which I could enjoy.
And if you know anything about the treasures of Egypt, we had no idea until King Tut's tomb was exhumed. And you marvel at the treasures of Egypt, just absolutely overwhelming. And so Moses said, I could have the pleasures of sin. I've got those pleasures and the pleasure of knowing God and looking forward to a future reward.
And so I'm going to do that, which brings me the most happiness. And he went with God and his pleasures. Our temptation is to seek the lesser pleasures. That's what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden. Eve looked at the fruit of the tree. She saw that it was good for food, a tree to be desired to make one wise.
And so she said, I'm going for this pleasure. The problem was that it cut out many other pleasures, namely the pleasure of walking with God in the cool of the day. It cut out all of these other pleasures. She went for the wrong pleasures.
Of course she desired pleasure and that wasn't wrong, but she went for the wrong ones. Notice it says the pleasures of sin for a short time. One translation says the fleeting pleasures of sin. What can we say about these lesser pleasures? First of all, they are indeed fleeting.
They're here today and gone tomorrow. But pleasures are like poppies spread. You seize the flower, its bloom is shed.
Or like a snowflake on a river, a moment white, then gone forever. The fleeting pleasures of sin. Or another way that we can characterize them is that they are idolatrous, these pleasures of sin.
They are idolatry because we begin to seek our happiness in them rather than God. Piper is right when he says that sin is what we do when God is not meeting our needs. Luther said that no man consciously sins, but that first of all, he thinks wrongly about God.
He thinks to himself, if I go my own way, I will get more happiness. God is not the means to happiness. And so he is deceived by the pleasures of sin, which are idolatrous and therefore can never finally fully satisfy.
These lesser pleasures are fleeting. They are idolatrous. They promise freedom. That's their promise. They make the same promises God promises.
They promise freedom, but they end in bondage. Jesus said that a servant has to serve his master and whoever commits sin becomes the servant of sin. Sin begins to tell him what to do. Sin begins to tell him what programs to watch on television. Sin begins to tell him exactly where to go and what to do.
And he is driven and he thinks he is free. It's been said accurately that sin takes you farther than you intended to go, keeps you longer than you intended to stay and costs you more than you intended to pay. Those pleasures of sin.
What is addiction? Why is it that God allows some people to be addicted? It is God's way of reminding people that sin is a bad idea.
It's a bad idea that the pleasures of sin for a season are deceptive and very much lead to bondage. So the pleasures of sinner overrated. In fact, there's a text in the scripture that says that he who rejoices in pleasure and it's talking about now the pleasures of this world is dead while he rejoices and is pleasurable. Remember that story of a man who walked into a funeral parlor and saw this marvelous, beautiful casket with of course the person who had died in the casket and saw all of these flowers and saw this elaborate setup and said to himself, now that's living, that's living.
He that is in pleasure is dead while he lives in that pleasure. And that's our temptation. If I could get this message across to every teenager today because see the problem with teenagers and we've all been there and by the way it's not just teenagers, it's folks like us who were teenagers a long time ago.
The problem is it's easy to look at the world and think we have been gypped. To say to ourselves if only we could cast off these restraints and do our own thing. There is a story about a kite, a legend that said that the kite thought to itself, you know, if I could just get rid of that string, the string is holding me down. I'd be able to fly higher. I'd be able to fly as high as the stars, but that string is restraining me. Well, one day the string snapped and the kite was so happy because now it could go to the stars and kiss those stars.
But it discovered a law of aerodynamics that the string that holds a kite down is the string that holds it up. And I want to say to you as I say to myself that if we want to fly high, if we want to be the ones who are going to rise to the stars, let us remember it is best. It is inevitably best that God be in control. God must be in control.
Well, notice how far we've come. God has many pleasures. We are created to seek pleasure. Our temptation is to seek the lesser pleasures, the pleasures of sin. My dear friend, it is so important that we emphasize to this generation that the laws of God are not given in order to restrict us, but actually to help us to achieve and to bring about fulfillment and flourishing.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been confronted with lies such as God seems to be whatever people want him to be? You know, the reason I've written the book entitled 10 lies about God is that I've heard people say that God is in effect who we want him to be and there are many ways to the divine. Well, these are the kinds of lies and a host of others that I write about in the book 10 lies about God and we need to emphasize that this is the last week that we are making it available for you. Here's what you can do to receive your copy. Go to rtwoffer.com.
That's rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. Learn to defend your faith. Expand your knowledge of the almighty and I believe that you will become a better worshiper. The title of the book is 10 lies about God.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337 and thank you so much for helping us as we spread the gospel of Jesus Christ around the world. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you find God's roadmap for your race of life. Long-term gain is often short-circuited when investors go for short-term fast profits. The same is true in life. Going for immediate pleasures can short-circuit our potential to enjoy the overwhelming pleasures of God, pleasures that can last a lifetime. On our next Running to Win, some good reasons why we should think long-term. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
