beatitude #2: how are you trying to be happy?
“I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.” — C.S. Lewis
As we think about how to flourish, one of the most important topics in our culture is happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, but have you ever thought about how you’re trying to be happy?
It’s a question that most of us never consciously ask, but yet it drives so much of our lives, as we answer it, not through words and thoughts, but rather through our choices.
In his second Beatitude, Jesus confronts the happiness-obsession of the secular culture and gives a very different view on what it means to flourish. He teaches:
Flourishing are those who mourn because they shall be comforted.
This teaching seems absurd to us and a great way to ensure that you’ll never flourish! After all, how can you flourish when you’re mourning? But Jesus gives you this Beatitude to force you to reflect on this foundational question: how are you trying to be happy?
Part 1: our culture's approach to flourishing
When it comes to flourishing, our secular culture believes that if you want to flourish, you need to be happy. Our culture’s version of this Beatitude would read:
Flourishing are the happy because they will never need to be comforted.
That’s the path to flourishing that we all naturally believe. It’s the message that we’re told everywhere we look in advertising, social media, and our cultural norms.
While there are lots of opinions about how to be happy, at its core, our secular culture teaches us that happiness primarily comes through experiencing pleasure. If you can fill your life with pleasure, then you can satisfy your desires and ensure that you will flourish.
And so we orient our lives around pleasure, comfort, and fun, trying to minimize pain and maximize whatever feels good. The theologian D.A. Carson summarizes our culture’s mindset this way: Our world likes to laugh, be happy. The goal of life becomes a good time, and the immediate goal is the next high.
This mindset causes us to pursue pleasure through:
Consumption: through consuming things like food, shopping, new clothes, Amazon deliveries, alcohol, coffee, new trends, new tech devices, redecorating our homes, marijuana, pornography, and drugs.
Experiences: through experiencing things like travel, concerts, adventure, comfort, falling in love, upscale restaurants, vacations, amusement parks, movie theaters, and on-demand convenience.
Achievement: through the thrill of achievement in things like work, money, social media, dating, exercise, status, and gaining social power.
This pursuit of pleasure dominates our lives. We keep a running list of the cities we want to visit, restaurants we want to try, and clothes we want to buy, trying to figure out how to fit as much pleasure into our lives as possible, given our combination of salary, interests, and vacation days. If we plan well and saturate our lives with pleasure, we assume we’ll be happy and will flourish.
so how do you create a life of happiness?
But as we seek this life of pleasure, we quickly find out that it's not cheap! That’s why we need to build a big kingdom of personal success in the secular approach to flourishing; how else are you going to have the money, status, and resources to get enough pleasure to satisfy your desires and ensure that you flourish?
This causes us to subconsciously follow this flourishing formula:
Build a big kingdom —> Use resources to get pleasure / avoid pain —> Flourish!
This is the message of Arthur Brooks, who in his monthly column in The Atlantic on happiness, wrote, “Don’t wish for happiness. Work for it.” And so we work hard to build a big kingdom, hopeful that we'll be able to afford an enjoyable, comfortable, and fun-filled life.
Sure, there are times when we will do difficult things, like work long hours, eat healthily, or save for retirement, but we only do these things because we believe they’ll help us experience even more pleasure in the future. We’re willing to delay our gratification, but hate the idea of denying our gratification.
does pleasure create flourishing?
But does trying to create happiness by experiencing pleasure so that we can flourish actually work? At first glance, most people would say “Of course, look at how happy everyone is! Look at how much fun people are having on social media!”
But, as we all know, social media isn’t real life. We all use our phones to edit our lives, doing everything we can to appear like we are happy and flourishing. But once you get behind the facade and start to hear how people are actually doing, we all have very different lives than the ones we portray on social media.
Adam Grant, the well-known writer and organizational psychologist, recently wrote an article about how much of our culture struggles with languishing, which he defines as:
A sense of stagnation and emptiness…as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.
So many of us, he observes, struggle with this joyless and aimless feeling, and he believes that it might be the most dominant emotion of our culture today. We’re stuck in the middle, he says, between depression and flourishing, not experiencing either.
I’ve met so many people in New York City like that. When you first meet them you assume their life must be going well, since they’re always so happy and excited on social media. But then, as you get to know them and they let down their facade, you realize that they aren’t happy, but rather are tired, anxious, worried, afraid, and burnt out, while also struggling with debt, hangovers, addictions, emptiness, disconnectedness, hopelessness, and despair.
But don’t we all struggle with these things? None of us want to admit it, at least not publicly, but yet a surprising number of us languish through life, even though we live in the richest culture in the history of the world, with more opportunities for pleasure, fun, and comfort than ever before. We’re not flourishing, even though we’ve done such an incredible job as a culture experiencing pleasure.
