A Life-Revolutionizing Discovery

It was a devastating and a liberating and life-revolutionizing discovery for me in 1968. Fuller Seminary. Pursuing joy. Anybody's gonna glory. Why should pursuing our Joy in God. Central to the Christian life. In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper demonstrates how our delight in God is This sermon is a very important thing. Trinity Baptist Church in Whedon, Illinois on September nineteenth, nineteen. Let's pray together before we begin the message.

as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, And return not thither to the but water the earth, causing it to bring forth and sprout. Giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. So shall your word be that goes forth from your mouth. It will not return to you empty. But we'll accomplish that. Would you purpose and prosper in the thing for which you sent it? And so my prayer, Father, is simply that. My words would accord with yours and so be caught up into that powerful assurance.

That your word never is spoken in vain. Be pleased, I pray, to accomplish significant things in the lives of every person here. Some are very mature believers. Some perhaps immature. There may be some outside Christ. But we all have needs, and I pray that in your sovereign wisdom you would apply my efforts. to their need and glorify yourself more fully through transformed hearts. In Jesus' name. Amen.

For those of you who couldn't be here last night, let me try to summarize in a few sentences what we did last night. Um there were two basic points. The first one was that the most passionate heart for God in all the universe is God's heart. God is passionately committed to magnifying himself and exalting his glory and honoring his name in everything he does. And then the second point was that this is the root or foundation of his love for us, in spite of sounding very self-centered.

And the reasoning behind it went like this. that in being one who is passionately for himself, he endeavors to preserve and display his glory always. His glory in its preservation and display is that which brings the deepest and longest lasting satisfaction to the human heart, and therefore in securing his own praise, And seeking his own glory, he is seeking that which will satisfy us, and that's loving. Now no other being in all the universe can do this.

Anybody that tries to copy God in this way and seek their glory Will not be a loving person. And the Bible condemns humans when they try to copy God in this way. seeking their own praise and their own glory. If you want to copy God's heart, which is a heart for God, you get a heart for God. You don't get a heart for yourself. Now that was a summary of last night. An effort to say that the most passionate heart for God is God's heart.

And that this is not unloving. Rather, it's the fountain of grace. It's the fountain of love.

And the question I posed at the end, which leads us into tonight. message is this. If that's true, if God seeks to magnify, preserve, and display his glory, By bringing us to satisfaction in it. I think I said in the chapel this morning over at Wheaton that When we are most satisfied in God, He is most glorified in us. That's that's one of the m most crisp statements I can think of to capture Christian hedonism.

The implication of it for tonight is, therefore, you should make it your lifelong vocation with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength to pursue happiness. That's why I call it hedonism. I looked up hedonism eighteen years ago in my Webster's sixth or whatever it was, and it said hedonism, a life devoted to pleasure. See. That's that's it. That's me. So I have not um hesitated to use the word hedonism.

And just clean it up along the way. Best I can. It it it does it doesn't work for everybody, and if you reject if you reject that word, I don't get mad, and that's okay. But if you reject the message, then I would be sad, because I think it's true and biblical. So let me try to state tonight's thesis again and then work into it. Since God has been pleased. to glorify himself by echoing back to himself his excellencies in the delights that his people have in him.

Therefore, if those people attempt to abandon their quest for happiness, they break the chain of God's pursuit of his own glory. They are opposed to his purpose. put it positively if we want to be on God's side If we want to have our lives count most for God and glorify God most and reflect back to the world and to God more of his excellency, we must make it our lifelong vocation to pursue happiness. In him. Virtually all Christians agree that the chief end of man is to glorify God.

and enjoy him forever. But when I state that the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever, there is more misgiving. And hence the need to unfold this story or this principle a little bit tonight. I don't think our problem in the church is that the church is filled with pleasure seekers. who who therefore go off to their cabin on the weekends in Minnesota and don't come to church. I don't think the problem with those people is that they are pleasure seekers.

The problem is that they've quit so early. The problem is that they have become so accustomed to second-rate, short-lived. unsatisfying pleasures that their capacity for joy has shriveled up so far that they can scarcely even conceive what I am talking about. It's like a foreign language to them.

In fact, the most stunning thing to me is that what's happened over the centuries, and I I take it back with C.S. Lewis to Immanuel Kant and some others who Institutionalize the forsaking of pleasure as a virtue. I see this as the most remarkable thing. I think we have become so incapable of joy in God, of delighting in him, and feeding upon him, like Isaiah fifty five, one to three summons us to do, That what we've done is turned joyless duty into a virtue.

