I have an invitation to give. I think it would be tremendous if the whole Toshavim entered the worship service en masse and sang about three of those for the congregation. Would you be willing to do that some Sunday morning? I just think that would be done. Then you got to put together some of those and we’ll put them all in the pews, and we’ll send those out. I really envy you. I’m planning to preach two sermons that’ll be based on what happens up here February 8th and 15th. It will be sex and the single person, and sexual relations in marriage. That might be a good Sunday or two for the Toshavim for men. So, I hope you can teach me a few things so I’ll know what to say on February 8th.

Overview

Tonight, here’s the order I think we want to do. We’re going to have about three sessions together. Tonight, I think we’ll stick mainly to the general topic of Christian Hedonism and what that is and what I am as a Christian Hedonist. Then we’ll make a turn at the end of this hour and tomorrow morning over to the question, “Why did God create sexual desire?” And then, we’ll move through that to the question, “Can or should Toshavim (that is, sojourners on the Earth), seek to satisfy that desire? Then the last two questions we’ll ask are, “What is sanctified sex before marriage?” and, “What is sanctified sex in marriage?”.

But tonight, it won’t be focusing on sexual desire directly, but rather on the theological foundations for how I go about making all my moral decisions, namely Christian Hedonism. I have two papers that I wrote on this. Some of you, I suppose, have heard one of these anyway and perhaps read the other one. I’m going to present one: How I became a Christian Hedonist, then pause and pose a question or two to you. Then if we have time after those questions, go ahead and present some of the other ones.

Sometimes I break down hedonism into vertical hedonism, that is hedonism governing our relationship between us and God; and then horizontal hedonism, the one governing our relationship between each other. But this how I became a Christian hedonist.

The Making of a Christian Hedonist

When I was in college, I had this vague, pervasive notion that the goodness of my moral action was lessened to the degree that I was motivated out of a desire for my own pleasure or happiness. Being motivated by a desire for pleasure when I bought an ice cream cone in the student center didn’t bother me because that didn’t seem to be a moral action, but to be motivated by a desire for pleasure when I volunteered for Christian service at Wheaton or went to church, that seemed selfish and utilitarian, and this was a problem for me because I couldn’t formulate an alternative motive that worked.

I found in me this overwhelming longing to be happy, this tremendously powerful impulse to seek pleasure, and yet, at every moral decision that I had to make, I had to make myself say that this should have no influence and bracket that massive desire in my heart and not let it have any power, and that was frustrating. One of the most frustrating areas was that of worship and praise. My vague notion that the higher the activity, the less there must be of self-interest in it, caused me to think of worship solely in terms of duty, and that, I think now, tends to cut the heart out of it.

Then in the fall of 1968, that was the year I graduated from college, went off to seminary at Fuller, I was converted to Christian Hedonism. In a matter of weeks, I came to see that it is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure that is to be had in him. Let me describe the series of insights now that made into a Christian Hedonist. There are about five. Along the way it’ll become clear, I think, what I mean by that phrase Christian Hedonism.

Seminary and Blaise Pascal

My first quarter in seminary, I was introduced to the argument for Christian hedonism. One of the great exponents, Blaise Pascal, in his 250th pensée. He said:

All men seek happiness. Without exception, they all aim at this goal, however different the means they use to attain it. What makes those go to war, those bide at home, is this same desire which both classes cherish, though the point of view varies. The will never makes the smallest move but with this as its goal. It is the motive of all the actions of all men, even those who contemplate suicide.

This so fit with my own deep longings and all that I’d ever seen in others, that I accepted it and I’ve never seen any reason to doubt it to this day. What was especially striking here was that Pascal was not making any moral judgment at all about that fact. He was just stating it. So, as far as he was concerned, seeking one’s own happiness was not a sin. It was a simple given in human nature. It’s a law of the human heart, like gravity is a law of nature. This made great sense to me and opened a way for the second discovery.

College and C.S. Lewis

I had grown to love the work of C.S. Lewis in college. Not until the fall of 1968 did I buy the little volume of sermons called The Weight of Glory. The lead sermon in there is called the “Weight of Glory.” The first page of this sermon is one of the most influential pages of literature that I’ve ever read, and it goes like this:

If you ask 20 good men today what they thought the highest of virtues, 19 of them would reply “Unselfishness.” But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would’ve replied, “Love.” You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of unselfishness carries with it the suggestion, not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.

