Nearly twenty years after writing what many would name my signature guide, Needing God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, I lastly wrote the guide I knew I needed to write as an important sequel. The guide is After I Don’t Need God: How you can Struggle for Pleasure. It’s now been greater than twenty years since its publication in 2004.
Lengthy earlier than this guide got here into being, I used to provide three messages when requested to talk on Christian Hedonism — the theme of Needing God. However in a short time, I spotted {that a} fourth message was wanted, as a result of probably the most pressing and customary query I used to be requested after these three messages was, “What if I don’t need God the way in which you say we should always?”
Liberating and Devastating
In different phrases, many individuals would learn the guide Needing God or hear these three messages (“God’s Ardour for His Glory,” “Our Ardour for Pleasure in God’s Glory,” and “Our Ardour for Different Individuals to Share in That Pleasure”), and they’d be persuaded that enjoyment of God was not simply icing on the cake of Christianity however important.
Then they might understand that this discovery from the Bible was each liberating and devastating. It was liberating as a result of they’d by no means heard that they weren’t solely permitted to be completely satisfied however commanded to be. This felt liberating. All of us wish to be completely satisfied. However on the identical time, they realized that they didn’t enjoyment of God the way in which the Bible instructions. And now, with this new understanding of the significance of pleasure, that felt devastating.
So, with the publication of Needing God, I knew that sometime there wanted to be a guide to answer that sense of devastation — a guide to reply the query, “What do I do if I don’t have the need for God, or the enjoyment of God, that Scripture instructions?”
I did put together that fourth message. And finally it was put in Needing God as an appendix: “How Then Shall We Struggle for Pleasure: An Define.” That, then, turned my guideline for what wanted to be within the guide After I Don’t Need God.
I’m grateful that it took me so lengthy to jot down this guide as a result of, with each passing 12 months, I noticed extra deeply into the complexity of Christian feelings. And yearly, I noticed extra clearly that the technique of preventing for pleasure are enormously various. And yearly, I examined extra of these means in my very own battles and failures to be happy in God. And I noticed extra situations and styles of melancholy and emotional brokenness.
So, within the delay, God was getting ready me to talk with extra endurance, extra compassion, extra sympathy, and extra nuanced sensitivity to how amazingly totally different persons are. Not less than I hope that’s the case.
Core Convictions within the Struggle
After I Don’t Need God is, maybe, my most sensible guide. That’s harmful to say as a result of different books that don’t dwell on software to the identical diploma have produced sensible transformations much more pronounced for some folks. Sensible is a tough phrase. In a way, I’d describe a number of the most advanced theological works I’ve learn as probably the most sensible, as a result of they resulted in probably the most thoroughgoing results in my life. However what I imply by sensible right here is that I attempted to deal primarily with the “learn how to” questions of dwelling the Christian life.
The title After I Don’t Need God: How you can Struggle for Pleasure implies three large commitments. It implies that wanting God and pleasure in God are massively necessary, not marginal. It implies, second, that persevering in that pleasure essentially consists of our preventing for it. That’s, actual effort is expended. Actual warfare is waged. And third, the title consists of the conviction that, in all of the preventing we do, we by no means combat in our personal energy. And the success of the combat by no means lastly relies on us however on God.
These three factors can scarcely be overemphasized. Pleasure issues. The combat is important. God’s assistance is decisive. All of them are controversial. So, the place do you stand? Is God most glorified in you when you find yourself most happy in him? In that case, pleasure isn’t marginal. Are you prepared to combat in your pleasure? Or is that an oxymoron for you — “fought-for pleasure”? To make certain, it’s like saying, “Work for relaxation.” “Run for stillness.” “Wage warfare for peace.” Sure. Precisely. Religion is a resting and a stillness and a peace — and but Paul tells us, “Struggle the nice combat of the religion” (1 Timothy 6:12). Combating for pleasure isn’t a contradiction.
I pray that God will grant you to embrace all three of those convictions. I feel all of them are important for the biblical pursuit of pleasure in God.
Pleasure issues: “Delight your self within the Lord” (Psalm 37:4).
The combat is important: “Put to loss of life the deeds of the physique, [and] you’ll stay” (Romans 8:13).
God’s assistance is decisive: “I labored tougher than any of them, although it was not I, however the grace of God that’s with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).
How you can Struggle for Pleasure in God
This month at Needing God, our staff will give recent consideration to “How you can Struggle for Pleasure in God.” We’ll rehearse God’s technique of grace — his phrase, prayer, and the covenant fellowship of the native church — and we’ll ponder how Devil opposes and seeks to sabotage our pleasure in God. We’ll take into account the usage of nature and the stewardship of our our bodies within the pursuit of pleasure, and we’ll revisit the concluding query, “What do I do when the darkness doesn’t elevate?”
In all of it, we purpose to recollect an all-important perception from C.S. Lewis, because it relates not solely to hope but additionally to pleasure:
You can’t hope and in addition take into consideration hoping on the identical second; for in hope we glance to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to talk) turning spherical to have a look at the hope itself. . . . The surest technique of disarming an anger or a lust was to show your consideration from the woman or the insult and begin inspecting the fervour itself. The surest means of spoiling a pleasure was to start out inspecting your satisfaction. (Stunned by Pleasure, 218)
God, and God alone, is the ultimate, final aim of our quest. All that God is for us in Jesus is the Object of our quest for pleasure. Once we communicate of preventing for pleasure, we imply pleasure in God, not pleasure regardless of God. Once we communicate of eager for happiness, we imply happiness in all that God is for us in Jesus, not happiness as a bodily or psychological expertise aside from God. Whether or not we’re wanting or delighting, the top of the expertise is God.
Combating for that have of pleasure in God, by Jesus Christ, is what the guide and our recent focus this month are all about. I hope you’ll be a part of us.
