Hoping for Happiness
When I was a kid, my role models were serious. They smiled occasionally, but when they talked about God they stopped smiling. God is serious. To become holy, I guessed, meant that one stopped caring about happiness.
I was confused. The Bible talked a lot about joy and gladness, and so did the songs we sang. But I didn’t see a lot of that as I looked around me.
I made sense of things by focusing on the verses that talked about denying ourselves, although I still wondered about all the other verses that promised joy. It all began to make a little more sense when someone told me that happiness and joy are two different things. Happiness is based on circumstances; joy is based on the Lord. Who would want to be happy when you could be joyful (minus the happy feelings) instead?
I noticed some time ago that, contrary to what I thought as a kid, the holiest people are also the happiest people. Not just joyful without the feelings, but actually happy, people who were fun to be around. I began to want the kind of happiness they enjoyed, a happiness that wasn’t just believed but felt, and that could survive all the drudgery and hardship of life.
God Wants Us Happy
In his book Hoping for Happiness, Barnabas Piper makes a bold claim: “God wants you to be happy.”
“This can be a difficult statement to believe,” he continues. We often believe that happiness is incompatible with the Christian life, or that we’re unworthy to experience happiness. But Piper explodes both beliefs in this book.
God has filled the earth with good, pleasurable things designed for our happiness. We’re meant to enjoy them without expecting them to deliver lasting happiness. Piper describes what we can expect from earth’s pleasures, why “even the richest, happiest moments for us are interspersed with drudgery, pain, frustration, sadness, and loss,” but why “the world still has God’s fingerprints all over it and tendrils of Eden woven through it.”
Piper isn’t writing out of academic interest. He’s writing as someone who’s suffered, who’s tired of feeling guilty for longing for happiness. He’s honest in this book about his longings and doubts. He also does a good job of handling Scripture as he pursues the truth about happiness.
He argues for happiness through holiness, a grounded happiness that we can hold onto throughout the difficulties of life.
Why This Matters
Given that everyone’s looking for happiness, this topic matters. It matters for those of us who follow God, and who need to learn what Ecclesiastes means when it says, “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot” (Ecclesiastes 5:18).
But it also matters because to miss out on happiness is to misunderstand and misrepresent God. The holiest people are the happiest people. We can’t afford to miss out.
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