Let me just give you a little preliminary explanation of why I am so jealous for you to get a handle on what we’re talking about here in this second lecture or message about Christian Hedonism. The key for me that makes this so important is from Matthew 24:11–14 where it says:

And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:11–12) . . . And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come (Matthew 24:14).

Now notice two things are going to be happening simultaneously as the end draws near, a tremendous cooling off of love for God, and a tremendous surge in world evangelization. And that’s not going to be done by these cold people. It says this gospel will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations and then the end will come. That’s white-hot, risk-taking, obedient people that are doing that.

So simultaneously as the end draws near, you have a cooling off in many people and a heating up in many people. I picture it as a kind of a glacier starting to move over the church and move over the world, a big glacier of indifference and lukewarmness and coldness moving over, and my job at Bethlehem Baptist Church and in this city is to take my little torch and just torch that glacier all over the place until I create this pocket called Bethlehem in which we live and there’s a big opening up into the sun of God’s love, and we just torch it everywhere we can until we have avenues getting to all the peoples of the world.

That’s why I’m a Christian Hedonist. What I’m going to talk to you about tonight is the torch that I carry. It’s what was lit years ago. I give it this name, Christian Hedonism. I don’t care if you call it that or not, but it lights my fire and it’s the means by which I try to light the fires of other people and extend our glacier-melting, red-hot, mission-accomplishing flame as far as we can.

Fundamental Convictions of Christian Hedonism

Let me review for you the five convictions of Christian Hedonism, the flame that is burning in my heart tonight and again and again. I said these at the close of last time and I’m going to say them a little slower this time with a verse or two to support them, and then we’re going to move further into unpacking some of them.

1. The Universal Longing for Happiness

The longing to be happy is a universal experience, has great missionary implications and evangelistic implications in this city. Everybody wants to be happy and this is not evil. It’s like hunger. It’s neither good nor bad in and of itself, it’s just there, the longing to be happy. In Ephesians 5:29, talking about marriage and why husbands should love their wives who happen to be their own flesh, Paul said:

For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

So Christ loves and cherishes himself, namely the church. There was an old preacher named John Broadus who wrote a great book a hundred years ago on the preparation and delivery of sermons, and on page 250 of that book, he says:

Those philosophers who insist that man ought to always simply motivate others through appealing to what is right are no philosophers at all, for they are either grossly ignorant of human nature or else are indulging in mere fanciful speculation.

The point being, an appeal to people’s longing for happiness, eternal life, escape from danger, and joy and fulfillment is not an evil thing. If you knew human nature, you would do it. That’s number one. Everybody wants to be happy and it’s not evil to want to be happy.

2. The Right End of Our Longing

We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. Now the gist of that long sentence is this: Don’t deny it as though it were evil, stoke it until it isn’t satisfied with anything less than what will be the greatest and longest lasting happiness.

Now here a couple of verses to show you that Paul lived out this stoking. Second Corinthians 1:24 says:

Not that we Lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy.

Now just think of what he said: “My apostolic vocation, the point of my ministry, is not to Lord it over you but to take my torch under you and light your joy.” That’s what he said. We work with you for your joy. His whole life was devoted to helping make Christians happy in God.

Here’s another way he said it. Philippians 1:25 says:

Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith . . .

In other words, “The reason God is going to leave me here a little longer on the earth instead of taking me to heaven is so that I can advance your joy. The joy of faith, which is the joy in God.” So I learned from Paul that he devoted himself not to beating down the quest for joy, but stoking the quest for joy by pointing people again and again to the place where it can really be satisfied. Which leads us to number three. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. To settle for anything less is insane. We will see why it’s insane a little later.

3. Christian Hedonism Is Vertical

The key text here is Psalm 16:11, which I quoted last time. It’s one of my key and favorite verses:

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

That’s only found in the presence of God, at his right hand and in fellowship with him. He is the fountain of joy, and therefore he commands in Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” He doesn’t say, “Cancel out your desires for delight. It’s bad to want to be delighted.” He doesn’t ever say that in the Bible, nowhere. He says, “Focus it, channel it, stoke it, glut it, satisfy it on God.” Delight yourself in the Lord.

4. Christian Hedonism Is Horizontal

The happiness that we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love. The last point was about finding our joy in God, and now that vertical hedonism comes to its consummation when it draws other people into the experience of it. If you settle for vertical hedonism and manifest an indifference to whether others come into it, it will begin to shrivel. God has not designed you to enjoy his glory in a privatistic way. He has designed you to enjoy his glory and to experience the expanding of that joy as it folds other people into it. For example, 1 Thessalonians 2:19–20 says:

For what is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before our Lord Jesus at his coming? Is it not you? For you are our glory and joy.