I do not think this is the Christian virtue of love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ, and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Immanuel Kant and the Stoics, and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

There it was, in black and white. To my mind, it was totally compelling. It is not a bad thing to desire our own good. In fact, the great problem of the human being is that he is far too easily pleased. He is not nearly selfish enough. He doesn’t seek pleasure with near the resolve and passion that he should, and thus he settles for mud pies of appetite instead of infinite delight. I had never in my whole life heard any Christian, let alone a Christian of Lewis’s stature, say that we all, not only as Pascal said, do, but also ought to seek our own happiness. Man’s guilt lies not in the intensity of his desire for happiness, but in the weakness of that desire.

Seeking Satisfaction in God Himself

The third insight there in Lewis’s sermon, but Pascal made it even more explicit. He says later in the 250th pensée:

There was formerly in man a true happiness of which there remains to him now only a mark, a trace, wholly void, which he vainly tries to fill with all that surrounds him, seeking from things absent the succor which he cannot obtain from things present but which are incapable of it because this infinite abyss cannot be filled but by an infinite and immutable object, that is, by God himself.

As I look back on it now, it seems so patently obvious. I don’t know how I could have missed it. All those years, I had been trying to suppress my tremendous longing for happiness so that I could honestly praise God out of some higher, less selfish motive. But now, it started to dawn that this persistent and undeniable yearning for happiness was not to be suppressed but glutted on God. The growing conviction that praise should be motivated solely by the happiness we find in God seemed less and less strange.

Reflections on the Psalms

Four. The next insight came again from C.S. Lewis, but this time from his book called Reflections on the Psalms. Chapter nine of this book bears the modest title, “A Word About Praise.” In my experience, it has been the word about praise, the best word on the nature of praise I’ve ever read.

Lewis says that as he was beginning to believe in God, a great stumbling block was the presence of demands scattered through the Psalms that he should praise God. He did not see the point in all this. Besides, it seemed to picture God craving for our worship like a vain woman wanting compliments. But he goes on to show why he was wrong. This is what he says:

The most obvious fact about praise, whether of God or anything, strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows in praise. The world rings with praise: lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game. My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards to the supremely valuable, what we delight to do and 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.

Now, that was the capstone of my emerging hedonism. Praising God, the highest calling of man and our eternal occupation, did not involve the renunciation, but rather the consummation of the joy that I so desired. My old effort to achieve worship with no self-interest in it proved to be a contradiction in terms. Worship is basically adoration, and we adore only what delights us. There is no such thing as sad adoration or unhappy praise. We have a name for those who try to praise when they have no pleasure in the object. We call them hypocrites. This fact that praise means consummate pleasure, and that the highest end of man is to drink deep of this pleasure, was perhaps the most liberating discovery that I ever made.

Finding Pleasure in the Psalter

Then I turned to the Psalms for myself and found the language of hedonism everywhere. The quest for pleasure was not even optional. It was demanded:

Delight yourself in the Lord,
     and he will give you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4).

The psalmist sought to do just this:

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
     so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
     for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God? (Psalm 42:1–2).

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
     my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
     as in a dry and weary land where there is no water (Psalm 63:1).

The motif of thirst has its satisfying counterpart in Psalm 36:8, where the psalmist says that men “drink their fill of the abundance of thy house, and you give them to drink of the river of thy delights.” I found that the goodness of God, the very foundation of worship, is not a thing you pay your respects to out of some kind of disinterested reverence. No, it is something to be tasted: “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Psalm 119:103 says, “How sweet are thy words to my taste. Yes, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” As C.S. Lewis says about the psalms, God is the all-satisfying object. His people adore him unashamedly for the exceeding joy they find in him (Psalm 43:4). He is the source of complete and unending pleasure, according to Psalm 16:11, which says:

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 then is the short story of my pilgrimage to Christian Hedonism. I said earlier that I think it is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure that is to be had in him. Now, let me add just three comments to make sure there’s no misunderstanding.

God is the Goal

First, Christian Hedonism, as I use it, does not mean that God becomes a means to help us get worldly pleasure. It does not mean that God becomes a means to help us get worldly pleasure. The pleasure that the Christian Hedonist seeks is the pleasure which is in God himself. He is the end of our search, not the means to some further end. Our exceeding joy is him, not the streets of gold or the reunion with relatives, or any other blessing of heaven or anything God can give. Christian Hedonism does not reduce God to a key that unlocks a treasure chest of gold and silver. Rather, it transforms the heart so that, to quote Job, “The Almighty will be your gold and choice silver to you” (Job 22:25).

