God Doesn’t Want You to be Happy
If you were to ask Christians today who they thought God was and what their faith was all about, what do you think they would say? What would you say?
It’s an interesting question in general, but even more so for pastors and parents who have raised their kids in the Church. In some sense, this is a good test of how we have faired in our task of faith formation. After all we’ve tired to teach, what do young people say they actually believe?
Just over a decade ago, Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton released a book entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. They studied and surveyed young people in America who grew up in the Church to find out what they actually believed about faith. Smith and Denton’s discoveries were quite shocking (or shockingly un-shocking).
Most young people surveyed believed that:
1. God exists and created and ordered the universe and watches over human life on Earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when He is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
Smith and Denton named this phenomenon Moral Therapeutic Deism. This means that our understanding of God has become based on being “good” people and living a life that “feels good” and makes us “happy.” For many Christians, this is the extent of their faith.
Many believe that there’s a god out there somewhere who can be called upon when we need something or are in trouble. Otherwise, life continues just fine by our own means and power. This god wants us to be happy and is there to help us when we’re not. This god also wants us to be nice and kind to each other, and as long as we do that, we will go to a happy place after we die.
But how did we get here? In the Western, post-modern world, we have evaluated individualism, consumerism, and the pursuit of happiness as our main societal priorities. We also often interpret the Bible in our present time to line up with what we already believe to be important. When we do this, our image of God conforms to our image of ourselves.
Today, our Western world is convinced that the individual is the centre of all things. We’re all unique, important, and special. When we don’t feel happy, we’re invited to consume more and more with the promise that we’ll eventually be content. But the messages we get through social media and advertising also tell us that we’ll never measure up. So we need to always try harder and consume more.
When that’s our starting place to think about God, then God becomes yet another thing for us to consume in order to be happy. And when we do eventually achieve “happiness,” then God becomes practically irrelevant. Needless to say, this view of God is not biblical.
But what if our culture’s priorities and values are misaligned? What if individualism, consumerism, and the pursuit of happiness aren’t God’s priorities for the world? Well, then we need a different starting point from which to figure all this out. If we start with God instead of ourselves, then we also have to be willing to allow our perspectives and priorities to change under the shaping influence of God.
Throughout the Bible, we are told that God is the creator and giver of all life. God stands outside creation and made this world to be good, full of purpose and life. God gives life and longs to see the flourishing of His creation. In fact, God is the very breath of life for the world. The image of the Garden of Eden in Genesis exemplifies this life where all things are in harmony with God and each other.
We often desire things for our own happiness that aren’t actually good for us. We think some things will make us happy when they actually won’t. Or we desire happiness at the expense of other people or creation without even realizing the cost. We believe that our “wants” will bring us happiness. We then expect that God wants those things for us too.
But God isn’t interested in being our personal genies. God is interested in bringing life and prosperity into the world. But because our world is broken by our decision to turn away from Him (i.e. sin), this task has been more difficult than we could have ever imagined. God always had a plan to bring reconciliation to His beloved creation. By offering His own life for the world through Jesus, God gave His life so that creation could become what it was meant to be.
“God doesn’t want us to be happy. God wants us to be fully human; fully who He created us to be.”
God doesn’t want us to just be happy. God wants us to be fully human; fully who He created us to be. And it’s only within the life of God that we discover what it means to truly be fulfilled. However, since we still live in a broken world, living in Christ and doing what we’re called to do often goes against our culture’s ideas of happiness and fulfillment.
Throughout time, Christians all over the world have known what it means to find peace, contentment, and joy in the midst of difficult life circumstances. When we live life with God, we will still experience suffering, pain, or unfulfilled desires; but because we find our identity and life in God, we are able to also be content. With Him we find true happiness. That happiness isn’t tied to what our culture defines it as, but in what it means to be truly human in God. Our starting place makes all the difference.