I love the sensation of chocolate ice cream. Especially when it has chips and chunks and ripples. The more chocolate variety, the better. I am capable of consuming strangely large bowls of this delightful dessert. And the word for the experience: pleasure.

A lot of Christians generally have an awkward relationship with pleasure. We spend a lot of time, for example, warning against letting earthly pleasures get in the way of your faithfulness to God. On the other hand, we also affirm that all good things—including pleasure—are a gift from God. To some, the term “pleasure” itself has sinful connotations, whereas other hear the word as neutral or good. Marketing people like to use “sinful” as a positive adjective for pleasure, to show that something is really pleasurable.

God is, contrary to some beliefs, not anti-pleasure. After all, pleasure is His own invention. He made all things in this world that we enjoy and our ability to enjoy them. But there are lots of ways to misunderstand what that means for us. Recently, I’ve given some thought to basic kinds of pleasure and their role in the Christian life. Pleasures like food, alcohol, and sex tend to be important parts of life, for better or worse. So how exactly do we turn them for the better?

Honestly, my wisdom is limited. These are thorny topics that Christians (and other people) have been wrestling with for centuries. I can’t give all the answers. But a few things have occurred to me lately that seem to line up both with Scripture and what I see in the world around me.

Every pleasure has multiple purposes. Pleasure itself is one of the purposes, but usually God gifts pleasure to lead us to things that we need for other reasons. Food, for example, nourishes our bodies. Meals also tend to nourish our relationships with family or friends. People bond when they break bread. Eating points us to our dependence on God: since we can’t live without refilling our stomachs each day, we more easily remember that we rely on the One who feeds all creatures for our very existence. In a similar way, every kind of pleasure is designed for more than one end.

Pleasures are better perfected by serving more purposes, and they lose their worth by serving fewer. To go back to the food example, food is at its worst when it serves nothing but your tastebuds. Without the nutrition, the fellowship, and the gratitude to God, you have only gluttony. Or consider alcohol. Scripture tends to associate it with maturity, celebration, fellowship, royalty, and the like. A glass of wine at a royal wedding feast symbolizes the perfected pleasure of alcohol. On the other hand, a drunk youth pacifying his misery alone is alcohol at its lowest.

A, or the, highest end of any pleasure is love. This is why feasting, drinking, and sex are all tied biblically to relationships. Feasting is primarily for households or communities. Sex is for two people alone in the most intimate and exclusive of settings. But both belong in the contexts of those relationships. Feasting alone is gluttony, and sexual pleasure alone is pathetic. By keeping pleasures focused on the relationships to which they belong, we keep them oriented toward love. And love, of both the God who crafted all pleasures and the people with whom we share them, is what everything is about.

Finally, legalism is a bad idea. You should not take anything I wrote here as a checklist. I am not saying you should stop half-dressed at the bedpost to check with your wife if you’re fulfilling all of the purposes of sex. Just remember that pleasures are a gift from God, but they don’t exist solely for their own sake. There is a lot going on with any pleasure. Our job is simply to receive them with thanksgiving, enjoying them as we use them to serve as best as possible our neighbors and our God.

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