I’ve been overwhelmed recently by a wave of acquaintances,
all professing believers, who have modified or abandoned certain biblical
convictions for the sake of personal happiness. There is the pastor who divorced his wife in order to
embrace a homosexual lifestyle and “find Jesus” in the gay community. There is a pastor’s wife who abandoned
her faithful husband and children in favor of the freedom of a single
lifestyle. There is a woman who is
divorcing her chronically ill husband because she desires to be cared for
rather than to serve as a caretaker.
All of these people are tied to the same conservative
Christian community and should know better. They do know better.
But how is it that they have each walked away from obvious biblical
principles? It seems that they
have bought the lie, created long ago but perpetuated by our culture, the
Hollywood ideal, and even the founding documents of this country, that “I
deserve to be happy.” And that
conviction, fueled by the selfish human heart and prodded along by the evil one
and this complicit world, begins to override all other previously closely held
convictions, including biblical inerrancy and till-death-do-us-part.
In each of these situations, certainly there was great
difficulty and anguish. There was initially the desire to fight to do the right
thing. The pastor struggling with
same-sex attraction resolved to kill that compulsion. The wife of the chronically ill husband sought to serve
well. But somewhere along the way,
fuel for the fight was expended, and right and wrong became confused with
happiness and unhappiness.
At its root, the problem is a misidentification of the
source and nature of happiness. It
stems from wrong thinking regarding who knows best what is good for us. Left to ourselves, our definition of
what is good for us will always stray from God’s definition, which is what is
truly good for us. Therefore, when
influences outside of biblical truth, including the fantasies of the entertainment
world, the examples of unbelieving friends and family, and even our own
perception of our circumstances, begin to overwhelm our pattern of thinking,
it’s a very short walk from “I’m fighting this” to “I deserve this.”
Discerning believers must keep in mind that frequently the
idea I want to be happy is just a
sanitized, justified version of I want my
sin. It is shorthand for I want to be happy outside of God and what
He has declared to be good for me.
And if you listen closely to this culture and its disciples within the nominal
church, you can hear echoes of Eden: "Did
God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" Behind that first sin was the newborn
conviction of a right to autonomy from God and the lie that a personal brand of
happiness could exist there. In
spite of the knowledge of God’s good law, when
the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the
eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its
fruit and ate… (Gen 3:1, 6).
And what did she lose, she and her husband? They lost God. Ironically, they
lost the source of true happiness. For their sin, they were removed from
His presence (Gen 3:22-24).
The psalmist captures for us the true import of that loss by
how he describes the value of God’s presence and the heartache of those who
chase other brands of happiness, other gods:
I say to the LORD,
"You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you."…The sorrows of
those who run after another god shall multiply…The LORD is my chosen portion
and my cup; you hold my lot. The
lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful
inheritance…I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right
hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore
my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure…You
make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psa 16)
The Lord Himself is the source of true joy and
happiness. There can be no
happiness apart from His presence and an unfettered relationship with Him. But as the scene in the garden shows,
we cannot embrace our sin and Him at the same time. Thankfully, within that third chapter of Genesis, God
promised a provision for the defeat of sin and the reconciliation of God to
man. He promised a seed, who would
crush the head of the serpent, that seed being Christ (Gen 3:15; Heb2:14-15). Christ died to save us
from the tyranny of the pursuit of “happiness” and its penalty, hell, in order that
we might be returned to the true source of happiness, God.
When people who profess to be believers turn from God in
Christ, the true source of happiness, so that they might pursue personal
pleasures and comforts outside of Him, they repeat the sin of the garden, and
come perilously close to what the writer of Hebrews describes as trampling
underfoot the Son of God and profaning the blood of the covenant by which He
was sanctified, outraging the Spirit of grace (Heb 10:26-31). They sell their birthright for a bowl
of stew (Gen 25:29-34; Heb 12:14-17).
The horrible irony is that their “happiness” can only lead to
misery.
What a sad poverty to cast aside this great gospel in favor
of the isolation from which the Son died and was raised to rescue us. How blind to prefer that slavery simply
because our flesh and the world and the devil have convinced us that because it
seems easier it must be better. When
we see people falling for that lie, when we feel ourselves being tugged by it,
we should view it in the context of a serpent lying to a woman in a garden,
convincing her that what God has said is good is bad and what is bad is
good. We should understand that
the result is not happiness but misery, not life but death.
And consider that the thorns in the flesh represented by our
battles with sin and our difficult circumstances are the very vehicles through
which we may experience true joy in the strength of Christ at work in us. Those who walk away from the difficult
in favor of worldly happiness forfeit the surpassing joy of saying with Paul,
“I will boast all the more gladly of my
weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of
Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, harships, persecutions,
and calamities. For when I am
weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9-10). The truth is that the strength of Christ is absent from
those who follow after the happiness of the world. They will never know the joy of weakness strengthened by
Christ.
When we are looking for happiness in things outside of God, we are in danger of falling for a lie. Let’s pay much closer attention to the influences in our
lives. We must guard our hearts
and minds by filling them with the truth of the Scriptures, investing ourselves
in meaningful conversations with other believers for the purpose of stirring
one another up to love and good works, and praying that the Spirit would assist
us in watching for the dangers posed by our flesh, the world, and the evil one.
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