Lovers Of Pleasure...

In 2 Timothy 3:3-5 there is a list of negative trends that characterize life in “the last days”. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, etc. And then come these words: “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

Our modern pursuit of pleasure has skyrocketed. Today we are relentlessly pushing the pleasure button in our brain – and overloading a system that is not designed to be continuously stimulated. The result is a condition in which our brains slowly lose the capacity to give us real pleasure.

There is in the brain (the brain being the control center of the soul) a particular point – it’s called the locus acumbens –that allows us to experience pleasure. Most people refer to it as the pleasure center. There is no pleasure humans experience that doesn’t come from this small, specialized area of the brain.

It is not the locus for happiness. There is not one – it takes the whole soul and spirit to give you happiness. That is an important difference.

God designed the human body with physical limits. We have a limited amount of strength, example. We have a limited amount of time we can go without sleep or food. We must live within those limits. If we step outside them we’re in trouble.

We need to learn to live “inside the box” of our human limitations. The pleasure center is inside that box, and when we abuse it, when we over-stimulate it or tax it beyond its capabilities, we should not be surprised if we begin to have difficulty finding real happiness in anything.

I can hear some people protesting: “But the Lord gives us His joy. We don’t generate it ourselves – He gives it to us.” Right – but we need the brain to appreciate it.

We cannot fully experience the joy that comes from God when our brains are abused with over-stimulation. We have to live within the box if we are going to live a happy life. God does not give us happiness outside of our brain. It doesn’t work that way. We need a healthy pleasure center to be happy.

Today we are caught up in a world that is pushing the brain’s pleasure button too fast and too often. A simple thing, like just being together as a family, doesn’t give people the pleasure it once did. You’ll often hear young people say, “I’m bored around here.”

It isn’t just the children, though. A pastor of a church admitted, “I can’t find pleasure in anything anymore. I used to enjoy preaching, but I just don’t find pleasure in it. My children don’t give me any pleasure anymore. And just recently, I’ve noticed that I’m not even experiencing any pleasure with my wife. And what scares me most of all is that I don’t seem to be able to take any pleasure in God anymore.”

There are three major things which shut down a person’s pleasure center: depression, stimulant drugs and stimulating behaviors.

Depression today is typically brought on by the prolonged stress of our accelerated pace of life. We don’t know when to quit. Most of us are not sleeping enough. And we don’t have enough downtime.

For the last century, the pace of life has steadily accelerated, but about 12 years ago, it suddenly skyrocketed. What was the cause? The Internet! The Internet opened the door to continuous, relentless stimulation, to steady abuse of the brain’s pleasure center. The Internet and hyper-realistic video games devour people’s time for hours, even days, on end, and the opportunities for numbing the brain’s pleasure center rise exponentially.

The second major cause of pleasure center shut-down is stimulant drugs. Probably the most extreme stimulant drug, cocaine, is that it totally hijacks the pleasure system. When it reaches the pleasure center, nothing else can provide pleasure.

But the lesser stimulants such as caffeine present in many soft drinks can also provide a slow shut down to the pleasure center. And Pepsi, Coke, etc., are consumed in fantastic quantities today.

The third cause of pleasure center shut-down is over-indulgence in stimulating behavior, which can shut down the pleasure center just as effectively as depression and stimulant drugs.

Behaviors can be as stimulating as drugs. The pathways to the pleasure center use a neuro-transmitter called dopamine. In a newborn baby, the pathways to this pleasure center are un-encumbered. Have you watched the joy on a young baby’s face as it recognizes its mother? That’s the perfect pleasure system.

And it will stay that way for a lifetime if it isn’t abused. The problem is, faced with the stress of modern life and the continuous flow of stimulation, we are “pushing the pleasure button” too frequently. So barriers are built to that pure baby pathway. The more we overload the pleasure center, the higher the barrier goes. So we seek bigger and more pleasurable activities to get over that barrier to the pleasure center.

WE HAVE DEVELOPED A CULTURE WITH SUCH A HIGH BARRIER TO OUR PLEASURE CENTER THAT THE SIMPLE, LITTLE THINGS OF LIFE CAN NO LONGER GIVE US PLEASURE.

The pleasure center needs rest, folks. Multi-tasking overloads our system. Everything in the media, every television program, every movie, every music CD, is designed to give us higher and higher levels of stimulating responses. None of these exciting things are necessarily bad. What is bad is that they are unrelenting. There is little downtime. That’s the problem.

What can we do to help preserve a healthy pleasure center? It is a paradox. If you pursue too much pleasure, you upset your pleasure center. You have to find a way to maximize your pleasure center without overloading it. Fortunately, there are things you can do to achieve that.

Excitement is not happiness. In fact, it is the ultimate drug. It is excitement that people seek when engaging in any destructive or addictive behavior. Today people have the ability to experience excitement more than any generation in history - cell phones, digital music players, radio, cable TV, not to mention designer drugs.

But what is missing is imagination. We all, and especially children, need a creative hobby. We need to be creative in talking to family members and friends. We need to find simple non-exciting pleasure in walking the dog, doing chores, reading a book or magazine, learning a musical instrument, or foreign language, exercising – or just plain thinking.

If we want to experience the joy and the happiness that come from living in union with Christ, we have to “live inside the box” and not abuse the pleasure center He has given us.

[Back to Home]