Pastor John was C.S. Lewis a Christian hedonist.

Joy led Lewis to Christ as the supreme object of his joy and the supreme source of his joy.

So if we're asking the question, what's the function of joy in Lewis and does it lead to Christian?

It leads to Christian hedonism. My resounding answer is going to be the function of joy was massive.

And yes, it leads to Christian hedonism. I think I learned crucial elements of my Christian hedonism from Lewis.

He called his autobiography, surprised by joy.

That's massive choice that he made to tell us that what he was experiencing during his 30 unbelieving years in this thing,

he called the inconsolable longing. Use the German word Zähnslacht.

What he was experiencing there, this northernness, was ephemeral and always disappointing, disappearing as soon as you try to grasp it,

keep it, make it your God, it went away. He wrote this really famous line.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Well, that's a description of the discovery it took him 30 years to get to because he was constantly having these desires and he called them joy.

He called these stabbings, these breaking ends of something he knew not what and the longing was the joy and it was so intense, he wanted it so bad and yet it went away.

And so he finally says in his story of his conversion inexorably, this quote, inexorably, joy proclaimed, you want, I myself am your want of something other outside, not you nor any state of you.

Now that's what he finally came to is that my desire is pointing beyond my desire and if I don't discover the God beyond my desire, the true God who awakens all my desires, who satisfies all my desires, I will live an endlessly frustrated life.

So there was a quest for joy which became a quest for the object of the joy so that the joy can be satisfied. That's how he became a Christian.

So you can't you can't overstate for Lewis the redemptive effect of joy in his life and that and the next stage for me in my own discovery was to realize that it didn't just bring him to Christ.

Joy remained in Lewis's way of thinking as a virtue behind all our good deeds.

I remember Tony standing at a square specials book table in Romans bookstore fall of 1968 on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California looking down at a little blue paper back call the weight of glory.

I never picked it up in my life. I picked it up open and read the first page and the impact of that page on my Christian hedonism is huge because that's the page where he basically says everybody is questing and pursuing joy and the problem.

He said is not that we are pursuing happiness, but that we are far too easily pleased and I thought yes, yes, that's right. The problem is not that I want to be happy.

The problem is that I'm settling on happiness that are to use his language like a little child making mud pies in the slum because he can't imagine what a holiday at the sea is like.

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