Now how could he say that and be God-centered? Where is vertical hedonism when he looks at the converts that he has at Thessalonica, and he says, “You are my joy at the coming of the Lord.” My answer to that question is that when the Lord comes, Paul will be enthralled with the Lord, but that enthrallment with the Lord will come to its fullest climax as he casts a glance at the smiling faces of the converts who are also enthralled in the Lord, and he sees the Lord’s glory not only in his own heart but reflected in their faces. The consummation of our joy in God is when we experience its doubling or expanding in folding other people into it, which is why in the book Desiring God, the chapter on missions is called “The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism.”

Another illustration of that is from Second Corinthians 8:1–2 where Paul is writing to encourage them to be generous and he tells about the Macedonians and he says there was an overflowing grace of God in Macedonia:

In a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.

That’s a description of the way Christian hedonism moves from the vertical to the horizontal. The grace of God was outpoured in Macedonia. Poor people did not get rich because of the grace of God, they got rich with joy and that joy overflowed in liberality out of poverty. So their joy in grace grew as it flowed out to other people.

5. The Necessary Pursuit of Pleasure

This is just a conclusion from the previous four: To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we will fail to honor God and love people. Let’s put it positively. The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part, not optional, of all worship and virtue. My main thesis here at the end, and this is what we’re going to spend some more time on now, is that you can’t honor God if you don’t make it your vocation to be happy in God. You can’t honor God if you don’t pursue happiness in God — if you don’t count him your joy, not just your commander or your lawgiver or your savior or your redeemer. You must count him your treasure, your reward, your joy, or he will not be honored by your slavish obedience.

The Foundation of Christian Hedonism

Now here are the two focuses for the rest of the time tonight. I want to build a foundation for this quest to honor God by being happy in God. I want to build a foundation for Christian hedonism. And then the second thing we’ll do is answer four or five typical objections that have risen as I’ve tried to teach these things over the years. Let’s talk first now in this part about the foundation of Christian hedonism or the foundation of my quest to glorify God by being happy in God. And here’s the foundation. The foundation of that truth and that quest is that God has the same quest before I do. God’s quest is to be happy in glorifying God.

Now I stood up in the chapel at Wheaton College in 1985. It was a real tense moment. It was the first time I’d ever preached at my alma mater. I’ve only done it twice. There were about 1,600 students there and a big blue chapel with chandeliers and premier evangelical students. I got my first chance to do what I heard so many people do when I went to Wheaton, and I began with this sentence.

The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

I could see my friends, there were several friends on the balcony right there saying, “Oh no, he began with a mistake, a misquotation of the Westminster Catechism! How could he do it? It’s the chief end of man, not the chief end of God.” I could just see him up there saying, “Oh, John, what have you done?” They didn’t know my theology well enough. I meant to say what I said. I’ll say it again, “The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy himself forever.” That’s the foundation of my quest to give glory to God.

I grew up in a family and in a church that hammered away wonderfully at 1 Corinthians 10:31, which says, “Whether you eat or whether you drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” So I knew that I was to live to the glory of God, whatever it meant, but I don’t remember anybody telling me when I was growing up that God lives for the glory of God. And it has become so central to my theology, and so central to my life and everything that it puzzles me as I look back on it now, that it would be so rare. In fact, I didn’t run into it, at least not in any powerful firm way, until I read The End for Which God Created the World by Jonathan Edwards.

In about 60 pages, Edwards piles reason upon reason and text upon text to show that God does everything for the glory of God. God will not be denied the highest pleasure of worship, and he is not an idolater and therefore he worships God. That’s the foundation of Christian Hedonism.

God’s Passion for His Glory

Now in a few weeks, I’m going to do a three-part series on missions and I will probably begin that with a long overhead demonstration of this truth, but I’m going to give you a quick bird’s eye view of why I believe what I just said, namely that God is on a quest to glorify God in all that he does, whether he eat or drink or whatever he does, he does all to the glory of God, and he delights infinitely in his glory, reflected back to him in the panorama of the perfections that he sees in his Son. He says, “Thou art my beloved Son and I love you and choose you and affirm you and delight in you because you are me.”

