Don’t Chase the Fraud of Happiness

Monday was International Happiness Day. If you didn’t know there was such a thing, don’t worry. It’s still not too late to educate yourself on how to smile more with the plethora of articles yet available. “Happiness experts” explained what “happiness means to them”, and how we can best pursue it. “(Happiness) is fundamental to human nature,” Professor Rickwood said, “It’s hardwired into us.” Expecting yourself to be happy all the time, however, “is setting yourself up for failure.”

Of course, we must begin by making the decision to be happy. One author resolved, “Today, I intend on putting myself first and doing what makes me happy. No worrying about anyone else…No feeling guilty…Today, at every possible opportunity, I’m going to question how I’m doing. How am I feeling? What do I need to put a smile on my face? And you should do the same.”

It will be difficult, of course, to carry out this resolve without feeling guilty. “Sometimes happiness isn’t easily achieved…because, for some odd reason, we seem to feel guilty for doing what it takes to make ourselves happy.

Suggestions across the internet included, “Remind yourself how great you are”, “Spend money on experiences”, “Fake a smile”, “Give someone else a compliment”, and “Just TRY to be happy.” One interesting suggestion was to: “Get spiritual” arguing that, “sometimes it helps to know you’re connected to something greater than yourself.”

Focus on yourself. Focus on others. Think you’re the greatest. Know there’s something greater. As happiness experts traverse through the deep and contradictory data, we find that our supposed fundamental hard-wiring must have a kink in the wire. The source of its power is weak and struggling, and our happiness steadily depletes no matter how we “just TRY”.

The Pursuit of Happiness

As many Christians scoff, laugh and weep at these pathetic attempts, many more react too far in the other direction, burdening themselves with the idea that pursuing happiness is certainly not a Christian pursuit. As the world tries to steal happiness, and the church tries to chase holiness, we both end in failure, clinging to the fraud. Neither the fraud nor the failure is holy, and neither will satisfy our inherent and inevitable desire for joy.

Theologian and Philosopher, Blaise Pascal observed 400 years before the happiness experts: “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. They will never take the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.”

Augustine, observing the same thing, wondered: “Where did (mankind) acquire the knowledge of (happiness), that they so desire it? Where have they seen it, that they so love it?”

The happiness experts tell us that this desire is hardwired into our very nature. Which begs the question: who hardwired it? There is no ground for personal happiness in a world of moral, volitional chaos, spoofed into existence without cause, purpose or direction. The fact that man tries to go back to the root of happiness apart from God, distinguishes the crux of their inevitable failure: there is no root of happiness apart from God. 

The Beginning of Happiness

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth for His glory. Implanted within His first image bearers was the joy of continual fellowship with Himself. As man and all creation glorified God, God was, in Himself, glorifying all creation. But man rebelled against his Cause, against his purpose, against his end, stabbing a knife into the very heart of our joy and communion, shattering the divine image we were created to reflect, and projecting paradise straight into the blackness of hell.

Ever since then, man has been craving a resurrection of this lost Eden. We aren’t lacking the seed of our desire, yet we’re lacking the means of attaining it. Planted deep within our hearts is a nostalgic longing for a return of this paradise we have never seen, the shattered remnants of an Image so ingrained into our nature, that even our repulsion of it for the satisfaction of this world, is a corrupted echo that it yet exists.

Happiness was created by God and given as a glorious gift that both He and His image bearers rejoice in. Happiness itself is not corrupted – the way in which we pursue it and the way we experience it is corrupted. That is why the things of this world – even those which provide temporary or shallow happiness – never truly fill us in the way we desire to be filled. We hunger for happiness because we’ve tasted it before, and we now feel its deprivation.

The Destruction of Happiness

The great and powerful lie of sin is that sin will make us happier. No one sins out of a sense of obligation or duty, when they really desire to do what is right. We sin because we fall for the same deception that made Eve see the bitter and enslaving fruit of death as a sweet and empowering fruit of life. She did not fall despite her desires, but because of her desires – because it looked “good for food” (lust of the flesh), was a “delight to the eyes” (lust of the eyes), and was “desirable to make one wise” (pride of life). It was the promise of the serpent that she would be happier in disobedience than obedience. And we have been falling for the same lie ever since, as we turn to the world to satisfy our lustful cravings.

Jeremiah 2:12-13 tells us to:

“Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
    be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the Lord,
¹³ for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
    the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
    broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

We have forsaken the All-satisfying for the shallow, the Fountain for the broken clay, the Water of Life for the mirage in the desert.

C.S. Lewis once said: “…All that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – (is) the long, terrible story of man trying to find something other than God (to) make him happy.” Famously concluding in his sermon, The Weight of Glory: 

“If we consider the unblushing promises…and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our desires are 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.”

Every act of sin is an act of trying to glut our God-given desire for Himself on the pathetic and evil filth of this world. The deepest thirst of our souls is for God Himself, who made us so that we can never be satisfied in anything less than His perfect glory.

The Command of Happiness

In other words, God commands us to be happy. Scripture tells us to, “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4), “Be glad in the Lord”, (Psalm 32:11), “Rejoice in the Lord” (Philippians 3:1), “Rejoice always” (1 Thessalonians 5:16), “Serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 110:2). To juxtapose happiness and holiness is to try to put asunder what God has joined together. Happiness is obedience which leads to holiness, and holiness is obedience which leads to happiness.

Our craving for delight is insatiable in this world not because it is sinful, but because it is misdirected. Our desire is not meant to be stifled, but embraced.

As C.S. Lewis said:

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water….If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it…(probably they) were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise or be unthankful for these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country…I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.”

Seeking to fill up our ravenous craving for joy in Christ satisfies both our chief purpose and our chief longing: God is glorified and we are filled with joy.

As John Piper stated so well in his book, The Pleasures of God: 

God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or a bucket brigade. If you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough, you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you’ve found.

My hope as a desperate sinner hangs on this biblical truth: that God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer – my thirst. (That is) the foundation of my hope – that God is delighted, not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades, but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace. He is most glorified in us, when we are most satisfied in Him. 

The Return of Happiness

The fight of faith is the fight for happiness in God. Hebrews 11:24-26 tells us that “By faith Moses…(forsook) the fleeting pleasure of sin…He looked to the reward.” The power of temptation is the lie that happiness can be found apart from God. The power of our weapon is the truth that happiness in Christ is greater than happiness anywhere else.

John Piper once called joy the “emotion of salvation”.  In our eternal quest for happiness, let us look toward eternity. There, in God, lies our faith, and our hope, and our eternal, Joy-filled glory (1 Peter 1:8).

Soli Deo Gloria,