Cheapest Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist

This book is key to understanding John Piper and his perspective on life, God, and anything else. I read the ten-year anniversary edition, which was well done, especially with the new chapter about suffering and the overly cute but effective poem that illustrates Christian Hedonism with Piper's thoughts about his wife on their anniversary.

Desiring God boils down to what is kind of a life motto for Piper: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Piper also gets a great deal of mileage out of another key phrase: The chief end of man is to glorify God BY enjoying Him forever. The rest of the book is, at its heart, research and padding to explain those two sentences, and Piper does it well. He uses his own translation of the Bible, which is impressive but not very conversational, and I often had trouble interpreting his quotations, so readers should be aware of that potential difficulty with the book. Still, it is well worth reading. It is a thorough analysis of many aspects of life, like love, marriage, money, suffering, missions, etc. Piper persuasively argues that we are commanded to pursue pleasure and to find it in God, and I especially recommend the book to people who have grown up in religious traditions that separate emotions from theology.

My main problem with Piper's books are that, while they are theologically solid, Piper tends to write page after page without bringing new points to his arguments. You can read every other page, generally, and understand his main ideas well. The first two chapters of the edition I read addressed this problem beautifully. Every few pages, Piper would give brief summaries of the arguments to come, with essentially a one-sentence distillation of each paragraph. Using that roadmap, I could easily pick out the points Piper wanted to make, and it made his work much more effective. The technique was abandoned by the third chapter, though, and Piper's writing quirks came back (to the point where I skimmed just the subheadings of the epilogue and skipped the appendices entirely, and I don't think I missed anything), which was disappointing, but the careful theology and the earnest heart were still on every page. It is a dense work, requiring time for reflection, so not everyone will enjoy it, but for someone willing to devote some serious time and energy to chewing on some often difficult spiritual principles, this book is terrific.Get more detail about Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist.