Podcast: The Story Behind ‘Desiring God’ (John Piper)

September 08, 2025 by: Crossway

The Steadfast Message and Ministry of Desiring God After Nearly 40 Years

In this episode John Piper reflects on nearly 40 years of Desiring God and the enduring message of Christian Hedonism. Piper discusses the pursuit of happiness in God, how it relates to the glory of God, and how Christian Hedonism can exist in a world of suffering, deceitful desires, and monotone worship.

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Desiring God

Desiring God

John Piper

John Piper’s influential work on Christian Hedonism, Desiring God, challenges the belief that following Christ requires the sacrifice of pleasure. Rather, he teaches that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:26 - Reflecting on 40 Years

Matt Tully
John Piper is the founder and lead teacher of Desiring God (desiringgod.org) and serves as chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary. He served for thirty-three years as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, which is now available in a revised edition, published by Crossway. John, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

John Piper
I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Matt Tully
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 it had been since you last read straight through that book?

John Piper
Thirty-nine years. Seriously, I thought about this, and 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 it 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, idea reading, and biblical reading. I hadn’t read it all the way through since it first came out in 1986. I don’t tend to read my own books. Maybe some people do, but I don’t read my own books. It’s like preaching. I’ve never read one of my sermons or listened to one of my sermons on Monday. I’ve got work to do, right? And it’s the same thing with the book. You finish a book, you believe in the providence of God, you’ve done the best you could, and you hand it over to the world and say, “Lord, do with it what you want.”

Matt Tully
Have you ever had the experience of somebody coming up to you, having maybe just read the book last week, and they have some insight or some quote and you’re like, “Wait a minute. I wrote that? I don’t remember that”?

John Piper
Oh, totally. People do that with sermons all the time. They say, “Thank you for saying this,” and I have no idea when I said that. And it’s the same with writing. My memory’s lousy no matter what, and when you’ve written a lot of things, they all jumble together. I’m happy if people remind me of what I said, but I don’t remember it usually.

Matt Tully
Well, in addition to reading through the book, you actually read the whole book this time for the audiobook that Crossway is producing. And we’re so excited to have it in your own voice. It’s such a joy to be able to do that and provide that to people. But I wonder, as you were rereading the book out loud, what hit you? What struck you forty years later about the book?

John Piper
Well, what struck me is that this is not preaching. That was my first impression. I realized in reading this that when I’m preaching, I’m so engaged with the people that I always make adjustments all the way along the way. I repeat a word, I redo a sentence, I recast something. I emphasize differently. With reading your own book, you are totally locked down. You can’t just wing it. You’ve got to read what’s really there, or it’s not an audiobook anymore. So that was the first impression. It was hard for me to just stay right there with the wording that I wrote. So that was a big deal. The other impression was I realized, when I read the book, my goodness, I’ve been singing one note for a long time! My ideas and my insights have not changed on this, and I pondered why that is. Is that a bad thing or a good thing that you don’t change your ideas over forty years? And I think, given the nature of this book and how fundamental it is to what I think, it’s because what it says is—I think—so close to the heart of why the universe exists that you can’t alter it. If you get close to saying it the way you want to say it, then that’s it. I mean, the universe and God and the Bible are not changing, and so if you get something as right as you think you can get it, then yep, say the same thing forty years later. So that was the second impression. It’s hard to read, and, goodness, I’ve said these things for a long time.

Matt Tully
On that second point, I’m just struck that when you are attempting to speak to, in many ways and in all the ways, the most fundamental realities of the universe, the most fundamental truths that Scripture reveals to us, to your point, it is, in its own way, a very unchanging message. It’s a very stable message. And yet, as we’ll see in our discussion today, there are some facets of how you’ve communicated this message that I think at times people have questions about or struggle with. And I think that’s maybe part of why the way that you communicated this in this book was so eye-opening for so many people. I think that’s been part of the resonance. To jump back a little bit from that for right now, what was behind your decision to move Desiring God away from a different publisher—the publisher who you originally published the book with—to Crossway in particular?

