What I thought I would do in our time together is talk about some aspects of Christian Hedonism. How many of you have read my book, Desiring God? What I want to do is use these as pump primers for question and answer time in just a few minutes. I’ll need discipline on how not to fill up the whole time with all these juicy things that I like to say, but I will summarize for you what that book is about and then give you some reasons for why I think it’s so crucial for your ministry.

To Be Satisfied in God

The reason I’m doing this is not just to prime the pump of your questions and let you ask anything you want to. What you heard this morning and what our ministry is about at Bethlehem and what I’m about as a pastor and a writer and a speaker is spreading a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples. I think I said that last time we were together, that that’s the mission statement of our church and it’s the mission statement of my life. We exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples.

That statement grows out of a theology, and the theology can be summed up in various ways. There’s a real, real short version, and then there’s the medium version, and there’s the book-length version, and then there’s the life version. The sentence version goes like this: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. That’s a sentence that comes as close to summing up my life and theology as I can get. That’s one way of describing what’s in the book, Desiring God, and what was in that message and what is in my life and what I believe your ministry should be about. If you want God to get glory through your student ministry, your students must be more satisfied in God than any football victory, any television program, any salary, any possible spouse, any health, or life itself. Your goal must be so to minister and so to model that they become ravished with God, satisfied in God.

I believe that’s the only way that you’ll break the powers of lust and greed and all the other besetting sins that destroy ministry and lives. We must break the power of sin’s promise with the superior promise of God, and students must come to feel more satisfied in an awesome God than in anything else in this world. Paul says:

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord (Philippians 3:8).

That’s everything folks. That’s everything. That’s your goal if you’re a Christian Hedonist.

Everyone Wants to Be Happy

Let me give you the longer version, the five-point version. This comes right out of somewhere near the front of the book. Christian hedonism, which is my life, means that everybody wants to be happy. Now, the only reason I stick that on as point number one is because you can debate it — and you can argue that people want other things besides happiness and what happiness is — is because I do believe that evangelistically there is a common ground anywhere in the world and on any campus. Everybody wants satisfaction, everybody wants to be happy. You can use the word “joy,” you can use the word “pleasure,” or you can use the word “exultation” or whatever you want to use. But the Bible is not squeamish about these things. It uses the word “happiness” and “pleasure” and “joy” indiscriminately and is unabashed in its statement that everybody wants this and Jesus assumes that when He makes His case for His own name and glory.

We Should Pursue Our Deepest Happiness

We should pursue the deepest and longest happiness possible. This is a duty. This is an ought and a must. This is not a caboose on the train, this is not icing on the cake of Christianity. This is an absolute must. I’ll give you a little anecdote here. I try not to use the name because it would embarrass somebody. I’m going to do a seminar with a well-known missions person later somewhere, and we don’t live in the same part of the country. I never talk to this person, and they just put us on the schedule and said, “Do a seminar together on missions.” They wrote me to write the description for the seminar, so I did and faxed it to this person.

The message came back to me. I had a sentence saying something like, “We are going to talk about how to pursue your maximum joy in giving your life away on the mission field.” This person wrote back and said, “Well, now I really don’t like talking about pursuing joy because Dr. Piper and I both know that joy is a byproduct of obedience, and therefore let’s stress obedience and not joy.” Why are we together in this seminar? Now, here’s the problem with what that person said. Here’s the problem. That person said, “We know that obedience is the key, and joy is the byproduct.” That’s a confusion of categories. Obedience to what? Commands like, “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4).

Do you see the problem? You can’t choose between obedience and joy-pursuit because you’re commanded to pursue joy, over and over in the Bible. It says:

Serve the Lord with gladness!
     Come into his presence with singing! (Psalm 100:2).

This is not optional, this is a command. Let’s talk about obedience to that command. That’s the anecdote on point number two. It is your duty to pursue maximum joy. By maximum, I mean as deep as possible and as long as possible.

Joy Is in God’s Presence

According to Psalm 16:11, that pursuit terminates on God, or you’re an idolater:

You make known to me the path of life;
     in your presence there is fullness of joy;
     at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Thou wilt show me the path of life, in Thy presence is fullness of joy at Thy right hand are pleasures alone, forevermore.” I’m not going to settle for any TV joy here, any sex joy, any family joy, any money joy, any pride at speaking at Passion 1998 joy. Those are threats to real joy. I’m going for deepest joy and longest joy. The text says, in his presence is, what kind of joy? “Fullness.” Gotcha, I’m there, I want that, I’m going nowhere else if that’s true. And at his right hand are pleasures for how long? Forever. I’m not settling for 800 years or 8,000 years. You give me forever or I’m looking somewhere else. So I’ve got my answer if that’s true. Point number three is that this duty to pursue deepest, longest joy takes us straight to God and nowhere else.

