This is the first in a series of what I hope will be four messages that sums up a philosophy of life, worldview, and theology that governs everything I do. My marriage is governed by this. My parenting is governed by this. My pastoring is governed by this. My writing is governed by this. My leisure time is governed by this. I went down to watch my son play soccer for a quick 45 minutes of the last half this afternoon today, and that was governed by this as I thought through should I do this with the lecture coming up tonight? My life is controlled by the teaching you’re about to hear and I call it Christian Hedonism. A little girl once said after a service to her mother, “Why is he talking about heathenism?” Some people equate heathenism with hedonism, and I hope before we’re done, you can make a big distinction between Christian Hedonism and heathenism because it isn’t heathenism. I think it’s plain biblical theology.

Now, the way I would like to do it is instead of starting with a careful, honed technical definition, is tell you the story of my life. I could do it because it’s in the book. The book from which most of what I’m saying is coming: Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Instead of doing that, what I’d like to do is tell you the story of how I got to be here, okay? I’m going to start way back with my parents and just take you through step after step of what God did to bring me to where I am right here tonight as I lecture to you about Christian Hedonism. I think I want to start with my father.

The Story of Christian Hedonism

The book is dedicated to my dad, to William Solomon Hottle Piper, my father, in whom I have seen the holiness and happiness of God. I think, though I can’t remember it nearly as well as I can remember seminary, my mother and my father are probably most accountable under God for why I am here tonight and why I believe what I believe. I saw in my father a combination of holiness and God-centered, radical commitment to the salvation of souls. My father is an evangelist, a full-time evangelist. Even today, he still is evangelizing over radio tapes in the Philippines. He had a holiness dedicated to the Lord and to the Scriptures over here, and I saw, I think, the happiest man to this day I think I’ve ever known.

I grew up in a home that probably most of you didn’t have the privilege of growing up in, with a father who modeled for me the way God is, I believe. And therefore, I think there was sown in my heart from early on the deep assumption that a glorious God who was holy, who had a hell in which he would assign people who didn’t believe in him, who longed for the salvation of lost people, who didn’t let little teenagers like me go to movies and smoke and dance — that God made for the happiest of all lives. That was just built into me. I never rebelled against it because I think there was that wonderful combination in my life as a little child. The glory of God and the gladness of my heart therefore, didn’t feel in tension early on, I think. Later on the tensions emerged.

Discerning Motives in the College Years

I went off to Wheaton College and there, the struggles started to happen. I wish my memory were perfect. Don’t you wish you could remember how it really was as a child and as a student? I fear that our memories are so selective, so take this with the grain of salt as I say, it’s the way it was. It’s the way I remember it was. I remember struggling with the issue of motivation. Why go to downtown Chicago to evangelize? Why worship? Why eat ice cream? Why laugh at jokes? I was so analytical, and I was always trying to figure out what were proper motives in life. I really hit the wall with coming up with motives that worked for me. I remember lying in my bed in St. Hall one time all alone thinking, “Well, what’s the point of winning people to Jesus? To make them people who win more to Jesus? Who win more to Jesus? Who win more to Jesus?”

Now, you probably think that’s a ridiculous thing to struggle with, but to me at that moment, it seemed like an endless sequence of winning people to win people to win people to win people with a big, “So what?” at the end. And for some reason, there wasn’t living in my heart at that moment — and it may have been just my fault and my flesh — the thought that we are winning them to delight in Jesus, and my delight in winning them to delight in Jesus expands when I get them to delight in Jesus. That kind of thinking was never in my mind in those days at Wheaton, and I really struggled with motivation. I didn’t yet have talk like, “My joy expands in winning them to joy in God.”

A Growing Distrust for Pursuing Joy

Now I want to ask the question, why did I feel this way? Why did I sense that the greater and more noble the act, the less of self-satisfaction there should be in it? I really had the tacit notion inside of me that if I do an act because it would make me glad, I have thereby ruined its goodness, and that the only act that is really morally valuable is if I do it with no view to my satisfaction at all. No pleasure in it. Now, where did that come from? Why did I feel that way? Because I profoundly reject that today. I listed this afternoon some reasons why I think I got to be that way and had that thought in my head.

