What I’d like to do is talk about a sort of Christianity 101 from a Christian Hedonist perspective, which is what I call my vision of life — Christian Hedonism. It’s not like the little girl from Canada who heard me say “heathenism”, which is what some people think hedonism is. I looked it up in my Webster’s 11th edition, and it says that hedonism is “a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure.” And that’s what I mean by it.

I won’t give you an extensive historical defense of Christianity tonight. We could talk about those issues later. One of the ways to come to conviction about a view of life and God and joy and family and the world is not only to investigate evidences for claims, but the very nature of the claims themselves as to whether they appear to be coherent and whether they fit into the universe as you see it. That’s the approach I would like to take tonight. I’m only given a few minutes. Mark Dever told me, “This is not your typical church crowd, so you can’t talk forever tonight.” This will have to be short.

Christianity Is About News

Let’s start like this. Christianity is not first a philosophy of being. It’s not first a code of morality and it’s not first a theory of knowledge. It’s not philosophical at root. It’s news — news about events. And the key event that it tells about is the coming into the world of the Son of God, named Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life, and who died a death that the New Testament says is in our place, such that all who will entrust their lives to him find all of their offenses against God remitted so that we can have an acceptance with the Father of the universe and an everlasting life. Now that news is called gospel. That’s the common word. What I find is that if you take these loaded words and begin to unpack them, you find yourself driven to what I call Christian Hedonism. Let me just try to do that very briefly here at the front end and then give you some evidences or reasons for why I embrace this view.

Gospel is good news about something, but it doesn’t say what the good news is. It’s not adequate to simply say Christians believe gospel. That doesn’t say anything. That doesn’t tell you anything. That’s a zero. Someone could say, “Good news about what?” And I could add that it’s good news about forgiveness of sins against God who created the universe and who is angry at us because we have offended him so badly and have fallen short of what we were created to be in his image, such that there is just wrath against us. We can be forgiven and that would be our gospel.

But if you analyze the word forgiveness, somebody could say, “Well, so what? Who cares about being forgiven?” Because forgiveness in and of itself doesn’t mean anything. The only value forgiveness has is if there’s a relationship that’s been wrecked and you’d really like to have it restored because the restoration would be so pleasant to you.

If I say something really crabby to my wife when I wake up in the morning, and she’s offended, and I’m feeling angry, and I walk out of the room and we go down the kitchen, and she’s in the kitchen standing at the sink, and I’m over there pouring my cereal and there’s ice in the air, I know what needs to happen; I need to be forgiven and I need to ask for forgiveness. Why? I want her back. I don’t want, when I walk over to the sink and kiss her on the back of the neck, to have her jerk away and walk out of the room. I’d like her to turn around and reciprocate. The only value that forgiveness has is to get my wife back.

To say “gospel” doesn’t say anything. It just leads us somewhere. It’s good news about what? And then you could say, “forgiveness”. But that doesn’t mean anything because it’s all about what forgiveness opens the door to. So we have to go further and say, well, what does it open the door to? What does Christianity say this thing calls forgiveness opens the door to? Then you could use another nice Christian word called salvation, or being saved. That doesn’t tell us anything. We could ask, “Saved from what and for what?” It’s just an empty word. See how amazing these words are? They don’t say much. You have to press them and press them and press them until you arrive at something that sounds good, and they don’t sound good yet. I mean saved sounds sort of good, but you don’t know what you’re saved from or what you’re saved for yet.

Saved From, Saved For

Let’s say we’re saved from wrath, judgment, hell, and condemnation, as everyone would say. Yes, good. Nobody wants to be condemned. And we are saved for what? Maybe it would be eternal life. John 3:16 says:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

So I could say, “You could have life if you are forgiven.” And maybe someone would say, “Well, maybe I don’t want it, because it might be boring. Endless boredom is not interesting to me.” So even with the word life, we haven’t gotten anywhere. Isn’t it amazing how many words we can use to describe Christianity without saying anything yet that sounds good to anybody?

