The Christian knows that his ultimate joy is found in a saving relationship with God through Christ Jesus. The joy that the Christian knows in daily communion with God is greater than anything the world could offer (1 Peter 1:8) and provides the Christian with the ability to enjoy all of life’s good gifts in proportion.
In my work with pastors and Christian leaders, we talk about all the challenges that come with leading organizations. These discussions usually end up touching on the need for Christians to deal with powerful and conflicting emotions in a godly way. But for many of the men I work with, a basic biblical understanding of emotions is something they’ve never even thought about. So when the topic of emotions comes up, I often get the question, “What are the basic (or core) emotions?” I answer with my working list: fear, loneliness, anger, sadness, hurt, joy, disdain, guilt, and shame. The response to this list is usually, “Well, how can I feel as much joy and as little of the rest of the list as possible?” It is that question that often leads Christians into the despair of hedonism or cynicism.
Definitions of Despair
Hedonism is a philosophy of living—sometimes adopted explicitly and sometimes implicitly—that places the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. Because pleasure typically produces (momentary) joy, hedonists think they have found a way to maximize joy. But in the end, this way of living ends in despair.
Researchers have two ways of describing the despair that hedonists eventually experience. The first is hedonic adaptation. This is what hedonists experience when they adapt to their current level of pleasure, resulting in both a malaise and a need to pursue even more pleasure. The cycle is never-ending and ultimately unsatisfying. The second term that describes the eventual despair of the hedonist is anhedonia. This is more of a medical term that describes the apathy and numbness that some hedonists experience after the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. It turns out that God did not design our bodies to experience nonstop worldly pleasure without becoming numb to it.