More than a feeling? | Theocast

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are going to be tackling emotions, affections, and feelings as it relates to your assurance in Jesus Christ. A very prominent evangelical recently said, to define saving faith apart from feelings is futile.

It's a pretty strong statement, and we're going to try and do our best to look at Scripture, history, and the confessions and answer the question, do we find assurance based upon our feelings, or is our security in Christ more than a feeling?

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All you have to do is go to smile .amazon .com and then search for Theocast, Inc., and choose us as the supporting donation. To learn more about this and other ways of supporting us, you can go to theocast .org slash give.

Theocast, Church Planting, and Bivocational Ministry

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Today our hosts are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church, and Jimmy Buehler is with us today, believe it or not, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Gentlemen, specifically Jimmy, it's good to be around the microphones today with all three of us. It makes the conversations a little more lively, especially when Jimmy comes in as hot as he is today.

Jimmy Buehler. That's my cow. I try my best. I try my best to keep things spicy.

Justin Perdue. Yeah, Jim, Jim, we haven't heard from you in a while, so why don't you give us an update? What's going on in the state of Minnesota?

Jimmy Buehler The state of Minnesota, so the classic thing to do in Minnesota is you talk about the weather, so just know that it's still bone-chillingly cold and that's all that needs to be said. John has experienced that.

He's experienced Willmar cold, so he knows.

Justin Perdue. Well, not minus 30. That's when you called me the other day and told me it was minus 30. I didn't experience that.

Jimmy Buehler. Yeah, that was cold. Honestly, the big thing that's going on just in our life is kind of twofold. Our church is up and rolling, which is good news. It's exciting news. We've got home fellowship groups that meet.

We have a men's ministry that's meeting. We've rolled out systematically catechizing our kids and our families, which is exciting. I've also re-signed a contract to come back to the school that I teach at bivocationally to come back next year, which kind of just takes a little bit of that financial pressure off of us as a family.

It's not without its challenge, as many who listen who perhaps are bivocational or who worship at a church where the pastor is bivocational. You're just less available for your people and for your family, which is difficult.

So pray for us in that regard. But it's also, just financially speaking, it just takes a lot of that load off. It's exciting. The school is glad to have me back and might be rolling out a Christian theology course, which you can only guess what we're going to talk about all the time.

Things have been good, added a couple of families to our midst. That's awesome. We definitely still feel like we're in that very infant stage of finding our footing, getting wording around our message, starting elder training, all of those things.

A little bit for me is I feel like I'm drinking from the church-planting fire hydrant. It's a thing. It really is. My wife and I often feel like we're ships passing in the night, so that provides some challenges as well.

I knew it wasn't going to be easy. There's a lot of sweetness in the early years of a church being planted, and they're also really hard years at the same time. Indeed. There's a lot that could be said about that.

We may do a podcast at some point on the first five years or something, because it's real. Give me four more years.

When you're planting a church, often you see the best in people, particularly your core families, the way that they sacrifice and they give and they serve. Honestly, being bivocational, which all of us, I think, have experienced, what it does for me is it gives me a level of compassion that I did not have before in full-time ministry, where when I ask somebody to do something, either to preach in my stead or to plan some particular event or to facilitate a group, I know what it's like to have that pressure of a full 40 to 50-hour-a-week job plus a family and then trying to do ministry.

I'm grateful for all the things that I'm learning. I just wish it would slow down a little bit, but here we are.

It does give you perspective, as you've already alluded to, and it works on you in such a way that when things do begin to shift and you're able to give more of your time toward the ministry of the church, you're just more grateful for it.

I think it humbles you, it tempers you, even in terms of your expectations. So, there's a lot of value in it that I think in refining that happens in that bivocational season. I'm not saying that everybody needs to do bivocational church planting.

I mean, that's not at all what I'm saying. If you get sent out of a good church and you're fully funded, praise be to God. But if you do find yourself in a bivocational situation, the Lord will use it.

I will say that as Jimmy is experiencing, there are a lot of emotional highs and emotional lows. Your emotions run rampant when you're a church planter.

Well, and you, I mean, let's just feel it in all kinds of ways, dude. Yeah, there are days where you feel really good, and there are days that you don't feel good at all.

