As to the object of your affections, in an especial manner, let it be the cross of Christ, which has exceeding efficacy towards the disappointment of the whole work of indwelling sin. "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. 6:14). The cross of Christ he [the Apostle Paul] gloried and rejoiced in; this his heart was set upon; and these were the effects of it--it crucified the world unto him, made it a dead and undesirable thing. The baits and pleasures of sin are taken all of them out of the world. ... If the heart be filled with the cross of Christ, it casts death and undesirableness upon them all; it leaves no seeming beauty, no appearing pleasure or comeliness, in them. ... Labor, therefore, to fill your hearts with the cross of Christ ... that there may be no room for sin.

John Owen, Mortification of Sin in Believers

Some Christians take the path of stoicism in the fight against sensuality. It doesn't work. It's not biblical. It is hopelessly weak and ineffective. And the reason it fails is that the power of sin comes from its promise of pleasure and is meant to be defeated by the ... promise of superior pleasure in God, not by raw human willpower. Willpower religion, when it succeeds, gets glory for the will. It produces legalists, not lovers.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 103

From C. S. Lewis's "The Weight of Glory":

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. 

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

C. S. Lewis on pleasure, gratitude, and adoration:

"Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility. . . . I have tried . . . to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. . . . Gratitude exclaims, very properly, "How good of God to give me this." Adoration says, "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!" One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. . . . If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour."

(Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer)

Our calling here is to fight for joy--ours and the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. The aim is that God's worth--his infinite desirability--be known and prized and praised in all the world. This is what we mean by God being glorified. He is most glorified in and through his people when we are most satisfied in him. The intensity of our pleasure and our desire bear witness of his worth to the world, especially when we are freed by this (present and hoped for) pleasure to leave the pleasures of this world for a life of sacrifice and love for others.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God

The aim of this book is not to salve the conscience of well-to-do Western acquisition. The aim is to sustain love's ability to endure sacrificial losses of property and security and life, by the power of joy in the path of love. The aim is that Jesus Christ be made known in all the world as the all-powerful, all-wise, all-righteous, all-merciful, all-satisfying Treasure of the universe.

That will happen when Christians don't just say that Christ is valuable, or sing that Christ is valuable, but truly experience in their hearts the unsurpassed worth of Jesus with so much joy that they can say, "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." Christ will be glorified in the world when Christians are so satisfied in him that they let goods and kindred go and lay down their lives for others in mercy, missions, and, if necessary, martyrdom.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God

Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites. [Instead, they should] be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures. . . . Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can't be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value. . . . [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. . . . There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.

Jonathan Edwards, quoted in When I Don't Desire God, John Piper

Would it not be an encouragement to a subject to hear his prince say to him, You will honor and please me very much if you will go to yonder mine of gold, and dig as much gold for yourself as you can carry away? So, for God to say, Go to the ordinances, get as much grace as you can, dig out as much salvation as you can; and the more happiness you have, the more I shall count myself glorified.

Thomas Watson, Body of Divinity