1. God’s Will or Our Will?

Number one, I grew up in a church, pretty typical, pretty good, and I heard missionary spokesmen come and say, at least this is what stuck in my mind and they probably said better things: “You ought to do God’s will not your will, even if it’s to leave America and go overseas.” In my head as a young person, I associated God’s will, therefore, with frustration. God’s will is not my will. I’m doomed to perpetual frustration. That was the message coming through to me. “You do God’s will and you deny your will.”

Now, I’m sure they said more, but that’s what I heard. So built into me was this notion that to do something noble and good and radical would mean living in constant denial of what I really want to do, and nobody seemed to deliver effectively to me the message of sanctification that said, what God really wants to do is change your mind, change your cravings, change your desires, change your hopes, change everything so that you would want to do his will and you would find satisfaction. You would say, “I delight to do thy will, oh God.” That message was not getting through to this teenager at White Oak Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. That’s one reason I think I had this sense that if you do something to make yourself glad, you’ve ruined it.

2. Misuse of Self-Denial Passages

Number two, there was a misuse of the self-denial texts in the Bible. I think the whole verses were never communicated. Jesus says:

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it . . . (Matthew 16:24–25).

That was the end of the discussion. That’s not the end. The next phrase says:

But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 16:25).

I never heard a pastor hit the pulpit at that point and say, “You want to find your life, don’t you?” Because I would’ve leaped out of my seat and said, “I want life. I want fullness of life.” He said, “There it is, lose it.” I somehow got stuck halfway through that verse, that to follow God was to lose, lose, lose and maybe in the sweet by and by it would be gain, but even the pictures of heaven that teenagers pick up along the way are not really exciting.

3. The Influence of Immanuel Kant

Number three is a little more philosophical. This is another reason for why I think I had this notion that if I do anything that might make me glad is bad. Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential philosopher in the last 300 years, died in 1804 and is known for teaching that one ought to do right because it is right out of duty with no eye to reward or benefit.

I want to quote a more contemporary philosopher, a woman named Ayn Rand who died a few years ago. She was an atheist through and through and her understanding of Immanuel Kant was her understanding of Christianity. He was a professing Christian, and she hated Christianity and rejected it outright. Here’s her quote of what she heard Immanuel Kant saying:

An action is moral,” said Kant, “only if one has no desire to perform it but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, either material or spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good. If one has a desire to be evil, one can be good.

Now it’s a little bit complicated. Let me flesh it out. What Immanuel Kant said is that if you are a person who is so good that you feel no covetousness, not stealing is no virtue for you. But if you’re a person who’s really covetous and you beat that down and don’t steal, that’s a virtue. Now I really believe I grew up with that. If I feel no lust, no desire to look at the magazines, that’s no moral quality in me. If I feel a real desire to look at pornography and I defeat it, I’m really moral. That’s wicked. That’s a wicked view of life because what it says is that in heaven, nobody can be moral because we’ll all be so good we won’t want evil.

There does lurk in the atmosphere of evangelicalism in America this Kantian notion that the only good is a good done for duty’s sake against your desires and if you glut your desires on an act, even a good one, you have ruined the goodness of it because you’re doing it because you want to do it. That’s just in the air. I grew up in that it seems like though I don’t think my father ever said anything like that.

4. Admonitions About Worship

My last explanation for why I was the way I was was the pervasive statements about worshiping that I heard from various pastors as they scolded their people’s lukewarmness in worship. Here’s the way they scolded:

If you people would just come to give and not to get, we’d have real worship services. The problem is that you are always coming to get.

I have heard that growing up in my life over and over again, but I regard it now as profoundly mistaken and I’ve never said it in this church. On the contrary, I view that my job on Sunday morning and right now is to spread a banquet and invite you to come and get. I want a fan into flame every desire for God that you have that would drive you hungry to this place. I think worship is fundamentally a craving for God, a coming to get God. This is right at the heart of Christian Hedonism. God is honored when people are hungry for him and when they come to worship to get him, but nobody was saying that in my hearing or through my dull brain in those days, and so those are four reasons why I think in the years 1964 to 1968, I was struggling the way I was with motivation. Why do you do good things and how do you do a thing so that it’s morally valuable?