We Worship What We Most Enjoy

Here’s the second qualification. Christian hedonism does not make a God out of pleasure. It says that one has already made a God out of whatever he finds most pleasure in. Christian hedonism does not make a God out of pleasure. It simply believes that we have already made a God out of whatever we find most pleasure in. The goal of Christian Hedonism is to find most pleasure in the one and the only God and thus avoid the sin of covetousness — that is, desiring anything else wrongly. Covetousness is called idolatry in Colossians 3:5.

Coming to God to Receive

Finally, here’s the third qualification. Christian Hedonism does not put us above God when we seek him out of self-interest. It is precisely the confessing of our frustrated, hopeless condition without him that we honor him. A patient is not greater than his doctor because he longs that he be made well by the doctor. A child is not greater than his father when he wants the fun of playing with his father. On the contrary, the one who sets himself above God is the person who presumes to come to God in order to give rather than to get. With a pretense of self-denial, he sets himself up as the benefactor of God, as if the world and all that it contains were not already God’s.

No, the hedonistic approach to God is the only humble approach because it is the only approach which comes with totally empty hands. Christian Hedonism pays God the respect of acknowledging that he and he alone can satisfy the longings of the human heart to be happy. To approach God in any other way, for any other reason, I think, is unbiblical and arrogant. Now, that’s the end of the first essay on how I became a Christian Hedonist. I’d like to pause here before we talk anymore about how it governs Christian ethics so that you can ask questions if they come to your mind. Did you want to ask a question before I ask you one?

Questions and Answers

What about the categorical imperative and the motivation to do our duty with no reference to our own enjoyment?

Lewis suggested that it comes from Immanuel Kant. Kant’s categorical imperative is that virtue rises in direct proportion to disinterestedness. That is, you have to be doing what you’re doing solely for the sake of duty and not for any benefit or pleasure that returns to you if you’re to have a moral benefit. Now, people who aren’t philosophically oriented would say it simply comes from the Bible. Jesus said, “Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” That’s what he said. Deny yourself. So, how does that fit in? Can you deny yourself through worship and worship authentically?

I think what he means is, “Deny all those crazy, confused, world-dictated notions of where happiness comes from, and let me show you where it’s found.” If you just go ahead and read the rest of the passage, the reason he says you should deny yourself and take up your cross is because those who try to save their lives, lose them. You don’t want to lose your life. You want to find it. You’re a hedonist. You’re all hedonists: Peter, James, John, the 12. Everybody here. Come on, now. Act like a hedonist. Do not seek to save your life. Give it up because then you’ll find it, and you all want to find life. The whole argument from self-denial is hedonistic. Let me read you a quote from St. Augustine:

If you love your soul, there is danger of its being destroyed. Therefore, you may not love it since you do not want to be destroyed. But in not wanting it to be destroyed, you love it.

You cannot get away from the hedonistic implications of that text, which is probably the one that people think of most in reaction against what I just said. But Jesus’s whole argument there is to get us to quit groveling around with drink and drugs and illicit sex like little kids who are having a great time with mud pies in the slums because they can’t imagine what a day at the sea is like with God.

Now, I think we are all hedonists. Everybody is a hedonist whether they want to be or not. We’re just not all self-conscious practicing. We don’t work at it. If Pascal is right, everybody seeks happiness. That’s what I mean, first of all, by hedonists: a person who is after happiness. Now, my definition, when I call myself a Christian Hedonist, I mean a Christian hedonist is a person who believes that it right to make your own happiness the motive for everything you do, and that just doesn’t sit well most people in the church. Everybody is a hedonist in the sense of seeking to be happy. You don’t have to become one; you are one and Jesus just assumed it when he talked.

But I’m trying to convert people to conscious Christian Hedonism in the sense that we believe it’s right to aim at happiness in worship and in ethics and in everything else we do. Then, we’re in a lifelong process of conforming our hearts to Christ so that we are made happy by the things that are true and good and beautiful. It made me a lot happier because I wasn’t so afraid of being happy. It also gave me a new zeal for worship. I couldn’t make sense out of worship before. It was a great confusion to me because I was trying to live with a contradiction, namely, worship God and yet don’t do it because you enjoy it. That just cuts the throat of worship. You cannot do it. You’ll contradict yourself. It’s an emotional impossibility. So, I really never knew what worship was until 1968.

