Today's question gets to the heart of what we do here at DesiringGod.org and the question comes to us from Barry in Columbus, Ohio. Pastor John, I have a history question for you about the DG slogan. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. How did the slogan come to be written?

Did it come to you alone or were others involved and how? Did Christian hedonism flow from the statement or was the statement a distillation after the theology was already developed? What role did the line from the Westminster Confession of Faith play in your own statement? Thank you for your diligence and precision in all of your teaching over the years.

Now this would be an interesting little research project for somebody to do. Maybe you Tony, you're good at this. I haven't done it, but my guess is that an electronic copy of Piper's Collected Works exists somewhere, which came out this year. Those Collected Works came out this year and with a search, you could probably find out or anybody could, I suppose if they had it, find out what was chronologically the first appearance of that phrase, God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him, in all my published writings.

I don't have any idea what the answer to that is, but let me try to answer Barry's questions as best as I can reconstruct things from my memory. First, the vision of life called Christian hedonism preceded by quite a few years, the slogan, God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him.

My guess is if you date my awareness of these things, my discovery of these things from age 22, which I would roughly, it was probably another 12 or 15 years before I ever used that statement. I don't know when I first used it, but I'm sure that I was thinking in terms of Christian hedonism long before that formulation ever came along.

What I said for years was that one of the greatest discoveries I ever made was that God's passion to be glorified in John Piper's and John Piper's passion to be happy were not at odds because they came to fulfillment in one and the same act, namely the act of worship.

My heart's praising God was not only magnifying His name, it was also bringing my joy in Him to consummation. So wonder of wonders, I didn't have to choose between glorifying God and being happy because God's glory was shown in my happiness in God. And you can see right at this point that we're just inches away, just inches away from the slogan because all I had to do was make those truths pithy and rhyming.

And here's just a little glimpse into how I write and preach. Somewhere along the way, as I was preparing one of the dozens and dozens of messages over the years that I gave on Christian hedonism, somewhere along the way, as I was preparing a message, I was trying to find a fresh way to put the truth into a pithy, memorable form, which I still do.

I still want to find new ways. And the words came, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." So the slogan did not come first. The reality came first. And then over the years, with every new opportunity to explain the reality, I would be grasping for fresh ways to say it.

And that formulation stuck. Now, as far as those who helped me, the most important thing to say would be the psalmist, "Praise yourself in the Lord," and Jesus calling for rejoicing in the midst of the worst suffering, and the apostle Paul with his passage in Philippians 1 especially. So the reality, the people that helped me were Bible writers.

And as far as the formulation goes, Jonathan Edwards would be the person who helped me most. With regard to Paul, Philippians 1, 20 to 23 contains the reality that Christ is most magnified in us when we are most satisfied in Him, especially at the moment of suffering and death, because Paul explains that his passion is that Christ be magnified in his dying because at the moment of death, Paul considers it gain to lose everything here and have only Christ, which I sum up as Christ was most magnified in Paul's dying when in his dying, Paul was most satisfied in Christ.

And so it's a short jump from that to the simpler phrase. Jonathan Edwards, he comes within millimeters of what I'm saying. Here's what he wrote. The most important quote from Edwards on Christian hedonism for me, "God glorifies himself toward the creatures in two ways, by appearing to their understanding and two, in communicating himself to their hearts and in their rejoicing in him, the manifestations which he makes of himself." God, here it is, "God is glorified not only in his glories being seen, but in its being rejoiced in." Let me shorten that.

God is glorified in his glory being rejoiced in. All I did was make that rhyme. That's all I did. So there it is. I didn't make it up. He goes on, one more sentence, "When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it," which so easily becomes, "The more they delight in the glory of God, the more God is glorified in them." And you just see we're just millimeters away from the slogan.

The last thing Barry asks about is the role of the Westminster Catechism question. What is the chief end of man? The answer to that question was a stimulus from early on, very early on, from the very beginning you might say, a stimulus to figure out what they meant by the word "and." And it became a confirmation later that Christian Hedonism really is what they were thinking.

Here's their answer. Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And I was entranced by the word "and." Glorify God and enjoy him. Before—I would say long before—I noticed that the word "end" is singular. Man's chief end—not ends—end, one end, is two things, to glorify God and enjoy him, which certainly seems to say that these two are not two distinct acts, glorifying and enjoying, but one act.

In fact, I don't think I'd seen that when I wrote the book Desiring God. Not sure about that, but I think that's the case given the way I unpack it at the beginning of that book. And my way of seeing their oneness is that the enjoying of God to the fullest in all we do is the way we glorify him to the fullest in all that we do.

So however it is that all of this came together for me, here I am at age 71, more thankful, more full of thankfulness than I've ever been that God has shown me these things from his word because few things, maybe none, have ever revealed my own sinfulness more, and the preciousness of the gospel more, and the true goal of life more, and the real path of holiness more, and the ultimate ecstasy of eternity more than the truth that God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him.

Amen. It is a profound point. Thank you for giving your life to explaining it and helping us all see it as well, Pastor John. I'm really grateful. And thanks for listening and making this podcast a part of your day and a part of your workout and a part of your commute.

However you listen, thank you for joining us. Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and you can keep up with our new episodes through the feeds, and you can search our past episodes in our archive and even reach us by email with a question about what DG is all about, like this question from Barry.

You can do all that through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well if you read the precious gospel of John, you will eventually come to that rich 15th chapter where Jesus talks about what it means to abide in him. So what does it mean for our lives? How do we abide in Christ and what does this look like in our daily lives?

We will hear from John Piper when we return on Friday with a listener's question on that very point. I'm your host Tony Reinke and we will see you then. 1 DesiringGod.org Page 2 of 2 DesiringGod.org Page 3 of 3 DesiringGod.org Page 4 of 5