Two Wrong Ways to Seek Happiness

Everyone wants to be happy, and there is nothing wrong with that.  It is not sinful or unspiritual to desire and seek your own happiness.  The problem is that most people seek happiness in the wrong ways.  In his book Prodigal God, Tim Keller wrote about the two ways that people pursue happiness -- both of them are wrong.    

The first is called moral conformity.  This is when you seek to live such a moral life that God will be indebted to you and will have to give you what you want.  It is using God for self-fulfillment.  It is not love for God, but love for self, and using God for your own ends.  When things go wrong, moral conformity leads to either self-hatred because you have failed morally and spiritually, or to God-hatred, because He did not keep His end of the agreement.

The second wrong way people pursue happiness is self-discovery.  This is the belief that “individuals must be free to pursue their own goals and self-actualization regardless of custom and convention.  In this view, the world would be a far better place if tradition, prejudice, hierarchical authority, and other barriers to personal freedom were weakened or removed.”  It is the idea is that happiness is found in doing whatever you want to do without being under the authority of another.  This leads depression when you find that self-discovery is not the pathway to happiness, or it leads to self-destruction through gratifying the flesh. 

Both of these ways to seek happiness are a rejection of God.  Moral conformity is the attempt to control God for your own happiness.  Self-discovery is the attempt to flee God's control for your own happiness.  Neither path leads to happiness.

The Bible does not leave us guessing about the path to happiness.  "Happy is the person who fears the LORD (Ps 112:1)."  The way to the good life is the godly life.  Godliness does not result in happiness because it leads to health, wealth, and prosperity.  Sometimes godliness leads to suffering.  Godliness results in happiness because it leads to a right, close relationship with God.  And in God our souls find rest and satisfaction and joy unspeakable.