CHAPTER 8: WHAT KILLS OUR HAPPINESS?

THE HAPPY LIFE IS to worship God as God—not putting anything or anyone else in his place. But in this fallen world, we can’t simply affirm God as the source of happiness without dealing with the competition.

Idols Claim to Offer Happiness

Potential idols can be legitimate sources of happiness when enjoyed in their proper place. However, they become contaminated when we elevate them above the only true God. In other words, happiness becomes idolatrous when we try to find happiness apart from our Creator and Redeemer.

In the first two chapters of Genesis, God had no competition for the affection of his creatures. Humanity found its meaning, purpose, and happiness in God. God was God; everything else wasn’t. And the only two humans knew it.

The Fall tragically changed that. Ever since, every member of the human race has been an idolater. What began in Eden won’t end until Jesus returns and all idols crumble under his feet.

We Look for Happiness in All the Wrong Places

Despite the fact that we’re surrounded by shows such as American Idol and the adulation of movie stars, musicians, and professional athletes, most twenty-first-century Americans don’t believe we’re a nation of idol worshipers. The word idol conjures up images of primitive people offering sacrifices to crude carved images. Surely we’re above that.

Or are we?

An idol is anything we praise, celebrate, fixate on, and look to for help that’s not the true God. That covers a lot of ground.

What are some of the idols people worship in our culture today? This list might surprise you:

In Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller writes,

Each culture is dominated by its own set of idols. . . . We may not physically kneel before the statue of Aphrodite, but many young women today are driven into depression and eating disorders by an obsessive concern over their body image. We may not actually burn incense to Artemis, but when money and career are raised to cosmic proportions, we perform a kind of child sacrifice, neglecting family and community to achieve a higher place in business and gain more wealth and prestige.[1]

Idols often trap us not with obvious evils but by twisting what’s good.

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) portrayed this conversation between two demons talking about God:

He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.” Ugh! . . . There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.[2]

Lewis pointed out a great irony, one we shouldn’t miss: since the devil can’t create, he has only God’s good creation to use as temptations. Hence, he must twist what God made in order to serve his evil purposes. He never acts for our good, since he hates us just as he hates God, who made us in his likeness.

When the fulfillment of a desire is seen as a gift and is gratefully enjoyed for God’s glory, we find satisfying happiness. When it’s not, we become miserable, enslaved to the very thing that was intended by God as a loving gift.

Idolatry isn’t just wrong—it fails miserably in bringing the lasting happiness it promises.

What Should We Do with Our Idols?

We must remove from the throne of our hearts every false god, both for God’s glory and our good.

Scripture speaks strongly about the sin of idolatry: “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many, and in horsemen because they are very strong, but who do not look to the Holy One of Israel, nor seek the LORD!” (Isaiah 31:1, NKJV).

God calls us to ruthlessly dethrone false gods: “This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire” (Deuteronomy 7:5, NIV).

John Piper says, “We all make a god out of what we take the most pleasure in.”[3] The one way to avoid idolatry is to take the most pleasure in the one true God.

As Christ-followers, we shouldn’t be more tolerant of our idols than God was of Israel’s. Once we recognize those idols, we can destroy them, exalting God alone. Only then can we know lasting happiness, for all lesser pleasures are only shadows of the real thing.

Let’s take a closer look at a few of those idols that tempt us to trust in them instead of in the true God.

Health and Wealth Can Be Idols

I will focus on the idols of health and wealth together because among Christians they are often joined as dual idols in what’s called “prosperity theology.” What we’ll learn here carries over to nearly every other good thing we can idolize.

Obviously it’s not unspiritual to desire health over sickness, wealth over poverty, and success over failure. But if the ultimate source of our happiness isn’t God, then health, wealth, and success become idols. God becomes a mere means to the end of what we really want. That end cannot be sustained—your life may not be long, but even if it is, your health will eventually fail. There have been no exceptions to that rule in all human history. (Even though Lazarus was raised from the dead, eventually he died again.)

Prosperity theology teaches that God will bless with material abundance and good health those who obey him and lay claim to his promises. “We don’t have to wait for God’s blessing in the life to come,” this ideology claims. “He’ll send it to us here and now.”

I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I will be blunt: I believe that prosperity theology, with its practice of twisting some Scriptures while ignoring others, is straight from the pit of Hell. Centered on telling people they deserve whatever they want, this worldview treats God as a cosmic slot machine: insert a positive confession, pull the lever, catch the winnings.

In prosperity theology, “faith” becomes a crowbar to break down the door of God’s reluctance rather than a humble attempt to access his willingness. Sadly, claiming that God must take away an illness or a financial hardship often means calling on him to remove the very things he has permitted and designed to make us more Christlike.

No matter how much we may appear to trust God and his promises, clinging to the American dream of health and wealth is idolatrous.

