Seeking Our Own Pleasure

While studying John Piper’s little book The Dangerous Duty of Delight,  I have recently become convinced of the absolute necessity of pursuing joy and pleasure in God as an end in itself rather than as a by-product of obedience. After all, are we not commanded many times over in the Scriptures to “rejoice in the Lord”?

I think that often in our fundamentalist groups, we become so focused on doing the right things that we overlook the heart motives and desires behind our actions. We either get bogged down in all of the duties we HAVE to accomplish in our homes and churches and develop a martyr’s complex, or we delight in the ministries we have more than in the God we serve and develop a spirit of pride. Sometimes we do both–we are proud of the way we have selflessly poured our lives into others and suffered hardship to do the right things. We glory in our own obedience. We have been told and often tell others, that right feelings will follow right actions (which is true–to an extent). But we take that mantra too far and focus only on the right actions, thinking that if we have done our “duty,” than we have obeyed and are pleasing and glorifying to God, despite how reluctantly or joylessly we have “obeyed”.

I have been struck lately with the thought that such obedience is not really obedience at all. If God commands me to love Him, to joy in Him, to worship Him, and to obey all His other commands, I have not obeyed if I simply focus on the outward actions and skip over the inner joy with which God desires I serve Him. We cannot separate enjoying God from serving God without living hypocritically. God is neither pleased nor glorified with the outward “right” actions of those whose “hearts are far from [Him].”

Perhaps we find ourselves joyless at times because it seems self-centered, and therefore wrong, to focus on pursuing pleasure in God rather than on merely obeying, hoping that pleasure will be a by-product of our obedience, and not worrying if it is not. We forget that coming to Christ at all is a most self-serving act–for nothing benefits us more. I love the following passage Piper quotes from C.S. Lewis in regards to the necessity of seeking our own good.

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen 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. 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 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. 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.

I submit that when we find ourselves merely going through the routine of our Christian lives, we are also “too easily pleased.” We settle for pleasure in our families and ministries or for lives that simply contain little pleasure, and think that we are being “spiritual” because we keep on going even though we don’t feel like it. I am not proposing that we forego obedience altogether as a solution. Rather, as we continue doing the right outward actions, we must repent of the sin of joylessness, pray earnestly for the Lord to “restore unto [us] the joy of [our] salvation,” and diligently seek the person of our great God in His Word. He wants us to rejoice in Him. He will give us that grace if we seek HIM with all of our hearts.

If you’re anything like me, you find yourself easily bogged down by sleepless nights with sick children, endless piles of laundry, and the never-satisfied appetites of our husbands and children. It’s so easy to allow our to-do lists, our chores, even our ministries, to rob us of our joy in God. By God’s grace, let’s refuse to settle for earthly pleasures when “infinite joy is offered us.” Let us seek to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.