The Quest for Joy Is the Foundation of Love

The consummation, the height, the pinnacle, the apex of this quest for joy, which we now know to be joy in God, not his gifts, not health, wealth and prosperity. I love Habakkuk 3:17–19. Noël and I had it read at our wedding 29 years ago:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
     nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
​​     and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
     and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
     I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

In other words, if being a farmer, everything fails and you starve to death, God is your joy. Now that’s what I mean. The apex of that quest for joy in God is when your joy in him expands like a weather front, a high-pressure weather front into the low-pressure zone of people’s pain and draws them into that experience so that you see more of God in their enjoying more of God. Don’t ever say that the consummation is a Hindu or Buddhist isolated pondering all alone under a tree with your legs crossed. You will not find God there in his fullness. If you really want the fullest possible enjoyment of God, your emerging joy of him must expand like a pressure zone, drawing students, drawing mom and dad and brother and sister, as much as it lies within you by the power of the Holy Spirit into that very joy so that as you rise together in that joy in him, your joy is made fuller in its being reflected back to you in their joy of God. Call it love, if you want a short version.

Therefore, You Must Pursue Your Joy to Love People

The last point, the fifth summary point is, therefore — it’s a big therefore and I put a point on it because if things aren’t controversial, they’re probably not true — to the degree to which you try to deny your desire to be happy as though it were a bad thing, to that degree will you fail to love people and fail to honor God. Which means that there are a lot of people who philosophically are opposing God and his name, because they’re telling people that the doctrine of self-denial means you should not want to do anything for the motive of happiness. I get these letters. There are not as many now as I used to since I’m sort of old hat, and either you believe these crazy things or you don’t. But I used to get more letters saying, “You do what’s right because it’s right and not because it will make you happy.” I think that’s atheism.

I think if I’m not motivated to be more delighted in God by what I’m doing, I’m an atheist. I think pagans do what’s right for right’s sake. Let me put another spin on it and just restate point number five positively. The pursuit of joy in God is a necessary component of all virtue and all worship. Underline the word necessary. It is a necessary component of all virtue and all worship.

Now, I wrote the whole book to defend those five points, but what I’d like to do here is just give some reasons for why this is important to me and why I would commend it to you for your very, very serious consideration. You can build a ministry around whatever you want, but I’m arguing with all my might here that if you don’t build it around something like these things, it will be profoundly defective in bringing God glory and honor.

Reasons to Build a Ministry on Christian Hedonism

Let me list off some reasons. And these reasons I’m going to give you here are in the appendix called, “Why I Believe This,” or something like that. And I’m just going to point them out. And the first one is that God is breathtaking.

God Is Breathtaking

God is breathtaking and therefore you ought to commend your students to pursue what is breathtaking. We send them places to see great things. We bring them to Passion 1998. We send them into the star-filled sky at night to look up. I talked about the Grand Canyon in the message this morning. Why do people go there and why do they buy these big, fat glossy coffee table books of mountains and rivers and canyons? Why? It’s because God is breathtaking and there is, implanted in every human heart, eternity, as Ecclesiastes says, so that you cannot find out anything because you’re made to embrace the infinite with your affections. God is breathtakingly glorious and your biggest job and your hardest job is to portray that for students who don’t have anybody else telling them that, or showing them that.

The music they listen to by and large isn’t giving them that message. The TV programs they watch aren’t giving them that message. The newspapers they read are not giving them that message. The late night dorm discussions aren’t giving them that message. Where are they going to get that truth that God is breathtakingly glorious? Well, hopefully in their local church. However, Albert Einstein, who died in 1955, said that he had seen so much of the glory of God that when he went to church he felt like the pastor was blaspheming. He thought the pastor was not talking about the real thing. If he were using the words of Job, he would say, “These are but the outskirts of his glory” (Job 26:14).

When you look up and you see through a telescope or what the Hubble is seeing out there now. I read an article every few weeks or so about what this telescope out there is seeing and I worship. If you look up and you see the expanse of the universe, you have to have a God big enough to do that like that. I wonder how many of our churches are portraying a God who can whisper the universe into being. So that’s the first reason this is important to me. God is breathtaking.

The Word of God Compels Us to Pursue Joy

The word of God commands us to pursue our joy. I think I’ve said probably enough about that, that we can pass over that. It commands us to pursue our joy, it doesn’t just suggest it. Maybe I could add this one thing about self-denial. Jesus said, “Unless you deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me, you can’t be my disciple” (Matthew 16:24). What that means is, “Unless you deny yourself all inferior, short-term inadequate, unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures, you can’t be my disciple.” Moses is an example of somebody in Hebrews 11:26 who forsook the fleeting pleasures of Egypt because he looked to the reward. That’s what Jesus meant by self-denial. Esau did exactly the opposite. Esau is an example of a person who did not live a life of self-denial. He saw in front of him a birthright through which he could know God to the full and be an heir of the promises of God and he looked at a bowl of oatmeal, and chose the oatmeal. That’s not self-denial, that’s suicide.

Self-denial is to look at God and look at oatmeal and choose God. That’s self-denial. That’s what Jesus meant by self-denial, and your job is to help your students see their sorority and fraternity strokes as oatmeal, and coming in number one in any sport as oatmeal, and getting the best job possible as oatmeal, and finding the perfect spouse as oatmeal. That’s your job. Teach them what real self-denial is so that they will not deny themselves the pursuit of joy in God, which would be blasphemy. Ultimate self-denial is blasphemy because it says God offers me himself to enjoy forever and ever, and I choose to deny myself that joy. That’s blasphemy, it’s heresy, it’s idolatry, and it’s ultimately atheism.

God is saying, “Here I am, the fountain of life.” Do you remember the definition of evil in Jeremiah 2:12–13?

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
     be shocked, be utterly desolate,
     declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
     the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
     broken cisterns that can hold no water.

That’s the ultimate evil. The ultimate evil of the universe is to look God in the face, have Him smile upon you, offer Himself to you for infinite and eternal joy and have you say, “I think I’ll deny myself that pleasure and turn on the television.” That’s blasphemy, that’s ultimate self-denial, and it’s wicked. You need to persuade your students of that.

Emotions Are Essential

A third reason this is important to me is because affections or emotions are essential to the Christian life and are not icing on the cake. This is almost the same as a previous point but not quite. At this point, I’ve gotten to the point where I’m rehearsing the second message I gave here last year in the plenary session where I listed off all these objections to Christian Hedonism. I don’t think I’ll dwell too long on that except to say, the Bible commands us not to covet, which is a desire. It commands us to be content. It commands us to bear no grudge. It commands us to love one another from the heart. It commands us to love each other with brotherly affection. I’m stressing it like this because there are a lot of people who say, “Love’s not a feeling, it’s a decision. So don’t worry about whether your feelings are there or not.” Well, that’s a half-truth. That’s a half-truth. It is a decision and you should worry about whether the feelings are there or not. If they’re not there, you should repent.

Feelings matter. The Bible commands them everywhere. I’ll keep the list going. It commands joy, it commands hope, it commands fear, it commands peace, it commands zeal, it commands grief, it commands desire, it commands tenderheartedness, it commands brokenness and contrition, it commands gratitude, and it commands lowliness. The reason people argue that the Bible doesn’t command the feelings is because we can’t turn them on and off like a water spigot, and therefore, the assumption, not from the Bible but from the man-centered mindset, is that you can’t be commanded to do what you can’t do. That’s a lie.

You can be commanded to do what you can’t do if you ought to do it. You ought to be fearful of God. He’s fearful. You ought to delight in God. You ought to be at peace in the promises of God. You ought to love each other with brotherly affection, you ought to be brokenhearted for your sins, and you ought to be profoundly thankful for every breath you take, and none of you is able to do these things because you’re all evil. Your hearts are dead in trespasses and sins until the almighty sovereign, awakening Spirit of God makes you alive and grants you repentance. Second Timothy 2:25–26 says:

God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.

So of course you can be commanded to do what you can’t do. Dead people can’t do anything worthwhile and dead people are commanded everywhere in the Bible to do only what is worthwhile, which means that the main thing you must teach your students is that they are desperate for God. If you have a gospel that’s doable by human beings, well, you have a very easy job. I’ve got a gospel that’s undoable by human beings. It takes God to do this thing. Christianity is a supernatural religion. It’s not a willpower religion. That’s why it is permeated by commands for transformed hearts who feel what they ought to feel in the presence of a glorious God. And the fact that your students can’t perform it is an agenda of prayer and desperation for revival, and for the coming of Almighty God upon their hearts.

Our Inability

I’ll tell you, I get up every morning and plead with God to make me live. I believe in the perseverance of the saints, but I do not take for granted my life. I do not take for granted that I will wake up and love God tomorrow. Do you? Is it a given to you, that awesome power will come out of this wicked heart of John Piper that he will love God tomorrow? I do not assume that, apart from, “Oh God, keep such purposes forever in my heart”(1 Chronicles 29:18). That’s a quote from David’s Prayer at the end of the building of the temple, or the gathering of the stuff to build the temple. Keep such purposes forever in my heart. When I was done speaking there, I was so glad, I walked off the stage in this big cavern, this dark place, and I just started walking toward the wall. There’s nobody else there and I just wept and I said, “I am so scared I’m not going to do what I just said and I’ll bring reproach upon this message.”

This is a God thing. This is not easy. You can’t just do it. Passion 1998 is all about asking God to come and do it. We can talk. Devils can talk. A devil could deliver that message that I gave. But a devil can’t love God because the devil’s never been wrought upon savingly by God to give him a new heart. God let him go, and God could let any of us go, but he won’t if we’re in him and we’re his. And the proof of that is, desperate prayer day in and day out.

Militant Against Human Boasting

A fourth reason for why these things, this Christian Hedonism, is important to me is because it militates against boasting and self-pity, which is the flip side of boasting. I’m so scared of pride. It’s an honor to be here. It really is. It’s an honor to be here, to be asked back a second year is an honor, and it’s so scary to be honored like this. It’s so scary. It’s scary to have written books, to have people come up and say, “Thank you. Nice message.” That is so scary. That is so threatening because there is that in every one of us and in me, a love of those statements and those honors and they are deadly. That love is deadly. Therefore, I want a theology that cuts at that thing again and again, just cuts at boasting and cuts at the flip side of self-pity.

Self-pity is a form of boasting. Now, this really happened, almost. I totally left out a point I wanted to make this morning. I’m kicking myself because something, if you go back and listen, there’s an element that was a little piece that was missing. Here I am kicking myself and starting this self-pity thing. I thought, “It would’ve been a better message had you said that thing.” That’s a form of boasting. If I say, “Oh, poor me.” I go home to my wife and she says, “How’d it go?” I say, “I left out the main point of something.” I want her to say, “Oh, poor Johnny.” I say, “Go ahead, do it to me.” Men are strange creatures. We like to think that we are cool and in charge and strong, and really we want mama to feel sorry for us because we left our point out. And that’s just pride. It doesn’t look like pride, it looks weak. Self-pity is pride in the mouth of the weak. Boasting is pride in the mouth of the strong. It’s the same thing.

Now, Christian Hedonism, I argue, cuts at that. Why? It’s because of a couple of things. Christian Hedonism says, when you come to God, you come as a beggar, you come empty, you come bankrupt, and you therefore have nothing to boast about when you come to God. You say, “I’m hungry for you. I need you. I’m desperate for you. Come.” My assistant over here, Jon Bloom, who came with me last year and came with me this year, wrote a song titled, “I’m Hungry for You, so hungry for you.” Maybe we play it later on, it’d be fun. You think you could do that out of your head? We’ll see. You think about it. We can sing it together.

When you come hungry for God, you’re not boasting — you’re hungry, you’re empty, you’re bankrupt. If you come to God to serve him as though he needed you, then you got something to boast about. But Act 17:25 says, “God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything for he Himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.” Therefore, Christian Hedonism says, “I’m bankrupt, I’m empty, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty. I come to you in the position of beneficiary not benefactor and therefore I have nothing to boast about.”

Forsaking Tin for Gold

It cuts that self-pity like this. Do you remember Peter? Right after the rich young ruler has been dismissed and Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “It’s really hard for a rich man to get into the kingdom. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven” (Mark 10:24–25). And they are staggered. This is not what they expected him to say. And they say, “Well, then who can be saved?” (Mark 10:16). And he says, “With men, it is impossible, but not with God” (Mark 10:27). In other words, men can’t leave their money. But God can enable you to leave your money.

Then Peter pipes up, I wish I had the tone of voices here — Peter’s tone and Jesus’ tone. I’m not sure. But Peter says, “Lord, we’ve left everything and followed you. What about us?” (Mark 10:28). You think, “Oh, Peter. Poor Peter, you’ve left everything for me.” Jesus didn’t say that. He’s a totally unsentimental teacher. He said, “No one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).

In other words, “Quit feeling sorry for yourself.” Christian Hedonism says, “Do you want this Peter? Of course you’ve left those things. Of course you’ve left those things. You’ve left tin for gold. Like C.S. Lewis says, you’ve left making mud pies in the slums for a holiday at the sea. You’ve left hell for heaven. You’ve left friends for God. Quit feeling sorry for yourself.” If you’re a Christian Hedonist, self-pity has no place.

Suppose you go to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Azerbaijan and hostile mobs surround your house and kill you? I’m moving towards tomorrow’s message here. Will you not say at that moment, “To live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). I won’t say anymore because that’s tomorrow’s message.

Producing Genuine Love

Reason number five is that it produces genuine love. I’ll ask you this simple question, do you feel more loved by a person, a friend, when they do something good for you begrudgingly or joyfully? And my answer to that question is, when they do it joyfully.

One of our elders just had a heart attack the day before yesterday, and I rushed to the hospital and they wouldn’t let me in because they were doing a procedure on him. I talked with his wife and it was almost like the script was being written for this illustration. She said, “Oh, you guys, you don’t have to come down here. It’s not that bad. You’re busy. It’s New Year’s Eve.” I did not say, “It’s my duty to be here as a pastor. I’m supposed to be here. This is my job.”

I didn’t say that. Because if you say, “I am doing this good thing for you dutifully in fulfillment of my pastoral responsibility,” she will not feel as loved and as cared for as if I take her by the arms and say, “I love coming to be with you at a moment like this. I delight to be here, Carolyn.” That’s pure hedonism. She might think, “You delight to be here? Why don’t you do something for us?” People are more loved when you do good for them in pursuit of joy than in fulfillment of duty.

That’s the chapter on love. That takes the most explaining, probably, of all the chapters in the book.

Let me just close my talk with this and then we can open it for questions. This was all I tried to say last year when I was here. Christian Hedonism, as I outlined it, glorifies God. Jonathan Edwards wrote a book called The End for Which God Created the World. He’s my greatest dead theological hero outside the Bible, and he argued in that book that the Lord intends to glorify himself two ways in the world. First, by our knowing him truly with our rational capacities, and second, by our delighting in him duly with our affectional capacities. To know him truly gives him glory. His excellence is reflected back through true and right ideas about him. And to feel rightly about him echoes back the other half of his excellency. If you try to know God truly without loving him duly, or delighting in him duly, you give him half his glory. And if you try to feel or delight in him duly without knowing him truly, you can’t.

If you could, he would only get half the glory because you can’t love somebody duly if you don’t know them truly. Which is why someone said, at the beginning, theologically-informed freedom in worship is a very good slogan. And “theologically-informed” is absolutely crucial. Worship comes from the heart or it isn’t real. But if it doesn’t get mediated by the head with the right views of God, he’s not honored. There are people with hands in the air and sway in their body and loud singing all over the world who don’t know God. In fact, they’re afraid of knowing God because to know him in his definition, his contours, his character, is to say he’s this and not that, which might get you into a controversy. And nobody in worship wants a controversy.