John Piper
I’ve worked with Crossway since 1990, roughly. I think my first book was published in 1990 with Crossway. So, more than thirty years. And what I love about Crossway, and I’ve published dozens of books with Crossway, is that we are of one mind about so many great things. I love that relationship. I love the ministry mindset, meaning Desiring God and Crossway can do a lot of creative things to get this book into the hands of people in the third world of different translations. And Crossway is willing to be so flexible. They’re not driven by the profit motive the way so many publishers are. So that was just huge. And then the last thing I would say with regard to the switch to Crossway is it is simply beautiful. Crossway has spared no effort in the selection of the paper, the typeface, the cover, the spine, the sutures. I have loved the commitment to excellence at every kind of level of excellence that Crossway has committed to me over the years. So, it was not hard to make this choice.

Matt Tully
Well, I think I can speak for everyone at Crossway that you and everyone at Desiring God have been good partners to us over the years, and we love the privilege of getting to steward the books that you’ve brought to us over the years. Big picture, John: Where does Desiring God fit within everything that you’ve written over the last four decades?

John Piper
I’ve tried to find a word that gets that right. One answer would be to say that if a person asks me, “What’s a Piper book that captures best, most penetratingly, and most fully the heartbeat of what you’ve lived for in your preaching and your teaching and your pastoring and your writing?” This is it. That’s what I would say. Go to Desiring God. Start there first. I’m tempted to say the book Providence, which you also published, but Providence is just too big for most people.

Matt Tully
It’s a tome.

John Piper
It’s just out of a lot of people’s league, and it’s really not quite as focused as this. So that’s the first answer is it is the book that I would suggest that anybody read who wanted to find out quickly the answer to, What have you lived for? What have you fought for? What have you dreamed for? What’s your ministry about? And I’ve wondered what’s the word that captures that? And I don’t think the word foundational does it. I’ve thought about that. Is it the foundational book? And I’ll say no. There are other books that are way more foundational in building pillars underneath the truth. Foundations are like made out of cinder blocks in the basement, and you always forget about them. You want to know what’s going on in the kitchen and what’s going on in the bedroom and what’s going on in the den, not the foundation. And the book is about that. It’s about the kitchen and the den. It’s about these practical things. And so foundation is just not adequate. So I thought maybe the best word I can come up with is essential. It’s the essential Piper read if you want to know what makes him tick.

Matt Tully
And would you say that, as the essential read, it would be a good starting place for someone who has never read one of your books or is new to this idea of Christian Hedonism, which we’ll get to in a little bit?

John Piper
My answer to that is almost always yes. The reason I say almost is because some people have found the book heavy sledding. It’s 300 pages. I’d say it’s written at the level of a C. S. Lewis or a J. I. Packer or an R. C. Sproul. And some people find that difficult. And so there’s the little version of it called The Dangerous Duty of Delight, which carries the same message and it’s shorter and simpler. But I think most people do not find it off-putting because of the demanding nature of its thought. I think people like that. You win their trust when you show you’re not shooting from the hip here; you’ve really given a lot of thought to what you’re saying.

11:08 - A Significant Moment of Awakening

Matt Tully
I would just challenge anyone to just read the first chapter. And I think if they read the first chapter and give it the time they need to give it, they’ll find that it is accessible, and yet it is eyeopening, to say the least. Let’s jump in a little bit to the big ideas that you try to address in this book. You open Desiring God by reflecting on a belief that you had as a young Christian—this idea that to really be loving and worshiping God fully and correctly, it had to be a very selfless kind of thing. Loving him without expecting anything from him in return. But one of the things you highlight in the book in this introduction is how you started to realize, as a young man, that Scripture actually paints a different picture of what it means to worship and love God. So I wonder if you can just walk us through that moment of realization and what that actually meant for you.