Chosen for the Glory of God

Here are a few texts to undergird this truth. God chose us for his glory. Read Ephesians 1:1–14 sometime. We won’t read it now. But I can remember when I first taught Ephesians, under each one of those arcs that I completed was “to the praise of the glory of God.” That phrase, “to the praise of the glory of God’s grace” is what it’s about. He chose us “to the praise of the glory of his grace.” He redeemed us “to the praise of the glory of his grace.” You exist “to the praise of the glory of his grace.” Now what is that saying? It’s saying that all the good things he does for you in redemption, at great cost to himself, he’s doing to the end that you might praise his glory.

Created for the Glory of God

He created you for your glory. Isaiah 43:6–7 says, “Whom I created for my glory.” He called Israel for his glory that they might be a people, a name, a praise and a glory. He rescued Israel from Egypt for his glory. It says, “Yet he saved them for his name’s sake that he might make known his mighty power” (Psalm 106:8). He spared Israel in the wilderness for his glory. Ezekiel 20:14 says, “I acted for the sake of my name that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out,” and on and on. I’m just going to pass over most of these. I think many of you have heard this before.

Christ’s Return for the Glory of God

I’ll just close with his coming again. Jesus is coming back for the glory of God and for his own glory. It goes like this in 2 Thessalonians 1:9–10:

[Those who do not obey the gospel] will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.

Jesus is coming back to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at by all who believe. So from the beginning of creation to the consummation of the universe, God does everything he does for the glory of his own name. That’s the foundation of my quest for joy in God’s glory. He shares the same quest. He has that priority, and therefore I share God’s priority.

When I saw that, lights went on everywhere. I had never really fully understood, for example, this most important paragraph in the Bible, Romans 3:25–26 where it says, “God put Christ forward as a propitiation through his blood to be received by faith. He demonstrated his righteousness in putting forth his Son.” Now what I have come to see is that the righteousness of God is his unswerving allegiance always to uphold his glory and demonstrate it and never to leave behind what is infinitely valuable and to give his heart away to what is less than valuable. That’s his righteousness. Our sin cried his glory down, trampled it in the dirt.

Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Well, what needed to happen at the cross? If he’s just going to say to John Piper, a sinner who’s trampled on his glory, “Innocent. Come on in,” how’s that going to be a just thing? Answer: He put Christ forward to demonstrate that he does not regard his glory as minor or insignificant. It cost him his Son and he upholds his righteousness by vindicating the worth of his glory in the death of his son. Those kinds of things caused lights just to began to go on everywhere as to why God has done what he has done.

Election for the Glory of God

I came to Romans 9, when I came to Bethel College, I would teach the sovereignty of God in election and in every other way and the objections would just fly from students. I would appeal to Romans 9, and they would all say, “Yeah, but Romans 9 doesn’t refer to individual destinies, it refers to peoples, not eternity.” So I spent seven years writing this book called, The Justification of God, which is my effort to prove to the best of my ability that Romans 9 counts when it comes to defining and reflecting the glory of God and his righteousness.

That’s just to give you a flavor for what it meant to me to discover the God-centeredness of God and his pursuit of his own glory.

What About John 3:16?

Now here’s the problem. I’ve taught this now since 1974 or so, and I see it all over people’s faces when I go to churches and say things like this. The biggest question is something like, “This doesn’t sound like John 3:16, which says, ‘God so loved the world.’ It sounds like God so loved God. It sounds like he’s on an ego trip. It sounds like he’s a megalomaniac. It sounds like he’s the kind of person you’d want to put in a room with soft walls.” So there is a hesitancy to receive what’s to me just on the face of dozens and dozens and dozens of biblical texts, namely that he acts for his own name’s sake.

It’s right in the middle of some of our favorite texts like Psalm 23:3, which says, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” God is God-centered when he’s leading you for your good. He pursues you with goodness and mercy for his name’s sake. So I see these questions written all over people’s faces and we need to try to answer the question, how can it be loving to be so self-centered when 1 Corinthians 13:5 says, “Love seeks not its own.” So here’s God spending all of his time seeking his own glory.

Now to get to the answer, I pose this question: If God were to be loving to us, infinitely loving, what would he have to give us? What would be the best gift that he could give us? Because I assume if you’re loving, you give someone the best, not less than the best, but the best. You give them the best. And my answer to that question is himself, his Son, his Spirit — the triune God in fellowship. He gives us himself.

