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Excerpts are taken from Desiring God, revised edition, (Multnomah, 2011); The Pleasures of God, revised edition, (Multnomah, 2013); When I Don’t Desire God, Crossway, 2004); and www.desiringGod.org.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

The Ironic Effect:
Deepened Unshared Convictions

The Synthesis:
When Mind Meets Heart

The Problem:
Too Easily Pleased

The Old Idea:
Christian Hedonism from the Greats

The Highest Virtue:
Why God Seeks His Own Glory

The Goal:
Beyond Desire and Delight

The Ministry:
Love Seeks Reward

The Creation:
Wielding the World for Joy’s Sake

The Incomparable:
God Is Happy and Free

INTRODUCTION

John Piper

C.S. Lewis died fifty years ago this year. “More than a generation after his death, Lewis’s works are now more popular and widely read than at any point during his lifetime.”1 His thought is so creative and so profound and so extensive that Alister McGrath says, “Half a century after his death, the process of receiving and interpreting Lewis has still only begun.”2

I put Lewis in the top three writers who have influenced how I read and respond to the world. Yes, the world is a book to be read. And few people could read like Lewis. When Clyde Kilby wrote an anthology of Lewis’s writings he titled it A Mind Awake. He might have called it “An Awakening Mind.” This is the effect it has. His alertness to reality is contagious.

My tribute to Lewis is scattered all through my writings and sermons. I want to thank Jonathan Parnell for gathering together all the parts of this book and providing the editorial sutures that transform them into a readable flow. This is our celebration of Lewis’s extraordinary gift of being Awake to Wonder.

The Magisterial Humility of C.S. Lewis

One way to appreciate C.S. Lewis is to see how his Christian humility shaped his life and work. Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, said that the “new voice” with which he spoke after his conversion had an “unmistakable note of magisterial humility.”3

What does “magisterial humility” look like? That is what this introduction is about.

Self-Forgetfulness

I first met Lewis’s humility embodied in one of his foremost American advocates in the 1960s, Clyde Kilby. ...