So as to justify our untransformed hearts which don't joy in God. And and uh what got me onto Christian hedonism was that I was hearing, and this all began at Wheaton College twenty four years ago, I was hearing messages that said to the degree that you take pleasure in an act, to that degree does its virtue decrease. And to the degree that you don't get pleasure in an act of duty, to that degree does your virtue increase. And by God's grace, everything in me screamed against them.

Something's wrong here, I was saying. Something's deeply wrong. I can remember students coming back from mission projects.

in the Wheaton Chapel, and then I heard it again when I was teaching at Bethel. God had moved in their lives, God had used them. In fact they had loved their summer. And they stood up in a Wheaton chapel and began their testimony at uh the missions week telling about what God had done and they were telling about what a thrilling time it was down in the Dominican Republic as they built this church or whatever.

And toward the end of their little five-minute testimony, it dawned on them, this does not sound virtuous. And would say things like I think the people really did benefit, or but I did try to do it for the glory of God. As though inside of them there was this rending between the joy that they had gotten in service and the Try. of what they were supposed to be doing.

And and I felt it, and they are feeling it. And I just came to the point after looking at the Bible long enough to say, I'm going to start opposing this. This is not right. Something wrong here. It was a devastating And a liberating and life-revolutionizing discovery for me. In 1968, that was my senior year when I moved on and went to Fuller.

seminary when I made the discovery with the help of C. S. Lewis and Daniel Fuller and Jonathan Edwards and Blaise Pascal that in fact Pursuing joy is the only way anybody's going to glorify.

Now, as soon as I began to talk in terms of Christian hedonism, Immediately objections arose everywhere. And in answering the objections, try to unfold the meaning. more fully of what it means to have a heart for God. Objection number one, does the Bible really teach this? Aren't you really performing some kind of um extra biblical logical gymnastics to really get people to pursue their pleasure. The Bible doesn't talk like that. Objection number.

Number two, what about self denial? I mean when I read the Bible, I see Self-denial taught as a virtue. You're going around calling everybody to pursue their pleasure. Where in the world do you fit self-denial into that? Which is clearly a biblical teaching. Objection number three. Doesn't this focusing on the pursuit of pleasure put way too much emphasis on the emotion?

Isn't the biblical approach to getting people changed to go for their willpower and their decision and their commitment and emotions or more caboose-like? They're not so essential. And then objection number four is that. What becomes of the noble concept of duty? of serving God. I mean serving God, like a servant, a slave. Dulos, the most common word used for Paul's own self-identification. What do you do with that? I mean a doulos is not a pleasure seeker.

And then objection number five, if life becomes the pursuit of pleasure, my pleasure, whatever becomes then of the centrality. Don't I become the center of my own world when I devote all my energy to pursuing my pleasure?

Okay, those are five of the kinds of objections that I raised for myself and that I hear from others. I'm just going to take them one at a time and I'm going to go to Scripture and try to answer them. Objection number one. Does the Bible really teach that we ought to pursue our joy and pursue our pleasure. See, most people would say, of course the Bible is full of joy. It's full of joy, but it's always an unintended result that sort of sneaks up on you when you're doing your duty.

And if you target joy, you will disobey the Bible. It's always a result, not a goal, of obedience. That's the most common response. In fact, a student, you may be here tonight. I don't know. Came up to me after the chapel this morning and said, I read your book last summer, it was dynamite. But what I was left with at the end was Ecclesiastes 12, where it says, and this is

I can't quote it exactly, but the sum of the matter is this. Fear God and keep his commandments. And I wish I had ten minutes here just to tell you my answer, but in a nutshell I said, one of those commandments is delight yourself in the Lord. And all of those commandments should be done the way Jesus did them. Behold, I come, and it is my delight to do thy will, O God. The Pharisees obeyed.

Didn't they? Yeah, six hundred and thirteen commandments. They thought you ought to obey God. That was the sum of the matter for them. What was wrong? They weren't hedonists. That was basically wrong with them. So you've got to be so careful here. You know, play off one scripture against another. Let me just give you the text that I think are the most helpful. Number one, there are explicit commands in the Bible that you must be happy.

