Love

The only way to glorify the all-sufficiency of God in worship is to come to him because “in [his] presence there is fullness of joy; / at [his] right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11, ESV). This has been the main point so far, and we could call it vertical Christian Hedonism. Between man and God, on the vertical axis of life, the pursuit of pleasure is not just tolerable—it is mandatory: “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Ps. 37:4, ESV)! The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever.

But now, what about horizontal Christian Hedonism? What about our relationship with other people? Is disinterested benevolence the ideal among men? Or is the pursuit of pleasure proper and indeed mandatory for every kind of human love that pleases God?

According to the prophet Micah, God has commanded us not simply to be kind, but to “love kindness” (Micah 6:8). The command is not just to do acts of mercy but to delight to be merciful or to want to be merciful. If you love being merciful, how can you keep from satisfying your own desire in doing acts of mercy? How can you keep from seeking your own joy in acts of love when your joy consists in being loving? Does obedience to the command to “love kindness” mean you must disobey the teaching of 1 Corinthians 13:5 that love should “seek not its own”?

But if love rejoices in the choices it makes, it cannot be disinterested. It cannot be indifferent to its own joy! To rejoice in an act is to get joy from it. And this joy is “gain.” It may be that there is much more gain than this or that this joy is, in fact, the firstfruits of an indestructible and eternal joy. At this point, though, the least we can say is that Paul does not think the moral value of an act of love is ruined when we are motivated to do it by the anticipation of our own joy in it and from it. If it were, then a bad man who hated the prospect of loving could engage in pure love since he would take no joy in it, while a good man who delighted in the prospect of loving could not love since he would “gain” joy from it and thus ruin it.

Therefore, 1 Corinthians 13:5 (“Love seeks not its own”) does not stand in the way of the thesis that the pursuit of pleasure is an essential motive for every good deed. In fact, surprisingly, the context supports it by saying that “love rejoices with the truth” and by implying that one should be vigilant in love so as not to lose one’s “gain”—the gain of joy that comes in being a loving person, both now and forever.