I have to say, saved for what? And we say, “Life.” Then I ask, what kind of life? Where? With whom? Will I want this life? There are lives I don’t want to live. Maybe the one you’re living now you don’t want to live, which would be a very dangerous position for you to be in tonight and I’m glad you’re here, because I would like to turn that around.

My answer — and I’m going to take this from an Old Testament passage of Scripture in Psalm 16:11 — goes like this:

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

Now you’re talking language that sounds like good news. There is fullness of joy and there are pleasures that never end. Okay, gospel might not have meant very much, forgiveness might not have meant very much, saved might not have meant very much, and life might not have meant very much, but pleasure, I want that. Joy that’s full and never-ending. You see those two modifiers? Full does not mean not 90-percent joy, but 100-percent joy. And then having everlasting pleasure means that means it never comes to an end. I’m not interested in your offer of 800 years of pleasure. No, thank you. I want it to last forever.

If this text (Psalm 16:11) is true — then the one place that can be found is in God, in Jesus Christ. Christianity teaches that the gospel is that Jesus Christ came into the world to die in the place of sinners so that we could be forgiven, so that we could be saved from the opposite of that and for that life, which is everlasting and ever-increasing pleasure in his presence.

All Things for the Glory of God

Now, I grew up in a home with a dad who was a believer, who prayed every night, and I learned from him to pray that God would be glorified in all things, which creates a problem for me now with this particular train of thought. Here I’ve arrived at a point where it looks like I’m saying the gospel is all about my joy, but my dad prayed in a way that taught me that the gospel is all about God’s glory — his beauty, his power, his justice, his truth, his goodness, his mercy. It’s all about making much of him, lifting up him, honoring him, worshiping him, and that’s all over the Bible.

I think the title they gave to this talk tonight was Created For Joy. Well, the Bible is crystal clear that we’re created for the glory of God.

Isaiah 43:6–7 says:

Bring my sons from afar,
     and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name
     whom I created for my glory, says the Lord . . .

Now I’ve got my heart longing for this joy over here, and the Bible is saying, “The end of all the gospel, salvation, forgiveness, and life is pleasures at God’s right hand.” And I’ve got these other passages of Scripture over here that say, “You’re created for his glory, and everything is for his glory” — in other words, to show how great he is and to magnify him.

The Harmony of God’s Glory and Our Joy

Now here’s my discovery, and I learned it indirectly from the Bible through Jonathan Edwards, who lived 250 years ago. My way of saying it is this, to bring these two together:

God is most glorified in me (honored, praised, made much of) when I am most satisfied in him.

When I discovered that in 1968, it turned my world upside down. I no longer felt ripped apart inside because I knew two things. One I knew mainly from the Bible, the other I knew mainly from my heart. From the Bible and my dad, mainly, I knew that God is God and I shouldn’t mess around with him. He means to be honored, worshiped, and glorified. And I knew from my heart that I want to be happy. And I couldn’t get the two together. They seemed to be like oil and water. Then I discovered Edwards, who said this. I’ll read you part of the quote I brought along here in my pile somewhere:

God is glorified not only by his glory’s being seen but by its being rejoiced in.

I’d never heard anybody say that before 1968, when I was a beginner at Fuller Seminary. I had never heard anybody say, “God is glorified by being rejoiced in.” If that’s true, and if he is the infinitely valuable person in the universe, then the two things that seemed at odds aren’t at odds anymore. God is glorified by being rejoiced in.

I thought, could it possibly be? This would be the best of all possible worlds, that God would be made much of, that God we would be shown to be glorious, that God would be declared as excellent and awesome, just, true, holy, good, and everlasting by my being happy in him. If that were the case, then I would have all I ever longed for and he would have the honor that belongs to him. Therefore, I began to look for it in the Bible. Because if it’s just a human opinion, it’s of no significance, but if it’s in the Bible, at least there’s a long tradition behind it. And if the Bible happens to be, as I believe it is, the Word of God, then you have divine warrant for it.

