My Story of Glory and Joy

This is the first in a series of what I hope will be four messages that sums up a philosophy of life or a worldview or a theology that governs everything I do. It's my marriage is governed by this. My parenting is governed by this.

My pastoring is governed by this. My writing is governed by this. My leisure time, I went down to watch my son play soccer for a quick 45 minutes of the last half this afternoon today, and that was governed as I thought through, should I do this with the lecture coming up tonight? My life is controlled by the teaching you're about to hear, and I call it Christian hedonism.

Hedonism. A little girl once said after a service to her mother, why is he talking about hedonism? And some people equate hedonism with hedonism. And I hope before we're done, you can make a big distinction between Christian hedonism and hedonism because it isn't hedonism.

I think it's plain biblical theology. Now, the way I would like to do it is instead of starting with a kind of careful, honed, technical definition, which I could do because it's in the book. This is the book from which most of what I'm saying is coming, Desiring God, Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, 1986.

Instead of doing that, what I'd like to do is tell you the story of how I got to be here. OK, start way back with my parents and just take you through step after step of what God did to bring me to where I am right here tonight as I lecture to you about Christian hedonism. And I think I want to start with my my father.

The book is dedicated to my dad, to William Solomon Hoddle Piper, my father, in whom I have seen the holiness and happiness of God. I think, though I can't remember it nearly as well as I can remember seminary, I think probably my mother and my father are most accountable under God for why I am here tonight, why I believe what I believe, because I saw in my father. A combination of holiness and God centered radical commitment to the salvation of souls, my father's an evangelist, a full time evangelist, even today he still is evangelizing over radio tapes in the Philippines, a holiness dedicated to the Lord and to the scriptures over here.

And I saw, I think the happiest man to this day at age 47 and him at age 74, the happiest man I think I've ever known. So I grew up in a home that probably most of you didn't have the privilege of growing up in with a father who modeled for me the way God is, I believe. And therefore, I think there was sown in my heart from early on the deep assumption that a glorious God who was holy, who had a hell in which he would assign people who didn't believe in him, who longed for the salvation of lost people, who didn't let little teenagers like me go to movies and smoke and dance.

And that God made for the happiest of all lives. That was just built into me. I never rebelled against it because I think of that wonderful combination in my life as a little child.

The glory of God and the gladness of my heart, therefore, didn't feel in tension early on, I think. Later on, the tensions emerged. I went off to college, to Wheaton College, and there the struggles started to happen.

What I remember, I wish my memory were perfect. Don't you wish you could remember how it really was as a child and as a student? I fear that our memories are so selective. And so, take this with a grain of thought as I say it's the way it was.

It's the way I remember it was. I remember struggling with the issue of motivation. Why go downtown Chicago to evangelize? Why worship? Why eat ice cream? Why laugh at jokes? I was so analytical and I was always trying to figure out what were proper motives in life.

And I really hit the wall with coming up with motives that worked for me. I remember lying in my bed in St. Hall one time, all alone, thinking, well, what's the point of winning people to Jesus? To make them people who win more to Jesus? Who win more to Jesus? Who win more to Jesus? Now, you probably think that's a ridiculous thing to struggle with. But to me, at that moment, it seemed like an endless sequence of winning people to win people to win people to win people with a big so what at the end.

And for some reason, there wasn't living in my heart at that moment, and it may have been just my fault and my flesh, the thought that we're winning them to delight in Jesus. And my delight in winning them to delight in Jesus expands when I get them to delight in Jesus. That kind of thinking was never in my mind in those days at Wheaton.

And I really struggled with motivation. I didn't yet have talk like my joy expands in winning them to joy in God. Now, I want to ask the question, why did I feel this way? Why did I sense that the greater and more noble the act, the less of self-satisfaction there should be in it? I really had the tacit notion inside of me that if I do an act, because it would make me glad, I have thereby ruined its goodness.

I've ruined it. And that the only act that is really morally valuable is if I do it with no view to my satisfaction at all, no pleasure in it. Now, where did that come from? Why did I feel that way? Because I profoundly reject that today.

And I listed this afternoon, some reasons why I think I got to be that way, had that thought in my head. Number one, I grew up in a church, pretty typical, pretty good. And I heard missionary spokesmen come and say, at least this is what stuck in my mind.

