Happiness

What if you could actually do whatever it was that made you happy?

I don't mean the freedom to go out to dinner whenever you wanted, purchase whatever your heart wanted to purchase, or snub a person just because you don't feel like talking. I'm talking bigger, purpose level stuff. What if you could actually enjoy life, day in and day out, doing exactly what you always wanted to do, feeling fulfilled in your work or daily life, finding that your joy was overflowing with each passing moment?

That sounds like a fairytale, and in some ways, it is. The fact is that even if you actually got what you wanted, and you could do, day in and day out, whatever it was that you most loved to do, hard moments were going to come and there would be seasons of sorrow. I was reminded this past week that Solomon himself said this in his letter of Ecclesiastes, after having lived a storied and privileged life if there ever was one, that in spite of having the ability to do and attain whatever he desired, he found that at the end of the day it was all meaningless.

There is a Christian thought that says that the chief end of man is the enjoyment of God; that is, once we have come to taste the pleasure of our salvation that is found in Jesus, we will increasingly grow in our delight of him so that, in the end, our greatest pleasure is giving honor and praise and glory to God, through whom we have received this great joy. I would never argue this theologically; in fact, quite the contrary. It is one of the principled themes that guides my life. We must find great joy in God himself, through Jesus Christ, or our faith is worthless. Why would I want to put my confidence in something that robbed me of pleasure? This is contrary to my entire being; I know, without having to learn it, without having to be taught it, without anyone having to tell me, that in my innermost being I will pursue whatever is most pleasurable to me. When I choose to pursue something otherwise, it feels profoundly off, like choosing the wrong path at a fork in the woods.

We are so guided by pleasure, in fact, that there are times when we are not even aware that we are doing it. There are times where the initial decision doesn't appear to be for our own pleasure at all, but the outcome is far more desirable. In other words, we choose the difficult path now because the long term reward is far better. There is something about us that knows the decision will end in pleasure even if, in the moment, our senses tell us otherwise.

I have sat on the exit row on an airplane on more than one occasion and every time I have listened to the flight attendant tell me that, should I choose to sit there, I would be responsible for ensuring that the other passengers made it safely out the door and down the slide, in the event that an evacuation was even possible (something I always assume will probably not be the case). I believed that the appeal the attendant was making was to my reason, and indeed, that is true to a certain degree. We human beings have the ability to choose against our natural instinct to save ourselves, and instead hang back in a dangerous position in order to let other people go on ahead to safety. That is a uniquely human characteristic, that we can choose reason over instinct. Yet, there is another factor at play as well, and this is the appeal to our pleasure.

It is our natural instinct towards pleasure that I may say unites us with the creation itself. My dog might choose the safety of my own family over his own family, much the same as I might choose the safety of the other passengers over my own, but this has nothing to do with reason. My dog puts my family first because his instinct is to serve; to say it another way, it is his pleasure to do it.

You might wonder how it is possible that there is any pleasure at all from putting ourselves in danger, or how remaining in danger is more pleasurable than running on to safety, but consider the outcome in either case. If we decided to disregard our responsibility and jump out of the exit door before anyone else had a chance, we would probably survive, along with at least a few others. Indeed, it is entirely possible that everyone would survive, and our act of cowardice would be inconsequential to the outcome. But we would have to live with it; we would have to live with the knowledge that we bailed out in what may have been the greatest moment of responsibility to others we have ever faced. It would have been a great displeasure to us to have to live under that shadow; we would be safe, but we would also be ashamed.

On the other hand, had we taken our responsibility seriously we may end up dead. Perhaps we would survive, in which case we would be lauded a hero. But if we did die, at least we would have had the pleasure of knowing that we went out helping others; we would still be lauded a hero, we would just not have the knowledge of it. Nevertheless, most would say, better to die as a noble person than to live as a coward.

The point of the story is simply that, even if we didn't immediately recognize it at the moment of decision, the end result was that our pleasure would be increased. It brought us more pleasure to set aside our inherent self-interest in order that others would be led to safety. We may not have known it when we sat in the exit row (a decision largely made for our own pleasure and increased leg room) and we may not have immediately known it when our exit services were actually required, but when it was all over and as many as could be saved were off the plane, we would have remarked that it was "our pleasure" to assist however we could.