As a matter of fact, I know when those days are happening, because I get a text from Jimmy and it's typically like three words, and I was like, oh no, oh no, I better call him. I quit. Well, I'm not saying, Jimmy, there are times you don't feel like a very good pastor.

Is that what you're saying?

You don't feel. There are times that I don't feel very good. Everybody's got feels. JP.

I'm ready, guys. I'm ready. Why don't you use that transition to bring us in? We're popcorning it around all over the place. All right, so. Feel, feel, feel. Brothers and sisters, listeners of Theocast, today we're going to be talking about feelings, feelings and faith.

Assurance, Feelings, and Faith in Christ

So what prompted us to have this conversation is a video that was put up on social media in the last few weeks by Together for the Gospel. It's a clip of John Piper from 2018's conference, and it's about a two-minute clip from the message that he gave in that conference two years ago.

And he is making the argument that it is futile to try to define saving faith apart from feelings. And many people on Twitter in particular, because that's the platform where I think the three of us are probably most active, many people on Twitter in the Reformed world and the confessional world grabbed hold of that clip and were assessing it and talking about whether it was helpful or not.

And the three of us started texting each other pretty much immediately. And I know we had conversations in my own home. My wife and I did. I know you guys probably did the same. And in conversations even in my local church here in Asheville.

And I trust that Grace Reformed and Christ Community, you guys were doing the same thing. So I'm not going to bury the lead here. We don't want to do that. We are concerned that the things that John Piper articulates in that particular video clip undermine rest in Christ.

They undermine assurance. And they put a burden on sinners that sinners, frankly, just cannot bear. And that's the conversation we want to have today is about not that video. We want to have a much bigger conversation than that one video clip.

But we want to talk today about feelings and faith and how it is that we're saved ultimately, but even how we would go about defining faith in Christ that produces and gives rest. So kind of teeing it up that way.

John, why don't you go ahead.

John or Jimmy, either one, guys. Jump in. Well, we just had a recording today. Today's a Wednesday afternoon. A little bit different recording time for us. So today means that Theocast came out with an episode.

Today is Radical Faith. We're normally about three or four weeks ahead. And when we decided to have this conversation, the one thought that came to my mind was John Piper is very clear on how someone is saved.

He fits into the, I would say, the evangelical, historical, and I would even say the Calvinistic faith as it relates to someone going from death to life. He holds to the utter depravity of the human heart.

He holds to the absolute sovereignty of God in election and predestination. He holds to limited atonement. So he understands that it's specifically paid for that person's soul, their sins, imputation.

So what's hard is that he gets what I would say some of the core foundation issues correct. And then where Theocast has kind of found our home and where we feel most helpful to the conversations that are happening in the broader evangelical world is pulling the clutter off of the gospel, that which causes weight and confusion.

And I would say John Piper is not preaching a gospel here that is heretical. And much of what he says in that sermon is correct. But just because someone may say 75 of something that is correct and that 25 that they add at the end is so confusing and so deflecting and so different than where the foundation is, the foundation then crumbles under the very weight that you have put on top of it.

And so I would say this whole idea of John Piper, he's assuming on the front end, he's assuming a proper evangelical reformed doctrine of salvation. Or at least of justification. Of justification, yes.

And then there's, I think, the radicalness of Sola Fide. He's almost trying to explain it away. To give him credit for the brilliant man that he is and the smart, compassionate, generous man that he is, I think there's a side of him that he's trying to explain away the radicalness of Sola Fide.

So I would start there.

And it's important to remember in this conversation, just for those that are listening, what we're not trying to do is tear down a brother and his ministry and the way that he has served over the course of a few decades.

That is not at all what we're trying to say at all. We also want to keep in mind context. I'm always a little fearful. I don't know if you guys feel this way. I'm always a little fearful. If an outsider listens to something that I say in a sermon, it's a little bit of that.

You don't go to our church if you're an outsider. You don't attend our church. You don't know the context of the things that are happening in the body, the things that I'm aware of as a pastor that I need to tailor my sermon towards, and so on and so forth.

I think there's a little bit still in this evangelical world. Something we like to say is that evangelicalism is a pietistic movement. It's the water we swim in, and it is the air we breathe. It is just everywhere.

What I mean by that is in a pietistic world, the focus so often becomes the interior of the Christian, what is happening in your feelings and your quote-unquote affections. That was a buzzword for many, many years.