And they probably said better things. You ought to do God's will, not your will, even if it's to leave America and go overseas. And in my head as a young person, I associated God's will with frustration.

Therefore, God's will is not my will. OK, I'm doomed to perpetual frustration. That was the message coming through to me.

You do God's will. You deny your will. Now, I'm sure they said more, but that's what I heard.

And so built into me was this notion to do something noble and good and radical would mean living in constant denial of what I really want to do. And nobody seemed to deliver effectively to me the message of sanctification that said what God really wants to do is change your mind, change your cravings, change your desires, change your hopes, change everything so that you would want to do his will and you would find satisfaction. You would say, I delight to do thy will.

Oh, God, that message was not getting through this teenager at White Oak Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina. That's one reason I think I had this sense that if you do something to make yourself glad, you've ruined it. Number two, the misuse of the self-denial texts in the Bible.

I think the whole verses were never communicated. Let him who would come after me deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For he who would save his life will lose it.

End of discussion. That's not the end. The next phrase says, and he who loses his life for my sake and the gospels will find it.

And I never heard a pastor hit the pulpit at that point and say, you want to find your life, don't you? Because I would have leaped out of my seat and said, I want life. I want fullness of life. And he said, there it is.

Lose it. And I somehow got stuck halfway through that verse that to follow God was to lose, lose, lose. And maybe in the sweet by and by game, but even the pictures of heaven that teenagers pick up along the way are not real exciting.

Number three, it's a little more philosophical. Another reason for why I think I had this notion that if I do anything that might make me glad, it's bad. Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential philosopher in the last 300 years, died in 1804, is known for teaching that one ought to do right because it is right out of duty with no eye to reward or benefit.

Now, I want to quote a more contemporary philosopher, a woman named Ayn Rand, who died a few years ago. She was an atheist through and through. And her understanding of Immanuel Kant was her understanding of Christianity.

He was a professing Christian and she hated Christianity and rejected it outright. Here's her quote of what she heard Immanuel Kant saying. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it.

But performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material or spiritual. A benefit destroys the moral value of an action. Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good.

If one has a desire to be evil, one can be good. Now, it's a little bit complicated. Let me flesh it out.

What she's saying is that Immanuel Kant said, if you are a person who is so good that you feel no covetousness, not stealing is no virtue for you. But if you're a person who's really covetous and you beat that down and don't steal, that's a virtue. Now, I really believe I grew up with that.

If I feel no lust, no desire to look at the magazines, that's no moral quality in me. If I feel a real desire to look at pornography and I defeat it, I'm really moral. That's wicked.

That's a wicked view of life because what it says is in heaven, nobody can be moral because we'll all be so good we won't want evil. There does lurk in the atmosphere of evangelicalism in America, this Kantian, from Immanuel Kant, this Kantian notion that the only good is a good done for duty's sake against your desires. And if you glut your desires on an act, even a good one, you have ruined the goodness of it because you're doing it because you want to do it.

That's just in the air. I grew up in that, it seems like, though I don't think my father ever said anything like that. My last explanation for why I was the way I was, was the pervasive statements about worshiping that I heard from various pastors as they scolded their people's lukewarmness in worship.

And here's the way they scolded. If you people would just come to give and not to get, we'd have real worship services. Problem is, you always come in to get.

Now, I have heard that growing up in my life over and again, I regard it now as profoundly mistaken. And I've never said it in this church. On the contrary, I view my job on Sunday morning and right now to spread a banquet and invite you to come and get.

And I want to fan into flame every desire for God that you have that would drive you hungry to this place. I think worship is fundamentally a craving for God, a coming to get God. God is honored.

This is right at the heart of Christian hedonism now. He is honored when people are hungry for him and when they come to worship to get him. But nobody was saying that in my hearing or through my dull brain in those days.

And so those are four reasons why I think in the years 1964 to 68, I was struggling the way I was with motivation. And why do you do good things? And how do you do a thing so that it's morally valuable? Now, I want to ask this question. What happened? What happened to turn my world upside down? How was this Christian hedonist born? And I've listed, goodness, a dozen things here, steps that God took me through starting in 1968.