So our pleasure is our chief motivation; God is our chief end. This truth has led many people to learn contentment and joy despite their circumstances. Many Christians, despite tremendous difficulty and suffering, can nevertheless say that they have joy because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ. It was worth whatever they had lost! It was like a treasure in a field that they sold everything to get. Yet I would argue that despite the theological truth, and the experiential reality of having enjoyed Christ in spite of suffering (and having seen Him enjoyed by others), the dimension of our pleasure that we have too quickly set asunder in our modern era is the reality of our humanity.

I have come across many people, and I may include myself in this, who have found themselves in unpleasant circumstances, but rather than change the circumstances for their pleasure have instead attempted to will themselves towards joy in Christ. I wonder how often Jesus might have curiously suggested that they simply change whatever it was that they did not like.

Indeed, there are moments where we cannot change what brings us displeasure, humanly speaking. We cannot simply will away cancer or decide not to have it. In those moments, we will be glad to know that we find our great joy in Christ. But what of the person who is miserable because they do not live near their family, or the person who is miserable in their job, or the person who lives in a place where they have no friends, or attends the church that they do not enjoy? To what degree are we expected to find joy in Christ in circumstances where our joy might be renewed simply by changing something?

Perhaps we assume that making a decision based purely on whatever will make us happy is unspiritual. I would argue that this is precisely the case, and precisely the reason we should do it. In one sense, we know that all of life is spiritual; that is, there is nothing that is not in some way affected by our relational status with God the creator of the universe. But in another sense, we are flesh and blood; we are irrevocably "earthy" in our existence and unmistakably unspiritual, which is exactly how God intended it to be. If it is impossible for us to separate the spiritual from our decision making process, it is equally as impossible–and equally unwise–for us to separate our humanity from the decision making process. We may even find that it is our earthly situation that is robbing us of our spiritual joy in Christ!

I was asked the question once whether I felt like I would be disobeying Jesus if I did not plant a church. "What a spiritual question!", I thought. Of course, I had no answer to it, as I hadn't really considered whether or not Jesus' call to me was one that I could obey or disobey, or whether he would be pleased or displeased with my decision. To that point, I had simply considered that this is what I should do. I had weighed the alternatives. This seemed right. It seemed like something worth exploring. By the time this person had asked me whether or not I would be disobeying Jesus, I really didn't know. I supposed that I could be perfectly obedient to Jesus doing any number of things, but this was the one that, for now, seemed to be the right one. I don't even know what I answered when the person asked.

Standing where I am now and considering the question through the lens of hindsight I see the deep flaw in it. To me, it spiritualizes what is in many ways a very human question: what do you want to do, and why are you doing it? For as much as Jesus calls us to come and die to ourselves so that we can live for him, it is also a deep truth of the good news that Jesus meets us precisely where we are. I would suggest that the way we can know a call is from Jesus is if the outcome fills us with great pleasure.

In fact, I may go so far as to say that I am convinced that Jesus greatest call on us is to whatever it is that will bring us the most pleasure.

It is important to understand that that Jesus knows better than we do what will bring us pleasure. There are dark desires of my heart that may fool me into believing that they will bring me pleasure, and in the moment, they might, but in the long run, will lead to my destruction and actually rob me of joy. Whereas, a temporary denial of that quick pleasure will lead to lasting joy. Jesus desires my greater pleasure, the one that fills me with lasting joy, and not a temporary high.

Yet there are many things in life that bring great joy and are not sinful, or guilty pleasure, or pleasures that are fleeting, but are good, God-given pleasures that are flawed because we are flawed but are good because God in his mercy has made sure they remained good. If your family is anything like mine is is deeply flawed and yet it is good. I live in and with a community of people who are deeply flawed and yet profoundly good. I live in a town with deeply flawed leadership and yet, somehow, by God's grace, is still good. There are good things that abound around us and that bring me great happiness.

