We need to be careful here about our having been made for pleasure. It’s just too easy for pleasure to become an end in itself, rather than the fruit of knowing and being with the Lord. Today’s excerpt from The Kingdom Turn is found on page 132:
“It’s clear from Genesis 2 alone that God created people to know pleasure – all kinds of pleasures. Pleasure is that state of happiness, wellbeing, peace, delight, and satisfaction that everyone seeks in one way or another. God wants us to know pleasure – aesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, sensual and sexual, vocational and creative, communal and spiritual. We are made for pleasure in all these ways.
“But the problem that has plagued humankind from Genesis 3 on is that we tend to seek pleasure as an end in itself. We want to know pleasure for its own sake – really, for our own sake – and so we make pleasure, of one kind and degree or another, the thing we seek above all else in life. In the process, we forget about God or relegate Him to a secondary place in our experience. If we look to Him at all it is so that He might facilitate our achieving the pleasure we seek from this, that, or some other experience or thing.
“God Who made us for pleasure becomes for many of us just a means to the pleasure we seek, not the end and greatest pleasure of all. Pleasure thus becomes our god, supplanting God Himself and setting us on a quest for that which can only disappoint.
“When we make pleasures our gods we become fools, as Solomon discovered the hard way. No earthly pleasure of any kind, nor any combination nor accumulation of earthly pleasures, nor any pleasures we can imagine, can fulfill the deep-seated desire for lasting, pure, perfect pleasure which God has planted in the human soul.”
For reflection or discussion
1. What can we do to enhance the fullness of pleasure we have in knowing the Lord?
2. How can knowing the pleasure of the Lord shape the way we think about all other pleasures?
In God’s Presence, David wrote, are fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Of all life’s pleasures, knowing the Lord is the best, the most satisfying, and the only one that will last forever. Share today’s podcast with a friend. Encourage your friends to subscribe to Read Moore, then get together to discuss what you’re learning. Your copy of The Kingdom Turn is waiting for you in The Ailbe Bookstore.
T. M. Moore
