Do Christian Hedonists Idolize Joy?
00:00:00.000 | A podcast listener named Daniel writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, how does
00:00:09.580 | Christian hedonism avoid making joy into an idol?" Well, the short answer is,
00:00:16.460 | Christian hedonism doesn't make a god or an idol out of joy, because Christian
00:00:26.600 | hedonism says we make a god out of whatever we find most joy in. That's the
00:00:33.640 | short answer. So find your greatest joy in God and thus be done with all
00:00:45.400 | idolatry. But his question is, how do you avoid making that mistake? It's not as
00:00:52.560 | though the mistake can't be made. In fact, that would be my first statement about
00:00:56.720 | how to avoid it, is to say, "Admit it can happen." And I admit it can happen, not
00:01:01.480 | just because Daniel asked me how not to let it happen, but because the Bible says
00:01:07.800 | it actually does happen in 2nd Timothy 3, where Paul says, "In the last
00:01:14.040 | days men will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." Now when I
00:01:22.280 | read that, I say, "Really? That's amazing! The fallen human heart is capable of
00:01:28.720 | suicidal illusions." Because I call it an illusion, because if you make pleasure
00:01:37.480 | the object of your love, it's like making love the object of your love. It's like
00:01:43.800 | making being pleased the object of being pleased. It's self-contradictory. It's
00:01:49.680 | self-defeating. My capacity, my faculty for delighting was made to delight in
00:01:58.080 | something. Delighting wasn't made to delight in delighting. Delighting was
00:02:04.000 | made to delight in something. If you delight in the delighting, you're like a
00:02:09.320 | hunter who aims to shoot his bullet. He's not going to get any deer that
00:02:17.280 | way. He's going to go hungry, which is why I said it's suicidal. It's an
00:02:22.400 | illusion. And yet it's true. I mean, it's a good question. It's not a stupid
00:02:26.600 | question, because Paul says men will be lovers of pleasure. Men will be so stupid
00:02:31.760 | and so insane and so drawn in on themselves, they will commit the
00:02:36.680 | suicidal hunting of trying to shoot the bullet in their gun. But here's
00:02:42.920 | another safeguard. I mean, we could talk about this all day, but let me just
00:02:46.600 | give you a few. Christian hedonism says never merely pursue your joy.
00:02:54.120 | That's hedonism. That's not Christian hedonism. That's just hedonism.
00:02:57.800 | Christian hedonism says pursue your joy in God, or more precisely, pursue your joy
00:03:05.880 | in all that God is for you in Christ. And I say is for you, not does for you. In God,
00:03:14.880 | not through God. God is the end of our quest. He's not a means. There's nothing
00:03:20.760 | more ultimate than God. So when we rejoice in his works, which the Bible
00:03:28.060 | says we should do, we are rejoicing in the God we see in his works and know
00:03:33.960 | through his works. We are receiving his works not as our substitute for God, but
00:03:41.280 | as a pointer to God. So the second caution or safeguard against turning
00:03:48.440 | pleasure or joy into an idol is to say that we always rejoice in God. Here's
00:03:55.400 | another one. We, Christian hedonists, explain that joy is a way of
00:04:03.080 | glorifying God. I mean, this is the most fundamental thing, right? We say it,
00:04:07.560 | "Desiring God, we exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things,
00:04:12.240 | for the joy of all peoples, by highlighting the truth that God is most
00:04:17.320 | glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." Everybody knows that
00:04:23.400 | you don't glorify yourself, and you don't glorify pleasure when you take supreme
00:04:31.200 | pleasure in somebody. And I've told my Rose story a hundred times, but I'll just
00:04:37.560 | give the conclusion of it here. So if I say to my wife, "There's nothing that
00:04:44.880 | would give me more satisfaction than to spend the evening with you tonight," she
00:04:50.320 | would never say to me, "You are so selfish! All you ever think about is what will
00:04:55.880 | bring you satisfaction! That's why you want to take me out tonight, because I
00:04:59.520 | make you satisfied!" She would never say that, because I am glorifying her
00:05:08.520 | satisfying qualities by telling her she makes me happy. And so when you come to
00:05:15.960 | worship on Sunday morning and you're driven by this by the sense of, "God, I'm
00:05:20.480 | here to spend time with you because there's nobody in all the world who can
00:05:25.280 | make me more happy," he's not going to say to you, "You are so selfish coming to
00:05:29.440 | me." No! Because we glorify him when he satisfies us. Here's another one.