There was a moment in my life when I would have moved anywhere for God, and many times did. (I am thankful that God has not called me to international missions, and I am not sure how I would have responded if he had.) We moved to many different states and cities, and would have moved to many more, in order to pursue the calling that we felt he had placed on our lives. Why did we do that? It was our great pleasure! There was something about the continual call, the next step, the bigger ministry. We weren't bound by time, place, or relationships. We would go wherever God called!

But was that more or less spiritual than our current desire not to ever move again, desiring that we stay here for a very long time, even if it means ministering in relative obscurity for the rest of our lives? This, too, is our great pleasure. To remain in a place where our children are loved, where we are cared for, with people that we love, with people that we care for. You might ask, what if Jesus has called us to great influence? I would suggest that Jesus has not called us to influence; he has called us to joy.

And so I return to my humanity and my joy and pleasure and family and all the things that make me me and you you. What are we doing or not doing under the misguided belief that Jesus has called us to contentment despite our displeasure? Perhaps Jesus has called us away from our displeasure so that we will find our contentment. I have run into those who lived in displeasure because they felt they were called by God to do so; I can't help but wonder if they are missing his purest call. Maybe contentment means deciding to take a lower paying, less influential job simply because it is near family, and family makes us happy. Maybe it is to not take the next promotion because it would mean more time away from home, and home makes us happy. Maybe it would be to move to the shore, because the shore makes us happy. Maybe it would be to move to a small town by a lake in the woods, because nature makes us happy.

Jesus has called us to pleasure in Him. What I am suggesting here, for myself and for you, is that if we really found our deepest satisfaction in Jesus, we would find ourselves far more free to choose whatever makes us happy in this life. Do you want to find another job? Find another job. Jesus is okay with it. Do you want to move closer to family? Then move. Jesus is just as much there as he his here; you may find him to be more pleasurable when you are near those you love. Actually leaving behind all those things that Jesus calls us to leave behind so that we can pursue him means that we don't have to feel like we are bound by those things anymore; instead of feeling enslaved to a job or to a location or a place or whatever, we are actually freed from the bondage so that we can enjoy them. Jesus doesn't just bring us spiritual joy; he frees us to experience human joy as well; the type of joy that comes from sitting next to a brook or fishing on a quiet pond or hiking a mountain or turning off our cell phone and just sitting there, unreachable for the rest of the world, playing a game with our kids, reading a book, doing a puzzle.

Finding our joy in Jesus reveals a freeing truth: Jesus doesn't need us to save the world. He's already done it. Which means that you can go and enjoy Him, forever.

Recapturing our Joy

The train of thought went like this:

I was somewhat sullen after a long summer, filled with more challenges and tragedy than I could have possibly expected.

I thought back to when I was feeling really fulfilled in my work and ministry, and remembered that it was earlier this year.

What was I doing then? I was writing more frequently–nearly every day, in fact. I was working up to something; writing was an outlet not just for my own joy but also for the burden I felt to share what God was doing in the world and how we should think about it.

I didn't feel like I could have that joy again.

And then I remembered the first post that I had written when I got back into writing. It was titled, "restarting and the Christian life." I read it again, and remembered. Sometimes you just need to get back on the horse.

The most shocking thing to me, perhaps, is that I got away from it to begin with. Why did that happen? What squeezed out the most joy-filled part of my day, the part I really looked forward to, the part that made me feel like every other part of the day was worth it? Of course I'm speaking about a work day here, not the day generally. There are plenty of things to make the day, each day, worth living, even if I were to place the general calling of the Christian that gave my life purpose to the side. A wife, children, the blessing of provision, and on it goes. Yet most of us go to work day in and day out and we can say that we love our work but what we mean is that we love spects of our work and we endure the other aspects of it because they allow us to do the things that we really love.

A friend of mine who is an exceptional communicator and pastors his church well through that gift said to me that he loved preaching so much on Sunday that he endured the meetings throughout the week just so that he would have a chance to do that. That sentiment resonates.

