Dear Michael,
It’s so good to hear from you again. It stirs my heart to hear of your thrill in discovering Christian Hedonism. Yes, we glorify God when we enjoy him! Yes, our deepest desire and God’s highest aim are in harmony. Yes, we must (but as John Piper would say, not that kind of must) pursue our joy in him.
I, too, experienced the freedom of these truths like the first sunrise over Eden. It is all too good not to be true.
Yet you say a question has lately haunted you: “Do I enjoy God enough?” You admit that thinking about God sometimes leaves you unmoved, like “a car that can’t get traction.” Making matters worse, you find it easy, almost unavoidable, to enjoy other things. Your fiancée’s smile, In-N-Out, pickup basketball, olives (which I find baffling), even video games bring you such delight that you often feel “a fog of guilt” around enjoying them. You’re anxious that God is less glorified in you because you find satisfaction in things that aren’t God. You wonder if you need to take the chainsaw of asceticism to any pleasure that rises “too high” (whatever that means).
Let me see if I can help you by examining the logic of gratitude.
G.K. Chesterton once said, “The test of all happiness is gratitude” (Orthodoxy, 74). He means no one can be hugely happy who is not hugely grateful. And Chesterton is referring to Christian happiness, the kind of happiness in God that you’re hunting. Before his conversion, Chesterton marveled at the gift of “two miraculous legs,” but he had no one to thank for them. Like his thick thighs (GKC was a big man), his gratitude remained on the ground. His delight ended with the gift, and so his happiness remained incomplete. In other words, there is an inseparable connection between deep joy and gratitude.
You remember Lewis’s word about praise? It applies equally well to gratitude, which is a particular kind of praise. “The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praise [or thank] most, while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praise [or thank] least. . . . praise almost seems to be inner health made audible” (Reflections on the Psalms, 94). Paul certainly highlights the latter half of this quote in Romans 1. What are the features of the unrighteous there? They refuse to honor God “or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21). Ingratitude, it seems, is a defining mark of God-ignorers, idolaters, and the generally grumpy.
But why? Why do unhappiness and ingratitude go hand in hand? The question answers itself when we consider the definition of gratitude. Gratitude is joy in the goodwill of a giver occasioned by a gift. Gratitude is a kind of happiness that begins with a gift and ends with a giver.
Imagine that every gift you receive from God (the chief among them being salvation and special revelation) is a firework. It starts out on the ground, but — unlike Chesterton’s “two miraculous legs” — it was never meant to stay there. Someone designed it to fly up into the sky and detonate in a dazzling kaleidoscope of colors. Gratitude lights the fuse; it ensures that the gift doesn’t abort on the ground but rather draws your eyes upward. Gratitude makes the gift what the Father of lights always intended it to be — a flaming arrow to heaven.
Without gratitude, both the gift and our joy remain inert. Here’s the rest of that Lewis quote: “I think we delight to [give thanks for] what we enjoy because the [thanks] not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation” (Reflections on the Psalms, 95). Without thanksgiving, we will never be anywhere near as happy in God as he means us to be. Like bungee jumping off a bridge, giving thanks takes us as deep into the gift as we can go, then bounces us back to the immovable Giver.
All this goes a long way toward explaining why, when we come to Scripture, we find an almost frantic impulse among the saints to thank God for his gifts. Their hearts especially erupt with gratitude at the gifts (and, yes, they are gifts) of his word and what he has done to save us (e.g., Psalm 9:1; 136:1–26; 119:1–176). Those who aim to be happy in God, those most filled with the Spirit of divine joy, not only give thanks often; they give “thanks always and for everything to God the Father” (Ephesians 5:20). “Always” — are you kidding? “For everything” — really? For Paul, all roads don’t lead to Rome; they all lead to God, paved in thanksgiving.
I’m reminded of your favorite book, Moby Dick, and the monomania of Captain Ahab. The man could not be distracted from the white whale. All the convoluted hallways of his mind ended on Moby Dick. No matter which way the Pequod’s prow pointed, no matter what weather heaven handed him, no matter whose company he kept, his heart’s compass always wheeled on the whale. Ahab is synonymous with obsession. And yet if we take Paul seriously, he commends an approach to gratitude every bit as locked in as Ahab.
Why? Because Paul knows gratitude goes right to the core of being happy in God. They cannot be separated. The man says, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18). Notice the direct connection between joy and thanks. He makes the ultimate object of this joy explicit elsewhere: “Rejoice in the Lord always. . . . In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:4–6). In both cases, Paul commends thank-filled prayers as a means of actively rejoicing in God. The irrepressible muttering of genuine joy is thanks.
Do you see what this means? If gratitude gets right near what it means to rejoice in the Lord, and if gratitude is always occasioned by a gift, then joy in God and joy in his gifts are not at odds. Godwardness and giftwardness do not compete when gratitude tethers them together. As we would expect, Paul beats us to the punch here: “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4). It turns out, we need not reconcile gifts with the Giver since they are already fast friends. Idolatry may try to separate them, but idolatry cannot survive in a heart full of Godward gratitude.
When you receive God’s gifts with gratitude, two things happen. First, you are positioned to receive them as God intended. We have a whole instruction manual for God’s gifts in his word: sex, but only if you have a ring; wine, but not to drunkenness; food, but not to gluttony; work, but with rest. All things within their limits, governed by your conscience, the good of others, and glory (Romans 14:5; 15:1–21; 1 Corinthians 10:23–31). Only those far too easily pleased, not nearly hedonistic enough, ignore God’s designs and guidelines. But within those boundaries, guided by love, go hog wild.
Second, your enjoyment of the gift never ends with the gift (even when the gift is God’s word and ways). Yes, you should enjoy the thing simply for what it is — as God intended. But gratitude ensures the delight never ends there. Gratitude elevates your delight to the Giver. And here’s where God’s design is truly breathtaking. All his gifts are anamnetic: They remind us of him. Their goodness is a glimpse of his, their truth an inkling of his, their beauty a beam of his. Your fiancée’s smile is a miniature of God’s gigantic joy. And because all God’s gifts taste of God, because each one uniquely declares his glory, because they bear the fingerprints of that right hand at which there are forever pleasures, because they smell like Eden, they all can and should lead us to marvel at God himself. Godly gratitude always ends in adoration.
This brings us back full circle to Chesterton. Even before he found God, he realized everything around him was a gift. But of course, reason demands that gifts must have a Giver. A gift without a giver is just as insane as a son without a father, a story without an author, or magic without a magician. For Chesterton, to recognize the gift as a gift infallibly led him to the Giver. And that’s exactly how God designed the world to work.
So, maybe your wheels have been spinning on God because you’ve been ignoring his gifts as gifts. Lewis reminds us that the good things of this world give us “‘bearings’ on the Bright Blur,” who is God, making him “brighter but less blurry” (Letters to Malcolm, 122). The normative way God designed us to enjoy him is through his gifts — his world, his word, his work, and his people, mediated by his Spirit.
Brother, you can’t escape God’s gifts. He plunged you into a world full of them. You eat gifts, breathe gifts, listen to gifts, love gifts, walk on gifts, play in gifts, work with gifts, laugh at gifts, live by gifts. Every day, all day, you encounter nothing but gifts from God. So fully enjoy God’s gifts for what they are: gifts, not God. Then let gratitude rocket your joy sky-high. Let thanksgiving consummate your delight in the Giver.
For the sake of your joy and God’s glory, next time you find your wheels spinning on the question, “Do I enjoy God enough?” try giving it some traction by asking, “How can I be more Captain-Ahab grateful?”
Desiring God