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What Does Piper Mean by ‘Satisfied’? · Pastor John Piper's answers

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  Welcome back on this Thursday. Well, if you were to sit down with
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  John Piper's collected works, his thirteen volume collected Works, published back in twenty
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  seventeen, and if you read the entire thing beginning to end, you'd come
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  across the word satisfy or satisfied nearly fifteen hundred times satisfy, satisfied. Those
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  loaded terms are all over those works, and they're all over your ministry,
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  Pastor John. But we rarely, if ever, read a definition of what
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  you mean by the term, leading to Ralph's question today, Pastor John,
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  Hello to you. I think God for your ministry in my life. I
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  have read many of your books and listened to many of your messages, especially
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  those on Christian hedonism. That idea revolutionized my relationship with the Lord. You
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  have spoken about being satisfied in God thousands and thousands of times in your life.
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  I cannot find any reference in your works to where you have defined that
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  term. To you, what does it mean to be satisfied? This is
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  good for me to be pressed to ponder a term that I ordinarily use because
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  I consider itself explanatory. Sometimes those are the very terms that would be most
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  fruitful to at least try to put into words or to relate to real life
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  experiences so that we don't just speak with empty phrases. So thank you for
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  the question. Yeah, I think the first thing to say is that it
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  doesn't really matter very much what John Piper means by satisfaction, But it matters
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  a lot. I mean, it's hard to exaggerate how much it matters what
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  God means by it when his inspired spokesman in the Bible, you who's the
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  word. For example, Psalm ninety satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast
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  love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Psalm sixty
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  three. My soul will be satisfied in the Lord, as with fat and
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  rich food. Psalm sixty five. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of
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  your house, the holiness of your temple some one oh three. The Lord
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  satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles someone oh
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  seven. He satisfies the longing soul Matthew five, verse six. Blessed others
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  who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Philippians four.
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  I have learned in whatever situation, I am to be satisfied or content.
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  I know how to abound, and I know how to be in need
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  satisfied Hebrews thirteen. Keep your life free from the love of money and be
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  satisfied. Be content with what you have, for the Lord has promised never
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  to leave you. So it's not so much what I think satisfaction is matters,
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  but rather what do text like these mean? What did God intend when
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  he called us in all those passages and others to be satisfied? What kind
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  of experience are we talking about? So let me try to get at what
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  satisfaction in God, or satisfaction in all that God is for us refers to
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  first notice that the experience of satisfaction corresponds to desire and longing and yearning in
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  the human heart. There would be no such thing as satisfaction if there were
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  no such thing as desire. God created human beings as desire factories. Everybody
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  has desires, lungings, yearnings, wantings. God made us that way,
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  and our problem as sinners is not that our desires are too strong, but
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  that they are directed toward the wrong things. That's the essence of sin,
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  that's the essence of evil. Jeremiah two thirteen. My people have committed two
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  great evils. What is that they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters?
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  Number two, They have hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken, cisterns
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  that can hold no water. That's evil. Evil is to turn away from
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  being satisfied with God as your fountain. All our desires are designed by God
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  to be Godward desires to move towards the fountain of living water. Even when
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  we desire earthly things like food or friendship, or praise or beauty, all
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  these things are tastes of God's goodness and pointers to God as the final satisfaction.
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  Yes. So, the first thing I would say about the meaning of
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  satisfaction in God is that it refers to the experience of having our desire,
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  longing, yearning, wanting filled and filled means not too little and not too
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  much. Satisfaction in God is the experience where God is enjoyed as the perfect
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  fullness that corresponds to the God shaped desires of our hearts. Number two.