Somehow that thing that I really enjoyed, and felt like I was fulfilled in, got squeezed out. Life does that. We need to protect the things that give us joy, or they get bumped to the side. I think it's for the same reason that our most important relationships tend to get neglected; we assume they will always be there, so we don't invest much in them. Then we find that they have deteriorated. Or we find that we aren't doing the things that bring us joy anymore, because life took over.

That joy need to be recaptured.

There are things in your life that used to bring you joy. Maybe it was a particular activity, maybe it was a relationship. Maybe you used to find joy in reading, but you haven't read in a while. Maybe you used to find joy in your marriage, and you wonder where it went. Many times we are concerned we may never get that joy back. The answer, I think, is just to press in. Start reading. Begin the activity. Invest in the relationship. Just do it.

You may find that the joy can be recaptured after all.

Freedom from Condemnation & Repentance

This is part of a four part series on freedom from condemnation. The four parts ended up being Freedom from Condemnation, Repentance, Parenting, and Drivenness.

After writing last week about our freedom from condemnation, I began to think about all the ways that this freedom actually plays itself out in real life. The idea that I've really been wrestling with is this view that what we is ultimately destroyed by the cross is our condemnation, but not the law, even though the law is a shadow. So as the author of Hebrews states, the sacrifices are done away with because Jesus in his perfection is the final sacrifice; there is no necessity for further sacrifices, not because the law is destroyed, and not because we will perfectly fulfill the law, but rather, because Jesus has perfectly paid the just due for all those who would be imperfect and break the law. Again, the condemnation is gone. We are freed. We are viewed as perfect in the eyes of God, because he sees us through Jesus.

The interaction of this freedom with the rest of life came out in at least three ways that I started considering. One was the idea of "drivenness". Some folk are just driven people; often, that drive is fueled by internal or external expectations, and while that might be a good thing, the challenge is to maintain the drive while losing the fear of condemnation. Another area was that of "parenting". Obviously we teach our children to "obey"; that's our parental duty. Additionally, we punish our children when they don't obey. How do we square that with the idea that we are no longer condemned? And finally, a third area was that of repentance. What does repentance look like in the Christian life? It is this third one, repentance, that I decided to cover first.

Freedom from Condemnation & Repentance

I was sitting at a luncheon with some friends when one member of the group said that they felt the need to repent of something that had happened the night before. Honestly, most of us probably didn't even know it happened, and the way that it was addressed made it even more awkward than if he had never addressed it in the first place. I wasn't sure whether it was awkward because I wasn't used to people repenting, or because I just didn't think that's what repentance meant. In other words, was repentance something that was done verbally, almost in an AA-like manner, where you have to confess to the people you feel you may have offended? Or was repentance something that was less about the verbal confession and more about the change of heart? To state it differently, was repentance about identifying what happened yesterday, or about what you were going to do tomorrow?

Answering those questions in depth would take a different post. The short answer is that it's a little bit of both. On the one hand, it's clear that confession is part of repentance. (1 John 1). On the other hand, it's also fairly obvious that confession without some sort of change in behavior or outlook would be fairly empty. I might say that confession indicates recognition of the need; the change in behavior or outlook is the evidence.

In any event, this week I've been thinking about repentance in relation to our freedom from condemnation. How is it that repentance is still required of Christians, and should mark our lifestyle, while condemnation is not? The question can only be answered if we understand that the law is still valid and good, even if it is only a shadow of the true reality which will ultimately be the kingdom of God, where there is no need for a law because we would all live perfectly according to God's ideals.

The fact is that repentance is only possible when we understand that while the law still exists, condemnation does not. Ultimately this is the reason that anything we do as Christians matters. God's ideals are not destroyed because Jesus was perfect; quite the contrary. Instead, we are finally able to live in freedom, without the guilt and shame of our own imperfection, because Jesus has a) already identified the problem and provided the solution and b) already dealt with any lingering doubts that we might have by giving us his perfection for free.