But this shouldn’t surprise us, because it’s the same conclusion Solomon came to in the book of Ecclesiastes. In the second chapter, he describes his search for ways to gratify his flesh with laughter, wine, and pleasure, building huge houses, planting vineyards and orchards, hiring singers and entertainers, and accumulating more and more wealth. He became the most successful and famous person of his era, creating a life that was a non-stop party. But even after all these things, he felt empty:
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
That’s crazy, isn’t it! We all approach life like Solomon, thinking that if we could afford to saturate our lives with pleasure, then we’d be satisfied, happy, and flourishing. So we spend our lives trying to build a bigger and bigger kingdom so that we can afford more pleasure. But then we’re shocked when like Solomon it doesn’t satisfy us, and only makes us feel more empty like we were chasing after the wind.
so why aren’t people flourishing?
But no matter how much time and money you spend pursuing and experiencing pleasure, the secular approach to flourishing will never create lasting flourishing. Why? Because as we try to pursue pleasure in order for us to feel happy, it causes us to:
Become addicted to pleasure: when we try to flourish through pleasure, we soon learn that pleasure never satisfies our desires, it only stimulates our desire for more. This causes us to chase pleasure past healthy boundaries and limits until we’re imprisoned by our desires and addicted to pleasure, ultimately damaging our bodies, bank accounts, and relationships.
Live only for ourselves: when we try to flourish through pleasure, we begin to think that our pleasure and happiness is the only thing that matters. So we become self-indulgent, only seeking our fulfillment and ignoring the common good. Meanwhile, our family, friends, community, and country suffer.
Live disconnected lives: we use pleasure to distract and disconnect from real life, ignoring the hurt, pain, and loss around us. Rather than address the brokenness of our lives, organizations, and communities, we avoid anything that makes us uncomfortable, causing us to shrink away from the real world to live shallow, superficial lives.
Struggle with suffering: the secular pursuit of pleasure appears to work when we’re young, healthy, and have easy circumstances, but it gives us no ability to handle the pain, sickness, and death that touches every human life. If your ability to be happy is based on how you feel, then when you encounter difficult circumstances your “flourishing” will vanish, leaving you feeling empty and without meaning.
Lose hope: while we may be able to use pleasure to deny, distract, and numb ourselves from the brokenness of our lives and the world for a while, eventually we’ll have to face the facts of reality. Pleasure will always fade, leaving us disappointed, discouraged, and unable to deal with the actual circumstances of our lives and world.
No matter how much pleasure we experience, the temporary thrill always passes, leaving us isolated and alone, feeling emptier than when we began. So many young people end up like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, who, after living a wild and pleasure-seeking life, wrote: "I have been ecstatic, but I have not been happy."
So why doesn't the secular approach to flourishing work?
So why doesn't the secular approach to flourishing work? It’s important to note like we mentioned in the second essay, that the problem isn’t with pleasure itself, but rather with how we try to use pleasure. God, after all, created pleasure as a good thing for us to experience and enjoy.
The problem comes, though, when because of sin, we take a created thing from God and try to make it into an ultimate thing. We take pleasure and no longer see it as a gift from God, but rather make it into a god. And so we pursue pleasure, hoping that it will give us a sense of transcendence, meaning, and satisfaction.
Arthur Simon described the difference this way:
Pleasure valued as a gift from God contains elements of joy. Pleasure detached from God and idolized, however, invests itself in sorrow. It seems to promise what will fill our lives with satisfaction, then disappoints us because it cannot do so. It gives us no transcendent meaning and becomes another god that fails.
When we make pleasure our god, we act just like Adam and Eve, who thought that obeying their own desires, and not God’s, was the path to flourishing. So when they saw that the forbidden fruit was pleasing to the eye they ate it, and in doing so, rejected God, choosing instead to worship the god of pleasure and try to flourish by obeying it.
There was just one problem: disobeying God and following their own desires for pleasure didn’t create a flourishing life, rather it destroyed the perfect life they had with God. Now, because of their sin, Adam and Eve had to deal with:
Death: they introduced sin into the world, which corrupted their hearts and created disordered desires within them, resulting in their eventual death.
Loss: they were thrown out of their perfect home in paradise and forced to scratch out an existence in a broken and cursed world.
Alienation: they didn’t just lose their lives and their home, they lost their relationship with God. Now they were alone and disconnected from God.
In our pursuit of flourishing, we’re just like Adam and Eve. We don’t believe that we can trust God to understand human flourishing, so we reject him as God in order to obey our desires and worship our god of pleasure.
