Three Good Reasons You’re Not Happy

We have learned to laugh when our 2-year-old screams.

At this stage, the end of anything good has become a devastating crisis — the bottom of the ice-cream cone, the closing scene of his favorite movie (that he’s seen dozens of times), the last time down the slide, even the end of a good bath. Good no longer goes quietly, but ferociously — not just whining, but roll-on-the-ground screaming.

Some screams deserve fatherly distress and strategic measures, but not these. Not yet. They’re immature, and at this early age, strangely adorable. We laugh because his sorrow is so wildly out of proportion. And because every good he mourns today will, in all likelihood, be just as good again tomorrow (we’ll probably have to give him another bath).

I laugh, but not when I rock him each night before bed. While he sleepily smiles up at me, I bury myself in our rocking chair like it’s a bunker. When I hold him, I secretly hate the brevity of those moments (and these years). The neighbors don’t hear me scream, but I protest deep down. Like a 2-year-old at the park, I refuse to put him down, wanting to keep the good from ever ending — to keep him from ever growing. I can already tell I won’t be able to hold him like this for long. I want my heart to be bigger, and the minutes longer, and the goodnights fewer.

We feel the futility of this world in goodbyes and all-gones.

Pleasures Are Not Accidents

From God’s perspective, my crib-side sorrow is probably even more wildly out of proportion than my son’s — I am not only two. He didn’t give me a serpent or a scorpion; he gave me a son. And if he gave me something as precious as a son, how much more will he give in the days to come?

Pleasure can breed disproportion in us. We chase small pleasures into the trap of thinking that life is really about small pleasures — food, sex, shopping, even friendship, marriage, and parenting. We end up trying to carve a god out of our small pleasures instead of following each one up to the greatest Pleasure.

The other pleasures are not accidents. God filled this world with them. These priceless moments with our 2-year-old are not accidents. They are good gifts from a perfect Father (James 1:17), like items we buy for someone months before Christmas because we found just the right gift for them. Except the perfect Father gives perfect gifts to children with short memories, small hearts, and wandering eyes. And because we are small, weak, and wandering, we’re never as happy as we were made to be.

John Piper writes, “Imagine being able to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever. This is not now our experience. Three things stand in the way of our complete satisfaction in this world” (The Pleasures of God). There are at least three good reasons why we are not (yet) totally happy, even in our happiest moments.

1. Even the best things here are not good enough.

Piper lists this first: “Nothing has a personal worth great enough to meet the deepest longings of our hearts.” God intentionally gives us longings deeper and wider than his gifts. He means for us to enjoy the gifts, but not to be content with just his gifts. He wants us to taste the good in everything else and want the highest pleasure: him. If I buy the best Christmas gift for my son in July, but then give him little energy and attention, even the best gift comes up far short. He wants Dad.

The apostle Paul says, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Philippians 3:8–9). Not some things, but everything — allthings. Not as just less, but as loss. Not as small or cheap, but as garbage. As the Preacher of Ecclesiastes says,

Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:10–11)

When compared with the size of our souls and the length of eternity, all the earthly pleasures simply add up to vanity. Together they come up short, even pitiful. Even the best things here are not good enough.

2. Our hearts are not big enough for the good we do have.

Again Piper writes, “We lack the strength to savor the best treasures to their maximum worth.” The angst I feel in our rocking chair is not only about the brevity of childhood. It’s also about the smallness of my heart. My mind knows there is more to enjoy in those moments than my heart can handle in real time, like my son enjoying his books without being able to read yet. The days force us to turn pages in life before we’ve learned how to see and enjoy all that’s there — before we were ready for the pleasures. The good we have is not good enough, and our hearts are not even big enough yet for the good we do have.

Part of why “fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11) is only found in the presence of God is that only then will we have hearts that could be that full. God has already given us a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26), but it’s an incomplete heart, one that will only be made whole when we are finally whole (2 Corinthians 5:1; 1 Corinthians 15:42–43; Philippians 1:6).

When we come up against the limits of our minds and hearts while we’re enjoying God’s gifts, he wants us to pray and wait. God wants us to pray that he would open our minds and widen our hearts to take in more of his glory in what he has made. He also wants us to wait with anticipation for the day when we receive new and better equipment — new eyes, new ears, new hands, even a new nose and tongue.

For now, we sample infinite joy with inadequate hearts.

3. Every good gift comes to an end — for now.

Piper’s final reason we will never be completely satisfied in this world: “The third obstacle to complete satisfaction is that our joys here come to an end.” My son won’t always fit in my arms. We won’t always live in our current home. It’s likely I will not be there for him throughout his life. The earthly goods we enjoy now will not last forever. In fact, they will not even last for long. “The world is passing away along with its desires” (1 John 2:17) — and its pleasures, even the very best ones.