The Making of a Christian Hedonist

Now, I want to ask this question, what happened? What happened to turn my world upside down? How was this Christian hedonist born and I’ve listed, goodness, a dozen things here, steps that God took me through starting in 1968. Let me just walk you through them because I praise God for what he did back in those years. They were the months of the summer of 1968 to the summer of 1969 roughly, were earth-shaking days in my life.

Discovering Pascal

The first thing was a discovery made in Blaise Pascal. Let me read you the quote that just blew me away in 1968. I’m reading it from the book here as I quote it in chapter one. Blaise Pascal said:

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war and others avoiding it is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even those who hang themselves.

I’d never read anybody say that, that everybody does everything because it diminishes misery, as they see it, or increases happiness as they see it. Even suicide is an attempt to reduce the misery of your life. Well, that blew me away and he didn’t condemn it. In fact, in the context Blaise Pascal said that it’s like hunger. You just can’t help it. That’s the way you’re wired and you aren’t wired that way by sin but by God. Well, it was amazing to me to read that.

Discovering Lewis

Then I found C.S Lewis. Now I remember the day I was walking down Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California. I went to Vrooman’s Bookstore on Colorado Avenue. I turned in. This was right in the middle of a course I was taking on hermeneutics in which Dan Fuller was talking about some of these things. I walked over to a table of books that had a whole array of C.S Lewis books. Now, I had come to love C.S Lewis at Wheaton. I had never seen nor heard of his little book called The Weight of Glory, which is four messages. The first one is called “The Weight of Glory.” I picked it up, it’s a little blue paperback, and I read the first page of “The Weight of Glory.” It still to this day is probably outside the Bible, the most significant page I’ve ever read, and I’m going to read it to you. It’s a little long. I won’t read the whole page, but most of it:

If you asked 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 to 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.

You can see my heart starts to beat here as I’m reading this there in the bookstore.

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 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 a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Can you feel how revolutionary that would be? Your problem John Piper is not that you’re trying to be happy but that you’ve settled on far too little happiness. That’s your problem.

Nobody analyzed my problem that way before. Nobody suggested to me, “Your problem is you are too easily pleased. You’re not nearly going hard enough after happiness. You are settling for mud pies in the slums. You don’t begin to pursue happiness.” Well, I bought the book and have it to this day, and it’s a precious book. Nobody had added to Blaise Pascal’s idea that everybody does seek happiness, the amazing statement that you ought to, and the reason you’re not a holy person is because you don’t seek happiness nearly passionately enough.

Happiness in God Alone

Third, I discovered that God is the only place that could be found. Here’s another quote from Pascal:

There once was in man a true happiness of which now remained to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all surroundings seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present, but these are all inadequate because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object. That is to say, only by God himself.

When I heard that, when I read that it started to feel safe. I trembled at the thought at the beginning that my problem was that I didn’t really pursue happiness enough, and then Lewis and Pascal and Dan Fuller at Fuller Seminary made plain to me what is so, so obvious in the Bible — namely, that God alone and God himself, not God’s gifts, is the source and the goal of that quest.

Praising God and Pursuing Our Happiness

Now, Lewis struggled with something and when you find somebody who struggles with something you’ve struggled with and then works his way through to a solution that just makes lights go on, it’s a great thing. Lewis, in his book on the Psalms, showed that he struggled with the issue of the glory of God and the praise of God on the one hand and the desire for pleasure and the enjoyment of things on the other hand. He was making these strong statements about the pursuit of pleasure and yet he read in the Psalms these commands to praise the Lord. He didn’t see how they came together and then he saw it and let me read you the solution. This was another one of those great eye-opening quotes:

The most obvious fact about praise, whether of God or of anything strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, and 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, 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.

Praise to God does not merely express enjoyment in God. It completes enjoyment in God. As soon as I read that, I knew it was true because I thought of several analogies in my own experience at that point in my life. I remember standing in Fuller Theological Seminary Library reading the cartoons in “The New Yorker.” I used to always read the jokes and I would stand there and it’s quiet in the library. You don’t talk in the library, you don’t laugh out loud in the library. I would read these and it would be so funny, I would find myself looking around immediately to find someone to show it to so that they would join with me in laughter and praise the quality of this cartoon, because my pleasure in the cartoon did not come to completion until somebody else joined in my praise of this humor.

