Who could have known what God’s gracious intentions were when the first copy of Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist rolled off the press? Looking back, we have only praise and thanksgiving to God for how he has used it to encourage and equip the church.

And as we look forward, it is our faith-filled prayer that God will glorify himself through the truths in this book, opening the eyes of millions around the world to seek Jesus Christ as their treasure and joy.

Below is an excerpt from John’s journal, when the first copy of the book arrived.

January 27, 1987—

Yesterday when I walked into the office there was a package in my box. . . . It was the first copy of Desiring God.

I shut the door to my study as I opened it and fell to my knees at my chair with the book in my hands. I was trembling and tears came to my eyes. I laid the book before God and pleaded with him for protection from the temptations to sin that the book will bring. I told him that I would rather die and come home to him rather than be made proud or self-exalting or useless to him. I pled with him that the book would be used mightily for the glory of his name and the good of his people and the reaching of unreached peoples and the vindication of his cause on the earth!

I asked that the obstacles to its being understood and accepted be removed and that a marvelous grasp and receptivity be prepared in the land.

It was a moving ten minutes as the reality of its presence sank in. Tears came when I read the blurb from J.I. Packer:

The healthy biblical realism of this study in Christian motivation comes as a breath of fresh air. Jonathan Edwards, whose ghost walks through most of Piper’s pages, would be delighted with his disciple.

This was better than I could have dreamed he would be willing to say. The personal touch, that Edwards would even be delighted with me, is what moved me so deeply. I love Jonathan Edwards and hold him in such high regard that to think of his great soul delighting in my labor to make his doctrine live again touches roots of joy that are at the foundations. . . .

May the Lord himself be pleased with the “meditations” of my mind in these pages. May he let the book have a little part in causing the movement of the final era in our day.