Last time we started to look at the concept of pursuing God and its relation to our enjoyment and happiness by first looking at the problem we face of how we often try to separate enjoyment and happiness from our praise and worship of God; how we try to take the heart out of how we relate to God. This time we will start to look at how our happiness and enjoyment actually relate to our interactions with God. Remember we sort of started this off by looking at the first question in the Westminster Catechism where it states, “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Much of our premise for finding enjoyment by seeking after God comes from the introduction in Desiring God and more specifically from John Piper’s observations from Pascal, Lewis, and Edwards.
Search For Happiness
In his own search regarding how happiness/enjoyment relates to our Christian life Piper first encountered the philosophy of Blaise Pascal. It was in this philosophy that we can see that humanity seeks out happiness. Pascal goes so far as to state, “This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves (Pensees).” So all of our actions have the motivation of seeking out happiness and Pascal presents is without making any moral judgment, whether good or bad our actions are attempts to achieve happiness.
Too Easily Pleased
The next thing Piper points out is from C. S. Lewis’ “Weight of Glory” where in looking through the Bible we find many promises of reward and blessings. The problem however is as men we are too easily pleased. It is along the lines of a child content with mud pies while there is a buffet of innumerable delights waiting. What Piper found Lewis stating is that not only do we seek happiness, as Pascal pointed out, but that we ought to seek happiness, the only problem is the weakness in our desire.
God Shaped Hole
The third thing Piper brings up flows out of the second point. Pascal presented it best in his argument for a God shaped void in each of us. The argument stems from man’s longing for happiness and how we will make every attempt to fill this emptiness with everything around us. The problem is that it is an infinite void that only an infinite and immutable object can fill. You see the issue is not that we look to God to give us the things to make us happy, but that it is God Himself that will make us truly happy.
Where Praise and Worship Flow
The next idea that comes up then comes from C. S. Lewis’ Reflection on the Psalms; where in the chapter on praise it is seen that praise is the overflow of our happiness. In other words when we truly praise and worship God it is because of the happiness that we find in Him. Piper puts it this way, “God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed.” We essentially worship and praise those things that we treasure and find happiness in, to not truly worship and praise God in this manner is stating that you find your joy and treasure somewhere else. This concept of a search for pleasure in our relationship with God is found all throughout the Psalms. Many of them talk about concepts as delighting in the Lord, longing for God, seeking after God, thirsting for God; all concepts that in corresponding verses or even the same verse show the pleasure such action brings.
Piper terms this quest for finding pleasure in God, Christian Hedonism. Essentially, unlike the concept of worldly hedonism, it is not so much looking at God as the means to obtain our happiness, the means to get stuff to make us happy. Christian Hedonism is more seeing God as the end of our pursuit, He is the source of our happiness not our stuff. We will look more into this concept next time and over the next few weeks as we dig further into the book Desiring God.
