To be human is to be a pleasure-seeker.
We are fond of thinking of the dissipated fellow partying all night, drunken, sleeping around, and experimenting with drugs as a pleasure-seeker. We are not likely to think of the sturdy fellow who goes to school, gets a job, and raises a family as a pleasure-seeker. Instead, we call him a level-headed chap. Then there are the philanthropists and volunteers. We call them altruistic. Certainly they are not pleasure-seekers. And finally, there is the missionary who travels to a different land to face certain death. He cannot be a pleasure-seeker, we say. We either call him crazy or a hero for his self-sacrifice.
Yet each of these is a pleasure-seeker.
Pleasure seeking does not distinguish one man from another, for pleasure seeking is a trait common to man. What separates one man from another is not that he seeks pleasure, but what he seeks pleasure in.
Furthermore, what separates one man from another is his relative success at not only seeking but finding pleasure.
The dissipated man is forever chasing a fleeting pleasure, a buzz that quickly fades. The steady man may have traded these “buzzes” for the pleasures of stability and comfort. The altruistic man has denied the buzz of the dissipated man–and perhaps even the stability and comforts of the stead man–for the pleasures of “doing the right thing” or the laud of other men.
All of these are pleasure-seekers, seeking pleasure in a variety of things. Each man trades some form of pleasure for another, depending on what he feels most likely to bring him long term pleasure. Some pleasures last longer than others. None of these last forever.
The Christian does the same thing. The difference is that while all these other pleasures are earthly and momentary, the Christian knows the source of true eternal pleasure.
The Chinese believers who face certain death as they seek a way into North Korea to share the gospel of Christ crucified and risen–they do so in pursuit of pleasure. They deem Christ the highest pleasure t be found–and are thus willing to forgo even fleshly life itself in order to chase after Him.
Crazy?
Only if God is not the eternal source of pleasure.
Heroes?
Perhaps.
Or maybe just the ultimate in pleasure-seekers.
God-seekers
(This is the beginning of my notes and reflections on Desiring God by John Piper. See other notes on the same topic by clicking the Desiring God tag.)