I grew up in a church singing hymns and so on. Maybe I don’t remember well enough. I no doubt had moments of real worship when the truth really got a hold of me, whether I was conscious of it or not. But as a conscious, self-reflective person in college, church was always a puzzle. It was an emotional puzzle to me. Therefore, I was freed up greatly when I discovered that I ought to walk into this building on Sunday morning and glut myself on God and enjoy him to the hilt. If I failed to do it, I wasn’t really worshiping. So, I had both the freedom and a new goal to aim at because my heart doesn’t always incline to worship like it should.

Let me ask this question. If somebody stood up here and said, “Worship is for God, not for man. It’s for God’s sake, for God’s glory, and for God’s pleasure,” do you agree with that? God doesn’t need our worship, and the dead person doesn’t need our worship. There’s the nail that does it. Let me take that statement I just made and tell you what I think of it. That statement is made by Bruce Leaflad who teaches worship. Worship is for God, not for man, for his sake, for his glory, for his pleasure. He said, when out at Lake Avenue, where I was ordained, where I learned to worship, where he was the music minister for 10 years, “The morning service is for God. The evening service is for the body.” It was Bruce Leaflad, a professor of worship and music at the college and the seminary. How many in here are you in the class with Bruce right now? Well, we’ve talked this out so I don’t think it matters. I’m going to talk to him again on Monday, so I can tell you what I said. He said in a seminar this week, “Worship is the most unselfish act that you can perform.”

I asked him how he could say that yesterday. He lectures on worship all over this country. If anybody is supposed to understand worship, Bruce Leaflad is supposed to understand worship. He’s written articles on it. He’s an expert. And oh, when I just go like that with an expert, I get concerned, especially somebody teaching at the college and seminary and a good friend. I asked Bruce, “When you say worship is for God, that is, for his glory and for his pleasure, you have to ask the next question: How do you give God pleasure?” Because I’m willing to say worship is for God; it is for his glory; it is for his pleasure. But then that doesn’t help us any until we ask the next question, “How do you give the all-sufficient, almighty God pleasure?” I get my answer from Hebrews 11:6, which says, “Without faith, it is impossible to give God pleasure, for he who comes to God must believe (two things) that he is and that he rewards those who see him.”

So Bruce, on Sunday morning, if I make it my aim to please God, I must make it my aim to see him as rewarding. If I don’t seek him as a reward for my need in my vacuous heart and my hunger for happiness, he won’t be pleased. It’s all vain talk to constantly talk about giving to God. Bruce wants to understand worship wholly in terms of giving. In worship, we give up to God because of what he has given to us. There’s truth in that, but it has to be distinguished.

You have to distinguish kinds of giving, don’t you? Because Paul said in his sermon in Acts 17 that God doesn’t have any needs. He is not served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. Therefore, you can’t give God anything except thanks. Psalm 50 says, “If I wanted anything, I wouldn’t ask you. The cattle on a thousand hills is mine. Here’s what I want from you: I want the sacrifice of thanksgiving. I want you to pay your vows the Most High, and I want you to call upon me on the day of trouble and I will answer.” We will make God happy if we call upon him in the day of trouble for his joy, so that I cannot define worship primarily in terms of giving unless I limit it very, very much.

Then the next question would be, how do you glorify God? If you please God by going to him as a benefactor, as a rewarder, how do you glorify him? I told Bruce, “There is nothing that honors my wife more than when I tell people that the reason I like to be around her is because she brings me so much delight.” It’s pure hedonism, but it’s the greatest compliment that I can pay her. The greatest way to glorify Noël is to tell other people I like to be around her because she makes me happy. What else could I say that would give her more honor? “I like to be around her out of duty.” Would that be it? What about, “I like to be around her because I like to give her the benefit of my presence.” The only thing that is going to honor Noël is to just own up to the fact that I’m a taker and she is a very satisfying giver. That just makes so much sense to me, and yet we balk at it. I don’t think I’ll ever persuade Bruce to talk this way but I’m going to try. Any other questions now you want to raise?

She we enjoy worship as much as God does, or should we more focused on pleasing him and less on our enjoyment of him?

You don’t need to worry about that because the more you enjoy God, the more he will enjoy you because the thing that he enjoys in his teachers is that they delight in him. He commanded us: “Delight yourself in the Lord.” Now, he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t like that.

But isn’t that an ulterior motive?

Paul says, “I make it my aim to please the Lord, whether alive or dead.” Okay. We all ought to be making our aim to please the Lord. Now, how do you make it your aim to please the Lord? There’s no ulterior motive. He said do it. Please me, please me.

What about those who go around trying to please themselves who get their reward already?

