The Pursuit of Happiness

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. Deuteronomy 6:4-7


As he sat in my office, pain was written all over his face. His marriage of 28 years was in shambles. He had just spoken to his 2 sons and daughter about why he was moving out. It was a conversation that cost him (and them) dearly. Tears ran down his cheeks. Yet, it was difficult to feel sympathy for him as the decision to end his marriage was his own. Too many years without joy he said. Too many unresolved issues. And, he had met someone new.

It is a story I hear repeatedly. I will call him "Bill" which is not his real name. Bill was someone who had grown up in the church and been involved in leadership for over 20 years. He had taught Sunday School classes and served as a deacon. Bill regretted that I could not support his decision to tear his family apart. "But, I am confident in my relationship with God. I know that God wants me to be happy." If I have heard it once, I have heard this a thousand times from people like Bill. I wondered which Book in the Bible taught this timeless truth? Then, I realized that this was same lie that Satan told Eve in the Garden of Eden. "Go ahead and eat that fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil so you can be happy" is another translation of Genesis 3:6.

Where does this thinking come from that suggests that our pursuit of happiness trumps obedience to God? From the world around us. Every commercial we watch tells us that if we brush with the right toothpaste, gargle with the right mouthwash and use the correct deodorant that we can all be "happy"! The authors of our Declaration of Independence declared that we have "right" to pursue it. So we take a little of the holy, mix in what we want to justify our actions, and we produce decisions that determine our priorities. It is what the church in Corinth was doing. Forget the cross and the part about "denying" yourself. Who needs humility and the agape love of I Cor. 13? It is all about what makes one "happy". It is what the church at Laodicea did confusing material wealth and security of their city with the kind of gold that comes only from God. Bill was simply listening to the voices of the world around him. The heart of every believer can justify one's actions by the doctrine of the pursuit of happiness. But, when we listen to the Word of God, that all gets stripped away. Faith without works is dead. Love without obedience and piety is meaningless.

Moses told the people in the words of the Shemah what they were to do. Jesus came along and decanted that into what we now call the "Great Commandment" and coupled it with "Love your neighbor as yourself" as being the essence of the only law that we ever need. However, until we understand that our obligation is to love God first and obey him, we will never discover for ourselves the meaning of true happiness. What the Lord wants from us is faithfulness. We have to learn to distinguish the voices of the world from the voice of God. When we lose that capacity, we become lost.