We ought to love our own happiness

In Charity and Its Fruit, famed theologian Jonathan Edwards writes about a very interesting idea concerning happiness. In the chapter entitled 'The Spirit of Charity the Opposite of a Selfish Spirit' he argues that though there are many instances of self-love that are inappropriate, the love of our own happiness is not one of them. That is, love of our own happiness cannot be too great. This is a facet of Christian Hedonism which requires and deserves serious contemplation. Consider,

First, that the inordinateness of self-love does not consist in our love of our own happiness being, absolutely considered, too great in degree. — I do not suppose it can be said of any, that their love to their own happiness, if we consider that love absolutely and not comparatively, can be in too high a degree, or that it is a thing that is liable either to increase or diminution. For I apprehend that self-love, in this sense, is not a result of the fall, but is necessary, and what belongs to the nature of all intelligent beings, and that God has made it alike in all; and that saints, and sinners, and all alike, love happiness, and have the same unalterable and instinctive inclination to desire and seek it. The change that takes place in a man, when he is converted and sanctified, is not that his love for happiness is diminished, but only that it is regulated with respect to its exercises and influence, and the courses and objects it leads to. Who will say that the happy souls in heaven do not love happiness as truly as the miserable spirits in hell? If their love of happiness is diminished by their being made holy, then that will diminish their happiness itself; for the less anyone loves happiness, the less he relishes it, and, consequently, is the less happy.

Let me draw out a few ideas from this excerpt that Edwards suggests:

1. We cannot love our own happiness too much.
2. Love of happiness is not a result of the fall but is God-given and necessary.
3. Our love of happiness results in us desiring and seeking it.
4. A regenerated man loves happiness appropriately and with balance.
5. The less we love happiness, the less we relish it, and the less happy we are.

Ultimately, what Edwards would indicate is that we can love happiness because we are most happy when we are in relationship with God as He intended. Thus, loving our happiness is loving our God.

It is clear to me that Edwards thought on an entirely different level than me.

Christian Hedonism TULIP

John Piper asks:

What would the doctrines of grace sound like if every limb in that tree were coursing with the sap of Augustinian delight. (that is, Christian Hedonism)?

• Total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to God’s beauty and deadness to the deepest joy.

• Unconditional election means that the completeness of our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed as the overflow of God’s joy in the fellowship of the Trinity.

• Limited atonement is the assurance that indestructible joy in God is infallibly secured for us by the blood of the covenant.

• Irresistible grace is the commitment and power of God’s love to make sure we don’t hold on to suicidal pleasures, and to set us free by the sovereign power of superior delights.

• Perseverance of the saints is the almighty work of God not to let us fall into the final bondage of inferior pleasures, but to keep us, through all affliction and suffering, for an inheritance of fullness of joy in his presence and pleasures at his right hand forevermore.

HT: Peter Cockrell

Pre-Piperian Christian Hedonism

Any of you who are familiar with John Piper likely are aware that he is a proponent of and the key spokesperson for a concept he has termed "Christian hedonism". Briefly, Christian hedonism according to Desiring God-Piper's ministry-is defined and explained in this excerpt:

A "Christian Hedonist" sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it? If the term makes you squirm, we understand. But don't throw this paper away just yet. We're not heretics (really!). Nor have we invented another prosperity-obsessed theology by twisting the Bible to sanctify our greed or lust. We are simply stating an ancient, orthodox, Biblical truth in a fresh way.

"All men seek happiness," says Blaise Pascal. "This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves." We believe Pascal is right. And, with Pascal, we believe God purposefully designed us to pursue happiness.

Does 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 (hedonism): 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.

We know this intuitively. If a friend says to you, "I really enjoy being with you," you wouldn't accuse him of being self-centered. Why? Because your friend's delight in you is the evidence that you have great value in his heart. In fact, you'd be dishonored if he didn't experience any pleasure in your friendship. The same is true of God. If God is the source of our greatest delight then God is our most precious treasure; which makes us radically God-centered and not self-centered. And if we treasure God most, we glorify Him most.

