The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, “what’s your main purpose?,” and answers, “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
John Piper famously says that God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in him. In other words, we glorify God by enjoying him.
This isn’t just our chief purpose, but our chief desire, too. When we take the deep dive into life with God we will find that “pleasures evermore” await us (Psalm 16:11). Think about that: ever-deepening, ever-satisfying pleasure. Sounds pretty good.
Yet we are so quick to settle because our desires are askew.
C.S. Lewis, take it away:
“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.”
Since Lewis wrote those words, our mud pie making typically (and slavishly) follows the lead of the massive entertainment industry.
Consider what pastor Eugene Peterson wrote in 1980:
“We try to get [joy] through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of another’s imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary – a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away. We cannot make ourselves joyful. Joy cannot be commanded, purchased or arranged.”
Thanks to our phones, we now carry the entertainment industry in our pockets.
This handiness of our phones makes our “mud-pie making” all too easy.
Don’t slap mud-pies together when “a holiday at the sea” awaits those who live life in Him.