Christian Hedonism Part 4a: The Problem

Please read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 to know what is going on here.
I came back to the "table" of my thinking to finish this off with joy, frustration, and a great sense of being overwhelmed. There is no way to do Part 4 in one sitting. There is just too much for me to write and too much for you to read and I worry if I put it all out at once you will get exhausted of the reading. So, I'm breaking it down into what I believe will be 5 sub parts, both for my benefit in organizing the thoughts and your benefit in receiving them. They will be:
The Problem
The Power
The Praise
The Prayer and..
The Practical
I'm not trying to be all spiritual with the P's, it's just the best way I could come up with organizing the thoughts in my mind. I don't know how long it will take me to get to them either so I will be taking the week off blog themes till I get through them. They were just too important not to miss though.

The Problem:
I said when I ended Part 2 that the problem I felt in myself and other believers in Christ is that we don't enjoy God. That was bleak to me.
Now don't misunderstand, this is not something I'm just coming up with. In fact, what you read here to day will be more from others than from me. It is something the Lord has been trying to show me and I've been amazed at the congruency of his direction on this topic as many different things in my life that "coincidentally" come my way are right along the lines of this topic.
You may not understand what I mean when I say "we don't enjoy God" and you may disagree with me. If we are not enjoying God as believers, then what the heck are we doing? Well, see if any of this sounds familiar to you:
"....once we've been saved, once we've understood and accepted the message of the gospel, the person and work of the Redeemer becomes secondary to what we're focused on- living the Christian life. ....our attention is primarily focused on our performance, on our spiritual growth. We know that the incarnation and resurrection are important truths to our initial salvation, but that's pretty much where their impact ends. "
"We haven't felt his absence because we're so preoccupied with living life for him."
"I believe that most Christians think fondly of Jesus, are sincerely grateful for salvation, and remember his name as a tagline when they pray, but they don't see his work and life as something to contemplate every moment of every day. I have to admit that until fairly recently I, too, pursued godliness without much thought of him."
"In your pursuit of godliness, have you left Jesus behind?"
(from Because He Loves Me by Elyse M. Fitzpatrick)

Here I was studying Piper and then opened the book I was rather begrudged-ly beginning for our ladies discipleship group when I came across this in the introduction! Do you ever feel God is pretty much taking something and hitting you over the head with it!? I felt Elyse stated the problem a little more clearly than some of the more challenging poetic type language of Piper (that I do love, but it can tie your brain in knots within 30 seconds sometimes). Her focus in her book is really on Christ, so it may seem unrelated to what we talked about in Parts 1,2 and 3 but it's not. Why? Because of what is at the right hand of God Almighty, pleasures forevermore....Jesus Christ. They are all connected and therefore her points are completely valid to this discussion.
Now that we've done some stretching with Elyse and started to feel our mental muscles warming up, let's visit the "Jillian Michaels" of Christian thought exercises- Mr. John Piper:
"For many, Christianity has become the grinding out of general doctrinal laws from collections of biblical facts. But childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.
And the irony is that we have aided and abetted the desiccation by telling people they ought not seek their own pleasure, especially in worship. We have implied in a thousand ways that the virtue of an act diminishes to the degree you enjoy doing it and that doing something because it yields happiness is bad. The notion hangs like a gas in the Christian atmosphere."
The trap for the believer is working out our righteousness rather than enjoying God. We so often put the cart before the horse. We do our duty and hope to find our delight when we need to delight and find that our heart response to God when we do, is nothing we would dare call "duty" at all. Working out our righteousness actually distracts us from Christ and it causes us to focus instead on our measure and the measure of others. We still are not focused on God.
This is a serious thing because it is falling into deceptions of the enemy. Let me try to explain how.
If God's main goal for us is to be happy in Him, what then would the enemy's main target be? Well, it seems that he would be working that we would attempt to fill that with anything BUT God. For the unbeliever that would be through false "happiness" and pleasure seeking of the world. But what would it be for the believer? What would it look like? How would he take our eyes off Christ and have us once again drinking from an empty well? By the very deception that we don't need to enjoy God, but we need to be a better Christian. God calls out to us trying to give us the joy and happiness of Himself, the goal He has had since the dawn of our existence and we sit there with our hands over our ears and our mouths gabbing "la,la,la,la,la!" at the top of our lungs. The only difference is that the unbeliever does not want to hear God say there is more than the happiness of the world, and the believer does not want to hear that there is more than the striving and striving to be holy!
"We assent to these precious truths of Scripture, but we frequently find ourselves living life like practical atheists- not much different from our unbelieving neighbors down the street- except that our garages are empty on Sunday morning. We forget who he is, what he has done; we don't know why it really matters. Because of this, we fail to remember who we are and how he has called us to live."
(Elyse)
This is the saddest of the sad! I believe it's the passion in God's heart when he says to the church of Ephesus that they have forgotten their first LOVE! What were they doing then? Well, the passage says they were doing really good at working on being Christians! Sobering don't you think?

"I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false;
and you have perseverance and have endured for My name's sake, and have not grown weary.
But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.
Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place--unless you repent."

(Revelation 2:2-5)

The strong admonishement is just as heavy as those given to the believers behaving as the ungodly! Yet, we seem to not realize the severity of these words.

