What is the meaning of life? Is it to be happy, to accumulate wealth, to create a healthy family? Or is it to indulge in personal pleasures like gambling, drugs, or sports obsession? Better yet, do you define a “good life” as Sally and Jim retired near the sea shore at the early age of 58, collecting sea shells and fishing when they’re not lounging around in their million-dollar beach house?
If you said yes to any above, you’re wasting your life.
Pastor John Piper coined the interesting phrase: “Jesus saves from the American Dream.”
In order to understand the dangers of the American Dream, one must understand that they were created for more.
1) The Bible explicitly states that God created us for His glory. The Creator of the universe did not create us to boost His ego or complete Himself, for no one is greater than He (nor will ever be) and He was complete without us. Rather, God created us and all that is around us because He is the Creator, and the loving Creator must create.
2) As a result of being created for God’s glory, we cannot find fulfillment in anything life offers other than God Himself. We are relational beings who were designed to intimately know God, yet the Fall switched up priorities. We tend to go anywhere but God quite often. However, there is a vacuum in all of us whether we feel it or not that testifies the Creator Himself is the only One who can fill the void.
3) Happiness does not lie apart from God, but true happiness lies in God. The famous evangelist Johnathan Edwards once preached a sermon titled “The Godly Are Designed for Unknown and Inconceivable Happiness”:
"[The] glory of God [does not] consist merely in the creature’s perceiving His perfections: for the creature may perceive the power and wisdom of God, and take no delight in it, but abhor it. Those creatures that so do, don’t glorify God. Nor doth the glory of God consist especially in speaking of His perfections: for words avail not any otherwise than as they express the sentiment of the mind. This glory of God, therefore, [consists] in the creature’s admiring and rejoicing [and] exulting in the manifestation of His beauty and excellency… The essence of glorifying… God consists, therefore, in the creature’s rejoicing in God’s manifestations of His beauty, which is the joy and happiness we speak of. So we see it comes to this at last: that the end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature; for if God created the world that He may be glorified in the creature, He created it that they might rejoice in His glory: for we have shown that they are one and the same."
So what Mr. Edwards preached (simplified) is that true happiness lies in glorifying God, so happiness is something that happens with God. What does this mean?
It means that you can enjoy sports while glorifying God. You can rock out to music in a healthy, Christian way by letting it lead to your personal type of worship (for example, some teenagers I’ve spoken to have been blessed with the ability to find some sort of Gospel message in undertones of secular songs. I can’t do it for the life of me, but they enjoy the worship they get from looking for Christ in every little lyric rather than listening to straight-forward Christian music. They admit there are limits though). It means that you can actually enjoy your job by choosing to act as if you work for God rather than trudging through the daily grind, dreaming of the scenario I depicted above of the retiree couple.
But more than that, it means you take the weight off the world to make you happy or bring you joy, and place it on God. Not only would it feel liberating and peaceful, not only could you enjoy earthly luxuries like sports, companionship, the brilliance of music, and the healthy feeling of working hard for well-earned money, but now you’d have the source of true happiness Himself. This communion with God daily would lead you to glorify His majesty and power, which then leads you to contentment, a state of well-being.
This is not a “prosperity gospel” endorsement. Just because God IS happiness does not mean you will be a happy-go-lucky person the rest of you days. You still live on earth, and as such you will still experience trials, and grief, and pain, but the happiness found in God could be more defined as stillness, and perhaps peace. The happiness found in God is like a constant flame. It roars up sometimes during worship or when you face a wonder, but for the most part it’s steady, a soft stillness in your soul.
And it is a better happiness than Sally and Jim’s because this happiness leads us to keep our eyes on eternity. The destruction around us reminds us there is a higher place, that we are not home quite yet. And one day we will enter the Kingdom of Happiness. Jesus promised to usher in a peace as the earth has never known: “‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘I am making everything new!'” (Revelation 23:3-5)
So the American Dream would be a wasted life in the light of what we were really created for. This does not mean we should stop pursuing dreams, but it means we need to stop putting dreams at a higher priority than eternity.
With all that said, don’t waste your life! Print out this post. I guarantee you’ll need it again soon, and I confess as will I.
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This article originated on Alina's blog Grace Starts Here.
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