So we were just in Isaiah 56, verses 4 and 5 on Monday, looking at a promise given that applies to couples who are sorrowfully facing infertility.

Now, just a couple of chapters later in our Bible reading plan, we read Isaiah 58 this week as well.

So it's a good time to tackle this challenging question from an

anonymous man. Hello, Tony and Pastor John. Thank you both for the podcast. It's been such a

blessing into my life and countless others. My question is about Isaiah 58 versus two and three,

where the people are described as seeking God daily and delighting to draw near him.

On the surface, this sounds very much in line with the idea of Christian hedonism,

finding our greatest joy in God.

But despite their religious activities, God rejects them for being self-centered, saying they, quote, seek your own pleasure, end quote.

It's in verse three.

So how do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?

How can these people delight in God and yet still be forsaken for selfishness?

It seems like the issue here is that they're seeking God with self-serving.

But I'm curious about how we as Christians can delight in God without falling into this trap.

How does a Christian hedonist live out this dynamic balancing the joy of delighting in God

without becoming self-centered? Thank you for your thoughts.

It seems to me that most apparent contradictions in the Bible are intended by God to protect us from careless uses of some precious truth.

When we make an exciting discovery in the Bible, we're very prone to carry that discovery in a direction that it was never intended

to go. And then we'd bump into a statement in the Bible that seems to contradict the discovery

itself, but after looking carefully at the context, we realized that the apparently contradictory statement

wasn't intended to nullify the discovery that we had made, which is true, but to protect us from

misusing it. So that's the principle that I think lies behind text like this one in Isaiah 58 and

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