So people think, “Let’s worship a cloud of unknowing. He’s out there. He’s something. He may not be a he. But whatever it is — it, she, he? — let’s feel good about him (her, it?). And that’s not an honor to him. So you have to know him with your mind and you have to pursue him passionately with your heart. And the pursuit of him is what glorifies him the most. God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. Now I’m done and I’m willing to take questions for as long as you want to hang out.

How does this play out in evangelism? Like what would you say to a college student who maybe doesn’t have a heart for God, but yet you want to share with him. How do you implement this theology?

That’s why I began with the first of my five points. That student, whether he’s suicidal or anorexic or just failed his medical entrance exam or whatever, wants heart satisfaction. You know where it’s to be found. He doesn’t have a clue. Even if he is a nominal Christian, he probably has everything upside down. So evangelism consists very much in teaching the truth about God. Is it not a marvel to you in Acts 19 that Paul spent two and a half years evangelizing the city of Ephesus. He was teaching five hours a day in the Hall of Tyrannus? Now multiply that out. I did it once, but I don’t have it in my head. For two and a half years it was 5 hours a day. I don’t know whether he took a day off or not. Let’s assume six days a week. That’s a lot of hours.

Now, he didn’t have to do that in the synagogue so much because he had a huge common ground. On your campuses, you probably do not have it. There may be little more in the Bible belt maybe, but I doubt it. In my city at the University of Minnesota, I don’t expect many shared categories, which means that teaching, doing what I’ve done here, is a provocative starting point. And then the questions start to roll and you just stay up and you get up, and you stay up and you get up, and you go after it and you pray.

I’ll give you a little anecdote here. I was in San Francisco a couple of years ago speaking at Golden Gate Seminary, a Southern Baptist Seminary out there. One of the university students from the local campus, I think it was Berkeley, came to me and he said, “I have to tell you a story about last week. I was doing this evangelistic thing on an evening with worship and speaking and unbelievers there.” A person came up to him afterwards and he said, “I heard all you said.” He had question after question about the problem of evil, about the sovereignty of God, about free will, and about Holocaust, about everything under the sun. This person talked to him for two hours and loved this guy for two hours with as many answers as he could give him out of the Bible. And when he was done, the guy said, “Look, would you be willing to just let me pray for you? That if these things are so, God would just show you?” He put his hand on his head like this and just said, “Lord, would you just open his eyes, and grant him . . .” And suddenly this guy was just whimpering and weeping and weeping, and he stopped and opened his eyes and waited, and he just said, “Glory, glory. I see glory.”

Not every awakening is that charged. But that paradigm is what has to happen for everybody. You may still need that to happen in your life, and you’re a student minister. Where you learned, you grew up in church and said all the right things. And this whole dimension of delighting in God and resting in God and cherishing God and treasuring God and being satisfied in God such that it breaks the power of all other competing satisfactions is new and foreign, and you’re scared you may not be a Christian. And the answer is, you may not be a Christian. So all that to say, teach and pray the word and pray. It’s the word and prayer. Ask the Holy Spirit to come. But say what is beautiful and what is glorious about God. Commend Christ in all of his attributes in all of his goodness.

I can tell you another story about a Jehovah’s witness. This was about 30 years ago now. I remember this story. In Germany, in Munich, a Jehovah’s witness stood up on Easter Sunday morning and said, “I was going to kill myself Friday night because I became so desperate that I could never perform the way the Jehovah’s witnesses wanted me to perform in order to be a part of the 144,000 or anything else. I was so desperate I couldn’t do anything. I decided that — I think it was of God — I would just give myself one last chance to see the truth. I began to read the Gospel of Luke straight through on Good Friday evening. I knelt by my bed, opened the Gospel of Luke, and I read the whole book. And when I got to the cross, glory came. It opened, it opened. God opened it to me and I saw the freedom of the gospel and the freedom of forgiveness. Jesus said, ‘Forgive them, they don’t know what they do.’ And to the thief, he said, ‘Today you’ll be with me in paradise.’ A whole life was forgiven just like that. So free.”

That’s a message a Jehovah’s Witness needs to hear. Find out where they are, what their particular hang-up is and then try to go for it.

My question is about this issue of Christian Hedonism in ministry. If you start with that, does it not present a possibility of emphasis upon your own pleasure? Doesn’t it emphasize your own hedonism instead of God’s awesome character and his saving words? He is our greatest delight, but where’s the starting point for us? Do we emphasize that this is our pleasure? Or do we emphasize that God is this and therein is your pleasure?

That’s a really good question. What sentences come out of your mouth first, I would say, is determined by where the people are and how the Spirit is leading in the moment. You could start an evangelistic message by saying, “Everyone in this room, I know one thing about you: You all want to be satisfied,” and you could build on that. Or you could shock him from the other side and sort of the way I started this morning and say, “God is virtually unknown by everybody in this room. He’s so glorious and his centrality in his own affections is so magnificent and so out of sync with all of you pleasure-lovers that you don’t have a clue what God is about.” You could start like that. Now, I’m not as interested in where you start your message as much as you wind up making God the ultimate value of the universe rather than self as the ultimate value in the universe.

