Piper has written a lot of books and preached a lot of sermons. You can learn something amazing and biblical from everything he has said. But the best place to start, in my view, still remains Desiring God.
This is where Piper lays out most fully the foundations of “Christian Hedonism” — the truth that the great business of life is to glorify God by enjoying him and to see this joy reach its consummation as it serves others (joyfully) in love.
Here are the five convictions on which Christian Hedonism is built, as Piper lays them out in Desiring God:
- The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.
- We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.
- The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.
- The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love.
- To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is, the chief end of man is to glorify God BY enjoying him forever.