The Apostle Paul Didn’t Have Health and Wealth

Jesus said of himself, “The Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). He owned very little, and he promised his disciples, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33, NIV).

Paul, the last apostle Jesus called, said, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7). We don’t know exactly what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was, but it was most likely some kind of sickness or disability.

Paul recognized God had a purpose in it, to protect him from pride. Then Paul went right on to call that same adversity “a messenger of Satan, to torment me.” Two supernatural beings, adamantly opposed to each other, are said in a single verse to have distinct purposes in sending Paul a disability.

God’s purpose for Paul was to keep his eyes on him; Satan’s purpose was to torment him and turn him from God.

Paul said he asked God three times to heal him, but God chose not to. This is proof that the prayers of godly people are not always answered. God did, however, reveal what he wanted Paul to learn by not answering his prayers: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Paul’s thorn was a daily reminder of his need to trust in God’s grace rather than his own gifts. When God chose not to heal him, Paul didn’t “name it and claim it.” Instead, he acknowledged God’s spiritual purposes in his adversity.

Prosperity Theology Has Consequences

When health is our idol, and when we believe God must always heal us, then sickness will rob us of happiness in God.

Not only was Paul himself not healed from his thorn in the flesh, he also left Trophimus sick in Miletus (see 2 Timothy 4:20). His beloved friend Epaphroditus was gravely ill (see Philippians 2:24-30). Timothy, his son in the faith, had frequent stomach disorders. Paul didn’t tell Timothy to claim healing—instead, he told him to drink a little wine to help his stomach (see 1 Timothy 5:23).

Ever since Nero had him beheaded nearly two thousand years ago, Paul has been enjoying perfect health and untold wealth. Still, like many of God’s servants, while Paul was on Earth, God’s plan was for him to often lack both health and wealth.

But because Paul trusted God, not his health or his wealth or anything else, in the midst of adversity, Paul was able to say, “Be happy in your faith at all times. Never stop praying. Be thankful, whatever the circumstances may be” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, PHILLIPS).

There’s an important difference between the happy-sounding health-and-wealth mentality and true Christ-centered happiness. The primary source of our happiness isn’t our circumstances but God, who promised to be with us always and who both commands and invites us to delight in him.

Sometimes We Need to Lose Our Faith

While we should never lose our faith in God, we often need to lose our faith in what isn’t God.

Unlike today’s jewelry-draped televangelists, Paul said, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22, NIV). Paul says we should not be “unsettled by these trials. For you know quite well that we are destined for them” (1 Thessalonians 3:3, NIV). This teaching could not be any more contradictory of prosperity theology.

As Nanci and I have spent the last eight months dealing with treatments for her cancer, it has encouraged us to know God has sovereignly sent this trial to us and is lovingly using it to make us more like Jesus. When righteous Job lost everything, even his children, he worshiped God, saying, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised” (Job 1:21, NIV). We’re told, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (verse 22, NIV).

In contrast, when advocates of the prosperity gospel lose their health and wealth, they lose their happiness, demonstrating that the true object of their faith was never God. Many, in fact, don’t have faith in God; they have faith in their faith.

True faith doesn’t insist that we say, “I’ll conquer this cancer.” Rather, we can affirm, “I know God can heal me, and I’ll ask him to do so, and I’ll do my best to get well. But I trust him. I pray he’ll accomplish his best whether through healing and ongoing life or through sickness and death.”

Some will write off this kind of prayer as faithless since it acknowledges the possibility of death. But aside from the return of Christ in our lifetimes, which is possible but far from certain, we will all certainly die. (Seriously, do you know any 120-year-old faith healers?)

Our prayers should be earnest, unapologetic requests for what we desire, uttered in willing submission to whatever our sovereign and loving God knows to be best.

There’s an Antidote to Prosperity Theology

What we need is not faith in the idol of prosperity theology, but faith in the true God of the Bible.

A life focused on God allows us to rejoice in whatever health and wealth he entrusts to us as stewards but reminds us that he never promises these as permanent conditions in the present fallen world.

Some Christians are called upon to sacrifice their health through long hours of labor or by enduring persecution. We should be willing to lay everything on the line for Jesus because our life focus is on God, not self, health, or wealth—and not happiness either, in any form other than happiness in God, which is his command and calling.

A man showed me a note written by his fellow Iranian Christ-follower who had been imprisoned and separated from his family for three years. He wrote, “They say I’m the happiest man in this prison, and I believe they’re right.”

If our happiness is grounded in God, like this man’s is, we’ll never lose the basis for it. Why? Because nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (see Romans 8:37-39).

The gladness of God’s children isn’t the pasted-on, fake-it-till-you-make-it posturing of the prosperity gospel. Rather, it’s the deep and resonant happiness of those who know and trust the Lord of the true gospel—the God with the nail-scarred hands.