It still is. There's this heightened sense of trying to weed out those who are perhaps faking it or who perhaps are among us, but they're not of us kind of thing. It's this overly acute desire to have a quote-unquote pure church, which I think all of us want.

However, often what happens there is it's kind of the wheat and the tares parable, or the wheat and the weeds, if you will. We see that there's weeds among the wheat, which is clear. What we want to do as an overzealous farmhand is we just want to start cutting it down.

What does Jesus say in that parable? Don't do that. You're going to cut down the wheat as well as the weeds. My fear and my concern is in a short clip like that. Not only is it ripped out of context, so we need to be mindful of that, but also when it was tweeted out, it was tweeted out in sort of this authoritative, this is truth, you should listen sense.

What happens, unfortunately, is people will listen to that. Where does it point them ultimately? It's this navel-gazing interior focus that it's me, me, me, me, me. What do I feel? What do I feel? Don't hear us trying to vilify feelings at all, but it was such this authoritative, strong statement that saving faith without feelings or particular feelings, a particular set of feelings, was futile.

I don't know if you guys want to jump on that. JP, if you want to jump in and discuss a little bit more.

I want to piggyback on a couple of things that you said. I do feel what you were saying about the fact that this is a two-minute clip of a probably 50 to 60-minute message. The one thing that I would say about that in trying to be reasonable here is that the video clip was tweeted out for the entire world to see, and it was promoted as, hey, here's why you should come to this conference even because you're going to hear things like this.

Like you even said, Jimmy, there's kind of an authoritative tone and feel to the thing. We wouldn't be interacting with this at all, at least this particular video clip. This idea of faith and feelings we want to interact with, of course, but we wouldn't be talking about this particular video today were it not tweeted out for everybody to see.

That's just one observation, that when you make things public and you're going to say things in such an authoritative fashion, then for others to come in and evaluate it biblically and then even according to the rule of faith and the history of interpretation that's existed in the church for 2 ,000 years is fair game.

That's what we're trying to do today. I want to say a couple more things about pietism before we maybe move this conversation forward. Pietism really in its beginnings, it really essentially was an obsession with feelings and affections.

It was a hyper-emphasis on feelings about Jesus and affections for Jesus, and those things being the emphasis and the center of attention in the Christian life. As we've said so many times, and you already alluded to, Jimmy, you even talked about this with respect to this video, where is the Christian pointed ultimately in this?

The Christian is pointed inward to examine his or her heart, to examine his or her feelings and affections. The concern with that, not that we should never examine ourselves and not that introspection is bad, but when that becomes the emphasis, it's very concerning.

I'm sure I'm going to quote some of this stuff later, but I'm just immediately thinking about how my own feelings, and this is true for everybody, feelings vacillate by the moment and they ebb and flow like crazy.

This is why God's people through history have always found great comfort in the fact that our assurance and confidence and our security is found in God, not us. It's found in the sufficiency of Christ and not our sufficiency.

It's found in the fact that though my emotions change all the time, Jehovah never does. That's the thing that's hard here, is that it seems to be undermining the foundation of Christian confidence altogether.

I put out a tweet last week or two weeks ago that said, every breath you take is riddled. It's filled with sin against your Father, which got a little bit of traction. Some people were struggling with that.

Even when you're preaching, I was like, absolutely. Even when you're praying, yes. It doesn't matter. Here's where we struggle, and this is where, thank the Lord, Luther was able to bring some clarity here about the differences between us as a saint, that which is filled by the Spirit, and that part of us that is still waiting for glorification.

We don't live in glorified bodies. Because of your nature, you can't love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. You can't love your neighbor as yourself. You can't do that perfectly because within our nature, we still have selfishness and we still have ambition.

We still have pride and arrogancy and laziness. We're still corrupt. Right. The question, which has always been the one thing we've always thrown back to some of the confusion, I feel that Piper clutters this assurance area, is how much emotions need to be tilted?

Is it a 50 -50? Is it a 60 -40? At what point do you say, I can have assurance because my emotions and affections meet this level? I also want to say, where in Scripture will you point me to that will create that watermark that I have to hit?

