When I was in college I had a vague, pervasive notion that
if I did something good because it would make me happy,
I would ruin its goodness.
I figured that the goodness of my moral action was
lessened to the degree I was motivated by a desire for my
own pleasure. At the time, buying ice cream in the student
center just for pleasure didn't bother me, because the
moral consequences of that action seemed so
insignificant. But to be motivated by a desire for happiness
or pleasure when I volunteered for Christian service or
went to church-that seemed selfish, utilitarian, and
mercenary.
This was a problem for me because I couldn't formulate an
alternative motive that worked. I found in me an
overwhelming longing to be happy, a tremendously
powerful impulse to seek pleasure, yet at every point of
moral decision I said to myself that this impulse should
have no influence.
One of the most frustrating areas was that of worship and
praise. My vague notion that the higher the activity, the
less there must be of self-interest in it, caused me to think
of worship almost solely in terms of duty. And that cuts the
heart out of it.
Then I was converted to Christian Hedonism. In a matter
of weeks I came to see that it is unbiblical and arrogant to
try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure
to be had in him. Let me describe the series of insights
that made me into a Christian Hedonist. Along the way I
hope it will become clear what I mean by this strange
phrase.
1. During my first quarter in seminary I was introduced to
the argument for Christian Hedonism and one of its great
exponents, Blaise Pascal. He wrote,
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.1
This statement so fit with my own deep longings and all
that I had ever seen in others that I accepted it and have
never found any reason to doubt it. What struck me
especially here was that Pascal was not making any moral
judgment about this fact. As far as he was concerned,
seeking one's own happiness is not a sin; it is a simple
given in human nature. It is a law of the human heart as
gravity is a law of nature.
This thought made great sense to me and opened the way
for the second discovery.
2. I had grown to love the work of C. S. Lewis in college.
But not until later did I buy the sermon called "The Weight
of Glory." The first page of that sermon is one of the most
influential pages of literature I have ever read. It goes like
this:
If you asked twenty good men today 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, 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.
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.2
There it was in black and white, and to my mind it was
totally compelling: It is not a bad thing to desire our own
good. In fact the great problem of human beings is that
they are far too easily pleased. They don't seek pleasure
with nearly the resolve and passion that they should. And
so they settle for mud pies of appetite instead of infinite
delight.
I had never in my whole life heard any Christian, let alone
a Christian of Lewis's stature, say that all of us not only
seek (as Pascal said) but also ought to seek our own
happiness. Our mistake lies not in the intensity of our
desire for happiness, but in the weakness of it
*This is an excerpt from Desiring God by John Piper
I have personally gone through a struggle very similar to this growing up. ‘Waste not, want not’ was the attitude I was (unintentionally) raised with to have when it came to life in general. I was under the impression that those people that went out and had lots of fun all the time were Godless. This thought process pushed me away from the Lord altogether. For quite a while, I wanted nothing to do with a being up in the sky that just wants me to be bored and not enjoy life. While I still do not want anything to do with a being like that, I eventually experienced God in a different way. All of a sudden I understood that there was immense joy to be found in Him and that through Him was the only way to pure, untainted happiness. I still often struggle with being far too easily pleased, but more and more I am focusing on the true joy found only in the Lord God.
I wonder how many of you have gone through similar thought patterns, or if anyone is currently struggling with this type of thinking? Maybe you disagree to an extent, whatever your thoughts, I would love to hear them.
-Nathan
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