Does the Bible teach this? Yes. Nowhere in the Bible does God condemn people for longing to be happy. People are condemned for forsaking God and seeking their happiness elsewhere (Jeremiah 2:13). This is the essence of sin. The Bible actually commands us to delight in the Lord (Psalm 37:4). Jesus teaches us to love God more than money because our heart is where our treasure is (Matt. 6:21). Paul wants us to believe that gaining Christ is worth the loss of everything else (Phil 3:8) and the author of Hebrews exhorts us to endure suffering, like Jesus, for the joy set before us (Heb. 12: 1-2). Examine the Scriptures and you'll see this over and over again.

Christian Hedonism is not a contradiction after all. It is desiring the vast, ocean-deep pleasures of God more than the mud-puddle pleasures of wealth, power or lust. We're Christian Hedonists because we believe Psalm 16:11, "You show me the path of life; in Your presence there is fullness of joy, in Your right hand are pleasures for evermore."

Join us in this pursuit of satisfaction in God, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.

With that in mind, I thought I would share a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that hinted at some thoughts of the author that seem to support this idea of Christian hedonism.

If I seem so happy to you, you could never say anything that would please me so much. For men are made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy."

Though perhaps Piper would want to, in our current use of the language, differentiate between joy and happiness, I think Dostoyevsky, speaking through the character Father Zossima, is probably speaking to the same thing. Dostoyevsky's character is recognizing that an enduring quality of the righteous, of the saints, despite sickness and other sufferings, is a profound happiness-or joy-found in God and that this happines should be pursued.

Christian Hedonism in Walter Marshall's The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

You are to esteem the enjoyment of Christ as the only salvation and true happiness, and such happiness as has in it unsearchable riches of glory, and will make our cup to run over with exceeding abundance of peace, and joy, and glory, to all eternity. We 'must account all things but loss or the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord' etc. (Phil. 3:8). Such a persuasion as this will allure and incline your wills and affections to choose and embrace Christ as the chief good, and never to rest satisfied without the enjoyment of Him, and to reject everything that stands in competition with Him, or the enjoyment of Him.
Walter Marshall, The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification

Here is the goal: "to choose and embrace Christ as the chief good".
Here is the fruit of that end: "never to rest without the enjoyment of Him" and to "reject everything that stands in competition with Him".
For this to happen: "incline your wills and affections".
But, our wills and affections are allured by a "persuasion such as this".
The persuasion is: "enjoyment of Christ" is the "only salvation and true happiness".

And that, my friends, is Christian Hedonism!

Beholding is becoming ... more from Storms

It has been a busy week as far as preparation goes. I have been preparing for a teaching on the existence of God for the Christian fellowship group at the high school I teach at. I have been preparing a small group lesson on "Who is Christ?". And finally, I have been preparing a sermon on "Jesus Our Sanctifier" for this coming Sunday.

For Sunday's sermon, the key text is 2 Corinthians 3:18 which is as follows, "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." (ESV)

The main idea of Jesus as our Sanctifier that I will put forth is the idea that "beholding is becoming". This is a foundational approach of Christian Hedonism as propounded by Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, and Sam Storms.

In his book Pleasures Evermore, Sam Storms presents this idea in many ways. here is one of them:

THE KEY TO HOLINESS, ONCE AGAIN, IS FALLING IN LOVE WITH Jesus. By “falling in love” I don’t mean mindless mush. I have in mind having in one ’s mind a passionate delight in the infinite excellencies of God in Christ. Falling in love with Jesus means having your heart and mind entranced, bedazzled, and captivated by the superlative beauty and sweetness of the Son of God. (81)

This is the beholding, a mindful delight in our awesome Saviour which causes our affections to rise in response, that will lead to our becoming like Christ.

The happiness of God

As I woke this morning, tired and sore, tired from getting to be after midnight and sore from an hour and a half of pick-up hockey, I fought to clear my mind and focus my energies on waking up. I began to prepare my mind for a day of work; always tougher after playing hockey the night before. I had some coffee, oatmeal, and toast, and sat down to get a post up on the blog. I opened God Is The Gospel to find something I uplifting and edifying. In the pre-dawn stupor and fogginess of my mind, I read this:

Imagine being able to enjoy what is infinitely enjoyable with
unbounded energy and passion forever.(102)

Considering my mental and physical state, this statement grabbed my attention. My, that type of enjoyment does sound wonderful. In this chapter of his book, Piper explains one of the grounds for God's joy and happiness:

