As a pastor, I get asked many questions regarding God’s plan for our lives versus our own plans. And the one question that they always seem to fall on is, “Does God care about my happiness?”
I’ve found that at the heart of it, what they’re really asking is, “How come God doesn’t let me do what I want to do?” For many people who ask this question, there seems to be a preconceived notion that to follow God’s plan, we must forgo our own happiness. But what all this really reveals is that there is a large misconception of what happiness is.
The simple answer to the question is, of course God cares. In fact, He cares so much about our happiness that when He created the world, He gave us all the earth to freely enjoy (Gen. 1). The one and only exception to this was that mankind was to not eat from the tree of good and evil. In light of all that God gave to humanity, I don’t think anyone would argue that God’s one rule was an injustice to mankind nor was it to prevent them from being happy. In fact, it was because God wanted His children to enjoy the riches of God for all the days of their life that He explicitly told them to avoid the tree of good and evil. This is the first evidence of God as the Good Father.
A good father will always give his children boundaries to keep them safe and put them in alignment with what is good and proper for their context. Boundaries are what allow us to safely enjoy the pleasures of the world. Imagine a world where there was no boundaries to the pleasures of the world like sex, food, alcohol or even boundaries in law and civilization. People often believe that the boundaries God has set upon us are to limit us from enjoying the world, when in fact they were created so we could fully enjoy them.
When Adam and Eve at from the tree of good and evil, they turned away from all the good things of the world to break the only boundary placed before them for their wellbeing. What an accurate picture of how we also live our lives. Instead of waiting to get married to have sex, instead of following the rules of society, we indulge in the pleasures of the world dismissing all the boundaries created for us to enjoy things in its proper context.
When we choose to live life our own way, breaking all the boundaries set before us, we are declaring dominion over our lives. We are choosing to live a life without God by making ourselves lord over all. But living a life without God is like living a life with a bottomless pit in our souls. No matter what pleasures you indulge in, what education you obtain, what relationships you cultivate, and what accolades you accumulate, you will never be satisfied and will always desire more. Ecclesiastes 3:11 reveals clearly why this is the case, because God has put eternity in our hearts.
As eternal beings we will always seek to pursue things higher and greater than the material pleasures of the world. No matter what we fill our lives with, we will feel an emptiness in our souls that can only be filled by eternal things. The only solution to this bottomless pit is an eternal call from our only eternal God.
So yes, God cares about your happiness, but true happiness is what the Bible calls joy, and it cannot be found apart from God. When God calls us to do His will, know it is to fill the eternal need of your heart. If you feel disappointment and hurt when God calls you, it’s time to ask yourself, “Am I grasping on too tightly to the pleasures of this world instead of on eternal thing?”
You can enjoy the pleasures of the world, they were meant to be enjoyed for you. But honor the proper boundaries and pursue true joy by following your eternal call from our eternal God.
Jennifer Kim
Healing Well Ministries 