And so we now bear the consequences of sin, too, leaving us with a deep sense of loss and incompleteness, both for the perfect world of Eden and the relationship we experienced with God. But we won’t admit this, so we use pleasure to:
Deny and distract ourselves from the reality of our brokenness and death.
Create our own version of paradise without God’s help.
Mask over our emptiness by using pleasure to numb and cope with our pain.
But yet it never works. The experiences of this world can never fill the God-shaped hole in our lives and give us the transcendence, satisfaction, and sense of meaning that we’re all looking for. Like Jeremiah says: we have forsaken God, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for ourselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
We’ve tried to replace our relationship with God with pleasure, but it isn’t working. No matter how much pleasure we experience, it can’t create flourishing, because it can’t solve the problem of our sin and fill the loss of our relationship with God.
Part 2: Jesus approach to human flourishing
This culture is the one that Jesus confronts in his second Beatitude. He’s challenging our cultural obsession with pleasure and happiness, he shocks our sensibilities by telling us that if you want to flourish, you have to mourn.
Few teachings in the Bible are less popular than this one. Most people assume that Jesus is teaching that you need to be sad and gloomy all the time, like some modern-day Eeyore. They don’t see any way that mourning could ever lead to a flourishing life, so they reject Jesus’ teaching and get on with their pursuit of pleasure.
so what does Jesus mean by mourning?
But when Jesus teaches that it’s the mourners who will flourish, he isn’t saying that we have to always be crying and downcast, he’s telling us that we need to spiritually mourn over our sin. We have to mourn that we are sinners, expressing a deep grief, sadness, and sorrow that we have rejected God and are trying to flourish without him.
But mourning is more than feeling sorrow and grief, it’s being moved to repentance. As the theologian Glen Stassen puts it, a mourner is someone who is:
Deeply saddened to the point of action. When Jesus calls for mourning, he means the mourning of repentance that is sincere enough to cause us to change our way of living.”
Mourning is not just admitting that sin exists in our lives, it’s repenting over our sin before God. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones described mourning this way:
To mourn is something that follows of necessity from being poor in spirit. It is quite inevitable. As I confront God and His holiness, and contemplate the life that I am meant to live, I see myself, my utter helplessness and hopelessness. I discover my quality of spirit and immediately that makes me mourn.
This is key. True spiritual mourning understands our sin before God and mourns over it. Jesus isn’t talking about all the different forms of counterfeit mourning, where we are sad and frustrated over the problems of the world, but never see them as sin we need to repent of. Counterfeit mourning can appear as:
Self-pity: we’re sad that we have to feel the effects of sin in the world.
Regret: we’re embarrassed and ashamed that our sin was revealed.
Anger: we’re angry and upset that our lives aren’t going according to our plan.
Self-righteousness: we’re mad at all of the problems caused by other people.
When we “mourn” in these ways, we are sorry for the effects of sin, but not for our sin itself. In his book on the Sermon on the Mount, Clarence Jordan describes the difference between counterfeit mourning and spiritual mourning:
We must be really grieved that things are as they are. Those people are not real mourners who say, 'Sure the world's in a mess, and I guess maybe I'm a bit guilty like everybody else, but what can I do about it?'
What they're really saying is that they are not concerned enough about themselves or the world to look for anything to do. No great burden hangs on their hearts. They aren't grieved. They don't mourn.
Jesus isn’t looking for people who will admit that things are bad somewhere, or who but rather that will acknowledge that their real problem is sin and will repent over it before God.
so what does it look like to mourn?
If you want to flourish, you have to reject the casual indifference of our pleasure-seeking culture and mourn over our individual and collective sin against God. You need to mourn over:
Your personal sin: We are to repent of all the ways we constantly disobey God and ignore his commands in our thoughts, words and actions. We are to express sorrow and remorse for how we’ve lived and for all the ways we’ve rejected, offended, and grieved God. We are to be like David, who in Psalm 51 said:
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.The Church’s sin: We are not only to mourn over our own sin, but also the sin of the Church. We are to mourn over the state of the Church, that we are so full of corruption and disobedience and lukewarm faith, as well as our indifference to God’s kingdom. We are to be like Nehemiah, who when he heard about the sins of God’s people sat down and wept:
I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees, and laws you gave your servant Moses.
The world’s sin: We are also to mourn that we live in a fallen world that has rebelled against God and is doomed to destruction. We are to mourn the violence and suffering and sin that we read about every time we look at our phones. And on top of this, we are to mourn the lostness of humanity and their rejection of God. We are to be like Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and Paul, who in Philippians 3:18 shares how he was driven to tears by the spiritual condition of the people around him:
For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
We can only mourn like this as the Holy Spirit works in our hearts, he convicts us of our sin and leads us into repentance. Because of the deceitfulness of sin, none of us naturally mourn over our sin. We don’t mourn over sins destructiveness and how it offends God, or how it destroys our world and ruins lives.