Yes, we have the beautiful stories in Matthew 6. One guy toots his horn before he goes with his giving, and Jesus says he’s got his reward, namely, the applause of the people. The other person stands on the corner praying loudly and people applaud, “Oh, piety, piety.” And he gets his reward. Somebody else fasts and contorts his face and shows that he’s hungry and people say, “Look what he’s willing to give up,” and Jesus says, “Look, he’s got his reward. But you! You would get another reward if you would wash your face and not let anybody know you’re fasting, go in your closet when you pray, and don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing when you give alms. Then your Father in heaven will reward you, not this paltry applause. Go for broke!”

If Christians are supposed to be happy and joyful how will other people know that they are happy in God and not just in other things?

That’s a really interesting question. That’s a very good question. It’s raised in the Sermon on the Mount itself. You see, in chapter 5:16, Jesus said, “Let your light shine before men so that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father in heaven.” And in chapter 6, he says, “Do it quietly so that nobody can see you.” Now, how do we work that out? I don’t think it’s hard to work out. But in chapter 6, he has in mind religious practices like alms-giving, praying, and fasting, all of which we ought not be ostentatious about. You ought not tell people how much money you put on the plate. You ought not to tell people how many hours you spend in prayer. You ought not contort yourself when you’re fasting.

But you ought to change the tire of your friend on the road, whether 10,000 people see you do it or not. You ought to take soup to the widow and go visit the prisoners whether people see you or not. See? I don’t think Jesus is inconsistent. And you ought to delight in it, and people will see, “Hey, look how much they enjoy doing this.” You’ll do it just like the people in Hebrews 10, and you will not be able to keep it a secret. Listen to this:

You had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.

We ought to delight in doing good so that the world sees us, namely God, and therefore they give glory to your Father in heaven.

How should we worship God if we are not feeling overabounding joy in him?

I don’t think you don’t have the ability to worship him. Now, let me qualify that because you said an “overabounding joy.” There are all kinds of degrees of happiness. If you do not feel any delight in God and all you can do is go through the motions — you can sing the hymn, you can bow your head, you can raise your hands — is that worship if it’s not coming from the heart? That’s another question, and it’s a good one. Leafblad very helpfully listed five reasons, five purposes, for music in worship. I can’t remember all of them. But one of them was to express our heartfelt love to God. Another one was to inspire heartfelt love for God. Another one was to channel or direct it, but it’s the second one I’m interested in. We have music in worship, and here at the beginning, for two reasons. Some of you are already with God and you want to sing. Others of you aren’t yet there, and the music might get you there.

So, in answer to your question, depending on your motive, yes. When you don’t feel like worshiping, you can have two possible motives for going ahead and going through the motions. One is deceit. You don’t want anybody to know that you don’t feel this way. You know it’s not good to come to church and not feel like worshiping, so you go through the motions. Bad motive. Better just stay home or just sit there. There’s another motive, though. In your heart, there’s still that spark that says, “I wish I felt it. Well, maybe if I sing, he’ll pour it into. Maybe if I pray, he’ll pour it into me.” That’s a different motive. That’s a good, honest motive. You’re not being a hypocrite when you do that, even though some people may misread you. So, the answer I think is, yes, you should go ahead and try if that’s your motive.

I don’t always feel like worshiping but I still come to church and keep trying. Do you think it’s enough in those times to want to worship and keep trying?

There is enough desire to want to worship and that desire is real. He honors that desire, yes.

How would you define some of these words like “happiness” and “glory”?

Beauty.

How would you define beauty?

I don’t think I can without just using other words that you would ask me to define, too. Ultimately, all definitions go back to pointing, don’t they? All definitions are putting one word into other words which have to then be put into other words, which have to then be put into other words, and there will be no communication unless ultimately we can put it.

Now, if you’ve never been pregnant, there will be realities which you can only guess at, like morning sickness or something like that, or, “What’s it like to have this big weight pulling your back out like this all the time,” or, “What it’s like at night to lay down and feel the baby kind of this way kick you in the spine and kick your husband in the back.” There are a whole lot of things that you can use analogies to get at, but ultimately you have to wait and say, “You’ll know what I mean.”

Or consider a person who’s never had a headache. Define headache. Would you say, “Oh, it’s like a stomach ache in the head,” or something like that? That’s no good. You have to have experienced it in order to know the word. All I can do is say that happiness is like something. Do you remember when you were a kid on Christmas morning? We always opened presents in the morning. Happiness was the night before, stringing the popcorn on the thread and hanging it up and watching the parents whisper in the corner, thinking, “Oh, what are they going to do?” You know what that is. Or happiness is falling in love and that heartbeat that starts the pitter-patter and you get clammy hands and just love to be with that person. Everybody knows what happiness is. It’s delight or joy. It’s a sunset for the artists. Artistic people tend to have more sensitivity than others for that kind of aesthetic pleasure. For some people, it would be sports.