Jeremy Taylor said, God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy. Now that's I'm jumping ahead to point number two, but which which talks about threats. But point number one is God commands us to be happy. Psalm 37, 4. Delight yourself in the Lord. Do you believe that is a commandment on the par of thou shalt not commit adultery? I do. I mean when the Bible tells me to do something, I don't care if it's not in the Ten Commandments. I ought to do it.

And the Bible tells you, delight yourself in the Lord. Now, if somebody comes along and says, you ought to be indifferent to whether you get delight out of this, so that it just kind of sneaks up on you. You ought to just quote this verse to them and say, no, the verse says I'm supposed to do it. I'm supposed to pursue it. You've got to pursue delight because it commands you to be delighted in God. If you're not delighted in God, you can't say, all's well, because I'm doing duty.

And delight might come along or it might not. You are not well. You're disobeying God. Now that's why I said this insight was devastating. You see, some people say, oh, Christian hedonism is just a way to make life comfortable. I tell you, it is devastating to be a Christian hedonist because we realize how Short, we fall of the biblical commands to rejoice in God. And again I say rejoice sitting in jail in Rome. When when you think of Paul in Philippa

in the stocks, in the dungeon, singing hymns, you say, This guy is on another planet. He's from another universe because most of us justify our Misery by our circumstance. I mean, and circumstances can get pretty horrid. That's number one response to the objection, is it biblical? Psalm 37, 4, another would be Psalm 32, 11, be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart. That is a command.

My second response to this objection is that the Bible threatens us with terrible judgments if we will not delight in God. This is what sobers you up. There's no glibness in Christian hedonism. It's a sober matter. The text is Deuteronomy twenty-eight, forty-seven. Let me read it for you. 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, in hunger and thirst, in nakedness, and in want of all things. That's where I you know, I read that text in C. S. Lewis, an anthology that he put together of George MacDonald's sayings. Eighteen years ago.

That quote from Jeremy Taylor, God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy. And I thought, oh, that's clever. I wonder if that's true. It took me twelve years to find the biblical verse that that's based on. And this is it. Deuteronomy 28, 47. Because you did not serve the Lord with joyfulness and gladness, you're going to serve your enemies in hunger and nagging. That's just a paraphrase of the Bible. Now my response number three to is it biblical?

That we should pursue our joy in God is the nature of faith taken from Hebrews 11:6, which you all know. Namely, without faith it is impossible to please God, for he who would draw near to God must believe two things. Number one, that he is And number two, that he rewards, or that he is a rewarder of those who seek him. Now think about that for a moment. I'll paraphrase it like this, and you s see if you think I'm being fair to the text. You cannot please God unless you come to Him for reward.

You cannot please God if you come to Him to give reward. You can only please God if you come to get, not to give. That sounds just the opposite of what so many pastors complain about in worship, doesn't it? What's wrong with this people is that they don't come to give. They're always coming to get. And I say, if my people would just come to get like they ought to come to get, there'd be no problem of worship here. If they were coming thirsty for God.

If they were coming starved for God, if they were saying, Pastor, gimme God at all costs, I'd say, no problem in this church. The problem with worship is not that people are coming. to to uh to get. That's not the problem. It's th they're already th it's it's like it's like getting up on Thanksgiving morning, stuffing a whole loaf of white bread down and then walking to Thanksgiving dinner table. That's the way people come to worship.

Worship is supposed to be a banquet of glory on which the people feed. Git, get, get. And then they're stuffed with television. newspaper on Sunday morning, whatever. They're not hungry. So I never criticize my people to say the problem with you people is you don't come to give. I said that's not the problem. This text says, the nature of saving faith is that you must come to God as a rewarder. If you try to come to him on any other terms,

You won't please him. Well, to me, that just began to speak volumes that I can't please God unless I'm a hedonist. Isn't that what that says? I can't please God unless I'm a hedonist? Some of your faces look real skeptical. I tell I'm I'm not quite there yet. Um But I I think that's what there. But Uh as far as I can see, that text says, if you want to please God, you come pursuing reward, which means joy. There's no such thing as an unhappy reward.

This is Light and Truth, God-centered preaching to help you see Christ clearly and treasure him truly. I'm your host, Dan Kruver. Thank you for listening. On our next episode, John Piper continues our ten part series. Heart for God with the sermon titled Alright. A quest to be satisfied. I hope you'll join us. For more resources, visit desiring God.org.