John Piper
At least for me, autobiographically, it’s very significant that there is a moment of awakening to what this book means to me. And it was the fall of 1968. It was in a hermeneutics class (which is a big, fancy name for principles of interpretation) with Dan Fuller. It was one paragraph in his hermeneutic syllabus which began with the title “We Are Far Too Easily Pleased.” I saw he had quotes around it, so I thought, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody say that before. I come with the assumption that my problem with sin is that I want to be pleased; I want to be pleased, and that’s a problem. And here is a quote that says the problem of the world is that we’re far too easily pleased. And I said, “Who said that?” And the answer is C. S. Lewis said that. I said, “Where did he say that? I want to know what he meant.” And of course the paragraph is about what Lewis meant. So I head off to Roman’s Bookstore down on Pasadena’s Colorado Avenue, and I find this little blue book called The Weight of Glory. And I would just say to anybody get the weight of glory and read the first page. It’ll change your life. It really will. After that you don’t need to read Piper. Just one page from C. S. Lewis. And what he said there was that famous line: “The problem with the world is not that we want to be pleased, but that we are far too easily pleased. We are like children making mud pies in the slums because we cannot imagine what it is like to have a holiday at the sea.” So God is the holiday at the sea. Everything we give our lives to in this world is mud pies in the slum. And suddenly, he’s saying that and it’s what turned my world upside down. John Piper, you got your problem all wrong. Your problem is not that you want to be happy, but that you haven’t found it in God to the degree that you should. Psalm 16:11 just blew up my world: “At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” So, fullness (you can’t improve on full) and forever (you can’t improve on forever). I said, “That’s it!” If God is really that satisfying, really that enjoyable, my problems are not at all that I want to be happy; my problems are that I’m looking in the wrong places, and I’m not devoting the kind of hedonistic effort to being happy as I could be and should be in God. And after that discovery, everything started to fall into place, because the big questions then were you’ve been taught by your dad and your mom that whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. How does this relate to the glory of God? You’ve been taught that love is the fulfillment of the whole law. How does this relate to loving people? And the rest of my life has been trying to figure those two questions out. How does it relate to the glory of God, this pursuit of happiness in God? And how does it relate to loving people? Because it sounds kind of selfish. Oh my, I got a lot of answers to those questions. That’s all I’ve thought about for fifty years.

Matt Tully
This is a bit of an aside, but just hearing you share that story of that classroom and of that syllabus, the fact that you came across a single line in a syllabus for a class that then changed your life and set you on a trajectory of an awakening of understanding of who God really is and the world that he made. It strikes me that it fits so well with two things that I know have been an emphasis of yours over the years. You’ve already referenced one, the providence of God—just a deep sense of God’s sovereignty over our lives. But then also on top of that, the power of a single paragraph or a single sentence. Books don’t change lives; it’s that single line that God can use in his providence to just open us to new truths. I wonder if you could just briefly reflect on those two themes.

John Piper
Both of those are absolutely right. That is what I think about. I say to students that you don’t plan your life. You think you do, and it’s right. The Bible says that the plans belong to man, but the steps are ordered from the Lord. We plan and we think, and then suddenly we read a paragraph. And you’re right. In my life, books don’t change me; paragraphs change me, or lines change me, because they just crack through old crusty ideas that were just half-baked and unbiblical, and they open you to reality. So absolutely, God has been very, very good to me. When I think about how I chose that school, how I chose that course, it’s utterly fortuitous. Just crazy random. I probably went to that school because there were palm trees in the catalog. Are you kidding me? And my life gets totally changed in this classroom. Oh my goodness! God is so merciful and so good to cover for our stupid priorities.

Matt Tully
And not just cover for them, but use them positively in these incredible ways. It is amazing. I’m sure all of us listening could take some time and think through these providential moments—moments that supersede our foolishness—that God used in really incredible ways.

John Piper
Oh my goodness. That’s right. People ask me, “Why’d you marry Noël?” I said, “I just could not not marry her. I loved her. I fell head over heels in love, crazy love.” He gave me the right one.

