The Lie About Pursuing Happiness

We have been raised taught that we are to achieve things that will make us happy. Find the perfect job, the perfect friends, the perfect spouse, have the exact number of kids you want and have the right amount of money that makes you happy so you can afford all the things that you want or feel you might need. If any of the above aren’t making you as happy as you want to be or as successful as you hope. Then you can quit that job, divorce your wife or husband and then find someone new and something new.

It seems like every day, people everywhere are breaking their backs trying to re-arrange their lives so that they can be happy. That’s what our life is about after all right? Our happiness.
Well, while there’s nothing wrong with having things that make you happy and you probably should marry someone you do love and enjoy being with that’s not what our life is about.

For example, celebrities are people our world seems to just idolize. It seems that they have everything. They’re making money, they have all the right clothes so they can look the best they possibly could, they can date whoever they want because they are famous but yet, here some of them are making headlines about overdosing or being addicted to drugs and alcohol, divorces, and getting in trouble with the law for various things that they thought they could get away with. You might be thinking but they have all that money and all that attention-why would they go and screw up their lives? Well, because they weren’t happy, so they try to consume more or find things that will make them happy.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the Great Gatsby (great movie by the way). And it’s so sad because at the end of it all you can see that these people had all this money and all this stuff and it would make them “happy” but then they were always left looking for the “next big thing”. So they have affairs with different people because they aren’t satisfied with who they are with and still, in the end it leaves them unhappy. And they are left consuming all these things, taking from other people and nothing seems to change. It’s an endless vicious cycle.

I think the thing that we’ve gotten wrong is who we are focused on. We are so focused on the pursuit of our happiness.

See lately, I’ve been thinking through the difference between joy and happiness a lot. While, I always found them to be the same, I have realized that they are not. You can have joy but still be upset. This is a difficult concept and I'm just working through it and trying to work on it in my own life, because I know I loose focus. You might be reading that and be like “what do you mean, doesn’t God want me to be happy?” Well, actually I would argue that He wants you to find joy. Joy that is found in Him alone. And again, there is nothing wrong with being happy about things that are going on in our lives but that can’t be our focus.

Because God will let things happen in your life that won’t always make us happy but we will be able to still have joy because of what He has done for us. We won’t always be happy when we’re working in our jobs, there will be times our spouse isn’t making us happy if we are fighting and there will be times when we aren’t making the money we want to be making or there may just be times when we’re just not feeling happy. But that doesn’t mean we throw all these things away and give up because it’s not about us being happy.

And I have discovered over the years, that even in difficult times, times when I am upset or frustrated, I can still have joy.
I have joy because of the grace that God has given me. Knowing that grace should always give me joy. Even in the times I look around at everything around me and start to pity myself and feel like I don’t have much to be thankful for, the blood that was shed for me so I could enter the kingdom of God and have a relationship with Him should be enough. I should give thanks everyday regardless of what else is going on.

I have been going through Ann Voskamp’s devotional throughout the year, “One Thousand Gifts Devotional: Reflections on Finding Everyday Graces” and the other day I stumbled on this,

"He cut open the flesh of the God-Man and let the blood. He washed our grime with bloody grace. He drove the iron ore through His own vein. Doesn't that memory alone suffice? Need there be anything more? If God didn't withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?"

WOW. That shut me up from questioning God on His will for my life and the missing pieces. When I read that it really hit me that if God did not withhold His very own Son from me, and I need Him every single day-will He withhold anything else I actually NEED? Won’t He meet me where I’m at? Won’t He handle the details, the unknowns , the desires, the worries, the fears? He gave me more than I could ever ask for, how will He not also give other things?

I can have joy and trust Him because of what He has already done and given.

I have realized that it's tiring to live for your own happiness. Most of the times when you’re living for yourself, things can go okay for a little bit or even great but eventually you end up crashing and realize that living for yourself just leaves emptiness. I feel like God is doing us a favor, when calls us to live for Him instead of ourselves.

So how do we fight this lie of pursuing our own happiness and that life is about us?

By God’s grace given to us through Christ and the Holy Spirit’s work in us. As it says in 2 Corinthians 3:5, “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God”. There is nothing in us on our own that can fight the lie that life is about us being happy. Nothing. We need Him to help us to fight this lie and help us get back on track. It’s a constant battle. We need to constantly be on our guard asking ourselves: Am I doing this for my glory or His? We need to ask God to show us the areas of our lives where we have forgotten Him and have gotten stuck on making a name for ourselves.

So the truth is, life is not about the pursuit of our happiness but instead about the pursuit of giving God glory