Christ Magnified in My Body

Let me read a text for you. I’ll just quote the text for you and show you one place in the Bible where I underline this. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the church in Philippi, and in Philippians 1:19–21 he said:

It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ (the Son of God, risen from the dead) will be honored (magnified, made much of, praised) in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Now, back up with me and think hard for just two minutes about that text. He said his passion in life is to make Jesus look good. And this is what it means to be a Christian, to have a passion that your life makes Jesus look really good. That’s what it means to be a Christian. It means you live as not to make yourself look good, but to make the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords look magnificent. He said, “My passion is that that would happen in my body whether I live or whether I die” (Philippians 1:20). Let’s take this death half. He is saying, “I want God, Jesus Christ, to look magnificent in my body by the way I die.” And then he adds this phrase, “For to me to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Now work on the logic of that for just a moment. You have a ground clause that says, “For me to die is gain.” That is supporting his passion that in his body, by his death, Christ would be magnified. Are you starting to get it? Probably not. How do I fulfill his design to be made magnificent and shown magnificent in the world? Paul’s answer, “By the way I die, and the way I die is by counting him gain in my dying.”

Well, maybe I’m missing a premise, maybe that’s why it’s not clicking as quickly. There’s a premise I’m leaving out of the argument which is found two verses later in Philippians 1:22–23. He says:

If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

Now we know why it’s gain to die, at least in Paul’s mind. This being, this person, this risen Son of God who had lived this perfect life, and had loved so deeply, and had died so terribly, and had risen so triumphantly, is now in heaven and will come in judgment someday, and Paul says, “If I die, it will be gain because I will go to be with him.” Now, put it together. How can I magnify God in my body through death? Answer, by counting death gain — that is, by being so satisfied with all that God is for me in Christ that I can let everything in this life go and count death gain. If I lose everything this world has to offer and count it gain because I get Christ, that kind of death will make Jesus look really good.

That’s the argument of the apostle, which is exactly what Edwards said. God, or Christ, his Son, is glorified in being rejoiced in. To put it in the death situation, Paul is saying, “Christ will be magnified in my body if I’m so satisfied in Christ that to gain him and lose everything else is gain.” I do say this is biblical. In other words, Edwards’s quote, which I also got from C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory and now found it in the Bible, is biblical and the implications of it for life are absolutely staggering, and I’ll mention the main one.

The Duty of Pursuing Our Joy in God

If it’s true that God created you both to be magnified by you in the way you live, to be made much of by you, and for you to be satisfied all the days of your life and then increasingly for eternity, and they come together, do you know what your lifelong vocation should be? The pursuit of pleasure in God. That’s why I call it Christian Hedonism. There is a Kantian ethic that hangs in the air of American church life that says, “To the degree that you perform any act of virtue or worship for benefit that you receive, you destroy its virtue.” That hangs in the air in the churches we attend, or in the classes you attend, or in the business place where you are.

Virtue, ever since Immanuel Kant, is that which you do with no view to your benefit whatsoever, but sheer duty. That hangs in the air. It ruins worship service after worship service, and turns Christianity into something it’s not so that an Ayn Rand rejects it out of hand as a ridiculous thought, as if you would be selling your highest values for your lowest. It’s a distortion. It isn’t Christianity. Christianity is not the forsaking of the pursuit of pleasure, it’s the glutting of the pursuit of pleasure on the right object — namely, the living God manifest in Jesus Christ loving us in history and on the cross.

Therefore, if we want to honor him, if we want to make him look good in Washington, D.C. or Minneapolis, Minnesota, we must pursue joy in him. If you are indifferent to your joy, you’re indifferent to the glory of God, and that is sin and will get you in trouble with him. It is incredibly good news that the way to get out of trouble with God is by delighting in him.

