How Can Pleasure Point Us To God?

How can pleasure point us to God?

Taste and see how good the LORD is! The one who takes refuge in him is truly happy! Psalm 34:8, CEB

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. C. S. LEWIS

THE MORE WE ENJOY pure pleasure, the closer we are to seeing God. If this seems wrong to us, we’re not understanding who God is and how he created us in the world.

In The Screwtape Letters, the demon Wormwood reports to Screwtape that he has lost his subject to God (“the Enemy”). Screwtape asks, “Could you not have seduced him?” He points out Wormwood’s error:

You . . . allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through country he really likes. . . . In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this?^a

Genuine pleasures, even simple ones, can point people to God. Satan’s strategy is to divorce pleasure from its logical connection with God. In doing so, he robs God of glory and us of happiness! If he can divorce God from pleasure, delight, and happiness, he can poison our view of God and make the Christian life appear unattractive and sin more attractive. If we believe there’s happiness without God, then we’ll seek happiness without God.

I’ve heard it said, “We should set our minds on God—no one and nothing else.” It sounds spiritual, but is it accurate? Clearly not, since Scripture commands us to think about “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). These true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and praiseworthy things aren’t God, but they’re rooted in his character. We should trace them back to him as we’d trace a sunbeam back to the sun.

So by all means, we should contemplate and enjoy all created goodness. But when we do so, we should thankfully worship God as its source, so that in thinking of and delighting in every good thing, we’ll be thinking of and delighting in our Lord.

The world is full of desperate people thirsting for gladness and trying to derive it from what cannot satisfy us for long. They eagerly drink from contaminated water surrounded by huge signs with neon letters flashing “Fun!” Sometimes there’s no fun at all, and often the fun quickly evaporates, leaving shame and regret. (If the signs were accurate, they would say “Deadly poison!”)

What people long for and desperately need can be found only in the “fountain of living waters”—God himself. God laments over the poor choices we make: “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).

When I’m thirsty, I don’t look up water on Wikipedia. I don’t go to social media to find out what others say about water. I don’t drink out of the nearest puddle. I go to the faucet and satisfy my thirst by drinking some of the world’s best water from the Bull Run water system where I live in Oregon.

I find God to be pure, refreshing, and satisfying. My happiest days are those I drink most deeply of him. I also know that if I don’t drink of him, I will drink something else—something that will leave me thirsty, dissatisfied, and sick. For idols cannot satisfy. Evangelist George Whitefield (1714–1770) wrote, “I drank of God’s pleasure as out of a river. Oh that all were made partakers of this living water.”^b

Jonestown was a socialist community in South America. In 1978, after murdering a US congressman and four others, Jim Jones gathered his cult members, who had relocated from the United States to Guyana, and served them a grape-flavored drink laced with cyanide, thereby killing himself and 912 of his followers.

Hence the expression “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” which means, “Don’t follow anyone blindly—if you do, it’ll likely kill you.” This is good advice for gullible people who are prone to believe that counterfeits will really deliver happiness.

Most offers of happiness are deceptions. People were wrong to trust Jim Jones. But we are right to trust Jesus, God’s Son, who went to the cross to bring us into relationship with God. Jesus is fully worthy of our trust, and he makes this offer: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37-38).

We’re free to be unhappy. We’re free to search for happiness where it can’t be found. What we’re not free to do is reinvent God, the universe, or ourselves so that what isn’t from God will bring us happiness.

Are you thirsty for happiness—for meaning, peace, contentment? Jesus invites you to join hundreds of millions throughout history and across the globe, and a multitude of those now living in the visible presence of the fountain of living waters, to come to him and drink the best water in the universe—the only refreshment that will ever fully and eternally satisfy.

Jesus, you offer us living water. Draw us to taste of you daily and see that you are good so that we will come back to you to be satisfied again and again. Increase our thirst for you, and increase our satisfaction in being with you so that we will drink deeper of you each day. May we experience your refreshment so that we never settle for those broken cisterns that can hold no water.