Fifty years ago, November 16, 1968, was one of the most important days of my life.
Nothing is more important in the whole universe that God is glorified, Christ be magnified, and the hearts of God’s people are satisfied in Him. The implications of this biblical truth are vast. And one day, an event started bringing me everything.
- Since the age of 22.
- Christian hedonism has been my goal.
- My guidance.
- And my strength.
- Now.
- At 72.
- This is my last preparation to meet Jesus face to face.
- There’s little reason for you to worry about what I think.
- But you must worry infinitely (I use the word with caution) if God has revealed that Christian hedonism is true.
- I’d like to convince you that he’s revealed it.
That’s why I’ll tell you what happened to me fifty years ago, november 16, 1968, and why it made a difference. Experience is not an authority. But this can be a useful indicator.
During my four years at Wheaton College, Illinois, from 1964 to 1968, I realized an unresolved tension in my Christian experience. On the one hand, I knew, by the instruction of my father and the New Testament, that I should live for the glory of God. “So whether you eat, drink, or do something else, do everything for the glory of God” (1C 10. 31). On the other hand, he knew from experience that he was constantly motivated by a desire for deep satisfaction.
These seemed like motivations in competition. I could try to make God look good, or I could point to my own satisfaction. I didn’t have a framework of thought in which these two reasons fit together. They seemed to be alternatives.
In fact, as a teenager, so he heard the call to Christian service: “Are you going to surrender to God’s will for your life, or will you continue to seek your own will?”It was a sign of my own immaturity, which seemed to be a frustrating dilemma:?Or do you follow God’s will and live in frustration that your desires will not be fulfilled forever, or do you follow His will and stay out of tune with God forever?
But it wasn’t just the preachers who stoked the fire of my frustration. Jesus himself said, “If anyone wants to come after me, deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8:34). What could be clearer? Jesus’ will meant not following my will, but denying it, disobeying and being ruined, or obeying and living frustrated.
It was the atmosphere I was breathing. Seek the glory of God or seek my own satisfaction, or perhaps. Seek God’s will and God’s glory, or seek my will and happiness. And I thought it was flawed to seek my happiness. You cannot serve the glory of God and your joy.
I wasn’t the only one breathing this atmosphere. Lewis said
“If there is, in most modern minds, the idea that wishing for our own good and sincerely expecting their enjoyment is a bad thing, I say that this notion was born of Kant and the Stoics” (The Weight of Glory, p. 27).
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher whose opinions on Christian motivation, intentional or not, had this kind of effect. In fact, Ayn Rand rejected Christianity in large part because she felt this “Kartian” air and found it undermining true virtue. In a scathing critique, he said:
“An action is not moral,” Kant says, “that if the person does not have the desire to do it, but he does it out of duty and does not derive any benefit of any kind, material or spiritual. An advantage destroys the moral value of an action (then, if someone does not have the desire to be evil, it cannot be good; if someone has it, he can) (for the new intellectual, 32).
The atmosphere he was breathing was exactly what Rand described: being motivated by his own benefit?Destroy the moral value of an action ?.
Even eminent biblical scholars have spread this atmosphere, I still remember a commentary on Luke 14. 13-14 from the book of T. W. Manson, The Sayings of Jesus, which was important when I was a student. Jesus said: ?? by feasting, inviting the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind; And you will be blessed, for they have no reward for thee; but your reward, will you receive it in the resurrection of the righteous?
In light of this, Jesus seems to motivate us for the risky hospitality of “open hands,” telling us that we will be “rewarded” by the resurrection. “Certainly it seems that we should prioritize our own long-term reward over brevity. but Manson wrote: “The promise of a reward for this kind of life is a fact. But you shouldn’t live like this for the reward. If you do that, do you live the old selfish way?
In other words, Jesus promised us a reward, but did not expect it to motivate us. Sounds strange doesn’t it? Ayn Rand felt this kind of thinking in the air and thought it represented true Christianity, so she rejected Christianity. Before her death, I wrote to her after my discovery of Christian hedonism to try to persuade her otherwise. She never responded.
When I graduated from college in 1968, I had not yet discovered Christian hedonism. The atmosphere was still fraught with tension between the search for God’s glory on one side and the pursuit of my happiness on the other. That was about to change.