But mourning isn’t some negative, toxic event like our culture thinks, but rather an opportunity to lay aside our self-delusion and admit to reality. Eugene Peterson said that when we mourn, we are refusing to pretend that things are just fine, and instead we confess that we're in trouble and need help.
but why do we have to mourn in order to flourish?
This leaves us with one big question, though: why do those who mourn over their sins flourish? Jesus gives us the answer in the second half of the Beatitude: mourners will flourish because they shall receive God’s comfort.
Mourners flourish because as they repent of their sins and admit their need for God, he comforts them. Jesus is quoting here from Isaiah 61, where Isaiah prophesies about the coming Messiah:
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me…to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion.
Jesus came to earth, not to teach us how to flourish on our own, but rather to restore our relationship with God so that we could experience his comfort. The Apostle Paul shares in Colossians 1 how Jesus did this:
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.
When we mourn over our sins and trust in Jesus’ atoning work on the cross, our sins are put as far apart as east from west and we are reconciled to God. Our alienation from God is turned to intimacy, and we receive God’s comfort through:
The forgiveness of our sins: we are forgiven of our sins through Christ’s blood and are set free from our burden of shame and guilt. He assures us that he has put away our sins forever and that we can never lose his love.
A restored relationship with God: God invites us into his presence and lavishes his love and attention on us. He fills our sense of loss and emptiness, so we can experience the wholeness and satisfaction in him that we all yearn for.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit: we are given the Holy Spirit to comfort us when we mourn. He understands our hurt and pain and suffering, and ministers and strengthens us as we live in the midst of a broken world.
The hope of a New Heavens and New Earth: we are comforted by the hope of a future New Heavens and New Earth, where Jesus will make all things new, erasing sin forever and ushering in an eternal paradise.
Mourning is not the reason we flourish, but it is the means to our flourishing, because it is how we participate in a renewed relationship with our Heavenly Father. In the midst of the brokenness, difficulties, and sufferings of this world, God comforts us and we thrive.
why does God’s comfort cause us to flourish?
So why does God’s comfort cause us to flourish? We flourish when we mourn because as God comforts us, we experience a deep and unshakeable joy. When we’re connected to God and live in his presence, we are filled with a supernatural joy that’s greater than any earthly pleasure could ever be.
David writes about this joy in Psalm 16, telling God that:
You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
When we receive the comfort of God’s presence, we can finally experience the true joy and happiness that we’ve been trying to get through the pursuit of pleasure. We can now live in harmony with God, filling our hearts with the love, acceptance, and forgiveness we need to thrive in this life.
This God-based joy is so different from the pleasure of our world. It isn’t based on temporary feelings or fragile circumstances, but rather on the eternal love we experience through God’s comfort and the life-giving hope we have in God’s coming kingdom.
When we are grounded in joy, we flourish, and create flourishing, because we can:
Enjoy pleasure as a gift from God without becoming addicted to it.
Engage in the uncomfortable work of confronting brokenness and seeking change in our broken lives, community, and world.
Find hope in the future redemption by God, even when you and the people you love experience hard things now.
When we are filled with the joy through God, we’ll be able to flourish on both good days and bad, because our sins are forgiven, our future is secure, and God promises to walk with us every step of the way, even through the valley of the shadow of death.
where do we get the power to follow this beatitude?
So how do we get the spiritual power to flourish as we mourn and receive God’s comfort? It comes through the cross, where Jesus, who had nothing to mourn over, endured God’s total rejection so that we might receive God’s ultimate acceptance.
We can be comforted when we mourn, because Jesus, at his moment of greatest sorrow, received the rejection that we deserve. As Isaiah says:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
When we mourn over our sins and receive God’s comfort, he welcomes us into the flourishing life of his kingdom, turning our mourning into dancing and loosening our sackcloth to clothe us with gladness.
NEXT POST: Beatitude #3: How are you trying to make a flourishing life happen?
There’s a great four part BBC documentary entitled The Century of the Self that demonstrates how corporations and governments used psychological understand to create advertising that would inflame our desires and get us to purchase more stuff. I found it fascinating! Here’s the first episode if you’re interested.
Titus 3:3 At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
Arthur Simon wrote this in a book entitled, How Much Is Enough?: Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture. It’s a great book with lots of thought-provoking ideas.
“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
John 14:26 “But the Helper (or Comforter), the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
I can’t allude to this verse without sharing this song…enjoy! :)