And let me just walk you through them because I praise God for what he did back in those years. The months of the summer of 1968 to the summer of 1969, roughly, were earth-shaking days in my life. The first thing was a discovery made in Blaise Pascal.

Let me read you the quote that just blew me away in 1968. I'm reading it from the book here as I quote it in chapter one. Blaise Pascal said, 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 others avoiding it is the same desire in both, attended with different views.

The will never take the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even those who hang themselves. I'd never read anybody say that, that everybody does everything because it diminishes misery as they see it or increases happiness as they see it.

Even suicide is an attempt to reduce the misery of your life. Well, that blew me away and he didn't condemn it. In fact, in the context, Blaise Pascal said, it's like hunger.

You just can't help it. That's the way you're wired and you aren't wired that way by sin, but by God. Well, that was amazing to me to read that.

Then I found C.S. Lewis. Now I remember the day I was walking down Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California, and I wish it starts with a V. Does anybody remember the name of the bookstore on Colorado Avenue? Verno's? Anybody been to Pasadena? It's a real famous bookstore. It doesn't matter.

The bookstore there, I turned in. This was right in the middle of a course I was taking on hermeneutics in which Dan Fuller was talking about some of these things. I walked over to a table of books that had a whole array of C.S. Lewis books.

Now I had come to love C.S. Lewis at Weep. I had never seen nor heard of his little book called The Weight of Glory, which is four messages. The first one is called The Weight of Glory.

I picked it up. It's a little blue paper bag, and I read the first page of The Weight of Glory. It still to this day is probably, outside the Bible, the most significant page I've ever read.

I'm going to read it to you. It's a little long. I won't read the whole page, but most of it.

If you ask 20 good men today what they thought the highest of virtues, 19 of them would reply unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance.

The negative ideal of unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of love. 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. You can see my heart starts to beat here as I'm reading this there in the bookstore. 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 this notion has crept in from Immanuel 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.

Can you feel how revolutionary that would be? To point out to me your problem, John Piper, is not that you're trying to be happy, but that you've settled on far too little happiness. That's your problem. Nobody, nobody analyzed my problem that way before like that.

Nobody suggested to me your problem is you're too easily pleased. You're not nearly going hard enough after happiness. You're settling for mud pies in the slums.

You don't begin to pursue happiness. Well, I bought the book and have it to this day and it's a precious book. Nobody had added to Blaise Pascal's Everybody Does Seek Happiness the amazing statement you ought to and the reason you're not a holy person is because you don't seek happiness nearly passionately enough.

Number three, I discovered that God is the only place that could be found. Here's another quote from Pascal. There once was in man a true happiness of which now remain to him only the mark and empty trace which he in vain tries to fill from all surroundings seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present but these are all inadequate because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object that is to say only by God himself.

When I heard that, when I read that, it started to feel safe. I trembled at the thought at the beginning that my problem was that I didn't really pursue happiness enough and then Lewis and Pascal and Dan Fuller at Fuller Seminary made plain to me what is so, so obvious in the Bibles namely that God alone and God himself not God's gifts but himself is the source and the goal of that quest. Now Lewis struggled with something and when you find somebody who struggles with something you've struggled with and then works his way through to a solution that just makes light go lights go on it's a great thing and Lewis in his book on the Psalms showed that he struggled with the issue of the glory of God and the praise of God on the one hand and the desire for pleasure and the enjoyment of things on the other hand.

He was making these strong statements about the pursuit of pleasure and yet he read in the Psalms these commands to praise the Lord, praise the Lord and he didn't see how they came together and then he saw it and let me read you the solution. This was another one of those great eye-opening quotes. The most obvious fact about praise he said whether of God or of anything strangely escaped me and it was this fact that brought the two things together.

