Pursuing Pleasure
Jul 07, 2009
Psalm 16.11: In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Psalm 34.8: Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Psalm 36.8: They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.
Psalm 37.4: Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Psalm 63.3: Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you
Psalm 90.14: Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
John 15:11: These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
A great lie has been perpetrated about God, Jesus, and Christianity for some time now. It has gained credence nationwide and is even widely accepted now in most Christian circles. Here is the lie: When it comes to how you live your life, you must choose between happiness and holiness; you must choose between righteousness and pleasure; you must choose between delight and duty; you must choose between following Jesus and enjoying life. The world outside the church often views God as the big party-pooper in the sky ready to crush fun with a single command, while the people inside the church often view him as the big ogre in the sky, ready at a moment’s notice to cast down lightening bolts for our slightest missteps. Just a cursory glance at the verses above yields a vision of faith and the God of faith far superior to the drudgery and duty religion I grew up with (maybe many of you too!). We’ve somehow inherited a view of Christianity that says that if we take any joy in doing the right thing, then we have spoiled the good of our actions, but this is patently unchristian, because God, who created our desires, continually appeals to them in the Scriptures. But didn’t’ Jesus call us to deny ourselves (Matt. 16.24-26)? Yes, but note the oft-quoted passage from Lewis:
“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
You see, a Christian view of self-denial is not one of drudgery but one of denying yourself the lesser pleasure for the greater. Jesus Himself poses it this way—If you lose your life, you will find it! Listen to how he appeals to us with His question: “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” In other words, even if you have to deny yourself the whole world right now, you are only gaining because you will keep your soul for eternity.
Doesn’t seeking your own happiness sound self-centered? Aren't Christians supposed to seek God, not their own pleasure? “To answer this question we need to understand a crucial truth about pleasure-seeking: we value most what we delight in most. Pleasure is not God's competitor, idols are. Pleasure is simply a gauge that measures how valuable someone or something is to us. Pleasure is the measure of our treasure.” (John Piper)
As an illustration of this, suppose you have a daughter and a man comes to ask for her hand in marriage. Suppose he tells you that your daughter is the prize of his life, his treasure, that his joy in only complete in her joy, that though he might lose everything else in the world if he still has her it will be sufficient, that her very presence is satisfying and in her he finds the greatest heights of pleasure and delight? Would you think that his pleasure in her disqualifies him from marrying her or somehow makes him selfish? Of course not. What we recognize very quickly in this illustration is that there is a way to pursue your joy in someone that honors that person and a way to pursue your joy in someone that dishonors the person. We want to pursue our joy in God in the way that honors him by showing forth His sufficiency and greatness.
From Screwtape, the mentor demon to Wormwood, his young disciple: “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His Invention, not ours. He makes the pleasures; all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at times, or ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden…An ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula…To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return—that is what really gladdens our Father’s [Satan’s] heart.”