Pastor John, was C.S. Lewis a Christian hedonist? Joy led Lewis to Christ as the supreme object of his joy and the supreme source of his joy. So if we're asking the question, "What's the function of joy in Lewis and does it lead to Christian hedonism?" my resounding answer is going to be the function of joy was massive and yes it leads to Christian hedonism.

I think I learned crucial elements of my Christian hedonism from Lewis. He called his autobiography "Surprised by Joy." That's a massive choice that he made to tell us that what he was experiencing during his 30 unbelieving years in this thing he called the inconsolable longing, used the German word "Sehnsucht." What he was experiencing there, this northerness, was ephemeral and always disappointing, disappearing.

As soon as you tried to grasp it, keep it, make it your god, it went away. He wrote this really famous line, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Well that's a description of the discovery it took him 30 years to get to, because he was constantly having these desires and he called them joy.

He called these the stabbings, these breaking ends of something he knew not what, and the longing was the joy, and it was so intense he wanted it so bad, and yet it went away. And so he finally says in his story of his conversion, "Inexorably," this is a quote, "Inexorably, joy proclaimed, 'You want.' I myself am your want of something other, outside, not you nor any state of you." In other words, that's what he finally came to, is that my desire is pointing beyond my desire, and if I don't discover the God beyond my desire, the true God who awakens all my desires, who satisfies all my desires, I will live an endlessly frustrated life.

So there was a quest for joy, which became a quest for the object of the joy so that the joy could be satisfied. That's how he became a Christian. So you can't overstate for Lewis the redemptive effect of joy in his life, and that, and the next stage for me in my own discovery, was to realize that it didn't just bring him to Christ.

Joy remained, in Lewis's way of thinking, as a virtue behind all our good deeds. I remember, Tony, standing at a square specials book table in Vroman's bookstore, fall of 1968, on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California, looking down at a little blue paperback called "The Weight of Glory," author C.S.

Lewis. I never picked it up in my life. I picked it up, opened, and read the first page, and the impact of that page on my Christian hedonism is huge, because that's the page where he basically says, "Every body is questing and pursuing joy, and the problem," he said, "is not that we are pursuing happiness, but that we are far too easily pleased." And I thought, "Yes!

Yes! That's right! The problem is not that I want to be happy. The problem is that I'm settling on happinesses that are," to use his language, "like a little child making mud pies in the slum, because he can't imagine what a holiday at the sea is like." I tell you, that sentence, Tony, was just explosively illuminating for me, and became part of the ground of the last 40 plus years of my life's work.

So that's—yes, he was a Christian hedonist. And one last piece. I forget when I read it. I think I read it a year or two later, his book "Reflections on the Psalms," and at the time I was wrestling with how God-centered God seemed to be in the Bible, and I was being shown by Edwards and shown by Dan Fuller, and all over the Bible, that God was God-centered.

And in his chapter on—I forget, something like a word on praise or something—he talked about his own struggle with God's self-exaltation, and he said it sounded like an old woman seeking compliments. "Praise me! Praise me! Praise me! Praise me!" It seemed to him that God was saying all over the Psalms, and He is.

And then he gives these two pages—I think it's pages 92 and 93, I didn't even check it because I just—I remember it so well from those days—that praise is not the constrained, dutiful add-on to delight. So you delight and say, "Oh, I guess I should praise it because it's so beautiful." Nobody, nobody does that.

If you love something, if you delight in something, it spontaneously overflows, and isn't that beautiful? Can you believe that? And you point, and you hope that somebody is standing at your side. I remember standing, reading the jokes in the New Yorker, in the library, at Fuller Seminary, and laughing quietly and wishing I could point to it with somebody, and that confirmed that Lewis is right, that I want to praise this joke right here, I want to praise this cartoon right now.

My joy in this cartoon will not be complete until I find somebody and say, "Look, look, look at this!" And he argued that when God calls us to praise, He is calling us to bring our delight to consummation, which means it's not egomania, it's love. And that was the capstone for me, it was just a capstone to believe that God's requirement that I praise Him was an act for me, it was for me.

He gets the glory, I get the consummation of the joy that I have in Him. So Lewis is a profound influence in my shaping of what I've called Christian hedonism, and I'll just thank God for Him until I see Him face to face, and can thank both Him and the Father that He let me bump into Him in my young years.

Thank you, Pastor John. We will be studying the enduring influence of C.S. Lewis later this fall on September 27, 28, and 29 here in Minneapolis at the Desiring God National Conference. The conference is titled "The Romantic Rationalist--God, Life, and Imagination in the Work of C.S. Lewis." More details and registration will be available soon at desiringgod.org on the blog and under the "Events" tab.

I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening. you you