Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

by John Piper

Scripture reveals that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. In this paradigm-shattering classic, newly revised and expanded, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn't truly exist: Delight is our duty. Readers will embark on a dramatically different and joyful experience of their faith

The pursuit of pleasure is not optional. It is essential. The pursuit of pleasure is not optional. It is essential.

Scripture reveals that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever. In this paradigm-shattering work, John Piper reveals that the debate between duty and delight doesn’t truly exist: Delight isis our duty. Join him as he unveils stunning, life-impacting truths you saw in the Bible but never dared to believe.

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Paperback, 369 pages

Published April 17th 2003 by Multnomah Books (first published 1986)

tags: theology, spirituality, faith, christianity, christian non fiction, religion, nonfiction, christian living, discipleship, christian

Book Quotes

“God’s reality is displayed to us in His Word or His world and we do not then feel in our heart any grief or longing or hope or fear or awe or joy or gratitude or confidence, then we may dutifully sing and pray and recite and gesture as much as we like, but it will not be real worship.”

― John Piper

“God’s passion to be glorified and our passion to be satisfied are one experience in the Christ-exalting act of worship—singing in the sanctuary and suffering in the streets.”

― John Piper

“Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” Concealed sin keeps us from seeing the light of Christ.”

― John Piper

“Redemption, salvation, and restoration are not God’s ultimate goal. These He performs for the sake of something greater: namely, the enjoyment He has in glorifying Himself.”

― John Piper

“Therefore Christian Hedonism is passionately opposed to all attempts to drive a wedge between deep thought and deep feeling. It rejects the common notion that profound reflection dries up fervent affection. It resists the assumption that intense emotion thrives only in the absence of coherent doctrine.”

― John Piper

“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. And? Like ham and eggs? Sometimes you glorify God and sometimes you enjoy Him? Sometimes He gets glory, sometimes you get joy?”

― John Piper

“I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”

― John Piper

“The hope of heaven brought him joy, and joy brought him strength, and so, like John Calvin before him and George Whitefield after him (two verifiable examples) and, it would seem, like the apostle Paul himself … he was astoundingly enabled to labor on, accomplishing more than would ever have seemed possible in a single lifetime.”4 But”

― John Piper

“There has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, in respect to the doctrine of God’s sovereignty.… The doctrine has very often appeared exceeding pleasant, bright and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. JONATHAN EDWARDS”

― John Piper

“When Christ calls us to a new act of obedience that will cost us some temporal pleasure, we call to mind the surpassing value of following Him, and by faith in His proven worth, we forsake the worldly pleasure. The result? More joy! More faith! Deeper than before. And so we go on from joy to joy and faith to faith.”

― John Piper

“The hardened disobedience of men’s hearts leads not to the frustration of God’s plans, but to their fruition.”

― John Piper

“Would you want to go to heaven if God were not there, only His gifts?”

― John Piper

“I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD” (Ezekiel 18:32).”

― John Piper

“True worship must include inward feelings that reflect the worth of God’s glory.”

― John Piper

“Not to pursue our joy in ministry is not to pursue the profit of our people...Begrudging service does not qualify as genuine love.”

― John Piper

“Putting it in my own words, [Edwards] said that the infinite complexity of the divine mind is such that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. He can look through a narrow lens or through a wide-angle lens. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the LORD God" (Ezekiel 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic- in all its parts- good and evil- brings him delight.”

― John Piper

“Nadie comprenderá la necesidad de la conversión si ni siquiera sabe por qué nos creo Dios. Nos creó a su imagen para que pudiéramos reflejar su gloria en el mundo. Fuimos creados para ser prismas que reflejen la luz de la gloria de Dios en todos los aspectos de la vida. Es un gran misterio por qué quiso Dios compartir con nosotros el resplandor de su gloria.”

― John Piper

“Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds … gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare.… Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music.… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.13”

― John Piper

“Phillips Brooks, an Episcopalian pastor in Boston a hundred years ago, caught the spirit of Peter’s counsel to pastors: I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all. This is all true of preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and saving of the souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministers have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word today, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them.8”

― John Piper

“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.”

― John Piper

John Piper

John Piper (1946 - Present)

is a Calvinistic Baptist Christian preacher and author currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His books include ECPA Christian Book Award winners Spectacular Sins, What Jesus Demands from the World, Pierced by the Word, and God's Passion for His Glory, and bestsellers Don't Waste Your Life and The Passion of Jesus Christ. The evangelical organization Desiring God is named for his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986).

In 1980, after what he described as an "irresistible call of the Lord to preach", Piper became Pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he has been ministering ever since. Piper hit the evangelical scene after the publication of his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (1986) and has continued to publish dozens of other books further articulating this theological perspective. In 1994, he founded Desiring God Ministries, which provides all of Piper's sermons and articles from the past three decades, and most of his books online free of charge, as well as offering for sale books, CDs, and DVDs and regularly hosting conferences.

John Stephen Piper is a Reformed and Baptist theologian, preacher, and author, currently serving as Pastor for Preaching and Vision of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of numerous books.

Piper's motto in ministry, preaching, and teaching is: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." He calls those who live out this motto Christian Hedonists. Piper places a heavy emphasis on the objective and absolute nature of truth and is confident in the Christian's ability to grasp that truth through the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
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