Those of you who know me know my background with Christian Hedonism. This was written on a forum, but I wanted to offer it to those of you who still check my site every once in a while. It’s nothing really new that some of you who have read Desiring God or have read some of my previous entries already know about. But perhaps it might strike a chord with you in a fresh way.
In some sense the most benevolent, generous person in the world seeks his own happiness in doing good to others, because he places his happiness in their good. His mind is so enlarged as to take them, as it were, into himself. Thus when they are happy, he feels it; he partakes with them, and is happy in their happiness. This is so far from being inconsistent with the freeness of beneficence, that, on the contrary, free benevolence and kindness consists in it.
Jonathan Edwards
As I was reading the “soulmate” thread, I was hearing several different perspectives on relationships and regarding our happiness or our denial of it in order to love someone.
I submit that if we abandon our pursuit of our own happiness, especially in the pursuit of a spouse, we cannot love them as God would want us to. This is a dangerous and risky statement because it’s open to incorrect application, hence I want to develop this idea.
Our society today has so elevated the idea that we must “follow our heart” instead of “our head” that it has made marriage stand on the foundation of pure romantic ecstasy, the initial “buzz” of a relationship which God has designed to assist in bringing two people together. This has resulted, at the least, in many marriage break-ups because once the initial, intense feelings that this person has caused subside, they begin looking elsewhere to get that same buzz. We do know that biblically this cannot be the only thing that holds a marriage together.
So there are those who have heralded biblical ideas like “self-denial” and such which are part and parcel to a biblical marriage. They correctly have identified that marital love is more than mere feelings. And that is true. Love in Ephesians 5, it is argued, is expressed in self-denial. So the key, they say, is to abandon your own happiness and sacrifice for your spouse.
The good of this popular teaching is that there is help in recognizing that love is more than feelings. It is a choice. But the harm it is causing is that love is not only a choice. It cannot be, otherwise the husband who dutifully chooses to buy roses for his wife on their anniversary yet has no feelings for her does not truly love her. He is a hypocrite when he gives her the roses and says “I love you.” To hold up FEELINGS and CHOICE as if they are opposites, or that one alone is genuine love is erroneous, unbiblical, and destructive not only to healthy marriages, but healthy relationships all around.
I think this is why we read things like “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28) and “A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 31:10). I think a more biblical way to speak of love would be to say: deny your own self-centered and exclusive pleasures and rather pursue your joy in the joy of your beloved. Christ’s love for the Church is illustrated clearly by His self-denial in Ephesians 5, but we err if we stop there and say, “So, husbands should deny themselves.” There’s an aim of Christ’s Self-denial, and that’s found in v. 27. “So that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” Why did Christ deny Himself temporary pleasures? To receive an eternal pleasure.
In conclusion of my opening remarks, we must conceive of self-denial as denying ourselves tin for the sake of gaining silver. We must not abandon our happiness, but rather regulate it in such a way that we make our spouse’s happiness our joy, so that when they are happy, we are happy. Truly, loving your wife is like loving yourself.
If you have thoughts, fire away. Disagree? Let me hear of it. I really think that the tenor of self-denial in the Bible is always an exchange of a deceitful, lesser pleasure in return for a genuine, greater pleasure. And if we say that we must deny our in-born desire for pleasure rather than aim it at what is ultimately most satisfying and pleasurable (namely, Christ Himself) we can neither love Christ nor love others as we ought. Jesus Himself went to the cross “for the joy that was set before Him” (Hebrews 12:2) and “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11).
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