How to Enjoy God—Summer Reading

This summer break Christian Students on Campus will be reading through How to Enjoy God and How to Practice the Enjoyment of God by Witness Lee.

One of the most striking facts about the Christian life is that God is enjoyable—not just that God provides joy through various created means, but that He Himself is enjoyable.

I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy. –Psalm 43:4

Since by creation man is a vessel designed to contain God (2 Cor. 4:7), and since God by nature is an overflow of joy and delight, the Christian life as a life of containing God is a life of supreme joy. The biblical record points to this fact repeatedly. Psalm 43:4 nicely captures this sentiment—God is my exceeding joy. Based on who God is and what He’s done, and because of faith’s lively appropriation of these divine facts, the Bible consistently posits joy as the Christian norm.

A Common Problem

And yet often times we find that our present experience does not tally with what we’re reading in the inspired record, with what we should be experiencing. We may know that the Christian life should be joyful, but we struggle with finding joy or maintaining it. This can be true not only in extreme circumstances (like a pandemic) when we’re threatened with fear and anxiety, but also in the humdrum wagon ruts in which we live our normal lives—the same boring commute, the same exhausting homework, the same relationship drama.

If the secret to the Christian life is joy, what is the secret to joy? If you are like most Christians, you have probably struggled with a lack of deep and consistent joy. If so, this is the book for you.

Overview of the Book

How to Enjoy God begins with a sweeping presentation of the biblical concept of enjoying God in both the Old and New Testament. You may be shocked by how extensively this concept is interwoven into the divine revelation. From many different angles, the Bible presents God as man’s enjoyment. God is man’s life, spouse, food, drink, home, strength—all vivid images of warmblooded enjoyment. Simply seeing this revelation will inspire you. Seeing how to apply it will revolutionize you.

After presenting the biblical view that God wants to be man’s enjoyment, the bulk of this book discusses how to practically enjoy God. Two fundamental ways are highlighted—reading the Bible and prayer. But before we can truly benefit from these practices, the typical and natural understanding of these must be deconstructed—reading for information and praying for things.

Many Christians operate under this basic premise, that we read to know things and that we pray to have things. And while these are certainly involved, they aren’t the focus, and they can easily downgrade into religious performance devoid of the enjoyment of God Himself.

This book aims to restore us to the enjoyment of God in word and prayer. After clearing room for this kind of understanding, much space is devoted to a detailed explanation (almost like a lab manual or field guide) to the practice of reading and praying for the enjoyment of God.

Read With Us

So, read along with us this summer! We’ll start Monday, May 25th and finish August 7th, reading just on weekdays. Download the reading schedule PDF! Or save the image to your phone below.

You’ll get the most out of the reading experience if you purchase a hard copy or ebook (iBooks, Kindle) that you can highlight and mark up. But you can also read the book online for free (scroll down to find it by title). If you are on Goodreads, you can add the book to one of your shelves. Let’s pray that God will lead us into a new level of enjoyment this summer!

By: Kyle Barton