Well, on Monday, we opened the week talking about the relationship between Christian hedonism and historic reform theology. And Wednesday, we looked at what Pastor John's fears and hopes for Christian hedonism are after he's gone. And today, we look at the title Desiring God Itself and some alternatives. The question is from Trent in Columbus, Ohio.

Pastor John, I was recently celebrating the impact of your ministry with a friend at Chick-fil-A of all places. We were both stumped by a question. It's this, "How did you arrive at the name Desiring God when so much of the ministry is not merely aspirational, but is focused on the actual act of enjoying God Himself in Bible reading and in sermons, for example?

Why not something more accurate like delighting in God?" Pastor John, what would you say to Trent? I like this question. It's a good question. It's an insightful question, and the answer will, I think, be illuminating. Trying to answer it really does reveal a great deal about the nature of Christian hedonism and a little bit about me.

Maybe a lot about me. I'll give you six reasons, all right, why the book has the title Desiring God. And some of them are more substantial than others, but they all figure in, I think. Number one, back when the book was being written between 1983 and 1987, two books were very influential, popular, significant, that I admired very much, Knowing God by J.I.

Packer and Loving God by Charles Colson. As an utterly unknown writer, me in those days, I had the wild and crazy dream that maybe my little book could someday be viewed as part of that trajectory by those great men, right? So it seemed like Desiring God would fit with Knowing God and Loving God and Desiring God.

Was that vain or what? I don't know. It was a dream. Number two, alternative titles didn't fit my sense of what might be arresting and intriguing and provocative and true, some of my criteria. For example, delighting seemed to be a word very few people use except in more refined settings.

Enjoying God and rejoicing in God seemed to me to have the feeling of too much religiosity and not enough ordinariness. Happy can't be made a verb in English, and the phrase being happy in God sounded cheesy. So when it came down to it, Desiring God simply had the right sound and the right connotations for the impact I wanted the title to have.

And of course, I could have been wrong. Number three, as I recall in those days, a cluster of texts was having a tremendous effect on me for good by awakening in me strong longings for God. Texts like Psalm 73, "You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.

Whom have I in heaven but you, and there's nothing on earth I desire besides you? My flesh and my heart may fail you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever." Or Psalm 42, "As a deer pants for the flowing stream, so my soul pants for you, O God, my soul thirsts for God." Or Psalm 63, "O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you." All those texts seemed to point toward the profound importance of having a heart that continually desires—desires God.

Pants for God, thirst for God, seeks for God, faints for God. So that just seemed like, "Whoa, this is biblical!" Number four, it was clear to me then, and it is even clearer now, how many years later, that every experience of delight or joy or satisfaction or happiness or contentment or cherishing or restfulness—every single experience in this present time and world of God's goodness and God's wisdom and God's love, no matter how deep, no matter how sweet, no matter how transforming, will be a mere taste of what is coming to us on the other side of the grave and in the resurrection.

Which means that even when we have experiences that are full of real joy in God now, they are dominated by experiences of desire. Because genuine, spiritual, Christ-exalting joy is rooted in an infinite reality, and we are prevented from feeling appropriate, full, all-satisfying responses to that reality by our finitude, and in this life, by our sin.

Therefore, the concept of desire as central to the book is because it's central to the Christian life. It's not an arbitrary choice; it's built into our finitude. The very best experiences of joy in this world are incomplete, and therefore baked in is desire. Number five, no doubt I was influenced by C.S.

Lewis. Nobody in my experience captured the utterly crucial dimension of human longing—Zehnsucht, German, he used that phrase—longing in this world as evidence of the next world. Desire was the very reality that brought C.S. Lewis to Christ, and desire remained a hallmark of all his experiences of God. And he just had a—I just found everything he wrote on this—well, yeah, that's right!

Number six, my own experience certainly played a huge role in the choice of desiring God. I don't have the sharpness of mind or the penetrating analytical abilities of a Lewis, or the capacities to observe the world like Lewis does. He's just off the charts superior to me. But everything he said about longing of my heart in this finite fallen world as ever-reaching, ever-grasping, ever-stretching to something beyond, and never being content with the present experience of ultimate reality, all of it rang true, deeply true to me, and does to this day.

I am fundamentally a desirer. That's my life. In a sense, all I do—I thought about this sentence, now I'm going to say it—in a sense, all I do in this world is direct, intensify, or diminish my desires. That's all I do. That's my life. And it wouldn't be wrong to paraphrase Christian hedonism like this, "God is most glorified in us when we cleave to him alone for the ultimate satisfaction of all our desires." As far as I can remember, those are the reasons that I named the book Desiring God.

Very insightful, helpful look back on the origins of that title. Thank you, Pastor John. And thanks for listening to the podcast over at our online home. You can explore all of our episodes in our archive of about 1,300 episodes to date. There you can find a list of our most popular episodes, read full transcripts, and send us questions.

You might be wrestling with yourself. Do all that at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well there are introverts and there are extroverts, and that's the topic Monday. Specifically, how should we think about particular ways God has wired us? Some who are energized by being around others and others who are energized by being away from people.

Specifically for introverts, how do we guard against social selfishness? That is the question on Monday when we return. I'm looking forward to that one. I'm your host Tony Reike. We'll see you then. 1 © The Blue Original Series, LLC. All Rights Reserved.