18:27 - The Genius of Christian Hedonism

Matt Tully
Going back to this idea of desiring God, that we are right to desire the goodness of God in these things, why do you think it is that so many Christians even today still struggle with that same confusion about pure worship or pure love of God? We think we have to do it in some kind of disinterested way for it to really count. It seems like that’s still a challenge for many Christians.

John Piper
I think, at least for believers (I’m not talking about people off to the side who are not believers) who care about the Bible, they have read so many times and been told so many times in the Bible and by preachers, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me . . . . If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it. If you lose it, you’ll save it.” And basically, then you walk into a worship service with this aura—it’s kind of vague, but it’s powerful and real—the essence of virtuous self-denial. So this is a high virtuous moment on Sunday morning. The most precious thing we can do. So what will worship be? Well, it has to be self-denial. So what will I deny? Well, I guess I should deny the desire to be happy. It’s amorphous. It’s amorphous the way it works. It feels wrong to want to be glad. It feels wrong because self-denial is what we’ve been taught. And so I think that exists. And then the second thing that exists is human beings, by and large, are sheep. That’s why shepherds exist in the Bible. They’re sheep. We’re sheep. Sheep don’t, by nature, take hold of a sentence in the Bible and ring it for all it’s worth, penetrate through it to reality, and realize, Oh my goodness! My vague notions about that sentence are all wrong! I think self-denial is a really good example because the way Jesus argues in that sentence is if you try to save your life, you’ll lose it. And you don’t want to lose it, do you? No. You want to save it. Well, then lose it, and you’ll save it. And you realize that’s a totally hedonistic argument. What does save mean? It means be happy forever. So he’s arguing that, for your own good, you deny yourself. And then you have to step back and say, Okay, well what about to deny and what about to pursue here? And the answer is you’re to deny any kind of pursuit of earthly pleasure that would keep you from being a loving person or keep you from glorifying God. That’s what you deny. But you don’t deny the desire to find joy in Jesus. You don’t deny the desire to find joy in loving other people. Just imagine walking into the presence of God and he says, Why are you here? And you say, Well, I’m not supposed to pursue happiness, so I’m here because you told me to come, and I’m doing my duty. That’s a lousy answer. That’s a God-demeaning answer. The right answer to why you’re here is, In your presence is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. You told me that, Father, and that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I want to be with you because with you his happiness forever. So that combination of my happiness at that moment and God being honored at that moment is the genius of Christian Hedonism. And we all know it’s true. With our wives, we know it’s true. If your wife says, Why do you want to go out with me tonight? and you say, Because good husbands have a duty, and they’re supposed to go out with their wives. Doing your duty is a noble thing, and that’s why we’re going out. Instead of saying, There’s nothing I’d rather do than spend the evening with you. Never in 1,000 years would a wife say to a person, Nothing you’d rather do. All you ever think about is your own happiness. No, because your pursuit of happiness in her honors her. And that’s what it is with God. So on Sunday morning we come hungry. I get really ticked if I hear a pastor say, All you people are coming here to get, but you need to be coming here to give! And I’m saying that is not the problem with your church. They need to come hungry, and you’re supposed to feed them with a banquet that makes them ecstatic in God. So, no, that’s not the problem. We are far too easily pleased. We should come to church to be pleased, to be happy in God. Oh my goodness, my life has been saved more than once by singing with God’s people on Sunday morning about 1,000 reasons to be happy in him. And he has altered my attitudes and saved my marriage and I’m a better person because of pursuing happiness in God on Sunday morning. Especially with God’s people. A shared joy is a double joy.

Matt Tully
I’m just struck by how often, because of our sin and because of our tendency to try to fulfill that longing for happiness in the wrong things, we at times impugn that underlying desire for happiness as the problem. But it’s not the problem. That’s good. We just need to fulfill it in the right thing.

