Does Christian Hedonism Make Joy an Idol?

00:00:00.000 | Daniel writes in to ask, "How does Christian hedonism avoid making joy into

00:00:11.000 | an idol?" Well, the short answer is, Christian hedonism doesn't make a god or

00:00:20.800 | an idol out of joy, because Christian hedonism says we make a god out of

00:00:28.800 | whatever we find most joy in. That's the short answer. So find your greatest joy

00:00:37.840 | in God and thus be done with all idolatry. But his question is, how do you

00:00:48.920 | avoid making that mistake? It's not as though the mistake can't be made. In fact,

00:00:54.200 | that would be my first statement about how to avoid it, is to say, admit it can

00:00:58.040 | happen. And I admit it can happen, not just because Daniel's asked me how not

00:01:04.120 | to let it happen, but because the Bible says it actually does happen in 2nd

00:01:08.920 | Timothy 3, where Paul says, "In the last days men will be lovers of pleasure

00:01:16.640 | rather than lovers of God." Now when I read that, I say, "Really? That's amazing!

00:01:25.040 | The fallen human heart is capable of suicidal illusions." Because I call it an

00:01:32.080 | illusion, because if you make pleasure the object of your love, it's like making

00:01:41.680 | love the object of your love. It's like making being pleased the object of being

00:01:47.120 | pleased. It's self-contradictory. It's self-defeating. My capacity, my

00:01:52.800 | faculty for delighting was made to delight in something. Delighting

00:02:00.880 | wasn't made to delight in delighting. Delighting was made to delight in

00:02:05.440 | something. If you delight in the delighting, you're like a hunter who

00:02:11.960 | aims to shoot his bullet. He's not going to get any deer that way. He's

00:02:18.240 | going to go hungry, which is why I said it's suicidal. It's an illusion.

00:02:23.360 | And yet it's true. I mean, it's a good question. It's not a stupid question,

00:02:26.960 | because Paul says men will be lovers of pleasure. Men will be so stupid and so

00:02:32.120 | insane and so drawn in on themselves, they will commit the suicidal hunting of

00:02:38.760 | trying to shoot the bullet in their gun. But here's another safeguard. I

00:02:44.080 | mean, we could talk about this all day, but let me just give you a few.

00:02:47.240 | Christian hedonism says never merely pursue your joy. That's hedonism.

00:02:55.480 | That's not Christian hedonism. That's just hedonism. Christian hedonism says

00:03:01.000 | pursue your joy in God, or more precisely, pursue your joy in all that God is for

00:03:09.960 | you in Christ. And I say "is for you," not "does for you." In God, not through God.

00:03:17.760 | God is the end of our quest. He's not a means. There's nothing more ultimate than

00:03:24.120 | God. So when we rejoice in his works, which the Bible says we should do, we are

00:03:31.360 | rejoicing in the God we see in his works and know through his works. We are

00:03:37.640 | receiving his works not as our substitute for God, but as a pointer to

00:03:44.560 | God. So the second caution or safeguard against turning pleasure or joy into an

00:03:51.720 | idol is to say that we always rejoice in God. Here's another one.

00:04:00.480 | Christian hedonists explain that joy is a way of glorifying God. I mean, this is

00:04:08.360 | the most fundamental thing, right? We say it desiring God. We exist to spread a

00:04:13.360 | passion for the supremacist God in all things for the joy of all peoples by

00:04:16.800 | highlighting the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most

00:04:22.440 | satisfied in him. Everybody knows that you don't glorify yourself and you

00:04:30.360 | don't glorify pleasure when you take supreme pleasure in somebody. And I've

00:04:36.160 | told my rose story a hundred times, but I'll just give the conclusion of it here. So if

00:04:42.520 | I say to my wife, "There's nothing that would give me more satisfaction than to

00:04:51.160 | spend the evening with you tonight," she would never say to me, "You are so selfish.