I thought of it in terms of compliment approval the giving of honor I underlined giving giving that I had been taught that well give to God he's real needy on Sunday morning he really needs you to give. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows in praise enjoyment overflows in praise the world rings with praise lovers praising their mistresses readers their favorite poet walkers praising the countryside players praising their favorite game my whole more difficult my whole more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us as regards the supremely valuable what we delight to do what we indeed can't help doing about everything else we value I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment it is its appointed consummation praise to God does not merely express enjoyment in God it completes enjoyment in God as soon as I read that I knew it was true because I thought of several analogies in my own experience at that point in my life I remember standing in fuller theological seminary library reading the new yorker jokes the cartoons in new yorker I used to always read the jokes and I would stand there and it's quiet in the library you don't talk in the library don't laugh out loud in the library and I would read these and it would be so funny I would find myself looking around immediately to find someone to show it to so that they would join with me in laughter and praise the quality of this cartoon because my pleasure in the cartoon did not come to completion until somebody else joined in my praise of this humor I can remember sitting with my mother watching Jonathan Winters anybody remember Jonathan Winters funny faces and and we would sit in the den and I would be alone and he would start cracking these jokes and making these faces and I'd say mama come here come here now what is that what is this mama come here come here stuff it's hedonism because I laugh harder and I enjoy the comedian more when she's there my mother really could laugh and so when she laughed and I laughed we laughed together and my joy in the comedian came to consummation when I praised him to her and together we said isn't that good and if you don't like any of those illustrations you can think of sports what a horrible thing to have to go to a world series game by yourself and be told you couldn't holler what a boring awful experience or to to to go with your beloved close friend wife husband whatever out on a camping trip and get up early and watch the sunrise and not be able to say or anything else not be able to say isn't something that would bring out the pleasure to consummation in praise well I got all that out of C.S. Lewis and suddenly the whole idea that worship was somehow a denial of my quest for pleasure was over worship is the consummation of my quest for pleasure and praise is is its capstone and then this is step number five I don't know if the numbering means anything to you but five on my sheet I saw it all over the place in the bible I just began to see it everywhere God commanding pleasure delight yourself in the Lord Psalm 37 Psalm 42 as a heart longs for the flowing stream so my heart longs for you O God Psalm 63 my soul thirsts for thee my flesh yearns for thee as in a dry and weary land where no water is Psalm 36 thou just give them to drink of the river of thy delights Psalm 34 taste and see that the Lord is good don't just think taste and see that the Lord is good Psalm 119 103 how sweet are thy words to my taste yes sweeter than honey to my mouth Psalm 16 11 this one has become tremendously important because of two words in it well more than two but two key that you'll hear thou to show me the path of life in thy presence is fullness of joy at thy right hand are pleasures forevermore now the two words that are crucial in there are fullness and forever because in this heart right here in 1968 I wanted two things I wanted 100 pleasure and satisfaction I didn't want 99 I wanted 100 proof joy if it could be had and I didn't want it to last 800 years I wanted it to last forever and this verse says thou to show me the path of life in thy presence is fullness of joy at thy right hand are pleasures forever I said if that's true that's it God is the end of my quest another insight I got in those days and I got this one now from Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Edwards the old Puritan preacher from 250 years ago I brought this along to show you because it's an old beat-up copy that I bought xeroxed in the Fuller Seminary bookstore of dissertation concerning the end for which God created the world by Jonathan Edwards and in this book what I discovered is that not only was my emerging hedonism good for man it's the way God is God's a hedonist God is pursuing his pleasure and his glory and his joy let me read you one of the quotes here that grabbed me I put a I see three different colorings of underlining here which means I've been through this three times their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God's glory that is our happiness in him is the emanation and expression of God's glory God in seeking their glory and happiness seeks himself and in seeking himself that is himself diffused and expressed which he delights in as he delights in his own beauty and fullness he seeks their glory and happiness that's too complicated for me to expound on right now but in a nutshell God delights in seeking his glory in your delight in his glory God delights in seeking his glory in your delight in his glory so that from him and through him and to him is all glory and all delight ultimately and your delight in God by the Holy Spirit tonight is God's delight in God the Holy Spirit is God the Holy Spirit who light who loves Jesus and delights in Jesus and glorifies Jesus is in you any little piece of joy in God that you have is God delighting in God in you those