John Piper
You mentioned my sin. I was going to say one other thing about why people are hesitant to catch on to the pursuit of joy in God as being a way to glorify God. And I think Satan and sin is a huge part of the answer. The Bible talks about deceitful desires. Now, that’s a very interesting phrase in Ephesians. What’s a deceitful desire? Satan’s specialty is deceitful desires, meaning he creates desires that deceive us into thinking they’re better than God. I was just talking to a brother this afternoon who’s got a man in his small group who’s sleeping with a girl, and he’s leading worship on Sunday. And he said, “I’ve got to do some discipline here.” And I said, You sure do. But I thought, What a crazy, crazy rationalization a person must go through to have a deceitful desire that contrary to God’s will. He thinks, I want this girl, and that is more to be desired than eternal happiness of God. That’s insane. And that’s the way Satan keeps us from honoring God—by desiring other things more.

25:44 - Is God Seeking His Own Glory and God Seeking Our Good Mutually Exclusive?

Matt Tully
John, the underlying vision of God that undergirds this whole idea of Christian Hedonism, this vision of God’s nature and his purposes, I think it can be surprising and even unsettling to people when they first encounter it. Because you point out how although many Christians often define God’s goals, his purposes, his designs as things like redeeming the world or saving sinners or restoring creation, and those are all true things that God is pursuing, but that those aren’t the actual fundamental objective of God in the universe. That there’s actually something much deeper that he is pursuing, and that is his own glory. And I think that truth can be hard for Christians—certainly, non-Christians, but even many Christians—to really understand and embrace. And when you say it as clearly and as starkly as you do in this book and other places, it can feel almost off-putting to us. Why is that? And how do you respond to somebody who chafes a little bit at the idea that God is most passionate about his own glory?

John Piper
If God were a man and he said the sorts of things that he says, he would be absolutely vain and arrogant. If I walk into a room full of people and I say, “Attention everybody! I’ve come to be worshiped, so everybody bow down right now, because I hate self-exultation. I hate that. So I want you to worship me!” I would be sick and I should be fired immediately. That’s what God says on every page of his Bible. So why shouldn’t it be off-putting? It shouldn’t be off-putting because he’s God. He’s infinitely good, infinitely wise, infinitely strong, infinitely beautiful. He is all-satisfying, which means he’s the one being in the universe for whom self-exultation is the highest virtue and the most loving act. Because what does a loving person do if he’s God? He’s stuck with being God. (God forgive me for speaking like I like to speak.) But he’s just stuck with being glorious. And how does an infinitely glorious person love another person? And he doesn’t do it by deflecting attention from himself. That’s why it’s unloving for me to want to be worshiped. I’m deflecting people from what would make them happy. When God says, “Look at me. Love me. I am the greatest. I am infinitely valuable, infinitely loving, infinitely good, infinitely holy. Look at me,” he’s doing what is loving because he’s upholding, preserving, offering what is most satisfying. So to love a person is to be willing to make great sacrifices, and God’s was the sacrifice of his Son, in order for that person to be eternally thrilled and infinitely happy. And that’s God’s goal for his people. That’s what he says over and over: “Come to me, drink from me.” That passage Jeremiah 2, where he says, “My people have committed two great evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and carved out for themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.” “Far too easily pleased” is exactly what that is saying. I’m on a crusade not to let that happen. That’s my life. I just don’t want people to do that. I don’t want them to leave the living water fountain and carve out broken cisterns for themselves. So I’m doing everything I can to lure people into a hedonistic pursuit of God above all things. So the answer to your question is 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. Piper cannot make anybody happy. God makes people infinitely happy.

Matt Tully
And I think that’s part of the trick here (and I don’t mean that in a demeaning way) that we have to wrestle with as we think about what you’re saying here is breaking this idea that God seeking his own glory and God seeking our good are mutually exclusive things. Actually, they are inextricably bound together as two sides of the same coin, or whatever metaphor you would use.

