My aim in this message is to show the relationships between the word of God, the glory of God, the satisfactionof the human soul, and the certaintyof the human mind.
And the main point is that, in and through the word of God — the Bible — the glory of God becomes theground of the mind’s certainty, and the goal of the soul’s satisfaction.

Or to put it another way: In the Bible, the glory of God reveals itself to be inescapably real to the mind, and incomparably rewarding to the heart. Nothing could be more true, and nothing could be more precious. Undeniable truth, unsurpassed treasure.
This has an amazing implication, and I’ll state it four ways.
1) The quest for truth and the quest for joy turn out to be the same quest.
2) The path to unshakable convictionand the path to unendingcontentment are the same path.
3) Knowing for sure, and rejoicingforever, happen by the same discovery of the glory of God in the Word of God.
4) The way you know for sure what istrue, and the way you find your supreme treasure are the same, namely, by seeing the glory of God in the word of God, especially in the saving work of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

The Goal of the Soul’s Satisfaction

I have devoted most of my life trying to understand and proclaim and live the relationship between God’s glory and our happiness. In God’s providence, this is partly because of the way I grew up. And partly because the ultimate goal of God in creating and redeeming the world is really written on the human heart. Every human heart!
Deep down, under the repressions of sin, is written: You were made for the glory of God. You were made to reflect the worth of your Maker. And you were made to do this by being more satisfied in him than in anything else. Every person knows, deep down, that we magnify the worth of what we enjoy most. And we know that God is most to be magnified. God is worth more than anything. And therefore God is to be enjoyed more than anything. This is written on the heart of every person.
But sin — the bondage to self-exaltation, instead of God-exaltation — has torn the single fabric of our happiness and God’s glory apart. And neither of them can come to a proper expression without the other.
So when I was growing up, I knew two things beyond the shadow of a doubt. One, because of what my parents taught me and what I saw in the Bible, and the other because of what I saw in my own soul, and could not deny. On the one hand, I knew that God intended me to glorify him. My Father loved the glory of God, and1 Corinthians 10:31 was woven into my mind — clarity and certainty: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
And on the other hand, I knew I wanted to be happy. And I knew this was not a choice that I was making. I didn’t choose to want to be happy. When I pondered who I was, at the bottom of my being, I was a wanter, a desirer, a craver. My heart was — and is — a desire factory. And I know now what I didn’t know then, namely, that this is the way human beings were created by God. This is not a result of fall. This is not sin. This is part of what it means to be human. Humans are designed by God to desire — to seek and find happiness, to long for and discover joy, to want and attain full and lasting satisfaction . Namely, happiness in God, joy in God, satisfaction in God.
But when I was growing up, I couldn’t put the two together: God’s demand for glory and my craving for happiness. For some reason, these two always seemed to be at odds. It seemed that I would have to choose — as if that were possible — between being happy and glorifying God. There were subtle messages that seemed to say: Are you willing to lay down your desires and choose God’s will? And there are Bible verses that sound just like that. Like 1 Peter 4:2, “[You should live] the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human desires but for the will of God.” And Mark 8:34, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
And so the thought that God never intended his greatest glory and our greatest happiness to be alternatives either didn’t occur to me or didn’t take root the way it should have. The thought that somehow God might be glorified in me by my being happy in him, wasn’t part of my conscious faith.
And then when I was about 22 years old everything began to change. Three waves of new insight broke over me. It was terrifying and exhilarating. And changed the rest of my life. I would not be here tonight without them.
First, I saw that the pursuit of God’s glory was not only supposed to be my ultimate goal, but that it was also God’s ultimate goal. From cover the cover the Bible showed God doing everything he does for his glory — to uphold and display and communicate his own greatness and beauty to the world.
     For my name’s sake I defer my anger, 
     for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, 
     that I may not cut you off. 
     Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; 
     I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. 
     For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, 
     for how should my name be profaned? 
     My glory I will not give to another. (Isaiah 48:9–11)
This raised the stake of my pursuit of the glory of God as high as imaginable. I was being called to join God in God’s self-exaltation.
The second wave that broke over me was the discovery that my desires were not too strong but too weak, and that the remedy for my early perplexity was not getting rid of desires but glutting them on God.
I saw this first in C.S. Lewis, standing in Vroman’s Bookstore on Colorado Avenue in Pasadena, California reading the first page of The Weight of Glory.
The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.
If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, 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.
This was amazing to me. Then I began to see it all over the Bible.
  • As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? (Psalm 42:1–2)
  • Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy. (Psalm 43:4)
  • Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)
  • Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! (Psalm 100:2)
  • Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. (Philippians 4:4)
This mandate from God to enjoy God was not marginal. This was central and pervasive. Being satisfied in God was not icing on the cake of Christianity. It was the essence and the heart of Christianity. Christianity is not a religion of will power and decisions to do things we don’t want to do. It is a supernatural new birth of the human heart to want God more than we want anything. Desires for God are not peripheral. They demanded and they are essential.
And then came the third wave — the insight that God being glorified and my being satisfied were not in competition. There were not even separate. They both come about in the same act: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. I saw this with the help of Jonathan Edwards where he said,
God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to . . . their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing in . . . the manifestations which He makes of Himself. . . . God is glorified not only by His glory’s being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. (“Miscellanies” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 13, [Yale University Press, 1994], 495 [Miscellany 448], emphasis added)
Then I saw it in Philippians 1:20–21:
It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
How is Christ magnified in Paul’s body? Whether by life or death! How by death? For to me to die is gain! Why? Because we go to be with him. Which means Christ is magnified — shown to be magnificent — when I am so satisfied in him that when death takes from me every earthly possession, I say: Gain. Christ is most magnified in me when I am most satisfied in him, especially in the moments of suffering and death.
And I have spent the last — almost fifty years now — trying to work out the implications of that truth — which I call Christian Hedonism. The truth that the pathway to glorifying God and to satisfying the soul are the same path. If you try to separate them, you will not glorify God, and you will not find lasting happiness.

The Ground of the Mind’s Certainty

Now suppose someone says, at this point, “You’ve staked an awful lot on the Bible. How do you know it’s true? You treat it as God’s word. Why? How do you know it’s God’s word?
And here is the amazing thing, and the point this message. That question does not take us in a different direction than we have been going for the last half hour. On the contrary, as I said at the beginning:
  • The quest for truth and the quest for joy turn out to be the same quest.
  • The path to unshakableconviction and the path to unending contentment are the same path.
  • Knowing for sure, and rejoicingforever, happen in the same discovery of the glory of God in the word of God.
  • The way that God has planned for us to know for sure what is true, and the way he planned for us to find your supreme treasure, are the same, namely, by seeing the glory of God in the word of God, especially in the saving work of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.