Maybe the most helpful thing to say in response to your question would be that it is a confusion of categories to say God is central, not your pleasure. See, God is an objective reality in the universe. My pleasure is a subjective response to realities in the universe, like television, money, sex, booze, good grades, good job, or God. To say that these two things should somehow be weighed off against each other — the subjective response, weighed off against the objective reality — is to confuse things. It’s a philosophical confusion. It is like saying God is paramount, not the worship of God. Well, worship is a response to the paramount nature of God. Of course God is paramount, but you show how paramount he is by the response of worship or the response of delight. I believe that what you’ve just said is a very crucial warning to those of you who might be inclined to embrace Christian Hedonism and make it a fabric of your ministry.

I know people who have heard what I have said and have gone off and done crazy things with it, just like they did with the doctrine of justification in the New Testament. They said, “Let us sin that Grace may abound. If justification by faith alone is true, let us sin that Grace may abound.” The Judaizers went to Paul and said, “See what you got us into?” Now, Paul did not adjust his doctrine. He just said, “Let’s just keep teaching. They have to get this. Of course you can abuse glorious truths.” Justification by faith alone apart from the works of the law is an unbelievably dangerous doctrine. It produces antinomians everywhere. But it’s true, and so is Christian Hedonism I believe.

So yes, you’ve pointed out a huge danger that we wind up cultivating a bunch of people who are so self-centered, they only think about themselves. That’s an absolute contradiction of Christian Hedonism, and that’s why I stress over and over and over again, it is joy in God. God gets glory by being delighted in. He’s most glorified in me when I’m most satisfied in him. I’m working on it and I’m sure I haven’t said it as well as it can be said, and some of you perhaps are being called to say it a lot better.

This might be quite personal, but can you just give us the qualities of your devotional life? Like some of the disciplines that you have? I would just love to hear some of those kinds of things.

Well, I will a little bit. Although, my left hand is not supposed to know what my right hand is doing, much less you. However, there were circumstances in 2 Corinthians where Paul made a fool of himself and took a risk to talk about himself. The question was, would I share something of my own devotional life? I think behind that question, at least I’m going to put the spin on it, is how do you keep your heart hot for God? How do you stay in love with Jesus?

I’ve already said I feel desperate a lot of the time. The reason I have developed a theology of joy is because I’m not a very happy person by nature. I’m a moody person. I’m prone to depression and discouragement. John prayed for me this morning when we got up that I wouldn’t be discouraged this morning. I said it in my church, “I have to get saved every day.” So everybody develops a theology for their own hangups.

You need to realize that that’s where all these books come from. They come out of my weakness and my craving and longing for God, which isn’t there a lot of the time. So, all that to say, I do try very hard to pursue him. And I do it in the morning. I mean, I have morning time. I’m not like those scholars, I know one in particular, who says he makes no distinction between his devotional reading and his study reading, his academic reading. Well, I do. It’s not that you don’t need hard thought in the midst of devotional reading or that God can’t break in upon the study of Greek tenses. But frankly, just like with Noël, my wife, there is a difference between the writing of a poem and the reading of a poem.

To write a poem for my wife, which I did for our 29th anniversary as I have for every other anniversary and birthday for these last 29 years, is unbelievably hard work, because I believe in rhyme and meter. I don’t want it to sound hackneyed and trite and stupid — “Roses are red, violets are blue . . .” So I put hours into these things. Well, that’s a very different experience than the night when it comes and we go out and I reach in and I pull out the poem and she smiles. She knows what it is. And I say, “I wrote something for you. Can I read it to you?” She says, “Sure.” Now that moment of reading to her is different. Well, in the morning when I opened my Bible, this morning I read the first nine chapters of Genesis. It’s New Year’s, I’m going to read the Bible this year. I read the Bible every year.

The alarm went off at 6:30 a.m. Now here’s my plan, I can use this morning as a paradigm. I have to preach at 11 a.m., I’m supposed to be over for soundcheck at 9:30 a.m. and then pray at 10 a.m. And so at 9:30 a.m., they’re getting me in the lobby downstairs. What time would you set your alarm for if you’re going to do what I had to do? Well, I set it for 6:30 a.m. Sunday mornings I set my alarm for 4:50 a.m. I’ll preach this coming Sunday. I just back everything up for what I have to do. I didn’t eat breakfast this morning. That’s not in the equation because there are just too many good things happening to eat breakfast. That’s called fasting, though I did eat an apple and had orange juice, so it wasn’t a total fast. But I didn’t go anywhere to eat breakfast. They gave me an apple in my room with a basket of fruit. Unbelievable.

I got up at 6:30 a.m. and I opened my Bible and I read for an hour. It took me an hour to read those nine chapters or so because I stop and I think about the wickedness of man in the flood and I think about how it says, “In the day of Seth, they began to call upon the name of the Lord.” Well, I just stopped there and spent about five minutes calling on the name of the Lord, trying to be like that generation. I read my Bible like that. My Bible is my prayer guide. I just read it slowly. I stop, pray, read, stop, pray, read, stop, pray. I listed off all my children and my wife in my prayer. I listed off all my 18 elders this morning, and I listed off all the 20 or so support staff. I have all those names memorized because they’re just like in the computer. I pray for them every day by name. I prayed for all those people as I prayed through Genesis.