were the kinds of things that exploded out of Jonathan Edwards in those days I bought that book as I was leaving Fuller Seminary and I want to mention Daniel Fuller before I passed from Fuller Seminary the years 1968 to 1971 because I was being guided through Pascal through C.S. Lewis through Jonathan Edwards by this great man who's going to speak at our pastor's conference here next January Daniel Fuller and I owe him more perhaps under God than anybody besides my dad perhaps in terms of the shaping of my thinking and I brought along one of the pages from the Unity the Bible now you can buy Unity the Bible in our bookstore because it's finally in print but this is one of the early pages that he was using as a syllabus let me quote you just a sentence at the bottom to give you a flavor he's really an updated Jonathan Edwards you'll hear the similarity God has not created us as a means to his ends but only that he might know the joy of being a means to our ends as we share the fellowship that we have with the father and the son with those around us God's purpose in creation which was to externalize his own glory becomes fully realized I only read that complex sentence to show you the kind of thing I was feeding on and wrestling with in those days in the latter part of the 60s and the early the early 70s now at this point in my life I have gotten up to what I would call vertical hedonism vertical hedonism I went to graduate school in Germany for three years at that point 1971 to 1974 poured myself into technical New Testament scholarly studies made very little progress in understanding the Bible a little bit and got my necessary papers to teach and was wonderfully offered a job at Bethel College in 1974 and taught there for six years when I was freed from the need to read a zillion footnotes I went back to what seemed to me to matter and began to ponder Christian hedonism again and in those years the late 70s I began to formulate and write and write much in seminary and this magazine means a lot to me this is March 1977 his magazine doesn't exist anymore but this is the cover for my Christian hedonism article this bread versus a stone here and they put right inside how I became a Christian hedonist by me and then they gave it front page billing and and I laid out for intervarsity Christian hedonism as I understood it in 1977 and God amazingly used this article if you're involved in intervarsity and you have any dealings with the West Coast branch you know that Christian hedonism is the dominant motif of intervarsity that's not owing mainly to me that's owing mainly to Dan Fuller but desiring God that emerged in 1986 crystallized it for a lot of people vertical hedonism is the teaching simply that our pursuit of joy in God vertically is a good thing to be pursued and not to be denied at all but having published that article in 1977 something was going on inside of me that was a real wrestling namely is it right to talk about Christian hedonism at the horizontal level I sort of was content and sure now that to pursue God for my joy in God was an honor to him and a blessing to me and others whether to pursue all my activity at the horizontal level whether love could be thought of in terms of pursuing my own joy I was not at all sure because I could think of texts that seemed to to contradict that idea so my second article as I worked my way through that was in the November 1981 issue of his magazine which is this time way at the back and I had to really wrestle with the editors to get the title and I didn't get the title that I wanted my title was dissatisfied contentment toward an ethic of Christian hedonism I guess too technical for a magazine they put holy hedonism with a big Marilyn Monroe lips on the opposite page and I called them back right away and said junk the lips you can't put the lips in and they didn't they scrapped the lips but they left it at holy hedonism feeling good about doing God I hate that title I don't like the title but that's the title that was used and since it's a defunct magazine maybe there's nobody to get mad at me for saying that what I meant by dissatisfied contentment was this here's the here's the discovery I made and if it sounds brief and inadequate tonight we're going to work on this one for a lot of the coming lectures Paul said I am content in every circumstance and I was reading in those days some novels and I read one by Herman Hesse are called Siddhartha. Siddhartha was in pursuit of salvation as a Buddhist and he found it in sitting cross-legged under a tree in India feeling totally content and I read that and I felt threatened by it because I said is that what I'm teaching that once you arrive at total contentment in God you fold your legs you sit under a tree and the world can go to hell as far as you're concerned so my horizontal hedonism my vertical hedonism had to have a horizontal dimension or I knew I was way off base and so I went to the New Testament and I said you really do teach God that you should be content but you also teach somehow that this contentment that can be abased and that can be abound that can rejoice in tribulation this contentment is dissatisfied with the way things are sounds so paradoxical and the analogy I came up with was that God created the world not because he was deficient God didn't wring his hands and say I'm not happy I'm not happy I'm not happy I got to create a world that was not God it wouldn't be God if that were true God created the world as the spontaneous overflow of fullness that he might share what he is with others Edward said it is no indication of the deficiency of a fountain that it must overflow now that's my paradigm for understanding the human heart that gets filled with the Holy Spirit it is no sign of your deficiency or your lack of contentment in God that you must spill over with God for others and