How John Piper Became a ‘Christian Hedonist’

00:00:00.000 | Today we talk about the various stages of progress in John Piper's becoming a Christian

00:00:07.760 | hedonist and the excellent question comes in the form of an email.

00:00:11.440 | "Hello Pastor John, my name is Alanna.

00:00:13.720 | Can you retell the story of your own journey into Christian hedonism?

00:00:18.000 | I recall you mentioning C.S.

00:00:19.320 | Lewis being a major influence on you through one of his books, but what has been the defining

00:00:24.540 | moments for you in this pursuit of the all-satisfying joy in Jesus?"

00:00:30.280 | I've got 10 steps in the story and I'll try to say them quickly.

00:00:35.680 | Number one, my father was the happiest man I've ever known.

00:00:42.020 | I grew up in that home, no doubt it had an impact.

00:00:45.320 | Number two, my father and my mother constantly cited 1 Corinthians 10 31, "Whether you eat

00:00:52.960 | or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."

00:00:56.760 | So I knew I've got happy parents and they're telling me constantly to pursue the glory

00:01:02.120 | of God.

00:01:03.320 | Number three, no one made the connection for me between my joy and God's glory in any biblical

00:01:12.220 | or theological way that I can remember.

00:01:14.920 | They just kind of dangled.

00:01:17.200 | Number four, unresolved tension all through college between I want to be happy and I could

00:01:26.680 | no more desire the want to be happy than I could stop myself from getting hungry.

00:01:33.360 | I think God put the desire for happiness in the human soul as a good thing rooted in our

00:01:40.680 | very human nature.

00:01:42.480 | So there it was, I couldn't do anything about it and I had in the Bible and in my parents'

00:01:48.780 | memory God demands that he be glorified and those two things were in constant unresolved

00:01:56.760 | tension.

00:01:57.760 | Maybe I'm just weird, but they were.

00:02:00.160 | How does my passion to be happy and God's passion to be glorified fit together?

00:02:05.560 | Number five, the fall of 1968, first year in seminary, 22 years old, fall of 1968, a

00:02:17.240 | process of discovery was opened that lasted several years in which C.S. Lewis, Daniel

00:02:22.360 | Fuller and Jonathan Edwards conspired to make me a Christian hedonist.

00:02:28.720 | Number six, it was the first step of that process.

00:02:33.440 | Maybe the first step was seeing the pointer to this in Daniel Fuller's syllabus on hermeneutics,

00:02:39.480 | but here's the actual encounter.

00:02:42.200 | So the weight of glory, Froman's Bookstore, Colorado Avenue, one afternoon, fall of 1968,

00:02:49.880 | opened up and here's the page I read.

00:02:52.840 | The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.

00:02:59.500 | We are told to deny ourselves and take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ.

00:03:06.200 | And nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal

00:03:13.760 | to desire.

00:03:16.240 | I was starting to get pins and needles running up and down my spine when I read that.

00:03:20.520 | And here comes, here's what's next.

00:03:22.320 | If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly

00:03:29.980 | to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing.

00:03:33.340 | Now, that was me.

00:03:34.500 | That was me.

00:03:35.500 | I had this lurking sense.

00:03:36.900 | That's not a good thing.

00:03:38.500 | That's why they didn't fit together.

00:03:40.380 | He says, I submit this notion has crept in from Kant, Immanuel Kant, the philosopher,

00:03:46.780 | and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.

00:03:50.980 | Whoa, you're kidding me.

00:03:52.700 | Indeed, he goes on.

00:03:54.360 | If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards

00:04:01.260 | promised in the gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong,

00:04:09.240 | but too weak.

00:04:11.140 | I had never heard anybody say that in my life.

00:04:14.620 | Your problem, Piper, is you don't have strong enough desires.

00:04:17.180 | I had never heard anybody say that.

00:04:19.980 | He goes on.

00:04:21.060 | We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite

00:04:27.240 | joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the

00:04:32.660 | slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

00:04:40.620 | Last sentence, we are far too easily pleased.

00:04:44.660 | And that was the title of an entire section in Daniel Fuller's hermeneutic syllabus.

00:04:50.020 | We are far too easily pleased.

00:04:53.100 | And it was a diagnosis of my soul that I had never heard before.

00:04:58.380 | Step number seven, reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis, page 93, helped me put the final

00:05:08.180 | touch on vertical Christian hedonism.

00:05:11.540 | And it went like this.

00:05:13.060 | The most obvious fact about praise, whether of God or anything, strangely escaped me.

00:05:19.220 | I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or giving honor.

00:05:24.340 | I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise, unless, sometimes even

00:05:31.220 | if, shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.

00:05:37.140 | The world rings with praise, lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet,

00:05:43.980 | walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game, praise of weather,

00:05:50.740 | wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children,

00:05:58.980 | flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians and scholars.

00:06:06.300 | I had not noticed how the humblest and at the same time the most balanced and capacious

00:06:12.940 | minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least.