The happiness of God is first and foremost a happiness in his Son. Thus when we share in the happiness of God, we share in the very pleasure that the Father has in the Son. Ultimately this is what makes the gospel good news. It opens the way for us to see and savor the glory of Christ. And when we reach that ultimate goal we will find ourselves savoring the Son with the very happiness that the Father has in the Son. (101)

This is Piper's starting point for the joy he asks us to imagine in the statement that caught my attention this morning. Infinite enjoyment and pleasure and happiness is only possible if the object of that joy is infinite, namely, Jesus Christ. Even in my morning grogginess of brain and body that sounds enticing. Piper goes on,

If God’s pleasure in the Son becomes our pleasure, then the object of our pleasure, Jesus, will be inexhaustible in personal worth. He will never become boring or disappointing or frustrating. No greater treasure can be conceived than the very Son of God. Moreover, our ability to savor this inexhaustible treasure will not be limited by human weaknesses. We will enjoy the Son of God with the very enjoyment of his omnipotently happy Father. God’s delight in his Son will be in us, and it will be ours. And this will never end, because neither the Father nor the Son ever ends. Their love for each other will be our love for them, and therefore our loving them will never die.

This is the ultimate reason why the gospel is good news. If this does not come true for Christ’s people, there is no good news. Therefore, preaching the good news must endeavor to lead people to this. We must make plain to people that if their hope stops short of seeing and savoring the glory of God in Christ, they are not fixing their hearts on the main thing and the best thing Christ died to accomplish—seeing and savoring the glory of God in the face of Christ with everlasting and ever-increasing joy. (102)

Storms on Christian Hedonism

In Pleasures Evermore, Sam Storms offers a summation gleaned from John Piper's book, The Pleasures of God, on Christian Hedonism:

1. The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.
2. We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.
3. The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.
4. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold Ways of love.
5. To the extent We try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, We fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is, the chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

Providence in reading

For the past while I have been incorporating 2 devotional writings into my morning prayer and reading time. I have been using Octavius Winslow's Morning Thoughts and Charles Spurgeon's Morning by Morning. You can access both of these online: Morning Thoughts, Morning by Morning.

This morning's writing by Spurgeon was particularly timely for me. It touched upon to concepts that I am currently reading about. The first idea is that of Christian Hedonism and I have been reflecting on that topic as I read Pleasures Evermore by Sam Storms. Spurgeon writes, "Well may we "delight ourselves in the Lord" who makes us to drink of the river of His pleasures."

Spurgeon also raises the main point that is the focus of a book by John Piper that I am also currently reading: God Is The Gospel. The following shares the theme of Piper's book: "It is not "The Lord is partly my portion," nor "The Lord is in my portion"; but He Himself makes up the sum total of my soul's inheritance. Within the circumference of that circle lies all that we possess or desire." God Is The Gospel is about God being the end of the gospel; that is, the gospel is 'good news' because it brings us to God. Anything short of God Himself is not the chief end of the gospel.

It is always exciting and encouraging when providence orchestrates 'coincidences' like these in our lives. He sees the sparrow fall, and He sees the books you are studying and the devotionals you are reading and blesses you as they coalesce at certain points. God is good.

I encourage you to consider readying both the devotionals mentioned above. I also strongly recommend both books.

Christian Hedonism ... more thoughts

"Your will is energized based on your belief that one pleasure (whether immediate or long-term) is better than others ... Satan isn't responsible for this. God is. God made you this way so that you would choose Him and His soul-satisfying pleasures in lieu of those that pass with the using and ultimately leave you empty and miserable. The alternative to resisting the passing pleasures of sin isn't religious misery but relishing the permanent pleasures of God." (Storms, C. Samuel. Pleasures Evermore: the Life-changing Power of Enjoying God. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2000. Print. 38)

So, assuming that we agree that we choose options based on pleasure-what makes us happiest is always what we will choose-one question that we are left with is do we believe that the ultimate pleasure and happiness can only be found in God.

Pascal addressed the assumption above saying "All men seek happiness, This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."

So, with that in mind, do I believe the following: If I will pursue lasting and ultimate pleasure I will invariably choose God. This is a key concept in Christian Hedonism.

This leads to the the final statement in the Storms' quote above which suggests that the key to resisting sin is not primarily suppression of desire but rather finding desire's fulfillment in the only source of true pleasure and happiness. This is, along with several concepts of Christian Hedonism, significantly different from much teaching we get about battling sin.