I'm going to point you to some confessions. That will give you the standard. I'm going to point you to some confessions, which is derivative of Scripture, but I'm going to have a hard time looking at Scripture saying, I can find the watermark of my emotions and my affections without finding assurance.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e-book available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. And we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest, and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

And you can get this at theocast .org slash primer. And if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our Total Access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

The Heart, Jeremiah 17, and Looking Outside Yourself

Yeah, so that's really good, John. I remember when I was kind of coming up in the Young Restless Reform movement, and one of the favorite verses to be thrown around was Jeremiah 79. You know, the heart is deceitful above all things, desperately sick.

Who can understand it? Where it was really, in the context that I was in, that verse was being lobbed against kind of a more, dare I say, charismatic, feely-based sort of faith, and trying to bring people back to rich doctrinal truths.

And yet, what was so ironic is that the Young Restless Reform movement, particularly that I was part of, we would quote this verse. You know, we love Jeremiah 17, and we loved Romans 9 as well. But particularly Jeremiah 17, we love to throw this in people's faces.

We love to throw this out. And yet, the way that we quote-unquote discipled people, the way that we ministered to people, we pointed them to the area that we told them to hate or to not trust. We pointed them to the area.

The area that you're telling them is desperately sick.

Yeah, the area that we're telling you is sick, in need of healing, in need of saving. We're asking you to look there for some sort of comfort. So let me just kind of share an analogy. Yesterday, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon after work in urgent care with my son.

He had kind of got a nice little stubbed toe, and turns out he kicked his nail in, and it was all sorts of gross, all kinds of nasty down there. It would be like me telling my son to look at his toe, which was all bruised and bloody and just kind of gross, and just say, hey, buddy, see how healthy you are?

Look at that toe. Look at that toe. Isn't that just a wonderful sign of health? It would be like, well, Dad, you're insane. He was limping so bad, and yet this is often what we do. We talk about this all the time.

In one hand, we will tell people how desperately sick they are and in need of a savior. Then often the medicine that we give them is to go within, go deep dive within your own soul and within your own heart and try to find some sort of comfort.

Well, the enemy loves that. He's like, well, great, this is my territory. I'd love for you to come to my camp. I don't know if you guys want to speak to that a little bit more or perhaps take it on a different angle.

We've already alluded to the saint-sinner reality that has been articulated by many people through history. Martin Luther is perhaps most noted for it. The phrase from the Reformation, simul justus et peccator, at the same time saint and sinner, at the same time justified and sinner, that has all kinds of ramifications and implications for this conversation.

Because I think every redeemed person through history would acknowledge that because I am born again, I am a new creation in Christ, yet at the same time I'm still battling the corruption that I inherited from Adam.

Those things are true of me. In my inner man, I'm thinking about Romans 7, of course. I'm thinking about Galatians 5, 17. In my inner man, I delight in the law of God. There's a feeling word. I delight in, I love God's truth, and I want to do all these good things.

I think every Christian ever would say, I want to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I want to love my neighbor as myself. I want to be filled with gratitude toward God, love toward God, affection toward God.

I want to be humble before the Lord. We could keep saying, I want to feel all of these things toward God. The problem is we battle the flesh, and we battle our inherent corruption. To use the language of the Apostle Paul, we do not always do what we want to do.

We do not always feel what we want to feel. The flesh waging war against our spirit keeps us from doing what we want to do, is what Galatians 5, 17 says explicitly. That reality is so critical for us to hold here, that intention with what we're talking about with respect to affections.

If Piper, for example, were to say that any Christian wants to, but yet we often struggle to, I would be like, brother, absolutely. I completely agree with you. The problem is we don't feel, yeah, the problem is we don't feel what we want to feel, and we don't feel what we should feel.

Then the question is, as we've already alluded to, where in the world is our hope and our confidence and our assurance? Because if you're pointing me to my feelings, the authenticity of them, the realness of them, the level of them, how much is enough?

How could I ever know that I'm feeling a sufficient amount of these things? Because, again, it's going to change. It's going to be different tomorrow than it is today. I can't even explain that to you as to why that's the case.

Because I wake up some days, and I'm thinking, I am just not feeling it today like I even was yesterday. I think that's the normal experience for the believer.

If you look at the Apostle Paul when he writes to the Corinthian church, who, historically speaking, all three of us would agree that they were very confused in their affections. No doubt. They were running after the wrong gifts.