I just heard on the radio some fantastic last-second 30-foot jump shot yesterday. I don’t know who it was. But some freshman popped that thing through there. They were yelling, “Oh! Man!” People just rise up all over the place here and you say that is joy. That’s happiness. You just keep on making the list longer and longer. I don’t think I could do any better than just pointing at experiences of happiness.

Would you say we only know a finite kind of joy?

Well, I think you’re probably right. I would say that for myself. I don’t know if I’d say kind of joy. There may be. I’m open to that. I would say there are vistas, depths, breadths of joy. I know I have finite joy simply because God is infinite and his beauty is infinite and his goodness is infinite, and what I’ve experienced in God could nowhere near be acquainted with what’s possible to be experienced of God. So, there are oceans of joy to be drunk in. I’ve just been taking little sips. So yes, I wouldn’t worry too hard about defining kinds of joy. Let’s all admit that there is an ocean of joy to be swum in, and we are getting the soles of our feet wet on the edge ofthe sea right now.

The psalmist says he pants like a dear for flowing streams. He seemed to always see something along the horizon he couldn’t get his hand quite ahold of. But then now and then he says, “I waited for the Lord, and he answered and put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to God, and many will see in fear and put their trust in the Lord." Sometimes he drank deeply.

Does hedonism, that is the desire for joy, also motivate us in our interpersonal relations?

Scripture says, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” It’s not hard to see how that is hedonistic. It isn’t as easy for some people to see how loving your neighbor as yourself becomes hedonistic. I think it is. That question usually comes up at the end after I’ve made a big case for the fact that we ought to do good for each other because of the joy that it brings. But we’ll skip over it to the end.

Your question is, “Should you go ahead and do good for people even if it doesn’t seem to hold out the prospect of much pleasure, if you don’t feel much like it?” I would answer it the same way I answered the other question. There are good reasons and bad reasons for doing what you don’t feel like doing. One is Pharisaic and hypocritical, like the rich people who dumped all their money in probably so that it would sound really loud. The benefits still accrued to the Temple, but they wrecked the moral value of that because of the motive they had. They did not do it cheerfully. God loves a cheerful giver.

Suppose you come then on a Sunday morning and you have this pocket full of money and you haven’t tithed, and you hear the call to tithe, but you don’t feel like tithing because you had planned to use that money to buy something that would bring you lots of pleasure. Now what do you do? I think the first thing you do is repent that you don’t want to get it out on the table with God. You say, “I’m sorry that my heart is so hard, God, and that my desire is to not get all excited about what’s pleasing to you.” The second thing you do is ask God to change your affection. You say, “Fill me with a desire to tithe, with a love to give. I want to be a cheerful giver.”

Now, between two and three, he might change you. He might fill you with that desire. More than likely, it won’t happen instantaneously, and so you’re confronted with a third, namely, if deep down you want to do what’s right, then say to God, “Lord, I’m going to give it even though I don’t feel 100 percent behind the giving and I trust that you’ll take it for the desire there is there and that you’ll go ahead and work on it. Use the actual giving to make me a better giver and a more joyful one in giving.” The answer to your question is yes. Go ahead and help the person anyway.

But that’s common experience. You’re driving down the road and you’re on your way somewhere, and here’s this stranded person on the side of the road. Very few of us are so sanctified that we say, “Great! An opportunity to do good! Wow! I’m so glad that she is stranded right where I was.” More than likely, we do this with a one-and-a-half second battle in our mind We think, “I’m going to feel guilty all day long.” We pull over and move in there and then we have to repent and pray or change.

What often makes the difference whether we feel like it or not is whether we’re happy or not. If we’re already happy in God and he’s meeting all our needs and we’re secure in his promise and not worrying about the rest of the afternoon, and an opportunity for doing good comes, then we’re glad out of the overflow that God has given us to increase that joy by pouring it out on some needy person. Now, that’s the essence of my horizontal hedonism.

We always want to increase our joy and giving does increase joy. Jesus says, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35), and therefore it is not wrong to be motivated by desire for happiness, even on the horizontal level. It’s okay to see that person on the side of the road and say, “If I pull over there and help them, I’ll be happy.” Well, when I discovered that, that was a great liberation too, and a great incentive to do good because I didn’t think these deeds were destroyed anymore by the joy that came from them.

