How (Not) to Be Happy Pt. II

In Part 1 of this article series, we discussed the definitive and simplest way to not be happy: drinking from the broken cisterns of sin. If trying to slake our thirst at dry wells is the surest way to be miserable, then the surest way to experience joy is to drink deeply from the river of living waters: which is to say, the surest way to be happy is to have union with God through faith.

But that’s an abstract sort of answer. How, in the course of our day-to-day living, do we come to experience the bliss and blessedness promised to us in Christ? The answer to that question is simple, but by no means is it easy; otherwise, we’d all of us be happy all the time, wouldn’t we? Yet here we are, reading this article about how to be happy, presumably because we are not happy or because we think we could somehow be happier. 

Communion

The essence of true joy comes from communion with God. Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God, as Augustine said it. We were created to love God, to glorify him and enjoy him forever — and we were meant to do this, not alone, but with other people. As God himself said, it’s not good for a man to go solo (Genesis 2:18). So happiness in God is a community project just as much as it is an individual project. 

But there’s a pretty big roadblock to experiencing this happiness in God, and that roadblock is our sin. We wanted happiness on our terms rather than God’s, and all because that old Serpent got it into our heads that we knew better than God (Genesis 3:1-7) — and so we rebelled against God. We disobeyed our King. We betrayed our loving Father. And something has to be done about that, otherwise we’re (rightfully) stuck on the other side of heaven and happiness forever. 

But the problem with our sin, is that we can do absolutely nothing about it. In fact, to mix my metaphors (which is surely its own kind of sin), we can’t help but go running to the broken cisterns of sin. We’re all born with a desire to sin. Ruin and misery mark our ways, and we lost the path back to Peace a long time ago (Romans 3:10-18). 

Woe, we are undone indeed. But here enters God himself, who makes a way for us to be happy in him again. He deals with our sin and brings us back to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his beloved Son, Jesus (1 Peter 3:18). So now, we can once again have individual and community communion with God, through faith in Jesus. All we have to do is believe, truly, that Jesus is exactly who the Scriptures say he is. And the Scriptures say that Jesus loved me and gave himself for me, and that he adopted me into a family (Galatians 2:20, Ephesians 2:19)

So the first thing about happiness, the thing that we have to understand before we can talk about anything else, is that true and eternal happiness is found only in communion with God, and we can have that communion through the power of God’s Spirit by faith in Jesus. 

Once our faith is securely placed in Jesus, his Spirit does something else for us that contributes to our magnanimous happiness: he enables us to obey God, and he empowers us to not sin.

Not Sinning

Here’s how the psalmist says it: “Blessed [happy, flourishing] is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:1-2). In other words, there’s a blessedness and happiness that comes when we live holy lives that are in step with God’s words, not the world’s. And because the Holy Spirit dwells within us, we can live this way. 

And when we are living in step with God’s words, that means that we’ll love God like no one else, and we’ll love our neighbors as ourselves — which means that that we’ll not make a practice of sinning against either God or our neighbors (1 John 3:9). When we obey God in the power of the Spirit, we are going with the grain of the universe, we are living according to the way God intends for things to be. This, naturally, makes human beings happy. 

But that is not to say that Christians never sin. Indeed, anyone who says that they don’t sin is a liar (1 John 1:8). But this is to say that Christians make a habit of holy living, and that they make a habit of confessing their sins honestly to both God and to the neighbors they’ve sinned against. In fact, that’s one of the works of the Holy Spirit within us: he helps us to see sin for the ugly monstrosity it really is, so that we may be grieved unto repentance and life (2 Corinthians 7:9). 

So when it comes to experiencing the happiness of God in the day-to-day, it’s really quite simple: we submit ourselves to God as he’s revealed himself in the Scriptures, and we flee from the pull of sin like Joseph fled from Potiphar’s adulterous wife (Genesis 39:12). In other words, we meet with God by reading the Scriptures with faith, we pray, we sing, we do our jobs as best we can, we lead our families in the instruction of the Lord, we worship together with the church, we feast with one another, we confess our sins to one another, we garden and run and take photos and swim and hike and paint — we live our lives as if God is real, because he is, and we offer up every part of our lives to him as a fragrant offering. We don’t go running to the broken cisterns of sin, trying to get life to conform to our desires — rather, we go running to God, whose arms are open to us, as we conform ourselves to his desires by faith in his Son.

Happiness: it’s so simple a child can do it, and so vast that the wisest people spend their whole lives living into it.