Praise as the Consummation of Joy

Now last week I quoted something from C. S. Lewis. I’m going to quote part of it again so that you see the significance of it in this connection. What do you do emotionally when you given the best? What do you do when something of infinite value is bestowed freely upon you? The answer is that you leap with praise and gratitude. You praise it. Now here is the quote from Lewis again:

The world rings with praise, lovers praising their mistresses, readers, their favorite poet, walkers, praising the countryside, players praising their favorite games, praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians and scholars. My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely valuable, what we delight to do, what we indeed can’t help doing about everything else we value.

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are. The delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

I think that’s absolutely right. I gave you some illustrations from my own life last week or two weeks ago.

Love or Self-Centeredness?

Now let’s see if we can put this together and see what the answer is to whether God is loving in being self-centered and pursuing his own glory and praise. If you’re smart and you’re with me, you’ve got it already. To be loving, he must give me what is best. What is best is God. When you receive what is best, the experience of the joy of having it is not complete until you can give expression in admiration and praise for it or to it. And therefore, if God wants to bring my delight in God, the best gift, to consummation, he must seek my praise to be loving.

God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act. If you try to copy him in this, you sin. That is, if you say, “Oh, I see. God is loving when he exalts himself and gets people to praise him, I will be like God. I will now get people to love and to praise me.” Mistake. If you want to copy God, you really copy God. God lives to exalt his glory in your life, bring it to consummation in praise back to him, and you join him in that. You join him by saying, “Yes, you are the source of joy, and yes, praise to you, to you and to others. Praise is the consummation of that experience. Telling it to you and telling it to others is the consummation of my joy in you.”

So here’s the paradoxical answer. Is it loving for God to be self-centered? Absolutely. If he ceased to be self-centered and began to say he was not infinitely worthy, but something else is infinitely worthy, he would be an idolater, he would be unrighteous, and we would have no treasure and we would have no God. If God is to give a foundation for my joy in an infinitely glorious God, he must love his glory, uphold his glory, offer me his glory, and seek my praise of his glory. Does that make sense?

So my answer to the most common objection that I get is that the reason people have it is because they’ve been so poorly taught about the centrality of God in God, in the Bible, and in all that he does. We are such a man-centered age.

I took all day Monday to write an article for the “Discipleship Journal” on the love of God. I was just blown away. The Lord was so good to me, I saw all kinds of things that I hadn’t seen as clearly before, but as I drew the article to a close, I knew I was saying things that these readers were by and large going to read for the first time, many of them — namely, why should we be excited that God loves us for his sake? The reasons were so powerful. I yearned for more and more of you to speak in these ways, in these God-centered ways, that when we talk about the love of God, we don’t degenerate into a sappy man-centeredness that somehow results in just stoking self-esteem and does not result in the glorious God-centeredness of God’s love for me.

Let me just give you one of the reasons. One of the reasons it’s such good news to be told that God loves me for God’s sake is that, therefore, he is committed as strongly and absolutely to me as he is to being God. There is granite strength that comes into a life when you start to see that when God acts for God’s sake on my behalf, my behalf is swallowed up into God’s God-ness, and he can no more stop loving me, his elect child, than he can stop being God. It’s good news. Really good news. Now that’s the first thing I said we were going to do, a foundation. I just tried to lay a foundation for why I should pursue my joy in God — namely, that God pursues his delight in his glory and he never ever gives way to a lesser value. Therefore, he provides a tremendous foundation for me to find joy in him and his glory.

Objections to Christian Hedonism

Now objections beyond the one we’ve just looked at. Let me list a few off: Does the Bible really teach that I should pursue pleasure? I mean maybe you are just using logical, nimble-handedness to make this statement and it’s a logical thing, but it isn’t a biblical thing.

Second, what about self-denial? I mean the kind of thing you are saying just sounds so American in the sense of cultivating pleasure when the Bible seems to preach self-denial.

Third, doesn’t this focus on pursuing my pleasure, highlight emotion too much? What about will? What about commitment? What about duty?

Fourth, what becomes of the noble concept of serving God, being a servant, not a pleasure seeker, serving him out of duty? Duty is not an ugly word. It’s not an ugly word. I love the word duty.

Fifth, doesn’t this put you at the center? Doesn’t your pursuit of your pleasure make you central? Now I don’t know if we’ll have time, we’ll see, to cover each of those five. Let me have a go at it here.