They were running after the wrong sexual pleasures. They were running after money. I mean, it was all kinds of affections.

They had misunderstood Christian freedom. They think that they're celebrating sin. All that.

But yet, Paul does not write to them in such a way where he's trying to shake them in their assurance. He actually uses the gospel and says, it's the gospel that I want to preach to you, and then uses the love of God for them as the way to correct the issue.

Listen, God's affections towards you, God's consistent emotional affection, whatever, we can get into the emotions of God another time, but we'll say the affections of God towards you, which are constant, ever-flowing, and according to John 17, it is the same affection that he has for the Son.

He says that he loves us the way that he has loved the Son. It is there that we, as the believer, find the true sense of our foundation. Let me just read to you, Justin, I know you have something here in a minute, but I'm going to read to you the LBC Confession, 1689.

It's 18 .4, and these confessions are important because we have, when it comes down to, if we were to take all of the Reformed Confessions, and when it comes to assurance, and when it comes to proper understanding of justification, we're going to agree here.

And point four, it says this, True believers may in various ways have the assurance of their salvation shaken, decreased, or temporarily lost. This may happen because they neglect to preserve it or fall into some specific sin that wounds their conscience and grieves the Spirit.

What they are making room for is the frailty of the believer. We are frail creatures. This is why we reference things like Galatians 6, because we as believers, our affections and our emotions can absolutely be captured by the temptations of sin and pulled away at a point to where faithful, loving Christians have to come and rebuke us and pull us out.

So we could say, Mr. Piper is correct in that if the Spirit lives within you, you will have these newfound affections, but they aren't a constant flow that is ever unmovable. If he doesn't mean that, then Desiring God and some of his other books and his well-known sermons, he kind of needs to create that simileus et peccator feeling in there, but that's not the feeling I'm getting from most of his material.

Jimmy, are you okay if I jump in with a little bit of 1689 while we're here, and then we can move forward? Go ahead. I've got a couple things after that, but go ahead. Excellent. I'm going to try to do this quickly.

I'm reading portions of two or three different paragraphs from chapter 13 on sanctification and chapter 14 on saving faith as they articulate it. So this is 13 .2, talking about sanctification and just pointing out the realities that we have been highlighting.

This sanctification extends throughout the whole person, though it is never completed in this life. Some corruption remains in every part. From this arises a continual and irreconcilable war with the desires of the flesh against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh.

They go on in paragraph three to say, in this war, the remaining corruption may greatly prevail for a time. That's huge, that the war of the flesh against the spirit, the flesh may prevail for a time.

Certainly that would mean that our affections are not right. They go on. Yet through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying spirit of Christ, the regenerate part overcomes. So the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of reverence of God.

They pursue a heavenly life in gospel obedience to all the commands that Christ has had and King has given them in his word. But that acknowledgement that the flesh may prevail for a season is critical.

And then finally this, the definition of saving faith, chapter 14, paragraph two, this is a portion of it. These words are excellent. The principal acts of saving faith focus directly on Christ, accepting, receiving, and resting upon him alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace.

So there you have that. Directly on Jesus, the words used are accepting, receiving, and resting on him alone and for everything, justification, sanctification, and glorification, eternal life, all by virtue of the covenant of grace, not works.

And so it's very helpful that that's defining faith biblically as looking outside of yourself completely to Jesus alone for everything that you could ever need in order to be finally saved. Jimmy, go ahead, man.

Looking to Christ Alone for Justification and Rest

Well, I mean, I just want to speak a little bit from my experience. I remember severely battling through all of these things in college, being part of that specific context. And I just remember asking the people who were kind of influential in my life, and this is nothing against them.

They were very helpful for the season that I was in. And I do think that they loved me, that they cared for me, that they wanted what was best for me. But, I mean, I just remember, you know, reviewing these conversations years later where, you know, I would ask, how can I know?

How can I know that I am feeling the right things or that I'm saved? And the response that I typically would get is, well, you know, they respond with the question, do you feel that you love God? Do you feel this?

Do you feel that? Well, sometimes. And they say, well, then we'll just look, we're just looking for a pattern. Like, is there a pattern? A general trajectory. Which in my brain, I'm like, yeah, is there a trajectory of onward and upward?