Just like the pleasures are not accidents, the expiration dates are not either. They were formed for us, when as yet there was none of them (Psalm 139:16). God wired every good gift with unique measures of pleasure. And he wired them to end. In love. He knew we needed finiteness to appreciate the infinite. If everything here lasted forever, God might seem less glorious, heaven less promising, hell less terrifying, and souls less precious.

Every temporary good — and they are all temporary here on earth — is an appetizer for the eternal. Now “we know in part . . . but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away” (1 Corinthians 13:9–10). The partial was always meant to prepare us for something perfect — someone who could satisfy us completely, someone who could make us perfectly and invincibly happy.

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Joy Makes All Things New

I want to talk about a discovery that I made by grace in the word of God fifty years ago. In the fall of 1968 came three months or so during which I passed from ignorance into knowledge concerning things that have shaped everything in my life.

The discovery has to do with the glory of God, and its massive centrality in the universe, and my happiness, and its massive power in my heart and my desire for it.

The discovery was how they relate to each other and how that relationship catapults delighting in God or the enjoyment of God to a place that is so pervasive that it changes everything in life.

I need to clarify something before I launch into explaining the discovery and how it changes everything.

Prejudice Against Joy

Most of you come to this room with preconceptions in your mind and feelings about the word joy or pleasure or happiness or delight or satisfaction. All that cluster of affectional, emotional language has associations for you — some of them positive, some of them negative, and you’re all over the map, because of your peculiar experiences.

“It’s not a sin to want to be happy.”

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Let me give a clarification so that I can at least eliminate some misconceptions of what I mean when I talk about delight in God or joy in God or satisfaction in God. The way to clarify would be this: the Bible sometimes talks about sorrow and joy as though they were sequential experiences. First you have one, then you have another. And sometimes the Bible talks about them as simultaneous experiences going on at the very same moment. I can give you two examples. Psalm 30:5, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”

Everybody gets that, right? Something horrible is going on in your life for a season called “night” here, and you’re crying most of the time. And it passes or it gets fixed or something happens, and joy returns. That’s a sequence. First weeping, then joy. We get that. Everybody understands the difference between crying your eyes out and leaping for joy because something wonderful has happened.

Sorrow and Joy Mingle

However, the Bible also talks about them as simultaneous. For example, in 2 Corinthians 6:10, Paul describes himself as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” Sorrowful and yet unbroken — not sequential — unbroken joy. I don’t think that’s a contradiction, because we use language that way. Don’t we? We all know that sometimes we use the word joy or delight or happinessto describe those bright, cheerful, sunny, smiling expressions of that good feeling. That’s not sorrow.

But other times — and if you’ve walked with Jesus a while, you know this — we also talk about the sweet, precious, deep, unshakeable satisfaction in your soul through the worst of times. I’ll just give you a concrete illustration. When I was 28, I got the phone call that my mother had been killed in Israel in a bus wreck. My dad was in the hospital. They didn’t know if he’d make it. I never walked through anything like this before, so I just put down the phone. My little two-year-old, Karsten, was holding onto my leg like this and saying, “Daddy sad?” And I said to Noël, “Mama’s dead. And Daddy might not make it. That’s all I know.”

I went back to my bedroom, and I knelt down, and I wept for two hours. I know that during those two hours, there was that part in me that was saying, “She was awesome. Thank you for my 28 years with this woman. Thank you that she brought me to Jesus. Thank you that she understood when nobody else understood. Thank you that she’s in heaven. Thank you that she didn’t suffer. It was a brain injury. Thank you.”

I’d never before experienced the simultaneous reality of never being more sad in my life, all while my delight in God’s mercies to me and his rock-solid being there for me and trust in taking her to himself never wavered. That was a gift.

We know this. So when I’m using the word joy, satisfaction, happiness, delight, I’m talking about a kind of spiritual experience that sometimes is bright and cheerful and smiling and laughing and leaping for joy, and other times is just the unshakeable, sweet, deep satisfaction of your soul in God while you are weeping your eyes out.

Can you handle that? Don’t make what I say then superficial. Okay? Don’t hear me in the most superficial way you can imagine delight, happiness, joy, satisfaction, and so on. That’s my clarification so you know what I mean when I’m using this kind of language.

God’s Glory or My Happiness?

It’s fifty years ago. I grew up in a wonderful Christian home and never, never turned my back on what my parents taught me. And love them to this day. They both are in heaven I believe.

I went away to university when I was eighteen, seven hundred miles away from my home. I carried with me a tension that I couldn’t figure out. The resolution of the tension was the discovery four years later, but between 18 and 22 I kept trying to figure it out. Over here, my dad had taught me 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whatever you do, Johnny, whatever you do in word or deed, do all to the glory of God. This world exists for the glory of God. You exist for the glory of God. Make God look glorious by the way you live.” I love that and want to do that.