What that means practically is that we can live under the goodness of the law of the Spirit that is constantly transforming us and aligning us with God's ideals, and we can live under the freedom from condemnation which means that we can freely admit when we fall short. If there was no law, there would be no need for repentance, because it would be impossible to be a rule-breaker when there are no rules. There would be nothing to turn from. Since there is a law, and God's ideals actually exist, there is not only something to turn from (inability to meet the ideal whether willingly or unwillingly) but there is also something to turn towards. Furthermore, since the condemnation has been removed when we do fall short, we can repent without implicating ourselves in our own crime. We can actually admit, without guilt, and without shame, that we have fallen short; we don't do it out of fear or out of embarrassment but out of freedom, with the full knowledge that the very foundation and need for the good news of Jesus is the reality that we can't save ourselves, and that we are always constantly destined to fall short. 

We are free, then, to unload the burden of our failures through repentance, without the fear that if we do so, "whatever we say can be used against us in a court of law." It can't, and won't, be used against us. Repentance is the true mark of freedom, because when we repent we are again reminding ourselves and those around us that we can't save ourselves, but that Jesus has saved us by his cross. In a sense we are staring down the face of punishment and turning aside, relieved. The punishment can't touch us anymore. We're free.

If we are in a context that makes us feel like repenting will mean guilt, shame, embarrassment, or defeat, then we are not in a gospel context. Repentance is freedom, because only a person who is free from condemnation can truly repent. If condemnation still exists, then repentance is done out of fear. But if it doesn't exist, then repentance is done out of freedom, and if it's done out of freedom, it leads to life.

That's the joy of the Gospel.

Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love

Annual "Christian" events are tough when you are a preacher. Christmas, Easter, Good Friday...everyone knows what you are going to preach on.

I remember one Easter Sunday back when I was a kid when the Pastor preached on something from the Heidelberg Catechism. My mom was ticked. Jesus rises to life and we open the dead catechism.

In any event, it also means that I spend more time thinking about the events themselves. What is fresh to me this year? What is new that I can share?

Our advent series in 2014 is called "the Canvas". The idea is that our lives are a canvas upon which and through which God is going to paint the story of salvation. He is going to use our very lives to demonstrate to the world what life in his Kingdom looks like; what faith looks like. I'm beginning to notice a theme as I consider the four topics of advent–hope, peace, joy, and love–and it's not necessarily an encouraging one. The theme that these traits have in common is that they require a corollary to truly be seen.

That is, if God's going to paint a picture of Hope on the canvas of your life, he's almost always going to do it by walking you through a period that would otherwise be hopeless. You have to need something or desire something to have hope. And it can't be something that is easily attainable. It's almost always something that is out of reach. "Who hopes for what he already has?", asks Paul in Romans 8. If you already had it, it wouldn't be hope. Which means that if Hope is going to be painted on your canvas, it's probably going to require that other things are stripped away. Most of that stripped-away-stuff is related to false hope; it's the stuff that might fool us into believing that something else can save us. Our money, our relationships, our comfort, our health, or whatever. When all of that is gone, why does the Christian still have hope? Because our hope is not in the temporary or the fading, but in the unchanging and unfading and unfailing God of the universe. Hope usually requires calamity if it is to be clearly seen.

Peace requires turmoil.

Joy requires trial.

Love requires the unloveable; it's seen most clearly when we love our enemies.

But then salvation requires a baby and forgiveness requires a cross and life requires death.

The Lion Aslan told Lucy and Susan that when a willing victim took on the death of another, the stone table would be cracked (the law) and death itself would begin to work backwards. I guess that's our story now. Everything is being reversed. The curse is being re-written into blessing.

Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love share another common bond, though. When you really have them, you wouldn't trade them for all that you have lost. Calamity, turmoil, trial, enemies. They are worth enduring if in the end you have Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. We'd love to have each of them without their corollary, of course, and someday we will (with the exception of hope! Someday, our hope will be fulfilled and will be no more.) Until the day we have perfect Peace, Joy, and Love, however, more often than not the way they will become evident in our lives is when they are held up against their alternative. The Christian's Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, are all more powerful than the forces that work against them, because they are rooted in the goodness of God himself.

That's the promise of the good news.