1. Should We Seek Our Pleasure?

Does the Bible really teach that I am to make it my vocation to be glad in God, to be satisfied in God, to pursue pleasure in God, to delight in God? Does the Bible teach that? I have three or four answers here. The Bible says, “Yes. Yes. The Bible does teach this.” First, there are commands. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord.” It’s a command. It’s not an option. It’s like, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Delight yourself in the Lord. Psalm 32:11 says, “Be glad in the Lord, rejoice, O righteous, shout for joy, all you upright in heart.” It’s a command. It’s not just icing on the cake. I grew up in a church where I think joy was seen as optional icing on the cake of commitment. And then I find commands, you must be happy.

Second, to really underline that must-ness of it, I found threats if we don’t. I remember reading Jeremy Taylor, he said, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.” I thought, “Oh, that’s clever, but is it biblical?” And then I found the text from which he might have taken it. 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 whom the Lord will send against you.” That’s a threat. If you won’t be happy in me, you’ll serve your enemies. So you not only have commands to be happy in God, you have threats of what will happen to you aren’t happy in God.

Third, the very nature of faith shows that the pursuit of joy in God is necessary. For example, in Hebrews 11:6 it says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” You must believe that he’s a rewarder. Now just think about this. You can’t please God without faith, and faith is coming to God with the confidence that he’s a rewarder. If you come to God and say, “Well, I really don’t want any rewards, I really don’t want to be happy, and I really don’t want anything from you, I’m coming for your sake, not my sake,” he will not listen. He’s offended to presume that you could put yourself in the role of a benefactor to God.

Who does that honor? It honors you. It says, “I come to you and I bring you all that I have to give and now you’re richer.” This text says, that’s not faith, that’s presumption. Faith must believe that he exists and that he’s a rewarder. It says, “I’m poor, you are rich. I’m bankrupt, you are overflowing. I’m thirsty, you are a fountain. I’m hungry, your bread.” That honors God. And you must believe that he’s that for you, and if you grow up in an atmosphere that says, “Oh, don’t want, don’t want, don’t . . .” Then you will not come to God, and you will not honor him the way he wills to be honored. So the Bible teaches this through the nature of faith.

One last way it teaches this is through the nature of sin. What is sin? Listen to this word from 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.

What is evil? What is evil? Evil is not the desire to be happy. Evil, the essence of sin, is the insanity of looking God Almighty in the face, overflowing in grace and riches, and saying, “No. Thank you.” And putting your face in the dirt and trying to suck water out of the desert. And all of us have those rocks out there that the devil has painted in really attractive colors that have no water in them and we’re sucking at them all the time trying to get refreshment and water out of the rock, and he is it. So the nature of sin teaches us that the Bible means for us to pursue the fountain, and not to hew out cisterns that won’t work. So my answer to the first objection is, yes, the Bible does teach these things.

2. What About Self-Denial

I mentioned this already. I’ll pass over it perhaps more quickly. Jesus says, “Whoever would save his life will lose it.” Whoever will save his life will lose it. Someone might say, “Aren’t you commending people to save their life, to enhance their life? Then you’re teaching suicide.” And my response, as you know, is to say, “Read the rest of the verse.” Which says, “And whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it.” So Jesus has a very unusual strategy for getting you happy, namely the loss of your life. You must be willing to forsake everything, Luke 14 says, in order to be the disciple of Jesus and have the benefits of heaven.

If you lay up treasures on earth, you will be bankrupt in the age to come. If you store up treasures in heaven by living out your satisfaction in Jesus rather than the satisfaction of money and home and job and everything else, then you will have treasure in heaven. It’s an upside down way of pursuing happiness, but it is a pursuit of happiness.

Here’s a quote from Flannery O’Connor, a southern novelist. She said:

I don’t assume that renunciation goes with submission or even that renunciation is good in itself, always you renounce a lesser good for a greater. The opposite is what sin is. The struggle to submit is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and possibly with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy fully armed too, for it is a highly dangerous quest.

That’s a good quote. Jim Elliott said:

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

And Elliott gave his life and he gained God forever. In other words, there is self-denial, but it is not ultimate self-denial. You deny yourself, as Lewis says, an afternoon in the gutter of the slum in order that you might have an eternity by the sea. You deny tin to have gold, and you deny sand to have silver. Yes, there is self-denial. It’s just not ultimate self-denial and that needs to be highlighted.

