So I'm doing everything I can to lure people into a hedonistic pursuit of God above all things.

It's loving for God to exalt God.

It would be unloving for me to exalt Piper.

It's loving for God to exalt God because Piper cannot make anybody happy. God makes people

infinitely happy.

John Piper is the founder and lead teacher of desiring God.org and serves as Chancellor of Bethlehem

College and Seminary. He served for 33 years as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church

in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God,

Meditations of a Christian Heedonist, which is now available in a revised edition published by Crossway.

John, thanks so much for joining me again on the Crosswood podcast.

I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

So in preparing this new edition of Desiring God, a book that I'm sure many of our readers are

familiar with and have read or at least heard about, you read through the book again and made

some fairly minor, modest updates to the text.

And I just wonder, how long had it been since you last read through that book, kind of straight

through?

39 years.

I mean, seriously, I thought about this.

And, you know, with the previous editions, I don't remember reading all the way through.

There were things we knew needed to be updated at each edition.

But this time was different because I was going to read it for the audiobook.

And so I had to read it all the way through, which means I really, really gave it a careful wording, reading,

...