I can remember sitting with my mother watching Jonathan Winters. Anybody remember Jonathan Winters with his little funny faces? And we would sit in the den and I would be alone and he would start cracking these jokes and making these faces and I’d say, “Mama, come here. Come here.” Now, what is that? What is this, “Mama come here, come here” stuff? It’s hedonism because I laugh harder and I enjoy the comedian more when she’s there. My mother really could laugh. So when she laughed and I laughed, we laughed together and my joy in the comedian came to consummation when I praised him to her and together we said, “Isn’t that good?”

If you don’t like any of those illustrations, you can think of sports. What a horrible thing to have to go to a World Series game by yourself and be told you couldn’t holler. What a boring, awful experience. Or to go with your beloved close friend, wife, husband, whatever, out on a camping trip and get up early and watch the sunrise and not be able to say, “Wow,” or anything else. Not be able to say something that would bring out the pleasure to consummation in praise. Well, I got all that out of C.S Lewis and suddenly, the whole idea that worship was somehow a denial of my quest for pleasure was over. Worship is the consummation of my quest for pleasure and praise is its capstone.

Seeing the Place of Pleasure in Scripture

I saw it all over the place in the Bible. I just began to see God commanding pleasure everywhere:

• Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord.”
• Psalm 42:1 says, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.”
• Psalm 63:1 says, “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
• Psalm 36:8 says, “You give them drink from the river of your delights.”
• Psalm 34:8 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!”
• Psalm 119:103 says, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!”
• Psalm 16:11 (which became tremendously important) 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.”

Now the two words that are crucial in there are “fullness” and “forever” because in this heart, right here in 1968, I wanted two things. I wanted 100 percent pleasure and satisfaction. I didn’t want 99 percent. I wanted 100 percent joy if it could be had. And I didn’t want it to last 800 years, I wanted it to last forever. And this verse says, “Thou dost show me the path of life, in thy presence is fullness of joy at thy right hand, are pleasures forevermore.” I said, “If that’s true, that’s it. God is the end of my quest.”

God’s Passion for His Glory

Another insight I got in those days was from Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards wrote A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World by Jonathan Edwards. In this book, what I discovered is that not only was my emerging hedonism good for man, it’s the way God is. God is a hedonist. God is pursuing his pleasure and his glory and his joy. Let me read you one of the quotes here that grabbed me. I see three different colorings of underlining here, which means I’ve been through this three times. Edwards says:

Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God’s glory. God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself, and in seeking himself (that is, himself diffused and expressed, which he delights in as he delights in his own beauty and fullness), he seeks their glory and happiness.

That’s too complicated for me to expound on right now, but in a nutshell, God delights in seeking his glory in your delight in his glory. God delights in seeking his glory in your delight in his glory, so that from him and through him and to him is all glory and all delight ultimately. And your delight in God by the Holy Spirit tonight, is God’s delight in God. The Holy Spirit is God, the Holy Spirit who loves Jesus and delights in Jesus and glorifies Jesus is in you. Any little peace of joy in God that you have is God delighting in God in you.

The Influence of Daniel Fuller

Those were the kinds of things that exploded out of Jonathan Edwards in those days. I bought that book as I was leaving Fuller Seminary. And I want to mention Daniel Fuller before I pass from Fuller Seminary, the years 1968 to 1971 because I was being guided through Pascal, through C.S Lewis, through Jonathan Edwards by this great man who’s going to speak at our pastor’s conference here next January, Daniel Fuller. And I owe him more perhaps under God than anybody besides my dad perhaps, in terms of the shaping of my thinking. I brought along one of the pages from The Unity the Bible. Now you can buy The Unity the Bible in our bookstore because it’s finally in print, but this is one of the early pages that he was using as a syllabus. Let me quote you just a sentence at the bottom to give you a flavor. He’s really an updated Jonathan Edwards. You’ll hear the similarity:

God has not created us as a means to his ends, but only that he might know the joy of being a means to our ends. As we share the fellowship that we have with the Father and the Son with those around us, God’s purpose in creation, which was to externalize his own glory, becomes fully realized.

