The Heart of Christian Hedonism — and the Bible and Creation and Everything

00:00:00.000 | Today's question comes from an international listener named Weiganjo Camotho.

00:00:06.000 | "Hello Pastor John, my question is over a few lines from your daily devotional dated August 21st, 2016.

00:00:12.000 | It all made perfect sense to me until I got to this line where you write this,

00:00:16.000 | 'All the works of God culminate in the praise of His redeemed people.'"

00:00:22.000 | And this was even more confusing when you wrote,

00:00:25.000 | "The climax of God's happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of His saints."

00:00:35.000 | Maybe it's due to the length of the sentence, I don't know, but please elaborate what you mean.

00:00:39.000 | The rest I understand.

00:00:41.000 | Well, I'm happy, happy, happy, happy to elaborate on that sentence because it is one of my favorites.

00:00:48.000 | Let's take the second sentence, the one that Weiganjo, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name.

00:00:53.000 | Weiganjo.

00:00:55.000 | The one that Weiganjo says is "even more confusing," and break it down to see if I can help make it clearer.

00:01:04.000 | I think this is worth doing because this sentence is one of those incredibly important expressions of what the heart of Christian hedonism is,

00:01:14.000 | and I think what the heart of biblical truth is.

00:01:18.000 | Let me say this sentence again. "The climax of God's happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints."

00:01:35.000 | It's true that when you read a sentence like that, if you're not familiar with the thinking and concepts behind it,

00:01:43.000 | you will need to slow down and take it phrase by phrase and seriously think about the relationships between those phrases.

00:01:53.000 | So I would really encourage you not to give up too quickly when you read a perplexing sentence

00:02:01.000 | if there are reasons to believe that the author might have genuine insight and not just be confused himself.

00:02:08.000 | There are confusing sentences that are owing not to the complexity of reality, but to the confusion of the author.

00:02:15.000 | Yes, there really are. And whether I am that, maybe you'll know by the end of this podcast.

00:02:23.000 | So let me try to deliver myself and my sentence from confusion by looking at, what, three, four of the phrases.

00:02:32.000 | Number one, let's start at the end of the sentence. "The praises of the saints."

00:02:37.000 | And I've argued in many places that the goal of history, all of creation, all divine activity,

00:02:44.000 | is to bring the saints, Christians, believers from every tribe, tongue, and nation,

00:02:51.000 | into white-hot, heartfelt, joyful praises of God's infinite value and beauty.

00:03:01.000 | The whole panorama of His excellencies. Praising, praising God and His excellencies.

00:03:08.000 | That's what this phrase signifies. The praises of the saints. That's the great goal of history.

00:03:16.000 | And I'm picturing the consummation of the ages in the whole assembly of the redeemed from all the centuries

00:03:23.000 | and all the ethnicities and all the cultures, praising God with white-hot joy in the excellence of God.

00:03:30.000 | Joy in God and His excellence.

00:03:33.000 | Now, number two, the phrase just before that, "The echoes of His excellence in the praises of the saints."

00:03:43.000 | So I'm saying that because our praises are the praises of God's excellence,

00:03:51.000 | when one hears those praises, he hears echoes of God's excellence.

00:03:59.000 | In other words, the praises of God are a reflection or a highlighting or a speaking forth of God's excellence.

00:04:09.000 | I call that the echo. It's an echo of God's excellence.

00:04:14.000 | When you hear an echo in a canyon, you are hearing a sound that is not identical to the original sound,

00:04:23.000 | but a kind of reflection of the sound or a passing along of the sound.

00:04:31.000 | In the same way, the praises of God's excellence are not identical with the excellence itself,

00:04:39.000 | but they're caused by the excellence of God, like a shout causes an echo.

00:04:46.000 | They are responses to the excellence of God, and as they are verbalized,

00:04:54.000 | these praises give some expression of the excellence of God.

00:05:00.000 | And in that sense, I see them as echoes of God's very excellence.

00:05:09.000 | So those are the last two phrases.

00:05:12.000 | Here's the third, the one just before. Third phrase to look at.

00:05:16.000 | God delights in the echoes of his excellence in the praises of the saints.

00:05:24.000 | So I add, God delights in those echoes.

00:05:28.000 | And what I'm getting at here is that God is not an idolater.

00:05:33.000 | That is, he has no God, small g, that he values above the true God, namely himself.

00:05:42.000 | In other words, for God to be righteous and holy, he must value supremely what is supremely valuable.

00:05:52.000 | He must admire fully what is fully admirable.

00:05:56.000 | He must delight in most intensely what is most intensely delightful.

00:06:03.000 | And God himself is the one who is supremely valuable and fully admirable and most intensely delightful.

00:06:13.000 | The reason God created man and destined him for white-hot, joyful praises of God

00:06:20.000 | is so that we might share in the very joy that God has in himself, in the fellowship of the Trinity,

00:06:29.000 | in God's contemplation of all the glorious perfections that he is.

00:06:35.000 | So when God hears the echoes of his own excellence in the joyful praises of his people,

00:06:46.000 | he delights in it.

00:06:49.000 | He would be unrighteous not to delight in the echoes of what is most infinitely delightful.

00:06:56.000 | Finally, I say at the front of that sentence that this delight or this joy that God has

00:07:05.000 | in the echo of his excellence in the praises of his people, this delight is the climax of God's happiness.

00:07:13.000 | In other words, there is no higher or greater happiness that God is looking forward to

00:07:21.000 | beyond the delight that he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the supremely happy praises of the saints.

00:07:30.000 | And this, I think, is the heart of the biblical message,

00:07:35.000 | that God's purpose in creation and through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ,

00:07:41.000 | God's purpose is to bring his redeemed people to full and lasting happiness in himself,

00:07:51.000 | which is also God's happiness in God, because our happiness in him is an echo of his excellence.

00:08:02.000 | So I'll say the sentence one more time and hope it's not as confusing as it was at first.

00:08:10.000 | The climax of God's happiness is the delight he takes in the echoes of his excellence in the praises,

00:08:22.000 | the white-hot, joyful praises of the saints.

00:08:27.000 | Well, it doesn't get more foundational or more glorious than that. Thank you, Pastor John.

00:08:31.000 | And to find a bunch of old episodes on Christian hedonism and this joy theme in Scripture and praise and glory,

00:08:38.000 | visit our episode archive, type in your keywords into the search bar at our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:08:45.000 | Almost a thousand episodes there now that you can search any time of the day.

00:08:49.000 | Well, if we're going to put our Bibles together and make sense of the whole story from Genesis to Revelation,

00:08:54.000 | we have to be clear on covenants. Covenants are the skeletal structure of redemptive history,

00:09:00.000 | and we're going to do that very thing when we return on Friday.

00:09:03.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.

00:09:05.000 | [End]

00:09:13.000 | Thank you.

The Heart of Christian Hedonism — and the Bible and Creation and Everything

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