Coming to Christ for All the Wrong Reasons - Ask Pastor John

Video from Desiring God

Coming to Christ for All the Wrong Reasons - Ask Pastor John

"Audio Transcript

We talk often about money and wealth and comfort here on the podcast because you send us a lot of questions here — and we address it a lot because there’s an ever-present danger in thinking that Jesus is the means to gaining wealth in this life. That’s the false gospel of the prosperity gospel, and it’s alive and well in our day. It’s a major theme on the podcast, as you can see in the APJ book on pages 106–113. In other words, people come to Christ for all the wrong reasons, and money is not the only one, as we see today in this email from a listener named Nate:

“Pastor John, thank you for your ministry! My question ties directly into the concept of Christian Hedonism and my joy in Christ. This concept was so important to me years ago because, though I had accepted Christ, I remember deeply wrestling with a lack of desire for God. I didn’t desire God the way I wanted to, but I knew I wanted to be happy. Christian Hedonism taught me that desiring the Lord wasn’t some bleak reality I’d never attain, but a beautiful, attainable reality that had direct implications for my joy. Desiring the Lord became less about trying to be ‘more Christian’ and more of an act of desperation to find the joy and fulfillment God always intended me to have in him.

“As I reflect on how Christian Hedonism helped me see that my longing for joy and my desire for God go hand in hand, my question is: Are there any wrong reasons to come to Christ? Is coming to him for the sake of finding joy truly sufficient? As I’ve matured, my desire for God himself has certainly grown. I came to him for fulfillment, and now I love Jesus for who he is. But is it biblical and appropriate to come to faith in Jesus for less than Jesus himself? Is it possible to exalt my own joy in Christ over Christ himself?”

There are a lot of questions — about ten questions — in that one question. So, I’ll just confess right off that I have to be selective here in which ones to answer. And no offense, really, to Nate (because I might be dense), but there are some I just don’t understand. So, I’m going to do my best to interpret the question and then reflect on the question. That’s where we’re going. Maybe we’ll look at, I don’t know, three or four of these.

1. Can we come to Christ for wrong reasons?

He asks an easy one to start. “Are there any wrong reasons to come to Christ?” Answer: Yes. But even the yes (even the yes!) we need to clarify, because I’m assuming that the phrase “come to Christ” may not be authentic; you’re not really coming to Christ. So, I’m taking it to mean, “make a decision and an outward profession that Jesus is Lord,” and that I’m coming to him to get what I can’t get any other way. That’s the way I’m interpreting “come to Christ,” which might be real or it might not be real.

“Any reason for coming to Christ that doesn’t include Christ himself as our supreme treasure falls short.”

And the wrong reason that the Bible talks about most in coming to Christ is money. In 1 Timothy 6:5, Paul speaks of depraved people “imagining that godliness is a means of gain.” Money — that’s why I’m coming to Jesus. I see it working. It works for people. They get rich. These people have come to Christ because they think it’s a way to get money. And Paul says that coming for that reason plunges one “into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Timothy 6:9).

There are other wrong reasons for coming to Christ, but I would just say that, in summary, any reason for coming to Christ that doesn’t include Christ himself as our supreme treasure falls short of why we should come to Christ.

2. Is coming for joy sufficient?

Nate asks, “Is coming to Christ for the sake of finding joy truly sufficient?” Now, I’m not sure what this means, so I’m going to interpret two aspects of it so that I can try to answer.

First, I’m going to take “finding joy” to mean finding genuine joy in who Christ is and the way he acts and all that Christ or God is for us in him. I’m taking “finding joy” as genuine: finding joy in Christ himself. So, then, the question becomes this: Is coming to Christ for the sake of finding joy in him and his ways and all that God is for us in him — is that sufficient? And now I have to ask, “Sufficient for what?” What does sufficient mean here?

