“Pleasure, unalloyed and unending, is God’s purpose for His people in every aspect and activity of their fellowship with Him. ‘You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand’ (Ps. 16:11).
I hold the heady doctrine that no pleasures are so frequent or intense as those of the grateful, devoted, single-minded, whole-hearted, self-denying Christian.
I maintain that the delights of work and leisure, of friendship and family, of eating and mating, of arts and crafts, of playing and watching games, of finding out and making things, of helping other people, and all the other noble pleasures that life affords, are doubled for the Christian.
For, as the cheerful old Puritans used to say (no, sir, that is not a misprint, nor a Freudian lapse; I mean Puritans — the real, historical Puritans, as distinct from the smug sourpusses of last-century Anglo-American imagination), the Christian tastes God in all his or her pleasures, and this increases them, whereas for other people pleasure brings with it a sense of hollowness which reduces it.”
–J.I. Packer, God Has Spoken: Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 14.
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