Welcome back to Aspastor John. This summer Pastor John is out of the studio preaching in Belfast in Scotland before returning to the States for a 40-day writing leave to finish up a book on Providence on the sovereignty of God.

A book he started last summer and hopes to finish this summer.

I cannot wait to see it and all of it. The travel, the book writing and this very podcast is all made possible by you.

We are supported by the prayers and the funding of God's people. So thank you for generously investing in this important and eternal work.

So with Pastor John Busy we're diving into our archive of 1500 episodes and this summer we're pulling out some of your favorites.

About once every 50 episodes we release one that touches a nerve and touches the 300,000 play mark.

These are the elite episodes in our six and a half year history. We only have about 30 of them and here's one of them.

Today's question gets to the heart of what we do here at DesiringGod.org and the question comes to us from Barry in Columbus, Ohio.

Pastor John I have a history question for you about the DG slogan. God is most glorified and us when we are most satisfied in him.

How did the slogan come to be written? Did it come to you alone or were others involved in how?

Did Christian hedonism flow from the statement or was the statement a distillation after the theology was already developed?

What role did the line from the Westminster Confession of Faith play in your own statement?

Thank you for your diligence and precision in all of your teaching over the years.

Now this would be an interesting little research project for somebody to do. Maybe you Tony you're good at this.

I haven't done it but my guess is that an electronic copy of Piper's collected works exists somewhere which came out this year.

Those collected works came out this year and with a search you could probably find out or anybody could, I suppose if they had it, find out what was chronologically the first appearance of that phrase.

God is most glorified and us when we're most satisfied in him in all my published writings. I don't have any idea what the answer to that is.

But let me try to answer Barry's questions as best as I can reconstruct things from my memory.

First, the vision of life called Christian hedonism preceded by quite a few years, the slogan, God is most glorified and us when we're most satisfied in him.

My guess is if you date my awareness of these things, my discovery of these things from age 22, which I would, roughly, it was probably another 12 or 15 years before I ever used that statement.

I don't know when I first used it but I'm sure that I was thinking in terms of Christian hedonism long before that formulation ever came along.

What I said for years was that one of the greatest discoveries I ever made was that God's passion to be glorified in John Piper's and John Piper's passion to be happy were not at odds because they came to fulfillment in one and the same act, namely the act of worship.

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