The C.S. Lewis quote from the previous post prepared me to think about my life of faith in completely different terms. Joy was the serious business of heaven. Obedience and moving into holiness was life. All sin was ultimately self-destruction. My desires were not too strong but too weak. I was far too easily pleased.
Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure, often without regard to consequence. God is the ultimate hedonist. He is so passionate about bringing forth his goodness and bringing us into His joy that He pursued it with reckless abandon: he died to make it happen.
Christianity is leaning into the glad hedonism of God. All the great saints write of their lives in deeply hedonistic terms: joy, peace, fulfillment, laughter, a self-forgetfulness that frees them to have relationships rightly. This is a life worth losing everything for.
The passage from Weight of Glory opened me up to thinking in this way. John Piper unpacked it for me Biblically. While there are many issues where I disagree with Piper, his fundamental understanding of the power of the promises of God and the joy in our obedience continues to be fundamental to how I think about the Christian life. Check out his article: Christian Hedonism, that unpacks the Biblical foundations for thinking about the Christian life as the gateway to the joy we were designed for.
1 comment:
thanks for the reminder, again. i was listening to stacie orrico, and reminded again how i put so much time and energy focused on the next temporary high, and not on the ultimate satisfaction and joy in the lord.
in other news, the guy we heard preach this week reminded us SO MUCH of you. it was uncanny. he actually looked a little more like daniel, but still. he looked like you, and had similar mannerisms and ways of enunciating words and fleshing out points. it was a wonderful moment. we miss you! (ok, jim barely knows you, but he agreed with me about the resemblance, and would miss you if only he knew you as well as i do)
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