In 2003, I was awakened from a spiritual nap (or was it a coma?) by John Eldredge’s books: The Sacred Romance, The Journey of Desire, Wild at Heart, and Waking the Dead. Shortly thereafter, I read John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life, and found much of the same “fire-in-the-belly” passion, but it was different: Piper was less sensational and more sober, less escapist and more entreating. Eldredge made me want to watch Braveheart; Piper made me want to follow Christ. No vicarious, spectator-sport catharsis riding on a fictionalized middle man for Piper; just real-life experience following the real Lord of Glory by taking up a real cross and really following him.

The difference between the two could be compared to the contrast between Tony Robbins at a personal growth conference and Winston Churchill addressing a nation at war. One psyches you up to take your life to the next level; the other readies you to die a great death in the service of something more significant than yourself.

I now recognize what it was in Eldredge that resonated so powerfully with me: the idea feebly expressed as “desire.” C.S. Lewis had a better word for it: Sehnsucht, a German word that defies precise translation into English, but which Lewis adequately described as an “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Don’t misunderstand Lewis’s ignorance there; he knew that God was the ultimate object of his longing, but God’s transcendence, his otherness, makes it impossible to specify with any sort of precision the nature of our longing for him.

While Eldredge pursued this desire in terms of risk—to the point of making God a risk-taker, à la open theism—Piper instead defines this desire in terms of certainty, with God himself being its source, its object, and its satisfaction, in all of his sovereign, unchanging glory. Both men place boredom and ennui in opposition to desire: one remedies it with the thrill of the unknown and uncertain; the other, with the thrill of the known but numinous.

Eldredge set up a false dichotomy with passion and desire on one side and doctrine on the other; Piper shows that the two sides are not in conflict with one another, but are, in fact, in perfect harmony. When we desire God (there’s the desire) for who he is (there’s the doctrine), we enjoy the greatest win-win available to men: giving glory to God while finding satisfaction for our souls.

Eldredge’s desire, therefore, is too small. It is too attainable; the one who decries the “less-wild lovers” has, himself, settled for less. By contrast, Piper’s desire cannot be wrought by human doing. Perhaps it is better described in terms of joy (as Lewis did) rather than desire: the object of Eldredge’s joy was somewhere in his own vicinity; Piper’s is found in the wholly other: God himself.

But the best indicator that Piper got it right and Eldredge got it wrong may be the fact that Piper’s call to joy provokes in his readers a sort of discouragement. Joy in God is so difficult and elusive, it moved Piper to write When I Don’t Desire God, a book affirming this difficulty and elusiveness and the need to fight for joy with dogged determination. You don’t see Eldredge describing his journey of desire as a “liberating and devastating” phenomenon the way Piper characterizes Christian Hedonism.

So I’m grateful for John Piper, but I’m also thankful for John Eldredge: thankful, that is, in the way a man is thankful for the providence of a common cold that sent him to the doctor but led to the early detection of his life-threatening cancer. God used Eldredge’s books in my life as a gateway to bigger and better desires; desires worthy of a sovereign, glorious, incomprehensible, and transcendent God; desires worthy of a bloody cross and an empty tomb. I hope God blesses John Eldredge with desires of this magnitude the way he did for me. I hope he does it for you, too.