I only read that complex sentence to show you the thing I was feeding on and wrestling with in those days in the latter part of the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Christian Hedonism and Love

Now at this point in my life, I have gotten up to what I would call “vertical hedonism.” I went to graduate school in Germany for three years at that point, 1971 to 1974, poured myself into technical New Testament scholarly studies, made very little progress in understanding the Bible, and got my necessary papers to teach and was wonderfully offered a job at Bethel College in 1974. I taught there for six years.

When I was freed from the need to read a zillion footnotes, I went back to what seemed to me to really matter and began to ponder Christian Hedonism again. And in those years, the late 1970s, I began to formulate and write. I didn’t write much in seminary. This magazine means a lot to me. This is March 1977 from “His Magazine.” It doesn’t exist anymore, but this is the cover for my Christian Hedonism article. This bread versus a stone here. And they put right inside, how I became a Christian Hedonist by me. They gave it front page billing. I laid out for Inter-Varsity, Christian Hedonism as I understood it in 1977. And God amazingly used this article.

If you’re involved in Inter-Varsity and you have any dealings with the West Coast branch, you know that Christian Hedonism is the dominant motif of Inter-Varsity. That’s not owing to me, that’s owing mainly to Dan Fuller, but Desiring God that emerged in 1986 crystallized it for a lot of people. Vertical Hedonism is the teaching simply that our pursuit of joy in God vertically is a good thing to be pursued and not to be denied at all. But having published that article in 1977, something was going on inside of me that was a real wrestling, namely, is it right to talk about Christian Hedonism at the horizontal level?

Dissatisfied Contentment

I was content and sure now that to pursue God for my joy in God was an honor to him and a blessing to me and others. Whether to pursue all my activity at the horizontal level, whether love could be thought of in terms of pursuing my own joy, I was not at all sure. I could think of texts that seemed to contradict that idea. So my second article as I worked my way through that was in the November 1981 issue of “His Magazine,” which this time was way at the back. I had to really wrestle with the editors to get the title and I didn’t get the title that I wanted. My title was “Dissatisfied Contentment: Toward an Ethic of Christian Hedonism,” I guess too technical for a magazine.

They put “Holy Hedonism” with big Marilyn Monroe lips on the opposite page. I called them back right away and said, “Junk the lips, you can’t put the lips in.” And they didn’t, they scrapped the lips, but they left it at “Holy Hedonism: Feeling Good About Doing Good.” I hate that title. I don’t like the title, but that’s the title that was used. And since it’s a defunct magazine, maybe there’s nobody to get mad at me now for saying that. What I meant by “dissatisfied contentment” was this. Here’s the discovery I made, and if it sounds brief and inadequate tonight, we’re going to work on this one for a lot of the coming lectures.

Paul said, “I am content in every circumstance” (Philippians 4:11). I was reading in those days, some novels and I read one by Hermann Hesse called Siddhartha. Siddhartha was in pursuit of salvation as a Buddhist and he found it in sitting cross-legged under a tree in India feeling totally content. And I read that and I felt threatened by it because I said, “Is that what I’m teaching? That once you arrive at total contentment in God, you fold your legs, sit under a tree, and the world can go to hell as far as you’re concerned?”

My vertical hedonism had to have a horizontal dimension or I knew I was way off base. So I went to the New Testament and I said, “You really do teach, God, that you should be content, but you also teach somehow that this contentment that can be abased and that can be abound, that can rejoice in tribulation, is dissatisfied with the way things are.” It sounds so paradoxical. And the analogy I came up with was that God created the world not because he was deficient, nor did God wring his hands and say, “I’m not happy, I’m not happy, I’m not happy. I got to create a world.” That was not God. Rather, he wouldn’t be God if that were true. God created the world as the spontaneous overflow of fullness that he might share what he is with others. Edward said, it is no indication of the deficiency of a fountain that it must overflow.

