The Pursuit of Happiness

Meaningless

It was a good movie. The Pursuit of Happyness, that is. Jenni and I were looking for an uplifting movie for "date night" last Friday and we thought this would be a good one. I can barely handle movies where everything goes wrong, however, and for Chris Gardener, everything did go wrong. He lost his girlfriend, apartment, hotel, and even the few friends he had. But he persevered, believing that if one worked hard enough he could find happiness, if only for a brief instant. And I was happy for Chris when he found what he was looking for.

But did Chris really find happiness, as this movie so boldly proclaims? Is true happiness really found in achieving your dreams – being a financially secure father who could provide for his son, in Chris's example? Of course, I'm not questioning the importance of a man's responsibility to provide for his family – but is this how true happiness is found? One would think that if this were the answer, history would long have documented this great discovery – this remedy to the human condition. Yet much of what has been documented is nothing but a search for meaning.

Consider the almost cynical review of an old philosopher:

Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless… All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 8-9)

We look and look for something of beauty, something that will satisfy, but we look in vain. Everything we try to quench our desire for satisfaction has been tried before and it will be tried again. Nothing satisfies.

But we keep looking anyway because it is defeat to accept that nothing satisfies. It removes the purpose of life; we might as well die. Some pursue wealth, some pleasure, some health, some even wisdom and philosophy, or religion and morality. But in the end, nothing satisfies. Everything's been tried and tried again, and nothing works.

And so, the best we can do, as the ecclesiastical philosopher discovered, is to "eat and drink and find satisfaction in [our] toil." (Ecc 3:13) Yet, intrinsic to the human kind is a desire for the lasting, permanent, and enduring. To live a life of work for the sake of work and the enjoyment of it does not fulfill this desire. C. S. Lewis, nevertheless, states that, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists." (p. 118) So, if we have a desire for what is lasting, there is a lasting thing to which we may apply our lives. Let me allow Lewis to complete his argument on this point:

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. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. 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, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Mere Christianity, [Glasgow: Collins, 1982], Ch. 10, pp. 118-119.)

Purpose

In other words, if we feel a longing to which no one has found satisfaction from the offerings of the world, we ought to look outside of this world for the object of our longing.

The truth is that we do, in fact, have a very critical purpose for living; it is a purpose that serves a cause of infinite importance and permanence. It is the glory of God. The Bible tells us, "For by him [God] all things were created… all things were created by him and for him." (Colossians 1:16) We have been created by God for the explicit purpose of showing how amazing He is. He is so good, so gracious, so just, and, overall, so perfect. Such perfection deserves – indeed, it ought – to be put on display! We have been created for this reason, to make the magnificent goodness of God known in the world.

When our lives are spent showing how good God is we will find our true purpose; we will be satisfied! This is true for two reasons. First, God has created us for this purpose. We have been specifically crafted to show God's goodness and so all our desires, wants, needs, etc, are only going to be fulfilled by doing what we've been created to do.

Second, the way we glorify God is by being satisfied in Him! I'm working on a computer science degree right now so I think about computers a lot. Imagine that I bought a new, fancy computer from Dell. I had been wanting it for months and finally saved up enough to get it. It was exactly what I was looking for: quad core, lots of RAM, huge hard drive, etc… (excuse me as I dream while writing this!). I would be pretty pumped, to say the least, about getting it and most likely, I wouldn't keep my excitement to myself! My friends at school would have to hear about it, my wife would never hear the end of it… or see the end of it since I would be on it a lot of the time! What I would be doing in this case is glorifying the manufacturer, Dell. I would be a walking advertisement for them. This is because the way we glorify something or someone is by enjoying them – being satisfied with something and expressing that satisfaction. This is how God wants us to glorify Him, by being satisfied in Him! God wants you to be so happy, so fulfilled, so joyful, that you can't stop talking about the source of your satisfaction – Him. And let me tell you, everything this world offers is useless compared to what God offers. Everything you are looking for in sex, money, or power is found in greater measure in Him. And so, glorifying God is not a boring life, it's not a life of sacrificing everything you wish you could do, it's a life experiencing everything better than you expected. It's a life far better than what the world offers.

The Bad News

The bad news, however, is that everyone has failed at this! The Bible says, "…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) We've all decided not to be satisfied in God and to figure out our own way of finding happiness. Though it's been proved meaningless generation after generation, we all look in the same places to find some sort of happiness in this life. And this is a huge offence to God. He's offered us so much in Himself! Everything we could look for or want is found in Him, and we've decided to look somewhere else for it. It's like a man being married to a beautiful woman and right after the marriage ceremony, going out and finding a prostitute to sleep with. It's disgusting and terribly wrong, and we've all done it. And so, like the woman who just married the offending man, God has the right to break off the marriage with us. And since God is infinitely more beautiful and fulfilling than the woman would have been for the man in my illustration, our offence to God is infinitely more disgusting and wrong. Accordingly, the consequence due to us for our crime is infinitely worse; we will receive death – a physical death as well as a spiritual death much worse than what we experience when our physical bodies die. We will not cease to exist, but experience pain in Hell for the rest of eternity (II Thessalonians 1:9).

The Good News

But God, in His perfection, is so loving! He wants us to be satisfied and happy. Yet, since He is also perfectly just He cannot allow us to get away with the offence we have made against Him. So, in His love He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer the spiritual and physical death we are all condemned to experience. The full wrath of God that was on us for how we had disregarded God was turned on Jesus as He died an excruciating death on the Roman cross. But God also physically raised Jesus from the dead and, in doing so, conquered death! There is now a way for us to avoid the death we ought to experience.

God, however, will still not accept us if we continue to look to the world and ignore or spite what He did for us on the cross. To avoid the penalty of living our lives our own way, we must believe in Jesus Christ. We must stop living our lives our own way and start living the way God designed us to, completely satisfied in Him. We need to ask God to forgive us for the huge crime we have committed against Him and pledge the rest of our lives to living the way He has intended us to. And when we do, God will forget about everything we did in contempt of Him and offer us the full benefits originally designed for us; we can have peace with God and live a satisfied life with Him forever.

Living Satisfied

After committing our lives to God, and promising to be satisfied only in Him, we have another dilemma. God has forgiven us and has completely forgotten our rebellion, but it doesn't immediately become easy to live as He wants us to. This is because the human body is cursed. It has been every since the first man, Adam, rejected God. And so, when we try to live as God has designed us to, we will eventually be frustrated. But after Jesus died for us, He did not just leave us hanging to figure out the rest of life alone! In fact, it was part of His plan for us to be unable to live without Him. The answer for us is to completely rely on Him for everything we do. He wants us to live completely satisfied in Him, and so He will help us do it. To the extent that we try to live well on our own, we will fail, but when we live dependant on Him for everything we will succeed. In order to live the way we ought, we have to always look to God for help. Yet, even this brings more glory to God. Since we can't do it with out Him, He is honoured as a generous God who continually helps and loves His children.

This is what the Christian life is all about. We keep working to depend more and more on God in everything we do. As we get better and better at doing this, we will be increasingly satisfied in God as we will be living more and more as He has designed us to. I beg you to join me in this lifestyle as I work to becoming more satisfied in God and increasingly more dependant on Him for everything I do. This is where true meaning is found!