The Fear of God

Sometimes I’ve tried to figure out, what is the fear of God? Because the fear of God’s a big deal in the Bible. The fear in God’s the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Here I’m going around telling everybody to be happy in God. Someone might say, “What do you do with the fear of God, Piper? The Bible is full of the fear of God. We should get the fear of God into the people.” Well, I believe in the fear of God, but like this.

I went to visit one of the deacons in our church one time when I first came, about 20 years ago, and my son, Karsten, was about seven or eight. He was little, and they had a huge dog. We opened the door and my six year old looked this dog right in the eye and was quite stunned. This dog, if he had opened his mouth, could have taken his head off. I mean, it was like a gorilla as far as I was concerned. The guy’s name was Dick, and he said, “Oh he’s all right. He won’t bother anybody.” Karsten, brave as he was, kind of sidestepped around him. We realized we had forgotten something in the car, and I said, “Karsten, would you run out and get mommy’s purse?” Karsten, obedient as he was, started trotting out to the car, and this dog pushed the door open with his nose and with this deep growl he went right up behind Karsten. Karsten looked over, and Dick leaned out as Karsten was just about ready to lose it, though he hadn’t lost it yet, and Dick said, “Oh by the way, don’t run away from him. He doesn’t like you to run away from him. Just walk. Let him go with you.”

At that moment I said, if that isn’t the most magnificent picture of the fear of God. Don’t run away from him. He’ll bite your head off. Turn around, give him a big hug, and he’ll lick you forever. That really is the meaning of the fear of God in the Bible. As silly as the illustration sounds, that’s exactly what the fear of God is. If you run away from this God, you have an enemy. If you run toward this God, you’ve got a friend. The only way to run toward him is in Jesus. Pursue your joy toward God, and he gets the glory as a big, friendly, gracious, forgiving German Shepherd. If you run the other way, trying to get your joy wherever you get it outside him, you’ll have an enemy. And you don’t want him as your enemy. You want him as your friend. Run to him through Jesus.

Now, the implication, therefore, is that we should pursue our joy in him all the time.

Arguments for Pursuing Joy in God

Maybe I could just take a few more minutes and show you. You don’t have Bibles probably. I’m just going to quickly quote several arguments for this crazy point of Christian Hedonism that says, “You should make it your vocation all your life long to pursue your joy in God.” Here are a few arguments for that.

1. The Duty of Delight

Number one: You’re commanded to do this

In Psalm 37:4, God says:

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

That’s a command like, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” It says, “Thou shalt rejoice in the Lord your God.” It’s a command. I remember a person said to me one time, “Piper, you should stop going around telling people to be happy in God and start telling them to obey God.” I thought, “That’s like saying don’t tell them to eat apples, tell him to eat fruit!” I mean, what is obedience? Obedience is doing what he says, right? He says, “Delight in me. Come to me. Rejoice in me. Be glad in me. Take pleasure in me.” That’s a command. I don’t buy this choice between the two. It’s a category confusion between obedience and joy. This is one of the things we’re supposed to do to obey. In fact, it better infect all the other things we do to obey, otherwise it’ll be legalism and raw duty, which doesn’t please God. It just makes you look like you have strong willpower.

2. The Danger of Joyless Service

Number two: God threatens terrible things if we won’t be happy.

Deuteronomy 28:47 says:

Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joyfulness and gladness of heart . . . therefore you shall serve your enemies . . .

Isn’t that amazing? It says, “Because you did not serve the Lord of God with gladness, you’re going to serve your enemies.” In other words, “If you won’t be happy in me, then I’ll give you away to your enemies.” God is summoning us. He’s summoning us always to find him as our joy.

3. The Nature of Faith

Number three: the nature of faith teaches that we should pursue our satisfaction in God.

Jesus said:

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst (John 6:35).