I entered my first class at Fuller Seminary with my teacher Daniel Fuller (son of the founder) in the fall of 1968 and heard things I had never heard before about the relationship between divine glory and human happiness. Did Dr. Fuller refer me to Jonathan? Edwards, Blaise Pascal, CSLewis?And the Bible! Edwards and Pascal aggravated the problem before they got better.
Edwards earned my trust by highlighting the centrality, importance, supremacy, and value of God’s glory beyond all other realities, and he did so in such a complete, passionate, biblical way that there was no chance he was on the verge of smuggling. man-centered theology.
His book The End for which God created the world is perhaps the most complete and convincing demonstration that the glory of God is the ultimate goal of all things. What was so disturbing in this book was the avalanche of biblical passages used to show God’s passion for his glory.
He was new to me. I knew my duty to live for the glory of God, but I had never heard that God lives for the glory of God; I had never heard that God’s commandment for me to glorify him was an invitation to join him in his zeal for his own. glory But have I been drawn to this avalanche of biblical truth?eternity in eternity.
Thus, in the tension I felt between the search for God’s glory and the pursuit of my happiness, no solution could be found that would weaken my search for God’s glory. The risks on this side of the dilemma have been raised to the highest possible level. There’s no deal. No decrease. I say this with great joy, because it was not, and I am not looking for a way to escape the absolute and unaltered supremacy of God’s glory in all things, it is the great polar star in the paradise of my mind.
But what about the other half of the dilemma?Problems have also arisen on this side. Blaise Pascal said it more forcefully than I would dare, even if it was what she suspected was true:
“All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. Regardless of the different means they use, they all tend in this direction. The cause of some going to war and others avoiding it lies in the same desire in both, with different Will never takes the slightest step if it is not for this purpose. Is this the reason for every action of every man, even those who hang themselves?(Thoughts, 45).
If you do not agree with Pascal, do not stop reading here, because Christian hedonism cannot be supported because he is right. Christian hedonism is not about the search for joy that is (everyone seeks happiness), but the pursuit of joy must be (everyone must seek happiness).
My point here is simply that Edwards and Pascal made my problem worse before things got better. Now the dilemma wasn’t just a private struggle within John Piper. It was a titanic tension between God’s greatest loyalty (his glory) and man’s inexorable passion (our happiness). On my personal level, the tension was even more real: God could not help but appreciate his glory above all else. And John Piper couldn’t help but pursue happiness, nor could he help but be hungry.
Then came the discovery of what I called Christian hedonism, which happened in two stages.
In his conference program, Dr. Fuller quoted C. S. Lewis under the title “We are very easily satisfied. “I thought the problem was we wanted to be satisfied. Now Fuller said: No, our problem is not that we want to be satisfied, but that our desire to be satisfied is very low. He quoted Lewis.
On November 16, 1968, he was at Vroman’s Bookstore on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. (The store is still there!) Lewis’ blue pamphlet, The Weight of Glory, was in front of me, face up on a special offer table. I opened and read the first page. Nothing’s been the same since.
The New Testament has much to declare about resignation, but not resignation as an end in itself, it tells us that we must renounce ourselves and take our cross to follow Christ, and almost all descriptions of the reward that will follow this renunciation contain a call to natural desire for happiness.
Indeed, if we consider the modest promises of reward and the astonishing nature of the rewards promised in the gospels, we would say that our Lord considers our desires not to be too great, but too small. We are divided creatures, chasing alcohol, sex and ambitions, ignoring the infinite joy offered to us, like an ignorant child who prefers to keep making his sand balls in a slum, because he cannot imagine what it means to spend the holidays on the beach. Are we very easily satisfied?
They were winds from other lands. It was the exact opposite of what TWManson told me not to live for the reward promised by Christ. Lewis told me he wasn’t living long enough to get the reward!Christ has made us promises of reward that are well opened. and do you find us with our desires not extremely strong, but too weak?The problem is not the desire for happiness, but the fact that we settle for sandballs while we are promised paradise. Humanity’s great problem is that we don’t want happiness with enough knowledge and passion.
