Does God Want Me To Be Happy? Series

3 A young adult is caught up in sexual activity with the girlfriend or boyfriend, and justifies it saying, “But I love them, and they make me happy, and God wants me to be happy.”

4. A big justification today for same sex relationships includes the reasoning, “They love each other, and make each other happy, so what could be wrong with that?”

G. So, saying that God wants me to be happy, and therefore that gives me an excuse to do whatever I think will make me happy, is just wrong and sinful.

1. Does God want me to be happy? Yes.

2. Does God allow me to determine what makes for happiness? No.

3. If I really care about whether God wants me to be happy, then I will care about what kind of happiness God wants for me.

H. There are a lot of things we think will make us happy, but in the end they don’t.

1. We think that things will make us happy.

2. We think that pleasure-seeking will make us happy.

3. We think that revenge will make us happy. Revenge is sweet, right?

4. But whatever happiness that might be brought by any of these things is only temporary.

a. New things get old.

b. Pleasure is momentary.

c. The euphoria of revenge fades as we realize how we lowered ourselves to destroy another.

I. God’s definition of happiness is so different from ours.

1. The happiness of God is not like the highly elusive emotion that we often chase.

2. The happiness of God is not grounded in physical and material things.

3. In the end, only the God who made us and knows us, can bring us to a place of happiness.

4. Psalm 68:3 reads, “But may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful.”

J. The word “happy” is found at least 28 times in the Old Testament.

1. A survey of those texts where it is found reveals that happiness, as viewed by God, always has to do with spiritual things and spiritual attitudes.

2. Happiness involves service to God that embodies an eternal hope.

3. The common Hebrew term for happiness is frequently used as an interjection of elation, like: “oh, the blessedness of,” or “How happy, truly happy is he…”

4. Here are some examples:

a. “Blessed are the people whose God is the Lord” (Ps. 144:15).

b. “Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God (Ps. 146:5).

c. “Blessed is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding (Pr. 3:13).

d. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps. 1:1-2).

K. In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis observed that it is a futile exercise to seek happiness apart from God.

1. Man has been designed to find his purpose, indeed his happiness, only in his Creator.

2. In fact, Lewis insists, “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”