00:06:21.980 | I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise what they value, so they

00:06:28.100 | spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it.

00:06:32.460 | Isn't she lovely?

00:06:33.460 | Wasn't it glorious?

00:06:35.140 | Don't you think that magnificent?

00:06:37.300 | The psalmists, in telling everyone to praise God, are doing what all men do when they speak

00:06:45.780 | of what they care about.

00:06:48.260 | My whole more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying

00:06:55.060 | to us as regards the supremely valuable what we delight to do, what we indeed can't help

00:07:01.700 | doing about everything else we value.

00:07:05.380 | And here it comes.

00:07:07.220 | I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but

00:07:15.740 | completes the enjoyment.

00:07:19.980 | It is its appointed consummation.

00:07:23.460 | It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they

00:07:30.500 | are.

00:07:31.500 | The delight is incomplete till it is expressed."

00:07:40.340 | I had never heard that before either.

00:07:42.700 | So one thing was clear.

00:07:45.140 | God's commanding praise, commanding that he be praised, was for our good because it was

00:07:54.580 | the consummation of our joy in him.

00:08:00.620 | But it took, this is number eight, it took Jonathan Edwards to bring me to the even more

00:08:07.620 | important realization that we should pursue joy in God because it is the essence and heart

00:08:16.260 | of praise.

00:08:17.900 | In other words, not only is praise the consummation of joy, the completion of joy, joy in its

00:08:25.660 | fullness, but joy is the essence of praise.

00:08:31.900 | You're not praising God if you're not enjoying God.

00:08:36.420 | And that's what so many people miss.

00:08:39.060 | And I got it from Edwards.

00:08:41.140 | Here's the way he said it.

00:08:42.860 | God glorifies himself toward the creature in two ways.

00:08:46.780 | This is from his Miscellanies.

00:08:48.500 | One, by appearing to their understanding.

00:08:51.300 | Two, by communicating himself to their hearts and in their rejoicing and delighting in and

00:08:59.820 | enjoying the manifestations which he makes of himself.

00:09:03.580 | God is glorified not only by his glory being seen, but by its being rejoiced in.

00:09:15.460 | Which brought me to the clear statement, God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied

00:09:27.020 | in him.

00:09:28.340 | And all these discoveries from Lewis and Edwards were confirmed throughout the Bible.

00:09:35.220 | And if we had time, we could take text after text to show them.

00:09:38.700 | But let me just give the last step in my pilgrimage.

00:09:42.140 | All this left me to work out especially how vertical Christian hedonism, namely, God is

00:09:49.660 | most glorified in me when I'm most satisfied in him.

00:09:53.100 | That doesn't take anybody else into account.

00:09:55.860 | How that vertical Christian hedonism worked together with horizontal Christian hedonism.

00:10:03.420 | Namely, you can't love other people if you abandon your quest for joy in God.

00:10:13.580 | Say that again, because it sounds really controversial when people hear it.

00:10:18.500 | If you abandon your quest for joy in God, you can't love horizontally.

00:10:27.100 | You can't love other people.

00:10:29.500 | Why not?

00:10:30.780 | Because love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others.

00:10:37.780 | Second Corinthians 8, 2.

00:10:39.560 | You can read that for yourself.

00:10:41.140 | Or here it is more precisely.

00:10:43.180 | You can see this if you just think about it.

00:10:45.740 | Joy in God has in it by nature, joy in God has built in it as God designed it.

00:10:54.700 | Say it again, joy in God has in it an expansive impulse to increase itself by drawing others

00:11:07.020 | into our experience of it, even if it costs us our lives.

00:11:15.460 | And so the rest of my life has been spent working out all the relations and all the

00:11:21.820 | applications of those discoveries.

00:11:24.260 | Amen.

00:11:25.260 | A lifetime of discoveries to come.

00:11:27.780 | An incredible story, Pastor John.

00:11:29.340 | Thank you for sharing it here.

00:11:30.740 | That great quote from Lewis that we delight to praise what we enjoy.

00:11:35.460 | That also emerged in this podcast back in episode number 719 on the question of how

00:11:39.980 | do I praise others but avoid flattery?

00:11:42.660 | That episode was really interesting too.

00:11:44.940 | But how can I find an episode from 2015, Tony, you ask?

00:11:49.300 | Easy.

00:11:50.300 | Just go to online home and check out the search bar and just type in 719, 719.

00:11:55.900 | Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:11:59.660 | Well for married couples with kids, so much of our time is spent together in the home.

00:12:04.860 | And it's one of the places where we most commonly wrong one another.

00:12:09.740 | We need to learn when to stop and to repent to one another in the busy home.

00:12:14.620 | It's a great question on this theme coming up from a mom that's on Monday when we return.

00:12:20.100 | I'm your host Tony Reinke.

00:12:21.100 | Have a great weekend.

00:12:22.100 | We'll see you back here on Monday.

00:12:22.940 | [END]

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How John Piper Became a ‘Christian Hedonist’

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