My definition of faith is this. If you wonder, “How do you become a Christian? If this is Christianity, how do you become one?” The answer is, believe in Christ. And if you say, “What’s that?” Jesus, speaking in the Gospel of John, says, “I am the bread of life; whoever believes in me will not thirst.” Here’s my definition: believing in Christ is a soul coming to Christ so as to be satisfied. It’s not a body coming, because your body can sit right where you are. It is a move of the heart, a move of the soul, a move of the mind out to God and Christ so as to find soul satisfaction in him. Call it bread and water. Those are just images that are showing, what food is to your stomach, he is to your soul, to your life. You come to Christ so as to be satisfied. That’s believing on him.

4. The Nature of Evil

Number four: the nature of evil teaches that the pursuit of satisfaction in God should be our daily, hourly vocation. Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, put it like this:

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
     be shocked, be utterly desolate,
     declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils (Jeremiah 2:12–13):

Now what are they? What’s the definition of evil?

They have forsaken me,
     the fountain of living water
and have hewed out cisterns for themselves,
     broken cisterns that can hold no water.

Isn’t that an amazing definition of evil? Evil is leaving a fountain and putting your mouth in dirt to try to get water out of the dirt because you’re thirsty, while God is saying, “I’m the fountain. I’m the fountain. I made you. I know you. I am infinitely satisfying. I made you to know me, to be satisfied in me, to love me, and to enjoy me forever, increasingly. Don’t turn away and carve out for yourself another fountain which has no water in it.” Do you know why people do that? The dirt tastes so good. It really does. I admit that. The dirt tastes good. Many of you have tasted it. You may be feeding on it right now, and it bothers you when Christians call it “sin”. It bothers you when they claim to be the ones who have the source of happiness while you’re quite happy in the dirt because it tastes so good.

Until something goes off in your head, you won’t see it as poison and lacking in everlasting nutrition. I would just commend to you that if you turn away from God as your fountain, all other cisterns are going to be broken and empty, at least in the end you will find it so. And I think in the late night hours, if you’re like me anyway, your conscience will tell you so.

5. The Nature of Conversion

Number five: the nature of conversion teaches us that we should pursue our joy in God. This is a one-verse parable in the parables of Jesus. This gripped me because it gets at the nature of Christianity and conversion. Just ask yourself, if you’re an believer sitting there tonight and you’re not a follower of Jesus, what would it mean to become a Christian tonight? What would be a picture of me becoming a Christian tonight?

Here’s a one-verse parable from Jesus Christ, and almost every scholar believes he told this parable. There are scholars all over the place on how many sayings he said and didn’t say. Joachim Jeremias wrote a book on the parables of Jesus, and he persuaded almost everybody of these key parables. He said, “The church never created these. Nobody made these up. Jesus used these parables.” This is from the mouth of Jesus Christ, almost everybody agrees:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field (Matthew 13:44).

That’s the end of the parable. That’s a picture of the arrival of King Jesus in your life. You’re walking through life, and owing to the amazing providence and grace of God, you stub your toe on a sermon or something, and you lean down and you brush it off and you open it, and by grace the eyes of your heart look in and say, “There must be millions of dollars in there. I wonder if anybody saw me?” The law of the land is that if you own the field, you own what’s in it. So you think, “I have to get this field. I will have this field.” So you cover it over, pat it down, and think, “Nobody’s going to see this field” — not everything in a parable is to be taken too literally, right? You’re not supposed to keep the gospel to yourself.

And then you run off. You sell your wedding ring, you sell your grandfather’s clock that your grandmother gave you. You sell your car, your computer, and all your CDs, and you buy the field. That’s what it means to become a Christian. In other words, becoming a Christian is recognizing Christ as an all-satisfying treasure.

Turning Again

This might be a good place to tell you this story because a few of you have been praying for Abraham, and he wouldn’t mind me telling you. My 22-year-old son was living in a van in Pensacola, Florida, making rock music. He doesn’t own anything, he doesn’t have anything, and he doesn’t have any insurance. I prayed every day that he didn’t get some awful disease. He wasn’t walking with the Lord for about three years, breaking my heart. He loved me and was never hostile or angry at me. He would even say academically, “Daddy, your theology is probably the best theology as it goes, but it’s just not mine.”