But mainly, as you can imagine, I’m praying for this event today. I’m asking, “God help me, please help me.” And that’s pretty much the way I do it. Every day offers its unique challenge. Every day’s has a staff meeting, or every day has a counseling session, or every day has a crisis, or Patty is dying of cancer and I’m going to go up and see her on Christmas Eve. I pray, “Oh God, come. I’ll probably never see her again.” I might, she’s still alive. But she’s 38 and she’s dying of cancer. I drove 45 minutes to her house. And what do you think I’m doing in my devotions that morning as I get up early? I’m praying, “Oh God, make me so satisfied in you. Help me to see things about you that when I speak of them, Patty and Glenn, her husband, will be mightily strengthened to die.” So my devotions relate very closely to the living of my life.

I read the Bible. I’m using the Discipleship Journal Reading Plan. If you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend it. What’s unique about it is that you read in four different places in the Bible, and at the end of every month there are five free catch-up days, which is the key to making it. You see, if you have a Bible plan that gives you no days off, you never can catch up when you get behind, and you give up in February. You’re just so depressed that you’re 18 or 20 chapters behind. You think, “I can’t read the Bible this year.” But at the end of every month, there’s five free days. If you’re up, you can memorize things. That’s another piece, I memorize something virtually every morning. It’s not always new and sometimes just a little phrase to carry it like a lozenge under the tongue of my soul all day long, just sucking on it.

Then in addition to Bible reading and prayer, I try to read in Bible-saturated books. For me that’s Puritans. They are Jonathan Edwards type books. Then I try to study some, which is just rigorous. It’s more dealing with controversies in our day, like whether God knows the future of free actions and things like that. Maybe that’s enough to give you a flavor. I do try to meet the Lord for an hour or so every morning in the word and in prayer to make me a Christian.

One of your more recent books is about the role of fasting in terms of pursuing God. Can you talk a bit about your sense and value for that in pursuit of God? And can you talk a little bit about how you view that in your life and in the life of your church as well?

The question is about fasting and how I view it as relevant for me personally in my pursuit of God and how it’s fleshed out in the church. The book grew out of a series of messages I gave in January and February of 1995, right after I attended Bill Bright’s big shindig on fasting. That has happened every year since then, and it moved me deeply. So I called the church to fast that year, one day a week, one meal of that day. It was one 24-hour period and we could pick a day in the week. I put cards out. This is something you could do with your students. This enables you to not manipulate or coerce fasting. I think you need to be real careful not to do that, although it’s hard when you group-fast. But you can make a group of cards, like I put out 40 cards on the information table every Sunday and said, “Would 40 of you new people take those cards?” And when they’re gone, I’ll know we’ve got 40 people that are fasting this week, one day, 24 hours. I listed on those cards things we might pray for through fasting. Now, I didn’t know who they were. God knew who they were. Then I put another set of cards out there the next week and we did that all year long.

I have called the church to different kinds of fasts over the year. There is crisis fasting, when something is going on. Or this Sunday we’ll begin prayer week at our church. Many of us will fast a lot this week. It is the habit of many in the church to do a very significant beginning of the year fast.

I heard Jeff Lewis this morning and I loved what he said because it sounded like what I would say. He said, “It isn’t Lord that we haven’t tasted you, that we’re hungry for you. It isn’t that we haven’t drunk at the fountain that we’re thirsty for you. We have tasted, we have eaten. The Kingdom has come, the Messiah is here, we’re born of God, we’re heirs of glory. But that means we’re addicted and we’re so hungry for all the fullness of God.” Fasting, to me, is a way of saying, not, “I don’t have anything of you and I need you,” but a way of saying, “I have tasted you. I have known your forgiveness, I’ve known your love, I’ve known your acceptance. I’ve known your empowerment. I’ve known your healing. I’ve known your helping. I’ve known your guidance. You are good beyond measure, and I know that you offer so much more than I now have.” I want to say, with a fast, “This much, oh God, I’m hungry for you.”

As my tummy hurts or I get a headache and my arm in a reflex reaches out for that piece of cookie or bread. With that much spontaneity and that much naturalness, I want to go for you, oh God. I think fasting is simply an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, “I need you, I want you.” It’s a way of adding another emphasis like kneeling might add an emphasis or staying up all night like we will next Friday at our church.

At the beginning of Desiring God, you talk about the plans of God to not being thwarted regarding the church, which goes into the issues of evil and suffering and things that we go through in this world. You’ve made a distinction between God seeing suffering and when he sees that little spec, he grieves it like we do. But when he looks at the whole picture and knows it will ultimately bring some glory, it’s part of his plan, part of his will.

We’re so involved in culture and the theology that says things that are evil that go on in this world, go on because sin is in the world, and that it’s not God’s plan or his desire for any of those things to happen. Someone doesn’t have cancer because God made them have cancer, they just are in a fallen world. You’re able to look at the really hard things and you can look at that theology and you can say, “Okay, well in the big picture God’s going to be glorified. And yes, he grieves with us and he feels that with us. That sounds really good until it’s your mom that’s dying or it’s your student who’s got whatever going on. And in the midst of all that, how do you deal with that whole issue?