00:04:56.720 | All you ever think about is what will bring you satisfaction. That's why you

00:05:00.840 | want to take me out tonight because I make you satisfied." She would never say

00:05:05.720 | that, because I am glorifying her satisfying qualities by telling her she

00:05:16.080 | makes me happy. And so when you come to worship on Sunday morning and you're

00:05:20.640 | driven by this by the sense of, "God, I'm here to spend time with you because

00:05:26.280 | there's nobody in all the world who can make me more happy," he's not gonna say to

00:05:30.680 | you, "You are so selfish coming to me." No, because we glorify him when he

00:05:38.120 | satisfies us. Here's another one. Here's another one. We insist, Christian

00:05:44.360 | hedonists insist on the truth that navel-gazing is bad hedonism. In other

00:05:51.680 | words, if you sit in—if you go to an art gallery, you would want to enjoy the

00:05:58.760 | beauty of these masterpieces, and you stand in front of a Rembrandt, say, and

00:06:05.680 | you are constantly saying, "Okay, stomach, are you being turned? Okay, palms, are you

00:06:14.600 | beginning to sweat? Eyes, are you beginning to flutter? Pulse, are you

00:06:19.480 | starting? You're not gonna see anything. You gotta forget your pulse,

00:06:25.200 | forget your stomach, forget your heart, and look at the painting!" Now some

00:06:31.280 | people have said, "Therefore, stop talking about pursuing joy and just talking

00:06:36.880 | about pursue God." Well, it's not that simple because there are ways to pursue

00:06:42.960 | God that don't honor him, and there are ways to pursue righteousness that don't

00:06:47.400 | honor righteousness. If you pursue God out of a mere sense of "ought," like,

00:06:54.360 | "Okay, I ought to read my Bible, and I ought to go to church, and I ought to do this or

00:07:00.840 | that," God is not as honored as if you come to him as the object of your desire.

00:07:07.000 | So I want to preserve both. Navel-gazing is bad hedonism, and we ought to pursue

00:07:16.040 | joy in the painting. We ought to want to be delighted by the painting. Let me

00:07:22.320 | give you one more, this short. I didn't see this early, Tony, say, what, 40 years

00:07:28.960 | ago, when I was first trying to formulate these things. We need, we Christian

00:07:34.440 | hedonists need to have a robust doctrine of self-denial and suffering, and so if

00:07:41.800 | you look at my writings after the first edition of Desiring God, which

00:07:47.440 | came along, I've got a chapter on suffering in almost everything, and

00:07:53.080 | when people ask me, "How does this fit with self-denial?" I say, "Look, I totally

00:07:58.320 | believe in self-denial because Jesus said, 'Whoever would save his life will

00:08:03.920 | lose it.'" But C.S. Lewis taught me this in that same sermon where I saw almost

00:08:10.680 | everything else at the beginning. He said, "Whenever you hear a promise or a

00:08:15.840 | command in the Bible, it always comes with a reward, and God doesn't treat us

00:08:21.640 | because we're seeking our satisfaction, but because we're too easily satisfied

00:08:26.320 | because the rest of the verse says, 'Whoever would lose his life for my sake

00:08:30.960 | in the Gospels will save it.'" So clearly Jesus is arguing, "You want to save your

00:08:36.240 | life, don't you?" "Yes, I do." "I'm a hedonist." "Well, good. I want you to be. Now lose it."

00:08:42.480 | In other words, here's the way I would put it, "Deny yourself tin so you can have

00:08:49.400 | gold. Deny yourself brackish gutter water so you can have a mountain spring. Deny

00:08:55.960 | yourself hog gristle so you can have the finest steak." That's the

00:09:01.800 | point of a doctrine of self-denial. We must be willing to die, I mean really die,

00:09:07.840 | because the steadfast love of the Lord, Psalm 63, is better than life. So maybe

00:09:16.480 | the sum of the matter is for Daniel, how does Christian hedonism keep joy from

00:09:22.360 | being an idol? Simply believe in the Bible and let the whole counsel of God

00:09:30.680 | inform your system. So I don't want to be more Christian hedonist than I am

00:09:37.880 | more biblical. Anytime somebody asks me a question where they see a part of the

00:09:42.640 | Bible that doesn't seem to fit with Christian hedonism, I am on that. I am on

00:09:46.640 | that because I want to be biblical more than I want to be faithful to any system.

00:09:52.680 | Thank you, Pastor John. You can download the book "Desiring God" for free at

00:09:56.840 | DesiringGod.org. Click on the resource library and then click on "Books" at

00:10:01.360 | DesiringGod.org. You'll find thousands of other free books, articles, and other

00:10:04.120 | resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.

00:10:09.080 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Does Christian Hedonism Make Joy an Idol?

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