Title Pages, Dedication & Contents — When the Darkness Will Not Lift

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Study companion: a chapter-by-chapter guide to the book’s structure, teaching and Scripture. The author’s full text is in the original PDF.

The Book

When the Darkness Will Not Lift
Doing What We Can While We Wait for God—and Joy
by John Piper

Published by Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Illinois. Copyright © 2006 by Desiring God Foundation. First printing 2007. Cover design by Josh Dennis. Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV), © 2001 by Crossway Bibles; emphases in Scripture quotations were added by the author.

The book grew out of the final chapter of Piper’s larger work When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy (Crossway, 2004), and was written for Christians who fight for joy through long seasons of spiritual darkness.

About this web edition. This UECF.NET web book is a study companion to Piper’s book. It follows the book’s structure page by page—every chapter, every sub-heading, and every Scripture passage—and explains the teaching in fresh words, quoting the Scripture and the public-domain hymns, poems and Puritan writers the author cites. It does not reproduce the author’s copyrighted text. Please read the original book itself from the PDF linked on the Contents page.

Dedication

The book is dedicated to the memory of John Owen (1616–1683), the Puritan theologian “who has wakened hope for many in the darkness of perfectionistic despair.”

Epigraphs

Before the Introduction, the author sets three texts over the whole book: two verses from the Psalms and a seventeenth-century poem by George Herbert. Together they announce the theme—patient waiting, the promise of morning, and a faith that laments and loves at the same time.

I waited patiently for the LORD.

Psalm 40:1 (ESV)

Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Psalm 30:5 (ESV)

Bitter-sweet

Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.

— George Herbert (1593–1633), from The Temple

Contents of the Original Book

Introduction: Faith Alone and the Fight for Joy111 The Darkness of Melancholy232 Waiting in Darkness, We Are Not Lost and Not Alone333 Fold Not the Arms of Action454 Does Unconfessed Sin Clog Our Joy?535 The Darkness That Feeds on Self-Absorption616 Loving Those Who Cannot See the Light69Desiring God—A Note on Resources80

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