All the biblical instincts in me knew I was fine. How many times have I read Jesus’ words: “Is it more blessed to give than to receive?(Acts 20. 35) and try to convince me:? Yes, but don’t let the promised blessing influence your gift This battle is over. Jesus made the promise and wanted him to move us. Thank you, CSLewis, for freeing me from the denial of the obvious.
Of course, what was not yet obvious was how Jesus’ commandment to seek reward related to God’s love for his glory. That was the next step in the discovery.
Ironically, Lewis provided the key, making the puzzle darker. He emphasized that God’s love for the praise of his glory had been a great obstacle for him to attain faith. When he read the Psalms, he said, did you seem to imagine God’s desire?, for our worship as a vain woman who wants praise?(Reflections on the Psalms, 109).
Since those days in 1968, I have learned that many others have stumbled upon God’s love for his glory. For many, does this love seem like a journey into the ego?How did Lewis overcome this obstacle?In his book Reflections on Psalms, he explains how to:
? The most obvious fact of the praise slipped away strangely. I thought about it in terms of praise, approval or honor, I had never noticed that all pleasure spreads spontaneously in praise, unless (and sometimes even) out of shyness or fear of disturbing others, who are deliberately repressed . . .
Nor had I noticed that just as men spontaneously praise what they like, they also spontaneously push us to join them to praise him: “Isn’t he adorable?Don’t you think it’s beautiful, Psalmists, asking everyone to praise God, do what all men do when they talk about what they care about. All my difficulty, in general, in praise of God, depended on my absurd denial, in terms of extreme value, what we like to do. , what we can’t help but do, everything we value.
I think we like to praise what we appreciate, because praise not only expresses, but complements pleasure; it’s the realization itself. It is not an obligation for lovers to continue to tell themselves how beautiful they are; Is the pleasure incomplete until it is expressed?(109?11, emphasis added)
That was the key. Pleasure is full of praise. Specifically, praise not only expresses pleasure; it’s the realization itself. Is praise a pleasure, the expression of pleasure of what we value.
If praise is the overflow of joy in what we cherish, and if that joy is not complete as long as it is not full of praise, then God seeks our utmost satisfaction when He demands our praises. He knows this is what satisfies everything. treasure of the universe. It’s a fact, and no false humility can misrepresent it. He also knows that we will find the fullness of happiness anywhere but in this very treasure. Finally, he knows that praise is the realization of this happiness.
So he orders us to make the most of it and invite this enjoyment to reach its fullness, that is, in the overflow of praise. In other words, God’s love for his glory and our desire to be happy lead to the same experience of worship. This isn’t megalomania. It’s love.
And it is also the happy marriage of God’s love to be glorified and my desire to be satisfied. Praise is obedience to God’s commandment to be glorified. And praise is the fulfillment of my desire to be satisfied. These two massive realities of the universe, divine glorification and human desire?ultimately, they don’t disagree. The old conflict, which should never have existed, ended. It was a decisive year: 1968, Christian hedonism was discovered. This has been the purpose, guidance, and strength of my life and ministry for fifty years.
Has it stood the test of time? Five decades of marriage, four decades of parenting, and three decades of pastoral ministry, all woven from children of sadness and joy. Throughout, Christian hedonism has been my goal, my guide, and my Bible-saturated force, touching all areas of life. And I’m sorry I didn’t penetrate deeper.
I do not pretend to be the best example of Christian hedonism; I know many others who embody this reality better than I do, but I’m a witness. And I pray that my testimony is not in vain. In all my life and ministry, I say (again) as a hedonistic Christian, I do not write to have dominion over your faith, but [I] want to cooperate for your joy ?(2 Corinthians 1:24). And if God gives me more years of life, I pray that, to the end, my goal will be the same as that of the Apostle Paul: “Let me stay and stay with all of you, for your progress and enjoy the faith. ?, (Philippians 1:25).
In this way, we do not make a god happy, rather, we show him that in all that we find greatest joy is our God; and the greater the joy in him, the greater the glory we give him, where our greatest treasure is, there is the greatest pleasure of our hearts. It was the great discovery of 1968: there is no conflict! The glory of God and our joy grow together. Because God is the most glorified in us when we are most satisfied with him.