Now, that’s my paradigm for understanding the human heart that gets filled with the Holy Spirit. It is no sign of your deficiency or your lack of contentment in God that you must spill over with God for others. And this is what we’ll talk a lot more about. That was the development of my horizontal hedonism. God’s bringing satisfaction into my heart came to its consummation, not just in praising him, but in expanding to meet the needs of others and bring them into this joy.

Christian Hedonism as a Pastor

Then I came to Bethlehem, 1980, and I began to think about this whole issue in relation to the local church and I wrote an article in “The Standard.” It’s the last article I think I wrote on Christian Hedonism until recently. In fact, I won’t bother holding it up, but the reason it’s significant is because I wrote it out of a pastoral situation, commending Christian Hedonism to other pastors.

In the fall of 1983, that was the sermon series on Christian Hedonism. And out of that, this book came, there were nine messages, there are nine chapters in Desiring God. I talked about conversion because I’d come to see the parable of the treasure hidden in a field as a parable of conversion. Matthew 13:44 says:

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.

That’s conversion. For joy. You sell everything you have to have the kingdom. Christ is worth more than anything. I talked about worship — “Delight yourself in the Lord . . .” I talked about love — “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” I talked about Scripture — “Your word is sweeter than honey to my taste.” I talked about prayer — “Ask and you will receive that your joy may be full.” I talked about money — “Sell your possessions and make purses in heaven that never grow old.” Really, really invest. I talked about marriage — “Nobody ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” Do that because you’re one flesh with your wife. When you love your wife, you love yourself. Do you want to be happy? Love her.

I talked about missions — “Lord, we left everything and followed you,” Peter says. And Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29–30).

I talked about all those things from the vantage point of Christian Hedonism, and then the book appeared in 1986. I almost brought along my correspondence file tonight, which moves me every time I think about it.

The Essence of Christian Hedonism

But let me draw this message to a close tonight by summarizing for you just what Christian Hedonism is in five steps. And then if we have time, just a closing word.

Step number one: Everybody desires to be happy and it is not evil. That desire is not evil.

Step number two: You should never try to resist that desire as though it were a bad impulse, but instead, intensify it and pursue whatever makes for the deepest and longest lasting satisfaction. These are absolutely crucial qualifications I’m laying out here. You must intensify your desire and go for what is deepest and longest lasting.

Step number three: The deepest and longest lasting pleasure is found in God and God alone.

Step number four: The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it overflows in praise to God and love for others in bringing them into the joy of God.

Finally, step number five: To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, you will fail to honor God (we’re going to talk about that next time) and you will fail to love people (we’ll talk about that the time after next). Or to put it positively, the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary component of all worship and all virtue.

Let me close by asking this question: Why does this matter? Why do I get so worked up about this? Why has this held me now since 1968 or so? Let me close with several reasons. Number one, it is possible to worship in vain. Scripture says, “My people worship me in vain. Their heart is far from me (Matthew 15:8). Christian Hedonism will not stand for that. It will not stand for that. It targets the heart and says, “You must worship with your heart.”

Number two, it is possible to love in vain. If you have all knowledge, if you give all your goods to feed the poor, if you give your body to be burned and have no love, it amounts to nothing (12 Corinthians 13:1–3). How can you give your body to be burned? How can you give all your goods to feed the poor and have no love? It has something to do with the heart and motivation in relation to God and Christian Hedonism.

Number three, it is possible to be lukewarm and be spewed out of Jesus’s mouth (Revelation 3:16), which is a terrifying prospect.

And finally, number four, I think today there is a tremendous need to be God-centered. We live in a massively man-centered culture. And you might say, “Christian Hedonism sounds pretty man-centered to me.” But I’m going to ask you, is God belittled and you made the center when you come to him like a fountain and you fall on your face and you put your face in the fountain and you just suck up water. Are you the center at that moment? When you stand up and say, “That’s the best water I’ve ever tasted. It satisfies my whole longing.” Are you the center? The water is the center. And it is glorified in that experience. And I’ve had people say to me, “Aren’t you making a god out of pleasure?” And my response is, you make a god out of whatever you take most pleasure in. And my whole life is devoted to making God God.