The fight for joy is a fight to grasp and marvel at what happened in the death of Christ — and what it reveals about our suffering Savior. If it were not for the death of Jesus in our place, the only possible joy would be the joy of delusion — like the joy on the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg. Without the cross, joy could be sustained only by denying (consciously or subconsciously) the inevitability of divine judgment. In fact, that’s the kind of joy that drives most of the world — a joy that preserves the power of its pleasures by being oblivious to the peril just ahead. If the passengers were suddenly made aware that in a matter of hours most of them would drown in the icy ocean, all their merrymaking would cease. Their joy depends on their ignorance (John Piper, When I Don’t Desire God, 71).

In the introductory material of his commentary on The Gospel According to John, D.A. Carson includes a helpful section on preaching from the fourth Gospel. Carson reminds preachers and Bible teachers that John’s Gospel is about Jesus; his person and work and “his place in the sweep of redemptive history”. He then remarks,

“…John’s stated purpose in composing the Fourth Gospel is not that his readers might believe, but that his readers might believe that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus, and that in believing they might have life in his name. To hammer away at the urgency of belief without pausing to think through what it is John wants his readers to believe and whom it is he wants them to trust is to betray the Gospel of John. Preaching from the Gospels is above all an exercise in the exposition and application of Christology (102, emphasis in the original).

Justin Taylor has some info on a new bibliography of D.A. Carson’s publications compiled by Carson’s research assistant Andy Naselli. The bibliography contains links to over 300 free PDFs of articles written by Carson.

Happy downloading!