And my response to that was always, well, how much? How much trajectory am I supposed to have? And finally, it wasn't until, you know, one of the, I remember one of my friends, he sent this to me a few years back, and I was like, where has this been all my life?

And, you know, shout out to our, you know, denominationally Reformed brothers and sisters that hold the three forms of unity. But the Heidelberg Catechism, question 60, is so weighty and good and something that I return to time and time again.

It's amazing. Where the question is this, how are you righteous before God? And the answer is, only by true faith in Jesus Christ. So that, though my conscience accused me that I have grossly transgressed all the commandments of God and have kept none of them and am still inclined to all evil.

God, without any merit of mine, but only of mere grace, grants and imputes to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ. Even so, as if I had never committed any sin, yes, as if I had fully accomplished all the obedience which Christ has accomplished for me, inasmuch as I embrace such benefit with a believing heart.

Again, when I was asking these questions of how can I know, how can I know, what if I don't feel these things? I wish somebody would have just pointed me to that, those truths. Exactly. Things that you can bank and rest on.

Go ahead, John.

One of my deacons, I know he probably will listen to this, I can remember early on. He's a very new believer, and he kept hearing me talk about the glory of Jesus Christ and the wonder. We were in Ephesians at the time.

He finally got up enough courage and said, Hey, John, I'm just going to be real with you, man. When you say the word Jesus, it does nothing for me. I don't know who He is. I don't know anything about it.

I believe I'm a Christian. I believe He died on the cross. I believe in God, but this whole thing about you saying the sweetest, the joy, the kindness, none of that. It does nothing for me. To which I could then say, well, then maybe you're not a Christian.

I could have said, because you are trying to have these affections for Jesus. What I begin to help him do is understand that through time and through exposure of the gospel, you're going to have, one, a knowledge base of trust, which then in the midst of pain and suffering, you will then understand what does it mean to rest in this absolute foundational, rock-solid love of Christ for you.

Just going back to, I'm reading the tweet again. It says, Defines having faith apart from feelings. Are there people in history who have these emotional experiences where they go from, it could be a horrible life or it could just be a massive struggle with doubt, to this overwhelming assurance and these feelings and affections come flowing out of them?

Yes, but I will tell you this, and every guy around here has probably experienced those overflowing emotions at points in their life. Every day doesn't feel like that to me. The other day it did, two weeks ago.

Justin, remember when we did the podcast a couple of weeks ago? We were just talking about how you had read Jeremiah, and I had read this idea about the glory of Christ. It was last week, and there was this emotional high I had, but I don't live there.

As a matter of fact, most of the time, I don't live there. Most of the time, I struggle to find my hope in Christ because my emotions are elsewhere.

The good news is the fact that we are saved by Jesus, not our feelings about Him. I think we can all agree that that's a good news. Agreed. The reality is... Resolved. Yeah. The reality, like John just depicted, and I alluded to this earlier, and Jimmy, I know you agree, is that there are seasons.

There are moments, there are days, hours, and seasons of our lives where we do have those waves of joy just washing over our hearts and souls. We're joyful. We're satisfied. We're thrilled. We're moved.

Those moments are fantastic, and I know that we all wish we had more of them, but then for every one of those moments, we probably have several where those waves are just not washing over our soul. The tide has gone out, and it's like, man, I don't know where my feelings for the Lord are today, but I can't find them.

In those moments, often I'm prompted, like you brothers are, to pray and ask the Lord to work and move in my heart and the rest, but I want to be fair to John Piper. He did write a book called When I Don't Desire God, but he had to write that book.

Seriously, though. He had to write that book because of the things that he had written and said in so many other situations because he paints a picture of the only way that you're legitimate is if you treasure Jesus above all things, to which, humbly, I would say, bro, if I want to treasure Christ above all things, if you're saying you want to treasure Christ above all things, okay, but if you're saying that the only way you're a legitimate Christian is if you treasure Jesus above all things, it's like, well, I guess I'm going to hell and everybody else that I know is too.

And so he's put himself in a position where he has to clarify what he means, and it's like, look, I don't desire God with all my heart all the time, and so I'm not saying what it seems like I'm saying, and I could say more about that, but John Piper does not mean that you always feel perfectly about God, but what we're asking and pressing for.