I can remember year after year sitting there in Bethel Chapel, and it would be Christian service time. People would stand up to tell about their Christian service experience in the old folks’ home and they would say things like this, “Well, I believe that I was able to help some of these people, and I’m sorry to say this, but I, too, enjoyed serving them. I’m sorry I have to admit it. I know it destroys the value of everything I do.” There is a lot of that in testimonies in Bethel Chapel. They say, “I’m sorry to say that this whole semester’s work brought me pleasure in doing work for the Lord.” I just want to stand up and say, “Would you quit apologizing for that? You’re a good person. That’s a sign of your sanctification. A sanctified person delights to do right. An unsanctified person has to grit his teeth to do right.”

All of us are on the road to heaven, and nobody will act contrary to any emotions in heaven. It’s total hedonism. You will only do what makes you happy in heaven. You will not do anything that makes you unhappy in heaven, and sanctification is simply becoming heavenly mind. Does that make sense?

There’s another thing. This can relate to sex. I used to think that a virtuous person was the person who overcame the strongest inclination to evil. If you had a really strong inclination to evil and you overcame it you were powerful and therefore virtuous, and the person who didn’t have a very strong inclination to evil didn’t have to overcome as much, and therefore didn’t have as much moral backbone and therefore wasn’t as virtuous. See what the implication of that is? In order to be more virtuous, you have to have a more evil inclination.

It hit me, though I forgot when it sunk in, that virtue is having our inclination so changed that it’s easy to do good. It takes no effort. Now, none of us is there yet, but that’s the goal, isn’t it? The goal is to become the kind of person for whom it is no speck to do right. I preached a sermon called, “Christian Hedonism and Humility.” I got a letter from somebody. Bruce Reichenbach teaches philosophy at Darth Augsburg. He was there that morning, and he didn’t like it. He wrote me a long letter, and I wrote him a long response, too, trying to convince him it’s true nevertheless. Let me read you part of what he said. I don’t think he’d mind this:

Your position reduces morality to a concern for advantage. You say, “I ought to do such and such because it will bring me certain things or have advantageous consequences.” But are the virtues of kindness, love, justice, and humility justifiable only in terms of what they produce? To quote D.Z. Phillips, who puts it as well as anyone, “When we are confronted with two men, one of whom loves justice, kindness, and generosity without thought of what they bring; while the other thinks only of what they bring, do we not want to say different things about them? Do we not want to say that only one of them loves justice while the other’s love is a mere pretense, a facade. This is shown by the fact that when the situation changes, when it no longer pays to be good, the man who pursued the virtues only for external reasons soon gives up his love of virtue.”

But notice, even if the change in situation never comes about, even if it always remains the case that it pays to be good, the difference between the two men remains unaltered, for what determines that difference is the relation within which they stand to pursue virtue. In reducing moral considerations to actions of advantage, we have, in effect, falsified the character of moral considerations. What is commended is no longer morality itself or the virtues themselves, but the advantage one can get from them. We are asked to do good because of what we get from it. But is it not the contention of morality that we should do good because it is good?

There’s a lot more. Here’s part of what I wrote back:

There are some significant disagreements between us exegetically and ethically. You ask, “Is it not the contention of morality that we should do good because it is good?” You answer, “We should do good and perform virtuously, because it is good and virtuous.” You say that the fact that God will bless it and cause us to be happy is a consequence of it but not the motive for doing it.” I believe that’s Emmanuel Kant. My answer to your question is to ask, whose morality? According to Emmanuel Kant’s morality, the answer is yes. According to biblical morality, the answer, I think, must be no. Morality is not jeopardized by being motivated by self-interest.

The Bible is replete with promises and threats which are not appended carefully as non-motivational results, which we had best keep out of our view, but which clearly and boldly and hedonistically aim to motivate our behavior. What sets off biblical morality from worldly hedonism is not that biblical morality is disinterested, but that it is interested in vastly greater things. Let’s take only one book, the Gospel of Luke, and see if your contention that God’s intention to bless virtue and make virtue happy should not motivate our virtuous acts.

Luke 6:35 says, “Love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great.” I would say that Jesus either disagrees with your view of morality or he has made it psychologically impossible for us to love morally, for if he agreed with you, the promise of reward for lending freely must not motivate such lending, then his mentioning the reward is an insuperable stumbling block to morality. But only a philosophical predisposition, probably stemming from Kant, would deny that here Jesus is inducing us to love by means of a promised reward.

