Desiring God (Revised Edition)

Preface

Revised for the 2025 Edition

This is a serious book about being happy in God. It's about happiness because that is what our Creator commands: "Delight yourself in the Lord" (Ps. 37:4). And it is serious because, as Jeremy Taylor said, "God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy."1

The heroes of this book are Jesus, who endured the cross for the joy that was set before him (Heb. 12:2); the apostle Paul, who was "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2 Cor. 6:10); Jonathan Edwards, who deeply savored the sweet sovereignty of God; C. S. Lewis, who knew that the Lord "finds our desires not too strong but too weak"2; and all the missionaries who have left everything for Jesus and in the end said, "I never made a sacrifice."

Almost forty years have passed since Desiring God first appeared in 1986. The significance of a truth is judged in part by whether over time it has transforming power in very different circumstances. What about the message of this book? Its context today is dramatically different from when it was first published.

Things have changed personally, culturally, and globally. Since its first edition, my body and mind have passed from being forty years old to being almost eighty. My marriage advanced from a seventeen-year-old marriage to a fifty-seven-year-old marriage.

My pastorate at Bethlehem Baptist Church extended from six years to thirty-three years. And since laying down those responsibilities in 2013, I have been working full time for Desiring God, the ministry that took its name from this book. There were four young sons when I first wrote this book. Today, there are five mature adults, including a daughter, and they all have contributed to make me the grandfather of fifteen.

Culturally and globally, the world is a different place. Consider some of the events: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Rwandan genocide, the global AIDS pandemic, Y2K, 9/11, the rise of jihadist terrorism, the ceaseless Middle East wars, deadly tsunamis, the historic Obama presidency, the rise of China as a world force, global warming, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Or consider the transformation of popular culture by developments that were not prominent-some inconceivable-before 1986: laptop computers, smartphones, debit cards, DVDs (which have come and gone), pay-at-the-pump gasoline, digital cameras (which have been replaced by phones in every pocket), Viagra, flat-screen TVs, the internet, streaming services, blogging, web commerce, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, electric cars, artificial intelligence, the ongoing sexual revolution with so-called same-sex marriage and so-called transgenderism, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing battle for the unborn. And who but God knows what revolutionary events and inventions will happen between my writing these lines and your reading them?

In other words, things have changed. This is the world I live in with profound appreciation and serious concern. But as personally astute and as culturally awake as I try to be, what seems plain to me is that the really important, deep, and lasting things in life have not changed-and will never change. And, therefore, my commitment to the message of this book has not changed. The truth that I unfold here is my life. That God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him continues to be a spectacular and precious truth in my mind and heart. It has sustained me through my eighth decade of life, and I do not doubt that, because of Jesus, it will carry me home.

In the 1995 revised edition, I added a chapter called "Suffering: The Sacrifice of Christian Hedonism." The reason was partly biblical, partly global, and partly autobiographical. Biblically, it is plain that God has appointed suffering for all his children. "Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22). "Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Tim. 3:12).

Globally, it is increasingly plain that a bold stand for the uniqueness of Christ crucified, not to mention the finishing of the Great Commission among hostile peoples, will cost the church suffering and martyrs. If the message of this book is to have any credibility, it must give an account of itself in this world of fear and suffering. Increasingly, I am drawn to the apostle's experience described in the words "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing" (2 Cor. 6:10).

Autobiographically, the years since the first edition of Desiring God have been the hardest. One of the older women of our church quipped to us at our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, "The first twenty-five are the hardest." We have not found it to be so. We are well past the end of the second twenty-five, and undoubtedly they were the hardest.

The body ages, and things go wrong. Marriage, we found, passes through deep water as husband and wife pass through midlife and beyond. Yes, we made it. But we will not diminish the disquietude of those years. We were not ashamed to seek help. God has been good to us-much kinder than we deserve. As we passed through our fourth decade of marriage, I thought I might be far enough along to write a seasoned book on marriage. It is called This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence.3 The paradox of that title is at the root of what we learned. Now, moving through our eighth decade of life and our sixth decade of marriage, the roots are deep, the covenant is solid, the love is sweet. Life is hard, and God is good.

During these four decades since Desiring God first appeared, I have been testing it and applying its vision in connection with more and more of life, ministry, and God. The more I do so, the more persuaded I become that it will bear all the weight I can put on it.4 The more I reflect, and the more I minister, and the more I live, the more all-encompassing the vision of God and life in this book becomes.

The older I get, the more I am persuaded that Nehemiah 8:10 is crucial for living and dying well: "The joy of the Lord is your strength." As we grow older and our bodies weaken, we must learn from the Puritan pastor Richard Baxter (who died in 1691) to redouble our efforts to find strength from spiritual joy, not natural supplies. He prayed, "May the Living God, who is the portion and rest of the saints, make these our carnal minds so spiritual, and our earthly hearts so heavenly, that loving Him, and delighting in Him, may be the work of our lives."5 When delighting in God is the work of our lives (which I call Christian Hedonism), there will be an inner strength for ministries of love to the very end.

J. I. Packer described this dynamic in Baxter's life: "The hope of heaven brought him joy, and joy brought him strength, and so, like John Calvin before him and George Whitefield after him (two verifiable examples) and, it would seem, like the apostle Paul himself . . . he was astoundingly enabled to labor on, accomplishing more than would ever have seemed possible in a single lifetime."6 But not only does the pursuit of joy in God give strength to endure; it is also the key to breaking the power of sin on our way to heaven. Matthew Henry, another Puritan pastor, put it like this: "The joy of the Lord will arm us against the assaults of our spiritual enemies and put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks."7

This is the great business of life-to "put our mouths out of taste for those pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks." I know of no other way to triumph over sin long term than by faith to die with Christ to our old seductions-that is, to gain a distaste for them because of a superior satisfaction in all that God is for us in Christ. One of the reasons this book is still "working" after almost forty years is that this truth simply does not and will not change. God remains gloriously all-satisfying. The human heart remains a ceaseless factory of desires. Sin remains powerfully and suicidally appealing. The battle remains: Where will we drink? Where will we feast? Therefore, Desiring God is still a compelling and urgent message. Feast on God.

I never tire of saying and savoring the truth that God's passion to be glorified and our passion to be satisfied are one experience in the Christ-exalting act of worship-singing in the sanctuary and suffering in the streets. Baxter said it like this:

[God's] glorifying himself and the saving of his people are not two decrees with God, but one decree, to glorify his mercy in their salvation, though we may say that one is the end of the other: so I think they should be with us together indeed.8

We get the mercy; he gets the glory. We get the happiness in him; he gets the honor from us.

If God would be pleased to use this book to raise up one man or one woman in this line of serious and happy saints who inspired it, then those of us who have rejoiced in the making of this book would delight...