John Piper
They are one thing. That was very close to the heart of my discovery is that I grew up in a Christian home knowing that the pursuit of God’s glory was absolutely necessary because of 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” A second thing that I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt was that I wanted to be happy and I could not not want to be happy. I could no more not want to be happy than I could not get hungry if I skipped three meals. Hunger just comes. The desire for happiness is built into our souls. Our hearts are desire factories, and that’s the way God made us. The two come together not in conflict if you realize that God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in him. I can’t yet improve on that sentence because it captures the book, it captures my life and what I’ve devoted myself to. If I can help people be satisfied in God, I’ve accomplished two glorious things. One, God gets glory; and two, they get joy.

32:06 - A Life of Endless Suffering and Endless Happiness

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that phrase Christian Hedonism. You’ve mentioned that term already, and it’s a term that you first introduced, at least in a big way, in Desiring God (the book). I did a quick search on desiringgod.org (the website for your ministry), and it shows up over 4,000 times on your site—Christian Hedonism.

John Piper
Well, my, my, my. What you can find out with Google.

Matt Tully
It’s a term that some people love and other people still, forty years later, can bristle at a little bit. You’ve said many times that you don’t really care, ultimately, about the term itself. You really care about the reality behind the term, behind the label. But I wonder if you could give us a brief one- to two-minute case for why that term, Christian Hedonism, is a great way to help people understand what you’re talking about.

John Piper
I don’t know if it’s a great way; it is my way. It was a fateful call. I don’t regret it. I’m happy to say that if the term goes out of existence and the reality remains in people’s hearts, I would have no regrets whatsoever. I don’t make a claim that it’s the ideal phrase. Here’s what I think. The word hedonism in my 11th edition of Webster’s College Dictionary, when I checked it out, the first definition was “a life devoted to pleasure.” And I said, “That’s it. That’s my life. I am devoted to obeying the command, ‘Delight yourself in the Lord.’ It’s in the Bible. Why wouldn’t you obey it?” And so my life is devoted to pursuing delight in the Lord. “Rejoice always,” Paul says. No let up. Not 90 percent of the time. Rejoice always. So you’ve got these commands, why wouldn’t you obey them? So hedonism means “the pursuit of pleasure.” And the Bible uses the word pleasure, not just joy, like it’s some big, noble word but pleasure is a bad word. The Bible uses pleasure in “in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” So let’s put the word Christian in front of it to make sure everybody knows we’re not talking about secular hedonism, but Christianism Hedonism, which creates a conflict in people’s minds. I know that, and I think that’s good. I like perplexing titles. I don’t always win these battles at Desiring God to title my books. People say, “That will just confuse people.” I say confusion is a negative word. It’s provoking. It’s provocative. Isn’t that a positive word? So, yes, it’s provocative, and so it’s risky, right? Some people can be so put off by it that they won’t read the book, or they start reading it and they throw it in a garbage can. I’ve had six people in my life say, “I hated this book, and a year later I read it and it changed my life.” Something happened. They weren’t ready for it. And sometimes that’s the term hedonism, and sometimes it’s just the reality that they didn’t like. So the word hedonism is literally true. The word Christian is meant to clarify. I have never been able to think of another phrase that is not utterly pedestrian and pointless. Everybody writes about how to be happy in God, and so why would I want to choose something so obvious as that? What I wrote, or maybe what Justin Taylor in his publisher’s introduction, said, “Piper said, ‘It is a helpful nickname for a constellation of biblical convictions that no other phrase captures.’” I say, yeah, I wrote that, and that’s right. That’s what I feel. These are atypical ideas, as historic and biblical as they are, and therefore I choose an atypical label.

Matt Tully
The thing that I love about it is the way that it feels like the term is like putting its finger in your eye of the assumption or the misunderstanding that the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of happiness is ultimately an unchristian thing. It just kind of sticks its finger in that and makes you think about that idea that is it possible the highest calling of the Christian is to pursue joy? For me that was a very powerful thing when I first encountered it, and I think it accomplished what you originally intended there.