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  Sometimes I use the phrase all satisfying, like the all satisfying God, and
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  by this I mean that there are no desires which in the end, God
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  will not purify and satisfy with himself. Even sinful desires have some vestige of
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  legitimacy. God will rescue that fragment of legitimacy and cleanse it of all that
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  is destructive and fill it up in the Age to come. When this sinful
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  age is over and the Kingdom has fully and manifestly come, there will be
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  no unmet longings, no unfulfilled desires, no dissatisfaction. Number three, There
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  are many mysteries about what our experience will be like when we are totally perfected
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  in the Age to come. But for now, I want to stress that
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  to say Jesus is all satisfying does not mean that when he becomes our satisfaction
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  our desiring ceases. That would be a mistake to say that our desiring ceases.
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  Jesus says in John sixty five, I am the bread of life.
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  Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never
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  thirst. Now, I don't think he means that when we are born again
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  and receive Him by faith, we never desire him again. Right, I
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  don't think he means that. I think he means finding Jesus to be the
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  bread and the water that our souls have always longed for means our quest is
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  over. We no longer look for a better drink or a better food.
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  We have found are all satisfying treasure. But in this sinful age, and
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  I'm including myself now as a sinner, remaining corruption within me that needs mortifying.
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  In this sinful age, where the heart of faith is always embattled,
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  our experience of the satisfaction of Christ will always be imperfect, fragmentary, ever
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  changing, renewable, greater and lesser. Christ remains who he is, right,
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  he doesn't change. He remains who he is, all satisfying. And
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  our new birth, with new spiritual taste, buds that no, he is
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  the all satisfying one remains attached to him. We don't lose him and then
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  find him, and lose him and then find him. He holds onto us.
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  We do not run away after some new fountain or new bread. But
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  for now our experience is up and down. It won't be like that in
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  the age to come. But how desire and satisfaction will be related in the
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  age to come? Frankly I can't answer that fully. Number four and finally,
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  and this is really important, the reality of love for other people,
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  and especially compassion for those who suffer, demands that our satisfaction in this age
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  of pain and sorrow be a dissatisfied satisfaction. Almost forty years ago, when
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  I wrote the chapter on love in the book Desiring God, I said this,
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  the weeping of compassion is the weeping of joy, or you could say
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  the weeping of satisfaction impeded hindered in the extension of itself to another close quote.
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  Now that sounds paradoxical. Weeping satisfaction can odd phrase, but what it
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  means is that when God grants me to know Him as satisfying to my soul's
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  deepest needs, and then I look on a suffering person, my god given
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  satisfaction at that moment has in it the impulse to expand and include the other
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  person in it. I want them in it, I want them to share
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  it. Satisfaction in God is not indifferent to those who don't share it.
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  If we could, we would fold them in into our satisfaction in God.
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  But if we are hindered from that, it is our very joy, our
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  very satisfaction impeded in the extension of itself that grieves it is a peculiarly Christian
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  form of dissatisfied satisfaction. So, Ralph, that's my effort to clarify what
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  I mean by satisfaction in God. It is a filling up of God given
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  God shaped desires. Two, It will in the end leave no desire unfilled
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  for God's children forever. Three For now, the satisfaction in God is embattled
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  and variable, and desires must be rekindled. Four for now, even the
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  best experience of satisfaction in God is a dissatisfied satisfaction when we are surrounded by
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  the pain of those who don't yet have it and the sorrows of this fallen
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  world. Wonderful summary and definition here. Pastor John, thank you for or
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  walking us through all those Bible texts. And Ralph, thank you for the
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  excellent foundational question today. No one has asked this question to this point in
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  the podcast that I can remember. If you have a great question like Ralph
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  did that you want to ask Pastor John, maybe one that no one else
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  is asking, Email me ask Pastor John at Desiring God debt Org. Next
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  week we're going to launch into a mini series of sorts apologetics questions on the
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  person and work of Christ. Questions like why did Christ leave after Easter?
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  Couldn't he have just stayed with us? Or why didn't his redemption of us
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  cost him eternal suffering? Isn't that the price? And why isn't there more
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  archaeological or historical written evidence for the death and resurrection of Christ? Those types
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  of questions, big questions up next and over the next couple of weeks.
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  I'm your host, Tony Rankie. We'll see you back here on Monday.