3. Isn’t This Emotionalism?

Some might say, “Aren’t I making too much of emotions? I mean good night. There’s so much emotionalism in the world and you come along and say, ‘Pursue your passion, pursue your pleasure, be happy in God.’ Aren’t those all emotions that are just kind of the caboose on the end of the train and not real significant?” And my answer to that is, no, that’s not true. I had a class in college in 1967. Millard Erickson was my teacher who then went to Bethel and now he’s down at Southwestern. It was a class on apologetics and we read Situation Ethics by Joseph Fletcher, a bad book.

The worst thing I can remember about that book is that Fletcher argued like this: “Love is not an emotion because it is commanded in the Bible. You can’t command an emotion, and therefore love is not an emotion.” It’s a little syllogism. Love is commanded, you can’t command emotions. Conclusion: love is just a raw act of will. There are no emotional components in it.

I think that’s a bad argument. All the premises are wrong and the conclusion is wrong. Love is commanded in the Bible, but so are dozens of emotions. For example, joy is commanded. Anybody disagree with that? “Delight yourself in the Lord.” It’s a command. Hope is commanded. Fear is commanded. “Don’t fear those who can kill the body, but fear him who after he has killed the body, can cast into hell.” Peace of heart is commanded (Colossians 3:15). Zeal is commanded. Be aglow with the spirit. Never flag in zeal. That’s an emotion. Grief is commanded. Weep with those who weep. Desire is commanded. “Earnestly desire the sincere spiritual milk of the word.” Tender-heartedness is commanded. Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted.” Brokenness and contrition are commanded. James 4:9 says, “Be wretched, mourn, and weep.” Gratitude is commanded. Ephesians 5:20 says, “For everything give thanks.”

Don’t tell me, Joseph Fletcher, you can’t command emotions. That’s your philosophy. That’s not the Bible. God can command of you whatever you ought to produce, whether it is in your power to produce it immediately or not. And he does. He commands emotions. It is no argument that love is not an emotion because it is commanded. All these emotions are commanded. Love is more than an emotion. It is. But it is not less than an emotion.

4. What About Serving God?

Some may say, “What becomes of the noble ideal of serving God? Of duty?” Let me give you some examples here of why we have to be real careful with this idea of serving God. The concept of serving God can really be offensive to God. Do you know that you can offend God by serving him? Why? Acts 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.” That text says you offend God if you serve him.

Psalm 50:12–14 says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine . . . Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” Do you get that? He is saying, “I’m the one who owns everything. You can’t give me anything. If I were hungry, I wouldn’t tell you. I own you. I own everything you have. I own the universe. Everything is at my disposal. I run the world, you cannot add to me.”

Now that’s the danger of the metaphor of service. Is God like a plantation owner who has slaves, and if they rebel, he can’t get the cotton in? God will get the cotton in. This gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come. God is sovereign. He will get it done. He’s not like a plantation owner dependent on his autonomous, independent slaves. You can’t honor God by serving him slavishly, by adding to him, by saying, “You have a need here. I’ll meet your needs. I’ll fill the need.”

There is another way to think about service. I get it from Matthew 6:24. It says, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” Now here’s a question: How do you serve money? Because this is going to teach us how to serve God. How do you serve money? Do you contribute to money? Do you add to money? Do you improve upon money? Do you help money out? No. You serve money by keeping your eyes peeled for how you can put yourself in a position to benefit from money, and to be thinking about everything in your life so that you can benefit from what money can bring. If money’s moving over here, you move over here. If money’s moving over here, you move over here. If money has a gift and a blessing to give here, you move there. You go where money goes under money so that the fountain of money and all that money can buy is your happiness. And that’s the way you serve God. You can’t do that to two people. You try to do that to money, you can’t do it to God.

God is moving. He has great blessings for his people. And the way you serve God is not by saying, “I’ll help you,” but, “I’ll stay where you can help me so that I can bless the world.’ So you go wherever the help of God goes. First Peter 4:11 says, “Let him who serves, serve in the strength that God supplies, that in everything God may get the glory.” To serve God, you let him be the supplier. And so you avoid the terrible mistake of being the benefactor of God.

So I think we still serve God, but we serve him, letting him be the one who fills us for others.

5. Is God Still Central?

I close with this last objection. Is God central or am I central? When I say pursue your own joy, am I saying be central in your life? It’s like little puppies gathered around a bowl of water on the kitchen floor. They’re all scrambling and you put the water down and like little brown petals, they come around this bowl. What’s the center there? The center is the water. And when God opens the windows of heaven on this church and pours out the fountain of his glory and his truth and his power, and we gather around that and say, “Nothing do we want more and nothing will satisfy me more,” then he’ll be the center and we’ll be satisfied.