this is what we'll talk a lot more about so that was the development of my horizontal hedonism God bringing satisfaction into my heart came to its consummation not just in praising him but in expanding to meet the needs of others and bring them into this joy then I came to Bethlehem 1980 and I began to think about this whole issue in relation to the local church and I wrote an article in the standard it's the last article I think I wrote on Christian hedonism until recently in fact I won't bother holding it up but the reason it's significant is because I wrote it out of a pastoral situation commending Christian hedonism to other pastors the fall of 1983 how many of you were here in the fall of 1983 some of you will remember that was the sermon series on Christian hedonism and out of that this book came there were nine messages there are nine chapters in this book conversion I talked about conversion because I'd come to see the parable of the treasure hidden in a field as a parable of conversion the kingdom of God is like a man who finds a treasure hidden in a field he buries it over and for joy he goes and sells everything he has to borrow that field that's conversion for joy you sell everything you have to have the kingdom Christ is worth more than anything I talked about worship delight yourself in the Lord I talked about love it is more blessed to give than to receive I talked about scripture they are sweeter than honey to my taste I talked about prayer ask and you will receive that your joy may be full I talked about money sell your possessions and make purses in heaven that never grow old really really invest I talked about marriage nobody ever hates his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it do that for your one flesh your wife when you love your wife you love yourself you want to be happy love her I talked about missions Lord we left everything and followed you Peter says Jesus says nobody has left lands and houses and brothers and sisters mother and father for my sake in the gospels who will not receive back in this age mothers and sisters and brothers and houses and lands a hundred fold and in the age to come eternal life I talked about all those things from the vantage point of Christian hedonism and then the book appeared in 1986 and I almost brought along tonight my correspondence file which moves me every time I think about it but let me draw this message to a close tonight by summarizing for you just what Christian hedonism is in five steps and then if we have time just a closing word step number one everybody desires to be happy and it is not evil that desire is not evil step number two you should never try to resist that desire as though it were a bad impulse but instead intensify it and pursue whatever makes for the deepest and longest lasting satisfaction these are absolutely crucial qualifications I'm laying here you must intensify your desire and go for what is deepest and longest lasting number three the deepest and longest lasting pleasure is found in God and God alone number four the happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it overflows in praise to God and love for others and bringing them into the joy of God and finally then number five to the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure now mark this to the extent that you try can't but you try to abandon the pursuit of your own pleasure you will fail to honor God we're going to talk about that next time and you will fail to love people we'll talk about that the time after next or to put it positively the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary component of all worship and all virtue let me close by asking this question why does this matter why why do I get so worked up about this why has this held me now for how many years since 1968 or so he closed with several reasons number one it is possible to worship in vain my people worship me in vain their heart is far from me christian hedonism will not stand for that it will not stand for that it targets the heart and says you must worship with your heart number two it is possible to love in vain if you have all knowledge if you give all your goods to feed the poor if you give your body to be burned and have not love it amounts to nothing how can you give your body to be burned how can you give all your goods to feed the poor and have not love it has something to do with the heart and motivation in relation to God and christian hedonism third it is possible to be lukewarm and be spewed out of Jesus mouth which is a terrifying prospect and finally I think today there is a tremendous need to be God-centered we live in a massively man-centered culture and you might say christian hedonism sounds pretty man-centered to me but I'm going to ask you um is God belittled and you made the center when you come to him like a fountain and you fall on your face and you put your face in the fountain and you just suck up water are you the center at that moment when you stand up and say that's the best water I've ever tasted it satisfies my whole longing are you the center the water is the center and it is glorified in that experience and I've had people say to me aren't you making a god out of pleasure and my response is you make a god out of whatever you take most pleasure in and my whole life is devoted to making god god almighty god and heavenly father how I pray that you would grant understanding how I pray that you would fill us with the holy spirit that pours the love of God for God into our hearts I pray that we would delight in you as a church I pray that our worship would be authentic and that our love would be radical and sacrificial even unto death because it is vastly more blessed to die in the cause of love than to be selfish and to live in luxury lord grant us understanding and transform our hearts I pray in Jesus name