Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
In my work with pastors and Christian leaders, we talk about all the challenges that come with leading organizations. These discussions usually end up touching on the need for Christians to deal with powerful and conflicting emotions in a godly way. But for many of the men I work with, a basic biblical understanding of emotions is something they’ve never even thought about. So when the topic of emotions comes up, I often get the question, “What are the basic (or core) emotions?” I answer with my working list: fear, loneliness, anger, sadness, hurt, joy, disdain, guilt, and shame. The response to this list is usually, “Well, how can I feel as much joy and as little of the rest of the list as possible?” It is that question that often leads Christians into the despair of hedonism or cynicism.
definitions of despair
Hedonism is a philosophy of living—sometimes adopted explicitly and sometimes implicitly—that places the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Because pleasure typically produces (momentary) joy, hedonists think they have found a way to maximize joy. But in the end, this way of living ends in despair.
Researchers have two ways of describing the despair that hedonists eventually experience. The first is hedonic adaptation. This is what hedonists experience when they adapt to their current level of pleasure, resulting in both a malaise and a need to pursue even more pleasure. The cycle is never-ending and ultimately unsatisfying. The second term that describes the eventual despair of the hedonist is anhedonia. This is more of a medical term that describes the apathy and numbness that some hedonists experience after the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. It turns out that God did not design our bodies to experience nonstop worldly pleasure without becoming numb to it.
Cynicism is a philosophy of living that sees the emptiness of the pleasures of the world and develops a low view and low expectation of people and the future. The cynic opts for a life of meager simplicity because he believes that joy is ultimately unattainable. So a cynical person is going to be distrustful that anything good or any deep and abiding pleasure is attainable. The cynic finds a faux joy in the expectation of not expecting to experience any joy. The problem with cynicism, aside from its unbiblical view of the world and what God has created, is that you cannot pre-grieve life’s future disappointments. Researchers have noted this as well.
So hedonism and cynicism are unbiblical and ineffective ways of dealing with our natural desire for joy. If you pursue joy with reckless abandon, you will end up striving for more and more while never attaining lasting joy. If you give up the pursuit of joy, adopting a morbid expectation about the future and people, you will spend your life experiencing sorrow and grief for events that may never happen or closing yourself off from experiencing true joy.
Is there an answer?
Christian joy
The Christian doctrine of joy is the antidote for the hedonist and the cynic. But the Christian view of joy rests on truths that only the Christian affirms. First, we live in a world that was created good but is fallen. God created the world to be enjoyed as His people profess Him as their highest joy. Family, food, fellowship, exhilarating experiences, and a day’s work well done are all joy-producing, though all of them, for a time, are filled with the disappointments and thorns of sin. A quick read through the book of Ecclesiastes will help the Christian grasp the tension of a good world fallen.
Second, the life of the Christian is patterned on the life of Jesus, following the scheme of humiliation and then exaltation. Jesus’ life was one of suffering (though still marked by joy) that was followed by deep and inexpressible joy after the resurrection (Heb. 12:2). The Christian’s life will follow the same pattern— suffering and joy mingled now with inexpressible joy to come.
Finally, the Christian knows that his ultimate joy is found in a saving relationship with God through Christ Jesus. The joy that the Christian knows in daily communion with God is greater than anything the world could offer (1 Peter 1:8) and provides the Christian with the ability to enjoy all of life’s good gifts in proportion. Only when God is our greatest joy will we be inoculated against both hedonism and cynicism.