In October of 2020 I released my latest book, Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s Most Elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality. Releasing a book on happiness in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year was more a matter of unfortunate timing than mad genius. However, with some more time under our belts since then, maybe we’ve come to a place of reconsidering what it is to truly be happy in this messed up world. If so, this book could be a significant help. My whole aim was to help people who feel guilty for feeling happy (usually conservative Christians) find some freedom and to help those tired of the hamster wheel of chasing happiness find something grounded by offering a biblical framework for living a grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy life.
Here are 35 of the most important quotes from the book.
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If happiness is so attainable why are our lives marked by such a desperate search for it? Why are we so often unsatisfied, grasping at what is next, groping for what is better, and racing after what is new and undiscovered? Why is it that even while we are in the midst of pleasure we are thinking of the next pleasure? It’s an exhausting way to live.
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The grander our dreams get and the more they turn inward the less happy we seem to be. Our response to this unhappiness is to pursue harder or to pursue another version of the same dream—another job, another cause, another relationship. If the definition of insanity is trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, well, we have just diagnosed ourselves.
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God didn’t put us in this world to be miserable. Quite the opposite—the world is overflowing with good things, pleasurable things, things that deliver happiness. And they are created by God. He intended us for happiness.
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Dreams are the wishes our hearts make, but our hearts are not reliable guides. Our hearts have taken good things from God and conjured up fever dreams of them as things in which we can find our identity and on which we can build our lives. But these objects of happiness were not created to bear that burden.
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So much of maturity is learning the value of delayed gratification and realizing that greater happiness can be had by waiting and persevering.
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Every disappointment is an unmet expectation.
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To live a life with small expectations is to live a life with small joys and little gladness. Expectations set us up for disappointment, sure, but they give us motivation and direction too.
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The real crux of our problem is that we expect temporal things to deliver lasting happiness
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Happiness is found in expecting the right things of the right things.
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Because we are finite beings confined to an earthly life span and limited knowledge, we seek the entirety of our happiness in things we can wrap our minds around, things that are readily available. We struggle to trust that God really will deliver a happiness that’s beyond the scope of our imaginations on the other side of the grave.
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We are not strong enough hooks to hold the weight of our own happiness. Not in our own strength, at least. As in every other example of misplaced hope, the expectations we put on ourselves are often born out of what we think is best, not what God has said is best.
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Adam and Eve thought they knew better than God. They put their hopes in the lies of the devil and in their own decision making ability. And we have been doing the same thing ever since.
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When we follow our feelings we will be perpetually abandoning things God wants us to commit to because we hope for and expect the wrong things in the wrong timing from the wrong objects.
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Reality just is. We don’t get to define it. To attempt to do so is to step right into the shoes of our father Adam and our mother Eve. They decided that the reality God had created wasn’t to their liking and sought to create a new “truth.”
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Rather than trying to shape reality with our expectations, we need to shape our expectations around reality as God has revealed it. That way we’ll be saved from the misplaced expectations that lead to disappointment and profound unhappiness.
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To have healthy expectations means disposing of “my truth” and living according to the truth that God has revealed in his word.
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Sin corrupted the good, but the world still has God’s fingerprints all over it and tendrils of Eden woven through it. Nothing is completely as it should be, but neither is the world utterly corrupt. The good that once defined all of creation still shines throughout it.
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To glorify God in my eating and drinking (or whatever I do) doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be serious. It means I need to be purposeful. It means that I need to pay attention to the goodness in this world, because “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it”. It means eating “with thankfulness” and embracing joy, which glorifies God.
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Evangeliguilt is the bane of some of us, but idolatry is the bane of all of us. We have a tendency to take temporal things and elevate them to objects of worship and hope.
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Many of us who feel that sense of suspicion at enjoyment do so precisely because we know our propensity for idolatry. We know we can turn good things into objects of worship, so we are skeptical of enjoying the good things. But this is the wrong response. It’s true that God is not honored by us idolizing his gifts—but nor is he honored by our ignoring them.
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There is no room for idolatry if we constantly come back to the giver—acknowledging that God gives life, gives food, gives enjoyment—and to eternity. These good gifts are for our pleasure now, but we’re fools if we depend on them to fulfill our eternal hopes.
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The victory of Jesus matters for a Tuesday afternoon when the baby won’t sleep, a Friday night of anxious insomnia, a Sunday service crushed by the tonnage of shame, or a holiday when the absence of a loved one feels like an amputation. When it feels like everything else is spiraling out of control, we trust that Christ is on his throne, weaving the threads of our lives into the pattern he sees fit.
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The Bible reframes happiness for us by complexifying it. We tend to think of being happy or sad, but Scripture depicts a sort of happiness in the midst of sadness.
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Death is the set of borders that contains our lives. Sometimes borders feel like captivity, like a prison wall. Sometimes borders are for our own good, like lane lines on the road. And sometimes borders are just the rules of the game, like a Monopoly or Scrabble board. Death defines the rules of the game of life.
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When we live in light of death, especially with an eye toward eternity, we see life as something given to us, not as something to use. In this way death actually increases our gratitude, and gratitude increases our enjoyment.
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Our lot in life—what we’ve received, what we’ve become, what direction our life is going—is not the hands of time or fate or bad luck but in the hands of a personal and sovereign God.
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A brief definition of holiness is: growing in Christ-likeness through the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives so that we pursue the things of God. So, if it’s true that God wants us to be happy, then pursuing the things of God cannot be in opposition to happiness.
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The only way happiness and holiness can be put at odds is to misdefine them both.
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Once we reduce happiness to something that is opposed to godliness, we end up seeing holiness as a dry husk; a matter of suppressing our desire for the sake of what is right. . .If we remove happiness from holiness, pursuing the things of God is drudgery.
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Pursuing holiness is the pursuit of happiness, in this life and the next. Nobody should be happier than a follower of Jesus.
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God never has to repent because he never sins or fails. He doesn’t have good days and bad days. He never changes or goes back on his word. And that means that every word God says about himself carries a promise in it.
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God’s promises define reality. They draw the lines of hope and happiness. So we must ask ourselves whether our expectations, our pursuits, our definition of happiness aligns with what God has said.
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You can have a version of happiness without joy, but you cannot have genuine joy without happiness. . .A professed joy that lacks happiness is nothing but an articulated belief system, and it is hypocrisy.
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Appreciate good gifts as God intended. Savor the delicious things. Laugh at the humorous things. Thrill at the exhilarating things. Enjoy the entertaining things. Cheer at the joyous things. Ponder the deep things. Rest in the peaceful things. Reflect on the somber things. Wonder at the beautiful things. Cherish the precious things. And share them all, for happiness is multiplied when gifts are experienced together.
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Repent often and eagerly. . . .We can either let our sins drive us from God, or we can remember the work of Christ and take our sins to God, our good Father, who stands ready to forgive and is generous with good gifts.