Give it some thought.

Heaven without Christ

The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? (15)

Author and pastor John Piper presents the scenario in his book God is the Gospel (Piper, John. God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008. Print.). Our first knee-jerk, Sunday-school-indoctrinated response is "No way! Heaven without Jesus would be wrong." But take a moment and think about it; no pain, no sorrow, surrounded by friends, pleasures evermore. Sounds pretty good actually.

But it only sounds good because I am regularly deceived by and often willingly accept the fact that true and lasting pleasure can be found in these things; it can't. The very basis for anything being good, or worthy, or pleasurable, or joy-inducing, or happiness-engendering is Christ Himself. The fact that I can even consider the notion of Christ-less joy or Jesus-less satisfaction or Son-of God-less pleasure means I am making a foundational error in my thinking. AND I MAKE THAT MISTAKE ALL THE TIME.

God, bring me to a place of maturity in you, of Christ-likeness, that I recognize that the only good, the only true pleasure, the only satisfaction, and the only worth is found in You.

More Christian hedonism

There is no way to triumph over sin long-term unless we develop a distaste for it because of a superior satisfaction in God. The only way to find sin distasteful is to eat and savor the sweetness of all that God is for us in Jesus. (Storms, C. Samuel. Pleasures Evermore: the Life-changing Power of Enjoying God. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2000. Print. 21-22)

Why is this so hard to "get". I believe it is true. But I so often fall back on the list of DOs and DON'Ts or on the ugliness of sin as means to stop sinning. I want this truth, the surpassing pleasure of Christ, to be part of me. I want to incorporate it into my life so that it is not something I continually adopt as a strategy but it is something I have so integrated in my life that it is the paradigm I live in and from; clearly, a desire that only the Holy Spirit can make real in my life.

Practical tips for enjoying God

In his book on developing a passion for the beauty of God, entitled One Thing(Storms, C. Samuel. One Thing: Developing a Passion for the Beauty of God. Fearn, Ross-Shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2004. Print.), Sam Storms gives some practical tips on how one might develop a passion for God's beauty:

"First, we should 'endeavor to increase spiritual appetites by meditating on spiritual objects'. Each time we surrender our minds to meditate on base and sordid objects their grip on our lives is intensified. To think we can decrease our affinity for sinful pleasure apart from a concentrated fixation on the spiritually sublime is simply delusional ... we must actually 'think' about them, ponder them, pore over them, and become vulnerable to the power God has invested in them to transform our values and feelings and to energize our volitions." (37)
Focusing our minds on anything, lustful fantasies or trivial daydreams, other than gospel truths will reinforce and reinvigorate their power in our lives. I don't want 'my neighbour's wife' or my co-workers car to have that power in my life. Neither should you. So don't put your affections and hence your thoughts on those things. But the mind is not a vacuum; it will meditate on something. So give it solid material to digest; Scripture, God-ward thoughts, Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Second, we "should 'endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement'. Posture your life so that you may be easily enticed by the beauty of Christ. Make it easy on your soul by exposing your senses to those things that awaken spiritual desire and deepen holy longings."(41)
If we are always about watching TV, browsing internet stores, listening to the radio, reading carnal books and magazine, we are putting ourselves under the enticing powers of the wrong things. We are making it hard on our souls to enjoy God. So think about those things which strengthen your passion and solidify your resolve to pursue God; sermons by great preachers, books by sanctifying authors, fellowship with like-minded believers, worship music that entices you to relish the beauty of God. That will help us maintain a posture where we can fall under the enticing beauty of Christ.

"Third, 'we should express our longings to God; they will increase by being expressed'. Passions often wither in silence. Undeclared delight is a virtual contradiction in terms. God never intended for our joy to be quiescent. 'I think we delight to praise what we enjoy,' said Lewis. 'because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.'"(42)
God's not interested in secret admirers. God wants us, commands us, to express our love and enjoyment of Him. Find ways to release the God-formed pressure that builds inside of you when you enjoy God. Sing, shout, discuss, argue, share, 'tweet', blog, compose, write; do something to give expression to the wonder of God. This expressing of our longings will feed the fire and fan the flames of our passion for God. It has that effect on our affections.