Thursday, a week ago, I got an email which began with the sentence, “I’m saved.” Then he documented the influences most immediately. Some of you have been praying for him for years, and I thank you for it and I want you to praise God with me. Some of you are right where my son Abraham was, and your dad and mom are praying for you, and perhaps your grandmama, just yearning that you would experience what Abraham did.

What happened? He came home for two weeks and he helped two young women in our church move into their apartment, and these women were very strong, very articulate, no-nonsense, in-your-face kind of women. They let him know, in no uncertain terms, what the truth was and what he needed to do. They mentioned some Bible verses, and my son knows the Bible better than they do probably, but that didn’t make a bit of difference because he had grown numb and blank and blind. He got on the plane, and I said, “Can I stick a couple of books in your bag?” And he said, “Sure.”

He got down there and he called us on Tuesday and said, “I read the books, daddy.” This was two days later. They were my books. We didn’t know quite what to say. It took our breath away. And he said, “Would you send me a copy of Seeing and Savouring Jesus?” Noël didn’t say anything except, “Yes.” We got that in the mail right away. We hung up and thought, “What’s going on? Oh Lord, could it be, could it be?”

Then the email came two days later, and he said three things along with seven requests for prayer to triumph over all the crap in his life. First, he said, “The patience and the love you and mommy have showed me has always humbled me and made me glad.” Second, he said, “I broke it off with so-and-so, a young woman, for the first time in six years, and it feels final, right, and good.” Third, he said, “Molly mentioned a verse and I couldn’t find it, so I decided to read Romans until I found it.” That’s dangerous. That’s really dangerous. He said, “I read Romans 1–10 and that did the trick.”

Here you are tonight, and the reason I mention that story is because finding Jesus as a treasure is a gift, and yet there are things you can do to get in the way of the gift, like open the Bible as my son did. After three years of a closed Bible, walking away from his dad’s faith and all that I thought he had believed, he decided on this particular day. Why? Why on this particular trip home? Why Molly and not all the other people that had been in his life for years? I don’t know why. He just opened his Bible and by the time he got to chapter 10, he was saved, he was a believer, and his heart had seen. Christ had stepped forth, as it were, spiritually out of the Bible, committed himself to his trust, and won him over as a believer. That little parable is a beautiful description of what it means to be saved.

The Reason for Self-Denial

I’ll close like this. A lot of people would say to me — usually it’s Christians who would talk this way, or people who were in the church and then left but remember a little bit — “You talk about pursuing joy and seeking your own pleasure. Blah, blah, blah all the time. What about self-denial? I mean, Jesus said, ‘Whoever would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mathew 16:24). But you’re going around telling people to commit suicide because the Bible says if you deny yourself then you gain life, and you’re telling people to glut their pleasures on God.”

I really believe in self-denial, but not ultimate self-denial, because the Bible nowhere teaches ultimate self-denial. The Bible teaches you to deny yourself tin so that you can have gold; to deny yourself brackish water so you can have a flowing stream; to deny yourself some old, crummy juice so you can have wine; to deny yourself soul-sickness so you can have health; to deny yourself second-rate, two-bit pleasures so that you can have everlasting, infinite joy. Yes, there is self-denial. You must deny yourself all those apparently good things so they don’t become your idols and your lords, so that you can have him.

Because when you deny yourself all those things and you choose Christ and you delight in Christ above everything else, you show that he is valuable. The apostle Paul said, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ” (Philippians 3:8). The bottom-line statement that I’m trying to get across for you to consider regarding what Christianity really is, is that God means to be honored and worshiped. My heart and your heart, with no exceptions in this room, want to be happy and we’d like it to be as full and as long as possible. Christianity says those two things are not at odds, but rather, in the act of delighting in God, seeing him as the treasure in the field, you get the joy and he gets the glory.

I commend to you Jesus Christ as the one who not only is that treasure, but also is the one who died so that every obstacle in your heart between you and that treasure would be removed. God bless you.