John Piper
Let me just say one quick thing because of what you just said, namely that life can be about but pursuing happiness and that’s okay. Now, in the categories of many people, that sounds very superficial. Why would I want to read a book that’s so superficial? And I realized that, and the first edition did not have a chapter on suffering. So I added, in the second edition, an entire chapter on suffering. That has been fateful in Desiring God, because Desiring God as a website and as a ministry is now loved and appreciated by thousands of people precisely because we’re not superficial. When we talk happiness, when we talk pleasure, it is almost always in the same breath as suffering, because Paul said “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” Paul said off-the-chart things that make me think he was from another planet. He said, “In all our afflictions, we are overflowing with joy.” So that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. So I think what protects the book from the kind of superficial misunderstanding of let’s all be chipper, let’s all be praise God anyhow, let’s all throw our hands in the air and be happy, happy, happy all the time, as as though little kids in Minneapolis don’t get shot, like they were two days ago. I live in a world of endless suffering as a pastor. Somebody in my church is always weeping. So how can I write a superficial book? So I just wanted to clarify that yes, yes, yes, I love the word hedonism. I love the pursuit of pleasure. But it is a tear-stained face most of the time when we are rejoicing in God.

39:08 - Advice for Reading *Desiring God* for the First Time

Matt Tully
And just as a plug for desiringgod.org, right now I see that you have a series called “Desiring God in the Dark” that is doing exactly this. It’s looking at these themes of Christian Hedonism in the midst of the darkness that we often face in our lives when we’re suffering in different ways. And so I think that is something that’s been so helpful for many people. John, maybe a final couple of questions. What kind of posture would you want to encourage somebody to take on if they’re coming to this book, Desiring God, for the first time? What kind of counsel would you give to them?

John Piper
I would want them to balance two things. On the one hand, the Bible says (Paul says) “test all things” and “hold fast to what is good.” I’m not God, and Desiring God is not the Bible. The Bible is the Bible, and the Bible alone has infallible authority. I don’t. Therefore, test it. So, Bible in one hand, and Desiring God in the other. That’s the first thing. The thing you balance that with is excessive suspicion distorts reality. And so somehow we need a kind of sympathetic read of whatever we read. Not gullible, but sympathetic. Because if you don’t have some measure of sympathy with the author and what he’s trying to do, you’ll be so reactive that you’ll twist almost everything he says into what he doesn’t mean. So I would ask for readers, by all means, don’t treat this as the Bible. Test all things by the Bible, but beware of the distorting effects of excessive suspicion.

Matt Tully
As a final question, as you think about your ministry (Desiring God) that you founded, the church that you’ve been a part of for decades now, all the books that you’ve written over the years, and then you think about the next chapter of your life, what’s your hope for not just this book in particular, Desiring God, but your hope your impact on the church and helping the church to perhaps recover or see afresh this core truth of Christian Hedonism in our generation?

John Piper
I really do not have a hard time answering that question. I set a course so many years ago with Philippians 1:20. Number one, I want the book and my life and every institution that I’ve been a part of starting to be a means of magnifying the glory of Christ. Paul said, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God is that I might magnify the glory of Christ, whether I live or whether I die.” I want to magnify. So I want my life to be a magnifying glass for the worth and the beauty and the greatness of God in Christ—all that God is for us in Christ. Secondly, I want to be the means of thousands of lost souls and saints finding everlasting happiness in him. I want to save souls. I want to see the unreached people’s reached. I want to see churches full of people who have found the treasure, like the man who stumbled upon the treasure in the field and sold everything he had to buy that treasure. And it says he sold everything with joy. With joy! So he’s a pure Christian Hedonist while he is selling all of his books and his computer and his house to have Jesus. So that’s what I want. And thirdly, to convince people those are the same goal. If I could help you be happy in Jesus so that you delight in him above all things, you will have lived for his glory. So I would accomplish both of my goals in one act. That’s what the book says. That’s what I live for.

Matt Tully
John, it was a pleasure speaking with you today, and we thank you for publishing this important book forty years ago and doing it afresh with Crossway today. Thank you so much.

John Piper
I’m so glad we’re doing it together. Thank you.

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