I argue, in Desiring God, that he has the unbelievable capacity (almost unbelievable), to look through the narrow lens at death and say, “I do not delight in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 18:33). He grieves. He wept over Jerusalem. You can grieve the Holy Spirit and he has the capacity to even do this simultaneously. Ask me not how. So the lens encompasses all of history and all of eternity and he sees the mosaic, such that the existence of this is part of a larger thing of which he does approve and in which he does delight as a whole.

Now, the question, I think, was, when it’s your mother dying of cancer or your student who’s just got the phone call that her parents are divorced or whatever, and they come to you and say, “This is good? This is okay? Praise God anyhow?” This is a front-burner issue for me. Our church is just full of pain right now. That little baby I described when I began is there, Patty is 38, dying of cancer. She may not live until I get home. Irv just had a heart attack. Olga is probably not going to live as her lungs fill up with pneumonia. Elsa just was told she has cancer and probably won’t live out 1998. Melissa, Roger, Kovar are people who have diseases. And then people just walk away from their spouses. We had that last year and I said, “What are you doing?” The man said, “I don’t love her anymore.”

Last Sunday I preached on singing from Ephesians 5:18–19, which says:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .

I had six points. One of the points was that underneath authentic singing must be a deep biblical theology of the sovereign goodness of God. And then I said, “Where do I get that out of this text?” And the answer was, I get it from Ephesians 5:18 where it says, “Be thankful for all things.” First Thessalonians 5:18 says, “In all things.” Ephesians 5:20 says, “For all things.” I simply said to the people, “That’s outrageous.”

I’m doing counseling, I’m doing congregational counseling right now. You should do for that individual what I was doing last Sunday. I just said, “That’s outrageous, unless we have a theology that somehow enables us to believe these parts of Scripture.” Romans 12:9 says, “Abhor what is evil.” Romans 12:15 says, “Weep with those who weep.” I get tough with my congregation right here because a lot of people have been attracted to my church because they love the sovereignty of God because I highlight it a lot. But I hammer away at this: We will not clobber each other with this thing. We will not walk into hospital rooms and funeral parlors and into people’s faces with some light, glib theology. That’s why I said it must be a deep biblical theology of the sovereign goodness of God. We will walk in with tears flowing down our faces with hands on our mouths lest we make light of pain, and with our arms stretched out, and we will hug and we will weep.

Then God did a great thing on Sunday. He ordained, without my planning at all, that we sang a hymn that had in it this line: “You who long pain and sorrow bear, praise God, and on him cast your care.” And I said to the people, “Did you mean to sing that? You, who long pain?” And I named them. They were sitting right there. I said, “There’s Dave and there’s Laurie with the three-month-old baby who’s never been out of the hospital, and they never get out of the hospital.” I said, “Did you mean to sing that to them? “You who long pain and sorrow bear, praise God.” And I said, “If you don’t mean it, don’t sing it.” Now, I think they did mean it. And we need to mean it.

But we are going to build a church here in which our theology is deep enough both to say, “I hate evil, I hate lostness, and I pray against lostness, and I pray against evil. And I read Genesis 50:20, which says, ‘You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.’” You could go to Romans 8:28 or Exodus 4:11, which says:

Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

Both of these things are going to be true at Bethlehem, and this one is going to make us tender and careful and quiet and gentle when we walk into this people’s life. I could make a living writing books. I could get enough royalties and hand them off to the ministry that John Bloom leads to live on easily. I don’t take these. Why would I do that? To be a pastor, it’s a pain in the neck. People are dying over the place. People are arguing with each other, getting upset, not liking the worship services. They say it’s the wrong song this Sunday. Why would I do that? I mean, most pastors are looking for a way out. They teach in seminary or write books or sell insurance or something. Now, why do I do this? And there’s a simple reason. I love meeting God in people’s pain.

I am going to die one of these days, and sometimes it feels real close and real soon. I want to be so real with God. To be with dying people, to be with suffering people is to get right up to the brink of eternity and to stand there with them and to look over the edge and to try to tell them what I see and I ask them what they see, and we help each other get ready to dive. You can’t do that burying yourself away writing books in some Idaho chalet.

My answer to your question is that you embrace people, you embrace them, you feel with them. You tell them that you understand as much as possible, or better, you say, “I don’t understand. I wish I could understand your pain.” But then you bring truth to bear.

The great thing about being a pastor is that I have 17 years to build a foundation before I go to the hospital. I don’t have to preach at the hospital. I can just hug. They know the theology. I don’t have to tell them the theology. That’s not the time for theology. So I hug them. I might have to say some tough truth. I’ll end with this. I sat on the couch there beside Glenn, who’s the husband who is going to lose his wife. Maybe she’s gone right now, I don’t know. He said, “I had a dream, John. I had a dream of a wife and four kids. And we got our four kids. And we were going to write music. And God shattered my dream.” I said something to him, and you have to judge the moment. I love this guy and we’ve been through a lot together. We were on the couch together. I put my hand out and put my hand on his back, and I said, “Glenn, don’t deify your dreams.” Those are tough words. His wife was lying in a hospital bed three feet away with things in her nose. I said, “Glenn, don’t deify your dreams.” And his response was, “I can’t. I can’t. God’s the only God,” which was worth it.