Note: This was written late one night about three years ago. It came up in my memories on Facebook, and so I’m republishing it here. Enjoy.
Late night thoughts from a once and former passionate hedonist
The devil did not invent pleasure. Pleasure finds its root in the God who made us for HIS great pleasure. All true pleasure is an echo of God’s own personality and character: God invented affectionate friendship, sexual pleasure, the endorphin rush, and that intense satisfaction one gets when they achieve something difficult after applying patience and diligence.
All of these things, the Lord Himself put into our design when He made us.
The only thing the devil has done is to rob us of our God-given right to pleasure by convincing us to obtain those pleasures through harming others and ourselves. He invented nothing. He rips God’s artistry from the canvas and profanes it, turning it into a vicious weapon. The enemy destroys. It’s all he can do because ALL good things, all TRULY good things, find their source in the Lord.
To be opposed to God is to be opposed to what IS truly good, truly holy, and truly pleasurable. To walk with the Lord is to abandon your own presumptions about what pleasure is and how it is obtained. To know the Lord is to have your own ideas about pleasure ripped from you and replaced with something true, something good, something … *divine* that one could not obtain on their own.
In the words of CS Lewis, whose work I find myself reading a lot of lately, “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
The enemy convinces us to drink in misery and call it euphoria.
He convinces us to use another person with disregard for their inward needs for devotion, cutting both parties and all associated with them to the quick as the soul cries out for true unyielding love.
He convinces us to risk our bodies, minds, and our very lives doing things that give the impression and emotional experience of achievement while accomplishing nothing, devouring our lives in things that are nothing more than a wisp of dust and ash in the breeze.
The enemy contrives to make us craft idols of things that will destroy us. He bids us bow down to the very excrement of humanity, praising it as the penultimate of achievements and most glorious of causes.
God simply calls us to Love Him, and by that love, we are granted every pleasure in its purest form for all eternity because the purest pleasure is that which we are designed for: to know God, to walk in His ways, and enjoy Him forever.
Christians are the only truly skilled hedonists, and none is so hedonistic as those who fling their lives to the wind in order to attain the affections of Christ.
To deny one’s self and take up the cross is to obtain the truest self one could ever possess: the eternal self, the completely functional self, the God-indwelt self because at the cross is where Christ suffered that He might OBTAIN His most desired and most pleasurable goal: to please the Father and obtain His bride cleansed from sin and united with Him for all eternity.
Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow Christ. This is what it means to truly live.