Over here was the real John Piper, in his heart, craving happiness. I wanted to be happy. I could no more turn that off than I could turn off hunger after skipping ten meals. It was natural, and I believe now it’s God-given. It’s not a sin to want to be happy. It’s not a sin.

I didn’t know how these two fit together. It seemed to be in the air that if you did a good deed in any way in pursuit of your happiness, it made the deed defective. It didn’t seem to be for God’s glory if it was for your happiness. That was the tension I lived with. I couldn’t deny this biblically. I couldn’t deny this experientially. And therefore, I lived quite torn during my college years.

Then, in the fall of 1968 in a class with Daniel Fuller, who introduced me to some writings of C.S. Lewis that I hadn’t seen before, and writings of Jonathan Edwards that I hadn’t seen before, and his own writings that I hadn’t seen before, I saw things that changed everything.

To Live Is Christ, To Die Is Gain

I’m going to try to show you from Philippians what I discovered. I don’t want you to embrace it because I think it, or because it sounds helpful. Philippians 1:20, “It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be” — exalted, honored, magnified, whatever word is appropriate.

This is what my dad taught me, right? “Johnny, use your body, use your mind to make Jesus look magnificent, to make Jesus look exalted. That’s why you’re on the planet. Do that.”

That’s Paul’s eager expectation and hope. I want in my body for Jesus to be exalted. That means I want to use my hands and my legs and my eyes and my mouth — I want to do everything with my body so that Jesus looks great, and it makes people want Jesus.

Track the Logic

So my question then became, as you can imagine, “How does that relate to Paul’s happiness, satisfaction, joy, delight?” Now watch the logic. I grew up in a very biblically-saturated home, and yet somehow had not been taught to follow the logic of passages. For me, Bible verses were like pearls on a chain. Here’s a pearl and a pearl. And these pearls are beautiful. I’d take a pearl with me all day long. Or a Bible verse is like a lozenge you put in your mouth, and you suck on it all day long, and you get wonderful sweetness from the verse. I still do that.

But what there is to be seen in the Bible when you don’t think of Bible phrases in terms of little pearls or lozenges, but as links in a logical chain that hang together. The link between verses 20 and 21, that link is forged with the word for, both in the NIV and the ESV because it’s really there in the Greek.

“The core demand of the Bible is not just embracing Jesus as Savior or Lord, but treasuring the Savior and Lord as your chief delight.”

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So he says, I want Christ to be exalted, magnified, honored, made great, made to look magnificent “in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” That word for, and that logical connection, changed my life. Let me see if I can help you see what I see. How does that logic work? The word forhere is “because,” right? “I’m confident Christ is going to look magnificent in my body, because to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Notice, “to live” in verse 21 corresponds back to “by life” in verse 20. And “to die” in verse 21 corresponds back to “by death” in verse 20. He’s giving a double argument. “Christ will be magnified in my life, because to live is Christ. Christ will be magnified by my death, because to die is gain.”

Now, I paused and looked at the second pair. “I want Christ to be magnified in my body by my death. Help me to die in a way that will make Christ look magnificent, and it will happen because for me to die is gain.” How does it work? How are you going to do that? What’s the basis of that? How does that work? Because to me to die is gain.

The Missing Piece

There’s a missing piece in the argument. It shows up in the next two verses. Philippians 1:22–23, “If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Now if I go back to verse 21 and say, “You just said to die is gain. What did you mean? How is it gain?” He answers that in verse 23, doesn’t he? “I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” So what’s the gain? With Christ, far better. It is far, far better to be with Christ.

So let me paraphrase the logic now so far. “I want Christ to be magnified in my body as I die, and that will happen, because for me to die is to experience so much more intimacy and closeness with the all-satisfying Christ that I call it gain, even though I lose everything in this world.” Is that a fair paraphrase? Christ is most magnified in my body as I die, when my heart is most satisfied in him as I die. That changed everything.

No Greater Gain

I think that’s what it says. The reason I make Christ look great in the hospital bed, my family standing around me, knowing I’ve got an hour or two before I’m in the presence of Jesus, is if at that moment I can exude for them, “This is going to be awesome. Don’t weep for me. You may weep for you. Don’t weep for me. Gain, gain, gain.” That would make Jesus look pretty good.

How else are you going to make him look good if you’re not satisfied in him? If you’re cleaving to this world — “I don’t want to lose this family. I don’t want to lose this job. I don’t want to lose this dream retirement. I don’t want to lose this house. I don’t want to lose this sexual pleasure I’ve enjoyed all these years. I don’t want to lose anything here. It’s so precious to me. Jesus, wait, wait, wait” — you’re not making Jesus look good.

The saying that captures Christian Hedonism is God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. That’s my biblical argument for it: the logic between verses 20–21 of Philippians 1.

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