Sunday January 3, 2016 | Jeremy Jernigan
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
John 10:10
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
This week we heard from a guest speaker, Jeremy Jernigan, teach on the topic of his new book, Redeeming Pleasure. The topic of pleasure within the church has often been shied away from because of an assumption that pleasure is connected with guilt and shame. Jeremy emphasized the need to seek pleasure on God’s terms where we will experience maximum pleasure rather than seeking pleasure on our own terms which ultimately leads to less pleasure.
Jeremy Jernigan, our guest speaker, began his teaching by emphasizing the discomfort of the topic of pleasure within the church along with the needs to expand the definition of pleasure beyond merely sexual pleasure. Jeremy defined pleasure as “a cause or source of enjoyment or delight”. Ultimately our journey for God and our journey for pleasure should be the same journey, but this has been confused and warped by our culture and our misunderstanding and mistrust of God’s character and plan for us. Within our culture we more often than need have two extremes when it comes to pleasure. We either emphasize no pleasure in our pursuit of God OR we emphasize seeking out all pleasure and abandon God. In the back of our minds most of us believe that there is a sense of guilt within the seeking out of pleasure.
The problem with the cultural understanding of pleasure is that seeking out pleasure on ones own terms drives it. We want what we want when we want it and oftentimes miss the truest pleasure in our pursuit of pleasure. Jeremy drove this point home through a story of an interaction with a banker who randomly asked him his opinion on pre-marital sex. The interaction ended with Jeremy emphasizing that the guilt she was feeling in her current relationship was driven by her avoidance of God’s design for her to experience maximum pleasure through sex in the context of marriage. This was the deepest truth of the narrative between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:6-7). The eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was driven by a desire to have our own knowledge apart from God and it broke our dependence on God. When we pursue pleasure on our own terms apart from God we experience dangerous consequences that lead to shame.
The final story Jeremy shared was of the hot water leak in his house that flooded the remainder of the house. The leak temporarily provided a warm tile in his bathroom while being oblivious to the greater leak under the surface. Jeremy notes that the heat on the floor was not worth the leak in the house. This pleasure of the heated floor was a bad trade for the resulting pain, money, time and overall headache of a forced home renovation. This truth is easy to see in the example of a water leak, but can much harder to see in our everyday pursuit of pleasure. We ultimately are required to trust in Jesus in a way that most of us don’t do on a daily basis. We live with a default setting of skepticism or believing that God is not as beautiful and loving as He actually is in the person of Jesus. In order to redeem the beauty of pleasure we need to redeem our picture of the Jesus-looking God who is not holding out on us, but is yearning for us to experience true life (John 10:10) and true pleasure by seeking pleasure on His terms rather than our own.