00:05:37.160 | Here's another one. We insist, Christian hedonists insist on the truth that
00:05:44.040 | navel-gazing is bad hedonism. In other words, if you sit in, if you go to an art
00:05:51.720 | gallery, you would want to enjoy the beauty of these masterpieces. And you
00:05:59.240 | stand in front of a Rembrandt, say, and you are constantly saying, "Okay, stomach, are
00:06:07.280 | you being turned? Okay, palms, are you beginning to sweat? Eyes, are you
00:06:13.400 | beginning to flutter? Pulse, are you starting? You're not gonna see anything!
00:06:19.400 | You gotta forget your pulse, forget your stomach, forget your heart, and
00:06:24.320 | look at the painting!" Now, some people have said, "Therefore, stop talking
00:06:31.560 | about pursuing joy and just talking about pursue God." Well, it's not that
00:06:36.960 | simple because there are ways to pursue God that don't honor him. And there are
00:06:42.480 | ways to pursue righteousness that don't honor righteousness. If you pursue
00:06:47.840 | God out of a mere sense of "ought," like, "Okay, I ought to read my Bible, and I ought to
00:06:54.200 | go to church, and I ought to do this or that," God is not as honored as if you
00:07:01.120 | come to him as the object of your desire. So I want to preserve both.
00:07:06.720 | Naval-gazing is bad hedonism, and we ought to pursue joy in the painting. We
00:07:14.540 | ought to want to be delighted by the painting. Let me give you one more,
00:07:19.800 | this short. I didn't see this early, Tony, say, what, 40 years ago, when I was first
00:07:27.200 | trying to formulate these things. We need, we Christian hedonists need to have a
00:07:32.600 | robust doctrine of self-denial and suffering. And so if you look at my
00:07:39.680 | writings after the first edition of Desiring God, which came along,
00:07:46.040 | I've got a chapter on suffering in almost everything. And when people ask
00:07:50.760 | me, "How does this fit with self-denial?" I say, "Look, I totally believe in
00:07:55.720 | self-denial, because Jesus said, 'Whoever would save his life will lose it.'" But
00:08:02.760 | C.S. Lewis taught me this in that same sermon where I saw almost everything
00:08:08.000 | else at the beginning. He said, "Whenever you hear a promise or a command in the
00:08:13.760 | Bible, it always comes with a reward, and God doesn't treat us because we're
00:08:19.520 | seeking our satisfaction, but because we're too easily satisfied, because the
00:08:23.920 | rest of the verse says, 'Whoever would lose his life for my sake and the
00:08:28.080 | Gospels will save it.'" So clearly Jesus is arguing, "You want to save your life,
00:08:33.320 | don't you?" "Yes, I do." "I'm a hedonist." "Well, good, I want you to be. Now lose it." In
00:08:40.320 | other words, here's the way I would put it, "Deny yourself tin so you can have
00:08:46.240 | gold. Deny yourself brackish gutter water so you can have a mountain spring. Deny
00:08:52.800 | yourself hog gristle so you can have the finest steak." That's the
00:08:58.640 | point of a doctrine of self-denial. We must be willing to die, I mean really die,
00:09:04.680 | because the steadfast love of the Lord, Psalm 63, is better than life. So maybe
00:09:13.320 | the sum of the matter is for Daniel, how does Christian hedonism keep joy
00:09:18.840 | from being an idol? Simply believe in the Bible and let the whole counsel of God
00:09:27.480 | inform your system. So I don't want to be more Christian hedonist than I
00:09:34.520 | am more biblical. Anytime somebody asks me a question where they see a part of
00:09:39.440 | the Bible that doesn't seem to fit with Christian hedonism, I am on that. I am
00:09:43.320 | on that because I want to be biblical more than I want to be faithful to any
00:09:48.800 | system. Yes, amen. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:09:53.680 | Like Daniel, you can email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.
00:09:58.040 | You can visit us online at DesiringGod.org as well to find thousands of
00:10:02.200 | books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper, all free of
00:10:05.160 | charge. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
00:10:09.360 | [BLANK_AUDIO]