How Fleeting Pleasures Sidetrack Our Love

Ask Pastor John

Desiring God

John Piper, Unknown, 163859, Pastor, Ask, Theology, Desiring God, Religion & Spirituality/christianity, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Questions

4.8 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2022

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A lack of love for other people doesn’t show that we’re trying too hard to please ourselves — it shows that we’re far too easily pleased.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We are far too easily pleased.
0:09.2	That's the problem in America.
0:11.0	We're not too hedonistic, too pleasure-centered, no, we're not pleasure-centered enough.
0:17.4	We settle for the world's poultry joys of the expense of giving our lives to pursue
0:22.6	our deepest and most lasting joy.
0:26.5	And in settling for the trivial pleasures of this world, we undermine both of our chief
0:29.8	callings in life, the two great love commandments that we have, to love God with everything
0:34.4	that we have, and to love others as ourselves.
0:37.3	In fact, it's only as we pursue our highest joy that we are driven to enact these loves.
0:43.5	The essential, counterintuitive point that we make in Christian hedonism, Christian hedonism.
0:50.4	And it was a point, Pastor John was making back in 1983 as he was first putting that Christian
0:56.2	hedonism into a sermon series for his church.
1:00.1	From that essential series would come the book Desiring God, and of course this entire
1:04.3	ministry.
1:05.3	And today I want to share with you a clip from his sermon, The Labor of Christian
1:09.1	hedonism, a sermon preached on October 2nd, 1983.
1:14.3	Have a listen to this point.
1:17.2	If you and I don't pursue our ministry, because we expect to find great joy in it,
1:26.8	then we don't pursue the command of God.
1:32.1	There's another verse.
1:34.0	This one is so familiar, you don't need to look it up.
1:36.3	It's Acts 20, verse 35, and strikingly, it's Paul's address to another group of elders,
	...

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