Does God Want Me to Be Happy?
God’s Overflowing Happiness
I love this question: Does God want us to be happy? And the answer is a resounding Yes! God wants you to be happy because he—God—created us and the world out of an overflow of his own happiness.
The Trinity delights in each other. The Father, the Son, the Spirit—they delight in each other. And then God created us to be happy. When we look at the world and we look at all the good things God has created, he has just abundantly blessed the world. He's not a utilitarian God who just made us to be able to survive and get by. God made us with taste buds and he made all these different ingredients that people are able to arrange. And they're delicious. God created us to be able to taste and enjoy and to hear beautiful music and feel moved by it and to see glorious sights like mountains and oceans and sunsets—and to be just struck by it all.
A Hunger for More
Amy DiMarcangelo
This book invites readers to feast at the table of grace, where they will find God’s vast glory and his intimate care, his strength made perfect in weakness, and his gifts of joy and comfort to his children—that they “may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Are Happiness and Holiness Mutually Exclusive?
So God is a good God and a generous God who wants to bring joy and happiness into our lives. He loves to bless his children. And I think one of the reasons we can question Does God want me to be happy? is because we often see happiness and holiness pitted against each other. But that's actually creating a false dichotomy that's important to address because happiness and holiness aren't at odds with one another. Actually, God cares about our happiness even more than we do.
Our happiness is going to be found in following him, in pursuing holiness and obedience—which will be costly at times.
Our happiness is going to be found in following him, in pursuing holiness and obedience—which will be costly at times. It's not that it's this easy road that never costs anything, but we're always going to find greater joy and happiness in following Christ.
We want to really trust that because if we question him, and if we pit happiness and holiness against each other, that challenges the goodness of God's law and distrusts his design. What he's called us to and what he's forbid us from is a reflection of his loving heart for us. So we want to be able to delight in obedience and see it as the path to the happiness that God wants us to have.
Amy DiMarcangelo is the author of A Hunger for More: Finding Satisfaction in Jesus When the Good Life Doesn’t Fill You.
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