The problem with the unsaved is their love affair with themselves. Are we falling in love with Jesus just to abandon enjoying Him (and thereby enjoying God himself) only to fall back in the pit of a love affair with ourselves?
I present to you that this is why God called me OUT of homeschooling. NO, I do not mean that all should be called out. Yet, I had fallen guilty of the above, my friends. I had barely a thought of enjoying God and my savior, I was too busy working harder at the Christian life. I was looking for my fulfillment and my happiness in one person's work, mine. You may not struggle with that if you homeschool, but I did and I THANK GOD EVERY DAY THAT HE PULLED THAT IDOL FROM MY LIFE, AND I HOPE HE KEEPS PULLING THEM! (This does not mean it is an idol or form of idolotry for all or any for that matter, for them I cannot speak nor do I dare to presume, but it had become that for me. It did not start that way, but it became that) He may even call me back at some point but I know now that it would never be to me what it was then. When I stopped homeschooling I had to take a huge leap of faith into the very hand of God. I began to acknowledge how powerful and huge he was and how I needed him. I began to be more and more focused on Him every day. He used that to grow my faith. I still struggle with this battle of self-righteousness. I use to want to be godly to keep up with the godly, now my heart has changed to want to be godly because I want to be like Him. "..our desires will be transformed when our eyes are fixed on his godliness." (Elyse) How often I still struggle with that godliness meter I parade around with me. I've been praying lately that God work in me now not to let the enemy have a foothold in my heart toward my brothers and sisters through that stupid meter either as I interact with them in any way. God has no use for such measurements and they dishonor him entirely. They only serve to do one thing and that is puff up my pride. I don't have to worry about others when my focus is on Christ. But, I digress and see the dust of a rabbit trail starting! LOL!
"Instead of humbly receiving the gracious love of our Father and depending daily on him, we want to believe that we really can improve ourselves. God's love is wonderful at first blush, but because it's not based on anything we've done, it humbles us to the dust." (Elyse)
Does it not pain you as it does me that we are just as bad as the world then in not enjoying God!? This is what I mean when I say I put the cart before the horse. I focus on me! I pray for help for me! I ask that I would do better! OH, heavens! I have forgotten my first love, which is NOT me! My LOVE is CHRIST! All that he has done, all that he will do, all whom he is, all he forgave of me, all he will work in me, all he does in the church around me, the world around me, his wisdom, his might, his promises, his peace above understanding. Do you know that if we pondered more the great things to enjoy about God, we would have so little time to fret about our performance. Our performance is pathetic, and it will always be pathetic. So what is the glory in our life? Whatever God does in us and through us, but that which he can only do if we let him and stop trying to grab the wheel of our deceptive strive for holiness!
I have to bring this back around at some point.....
I think that what we mean when we say that God's goal for us is our complete happiness, that this is what we mean, our enjoyment of Him. We enjoy Him by so many means I'll get to later. It's a constant hunger and pursuit, a passion, a delight and a constant need that God fills. Our joy stays with us through it all, but we also pursue our happiness through pursuing enjoyment of God in many ways. If we don't focus on Christ, we do just as the unbelieving and focus on our flesh. Even if the way we do that is by focusing on our Christian performance, that is still us, and it's still the flesh and it's satisfaction is deceptive.

"Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? (Galatians 3:2-3)

"Religious 'flesh' always wants to work for God (rather than humbling itself to realize God must work for it in free grace). But 'if you live according to the flesh you will die' (Romans 8:13). That is why our very lives hang on not working for God.

You may also be discouraged repetitively, depressed again and again, and insecure. Though these are a struggle for us all, the more we understand this view of God not needing our service to Him, the more freed from these we become.

"God is not looking for people to work for Him, so much as He is looking for people who will let Him work for them. The gospel is not a help-wanted ad."

"From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him." (Isaiah 64:4)

"Most of us think serving God is a totally positive thing; we have not considered that serving God may be an insult to Him. But meditation on the meaning of prayer demands this consideration.

Acts 17:24-25

'The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.'

'The Son of Man came not to be served (Mark 10:45). He aims to be the servant. He aims to get the glory as Giver.

This is true, not just in the days of His earthly humiliation, but even in His glory at the close of the age.

'Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.' (Luke 12:37)

To be sure, we are called servants- and that no doubt means we are to do exactly as we are told. But the wonder of this picture is that the 'master' insists on 'serving' even in the age to come when He appears in all His glory 'with his mighty angels in flaming fire' (2 Thess 1:7-8). Why? Because the very heart of His glory is the fullness of grace that overflows in kindness to needy people. Therefore, He aims 'in the coming ages to show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus' (Eph 2:7)

What is the greatness of our God? What is His uniqueness in the world?

Isaiah answers:

'From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him. (Isaiah 64:4)

All other so-called gods try to exalt themselves by making man work for them. In doing so, they only show their weakness. Isaiah derides the gods who need the service of their people"

(All taken from John Piper's Chapter entitled "Prayer" from Desiring God.... I went from thought to thought that struck me. I really do it injustice to say that is all however as reading on your own you will find much more in between)

The obvious question would therefore be what about all the scripture that tells us to serve God? How do we serve Him. Well, first I have to recommend reading this yourself because I'm not getting it all as I just stated in the parenthesis. But here is a morsel:

"The way to serve God so that He gets the glory is to look to Him for mercy. Prayer prevents service from being an expression of pride." Piper

Ah, and there in lies the rub as they say! Pride is self, self is flesh, flesh is me. I'm back to square one where I'm not enjoying God I've started to enjoy me and my fine tuning Christian ways.

I hope you start to see therefore, how this all comes together. It's a lot I know, and there is more important stuff surrounding it.

Next post I'd like to hit the really joyful aspect of the power behind this happiness. Where does it come from? What makes it such a strong desire in us, this pining for happiness?

Please, please, and I say again, please ask any questions and make any statements of thought. I welcome them all.