So, let me interpret. Does it mean, “sufficient to save us”? Or does it mean, “sufficient in the sense that you don’t need to come to Christ for anything else if you come to Christ for joy in Christ”? Now, I think, in answering the second one, we will probably also answer the first one. So, let’s try this. (This is complicated. Put on your thinking cap, or slow down the audio, or read the transcript.)

Should you come to Christ for the sake of finding something more than joy in Christ? I think you should come to Christ in order to find Christ himself as the essential cause of your joy and your thankfulness and your admiration and your trust and your hope (and that list could go on). But if you are joyfully embracing Christ for all that he is, then your joy is in those very attributes of Christ that give rise to thankfulness and admiration and trust and hope.

When I speak of coming to Christ for the sake of finding joy, that joy is an essential element of all genuine spiritual thankfulness and admiration and trust and hope. If you took the element of joy — try this in your own thinking — if you took the element of joy out of thankfulness (joyless thanks) and admiration and trust and hope, I don’t think any of them would be spiritually real. You would have hollowed them out. There would be nothing left that would glorify God in your heart.

I think joyless thankfulness, joyless admiration, joyless trust, joyless hope, are all contradictions. If you take joy in Christ out of thankfulness, take joy in Christ out of admiration of Christ, take joy in Christ out of trust in Christ, take joy in Christ out of hope in Christ, you’ve destroyed them all. You don’t have spiritual, biblical, Christ-honoring thankfulness or admiration or trust or hope anymore.

And if that’s right, then coming to Christ for the sake of finding that all-pervading joy in Christ is sufficient in both senses. Joy is there in all the other spiritual affections (so, to pursue it is to pursue them all), and, being there as part of all the other necessary affections, it is sufficient for salvation.

“People may love loving God more than they love God.”

That’s a crucial statement. Let me say it again, because somebody’s going to pick at this — I mean, there’s a level of scholarship that’s going to pick at this, I know. I’m saying that this joy, being there as part of all the other necessary affections, is sufficient for salvation. So, that’s number two.

3. What if we come for less than Jesus himself?

Nate says, “Is it biblical and appropriate to come to faith in Jesus for less than Jesus himself?” And the precise answer is no. It’s not appropriate. It’s not biblical. It’s not biblical or appropriate to think you have come to Christ in a saving way if you have come for less than Jesus himself.

But oh, how careful I want to be here, because I believe there are many acts of saving faith that are defective because they’re immature and yet are saving. For example, many of us were scared of hell when we were six or eight or ten, and that was a big part of our coming to Christ. We came in order to have a cool heaven and not a hot hell. And we would have been hard put at age eight or nine to explain anything other than we wanted Jesus because Jesus got us into heaven and eternal life. Now that, I think, is quite defective, but I’m saying it is possible that beneath that inadequate reason for coming to Christ, there was, for many of us (I believe it was true for me), a genuine spark of treasuring Christ for who he is.

In other words, a child — or an adult, for that matter — may have a better faith than they are able to articulate. God sees, God knows, the heart. I want to be very careful not to write off a child or another person because of defective ways of saying or seeing Christ. So, when I say you must come to Christ for Jesus himself, I don’t mean there aren’t other motivations, and I don’t mean that there’s no spark of authentic embrace of Christ himself for who he is.

4. Can we exalt our joy over Christ?

And finally, Nate says, “Is it possible to exalt my own joy in Christ over Christ himself?” Again, I’m just not quite sure what that means, but I’m going to answer it with a saying from my longtime associate Sam Crabtree, which I think might get at what this is asking. And in any case, it’s just a great saying that I found tremendously helpful over the years.

Sam said to me years ago that he’s concerned that, in worship services, some people may love loving God more than they love God. And what he meant was that they enjoy singing happily about God with other people on Sunday morning and may not be connected to God at all in a real love relationship. So, if that’s what Nate is getting at, then no, don’t exalt the act of worship, joyful worship, over the person worshiped.

So, Nate, thanks for pressing in with me to try to make our treasuring of Christ as authentic and pure and Christlike as it can be." from the Transcript

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. Read more about John.