Does God Want Us to be Happy?

[savedandhappy1]

Exactly! The world looks to please the flesh - drugs, alcohol, relationships, material goods, etc... But, true happiness is spiritual and from God.

It is so good to be seeing and reading your post again.


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[Eleora]

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It is so good to be seeing and reading your post again.​

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Thank you. Good to be back...

 

[4Christ2]

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
-- Benjamin Franklin

Respectfully brother,

Someone who has been in bondage to alcohol may not find your quote amusing. It took me ten years to get sober and my poison was beer!

 

[LoveForWisdom]

I have been pondering this question very much lately because I hear it soooooo much from professing born-again-christians. The interesting thing is that when I hear it, it usually involves something being done by that christian that God probably would not approve of and possibly would call "sin". One particular thing comes to my mind - this is often the cry of those who divorce their spouse (or are contemplating it.)

This excerpt from a series on happiness by Times Journal made me want to post it here to see what other's reactions and thoughts are about how God might view "happiness" of His chosen.

Does God Want Us to Be Happy?

Sunday, Jan. 09, 2005 By DAVID VAN BIEMA

If you are interested in God's position on human happiness, please proceed to Chapter 12 of Luke, where Jesus seems to take a slap at Ecclesiastes. The author of the earlier book, a seen-it-all, done-it-all type attuned to life's brevity, famously observed, "Man hath no better thing ... than to eat, and to drink and to be merry" in the time "God giveth him under the sun." Jesus, in a parable, puts these very words in the mouth of a man who reaps an unexpected bumper crop, plans bigger barns to hold it and anticipates a kind of Miami retirement: "And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou has much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry." But then Jesus lowers the boom: "God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be?" The message: happiness in this life is--emphatically--beside the point.
Anthropologists will tell you that religion is a mirror held up to humanity, and as such must accommodate as many definitions of happiness as we can imagine. Transcendence or material gain? Contentment or ecstasy? Individual or social joy? All are addressed somewhere, perhaps most broadly in classic Hindu scripture, which spoke of a "calculus of bliss" and parsed four ascending human "aims": worldly pleasure, power, righteousness and transcendence. But in Western Christianity the question has often been framed more narrowly: whether God wants us to savor this life or whether its only true joys are the anticipation of heaven and obedience to his sometimes inscrutable will.
Don't recall the debate? It was a doozy while it lasted, especially since Jesus was not obviously consistent on the topic. (Matthew's Beatitudes see joy almost entirely in the future tense, but Johnpromises a this-worldly "whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.") Discussion was especially intense in U.S. Protestantism from the 18th to the early 20th century. Says E. Brooks Holifield, author of Theology in America: "The issue that emerged is whether God's primary end for human existence is God's own glory, or human happiness." Religious liberals thought the two were alike. Conservatives wondered, If God rules the world and bad things happen to good people, then his happiness clearly diverges from ours--and why should he endorse our ill-informed and oft-depraved ideas of joy? Extremists in this camp remarked that the most unhappy thing they could imagine was to be damned eternally. What if God, for his own reasons, made this seemingly outlandish demand? True happiness, they concluded, would lie in glorifying him through obedience.

True happiness can only be found in Jesus Christ. Thats Biblical as well. I do read the Bible much differently than most folks. I evaluate it as I would any other book. All I see out of the Bible are words, not a book. In other words, if the words in the book correspond to reality its true, and if not then its false. The Bible is the only thing I"ve ever found that actually totally corresponds to reality, and thus I accept it as the only true message within any book I've ever been able to find. Most Atheists have no problem accepting that Darwin went to the Galapogos, found finches and evaluated a notion known as Evolution to be true. But what they don't understand is that there's more evidence that Jesus Christ performed miracles from 2nd hand support (which I consider more valuable than first hand support, what if he's lying?) If people walk around and follow the guy, then there's no reason to suggest he's lying if all of their words about the guy are true. However, in the case of Darwin, what if Darwin's completely lying, or what if he's insane? Using the same Liar Lunatic or Lord evaluation, I think Darwin lies under Lunatic moreso than anything else. No other Scientist at the time was under the same notion as Darwin. I'd love to find someone else who thought Naturalism was the only Science. You won't really find this again until you see Adolf Hitler in Germany, and the rise of Naziism. So there's really no other book like the Bible.

 

[4Christ2]

But here is where the problem lies my brother in Christ... how is "true happiness" defined? I agree with you regarding the Bible - there is nothing in the word of
God that isn't a reality. BUT, the reality that I see in terms of God's word and christian's being happy is oft times disobedience to that same holy word. We seem to choose "happiness" over the word. Shouldn't obedience bring happiness?