The distinction you and D.Z. Phillips did not make was between loving for material rewards and loving for holy, immaterial rewards. Luke 6:35 clearly makes this distinction. Don’t lend with a view to material aggrandizement. Lend with a view to the joy God is to free love. It is not fair when you and Phillips lump me and Jesus together with mercenary materialists.

To confirm this interpretation of Luke 6:35, look at Luke 14:12–14, which says, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” In other words, don’t seek worldly advantage; seek spiritual, heavenly benefits.

I have lots of other texts there, too, but time is almost up and maybe you should have a chance to ask one more question.

I understand that you should love others and do it for the sake of your own joy, yet in 1 Corinthians 13:5 says that love “seeks not its own.” How would you reconcile that?

Jonathan Edwards wrestled with that text. He has a great paragraph on it in his sermon, Charity and Its Fruits. Basically, it says the same thing Jesus does here. “Love seeks not its own," means love doesn’t seek any other reward than the joy of loving and the joy of being with the God whose character is like that. In other words, what Paul was saying when he said “love seeks not its own” is that you’re not loving when you marry a woman for her money. You’re not loving when you help clean the church to gain brownie points with the pastor. You’re not loving when you decide to speak at a college retreat in order to get praise from people. That’s not loving because all of those rewards are not organically connected to the act of love.

It might help you grasp my position if I point out here that I think it is ethically crucial that the reward we anticipate at the resurrection be organically related to the beauty of the act we are performing. It is bad when Christians think of heaven materialistically, when they make it merely a glorified secular city to gratify their temporarily suppressed desires. The reward is the Lord himself, in all his beautiful holiness. Therefore, when a person does justice and kindness with a view to enjoying fellowship with the just and the kind Jesus, it would be a contradiction to say he doesn’t love justice and kindness. He does. He regards them as beautiful ways of acting, but not without reference to their relation to the future and to the Lord who creates the future. It seems to me essentially godless to define virtue by some intrinsic thing.

Once the God of promise and warning, the God who rules all history and is always designing and moving toward a goal, once that God is brought in, virtue becomes virtuous as it promotes good ends, and when the Lord constantly reminds me that my good end is part of the goal of virtue, I think I would be wrong not to make this my motive. That is my good, my goal, my happiness.

So, “love seeks not its own” means love seeks not its own material advantage through another person. Love does seek its own in the sense that it seeks its own happiness in the act of loving, provided it is love that brings us joy and being with the Lord, who is love. If that’s the case it’s not a contradiction of 1 Corinthians 13:5.

Is it wrong to go to heaven then because of the benefits we would get there?

Well everything I’ve said is an amen to that. There are benefits for me. Who wants to go to heaven if there’s no benefit? But your question has to do with this. I’ve been stressing delight in the Lord because of his beauty and glory and you’re raising the question, “What about my health?” Now, I’m trying to figure out a way to fit that in without it being a contradiction to something that is God-oriented. It’s written right here:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away (Revelation 21:4).

So it is not wrong to expect that. Would it not, however, be wrong if that was the only reason you wanted to go to heaven? In other words, if Jesus didn’t matter, if you had to choose between a headache for eternity with Jesus or no headaches for eternity without Jesus, which would you choose? But that’s a lousy question to ask. I don’t like those kinds of questions because they force on us an unreal possibility. I think I would tie the two together like this. The Jesus we love — and one of the reasons we love him is because he’s Lord and he’s good and he’s loving, which means he controls this world — when he finishes his loving purposes with the world, pain’s got to go for his people. That’s one of the reasons we love him.

So, maybe if you want to be rid of a headache and you want to love this Lord and be with him, really do come together, and they’re not two completely separate desires in the long run because how could you love a Lord who when he consummated his whole purpose, finished everything, did away with his enemies, said to you, “I’m done, but you’re still going to have those migraines for eternity”? You’d have to scratch your head and say, “But, you’re not done yet. What? What sort of a Lord are you that the migraine has to go on forever? We can understand that you use pain for a time to teach us something, but that it should go on forever would contradict your goodness.” And therefore to love God and want to be with him and to want to get rid of the headaches really are two different goals, but the same of all of one piece.

I think we better stop. The question we’ll pose in the morning is, why did God create sexual pleasure? Now, this fits right in because if all this talk about delighting in God is where it’s at for the Christian Hedonist, why in the world should he create such a competitor as sexual desire? That’s what we’ll try to answer first off tomorrow.