beatitudes intro: how are you trying to flourish?
“It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy." —Augustine
Everybody wants to flourish. It’s a desire that’s rooted deep within us, both individually and collectively. We want to live personal lives filled with meaning, success, and happiness while living in a society that’s prosperous, peaceful, and safe.
Whether you're aware of it or not, most people spend their lives in a sort of constant, low-grade infatuation with the pursuit of flourishing. They’re on the hunt for a flourishing life, so everything they do and experience gets judged against that benchmark. And so we spend our lives asking: how do I get a flourishing life?
It’s such a basic question that most of us have never even stopped to consider it. But it’s the underlying question behind so many of the other questions that we ask, such as:
How can I be happy?
How can I live my best life?
How can I be successful?
How can I reach my goals?
How can I get a job that I actually enjoy?
How do I get a life like his/hers?
These questions all spring out of the deeper, more fundamental question of flourishing, affecting what we live for, what we value, and what we see as good and bad.
But before we look at how we try to flourish as human beings, what does it even mean to flourish?
what does it mean to flourish?
The word flourish can be difficult to define since we each attach our own ideas and expectations to this abstract word. But for the sake of clarity, I'll define flourishing as: a growing, healthy life filled with meaning, purpose, and depth, where you experience peace, satisfaction, and true joy.
This is the life that everyone in our society is trying to get. It’s what drives so many people, from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep.
The key question, though, is not whether we want to flourish, but rather how we try to find flourishing. That’s what we’re going to examine in this series of essays.
so how do you flourish?
Before we look at Jesus’ plan for human flourishing, we first need to examine how our society tries to find a flourishing life. I’ll call this the secular approach to flourishing, which believes:
The key to flourishing is satisfying all of your inner desires.
This is what our culture sees as flourishing, a life of total self-fulfillment. If you are satisfying your desires, then you'll be happy, successful, and thriving.
But how do we satisfy all of our inner desires? The secular path to flourishing teaches us that if we want to satisfy all of our inner desires, then we need to pursue the objects of our desires, which come primarily through external achievement and success.
If you can get all of the right external success, then you'll experience the internal satisfaction that will create a flourishing life.
On the flip side of this, if you aren’t flourishing, then it’s because you aren’t good enough yet at satisfying all of your inner desires. You have unmet inner desires, for things like comfort, success, status, possessions, money, acclaim, pleasure, power, and so on, which are causing you not to flourish.
The way to fix your life, then, is to solve these problems through external achievement. You need a better job, a bigger house, a prettier boy/girlfriend, a better body, nicer clothes, cooler friends, better conversation techniques, better vacations, more social media followers, and on and on and on.
This is the message that reverberates through all of society, whether it’s through advertising, small talk, or social media. If you want to flourish, our society tells us, you need to build up your own external kingdom until it’s big enough to satisfy your every desire.
the steps to flourishing in the secular approach
When we pursue flourishing through the secular approach, we follow three main steps to build our kingdoms and create lives that will satisfy our desires. We learn to:
Imitate the successful: we learn from an early age to admire and obsess over people that our culture recognizes as successful. We follow them on social media, study their life strategies, and listen to their stories on podcasts. We hope that by understanding and imitating the people who have the external lives that we want, then we'll be able to create a flourishing life for ourselves.
This is why we spend hours of our lives consuming content from successful people. We want to know their secrets to success! So we learn about:
A tech founder's morning routine.
A nutritionist's advice on how to eat the ideal diet.
A model's daily skin and hair routine.
An influencer's style tips.
A corporate executive's advice for climbing the corporate ladder.
A stay-at-home mom's plan for managing a busy life.
An attractive person's strategy for dating and relationships.
There are thousands of examples I could have put here, but all of these show how we imitate the strategies of successful people to satisfy our unique inner desires.
Work hard to create your own success: Once you have gleaned the insights and information from people who are more successful than you, then you implement them in your life through hard work, discipline, and focus. We fixate on personal development and self-improvement, hoping that through greater efficiency and productivity we can build our careers, make more money, and reach all of our goals even faster.
This “work harder” mentality shows up in our culture through:
An obsession with hustling and working long hours.
A fascination with productivity and efficiency.
Non-stop talk about things like setting better goals, developing better habits, and using technology to get even more done.
If you work harder, we’re told, then we’ll get a bigger and better personal kingdom, which will allow you to satisfy more of your desires.
Use your success to live a lifestyle of consumption: If you've done the first two steps correctly, then you should have plenty of money, status, and power to create a lifestyle where you can satisfy all of your desires through the consumption of the right products, possessions, and experiences.
Our culture is always promising that if you'll just buy this product, then you can satisfy your desires and live a life of flourishing.
If you eat organic vegan food, then you'll feel healthy.
If you use chemical-free makeup and household products, then you'll feel safe.
If you take the right exercise classes, then you'll feel fit and energetic.
If you have the right clothes and personal style, then you'll feel elite.
If you take the right vacations to the right places, then you'll feel relaxed and one-of-a-kind.
If you live in the right neighborhood in the right city, then you'll feel cool.
If you follow the right dating advice, then you'll find the perfect spouse.
This is why consumption is important in our search for flourishing: it’s how we actually try to satisfy the desires of our hearts. We all find ourselves longingly looking at an ad or someone else’s life and thinking, “If I just had that, then I’d be really happy.”
the ultimate goal
These three steps towards flourishing occupy so much of our lives, as we hope that by building bigger and bigger external kingdoms of success, they’ll be able to satisfy more and more of our inner desires.
Once this happens, then we’ll reach the ultimate achievement of a flourishing life: we’ll be the ones that other people, through social media, conferences, and books, look to to learn how to flourish. If we can just get to this level of success, we think, we’ll have made it.
but is it working?
Whether you're scrolling social media or making small talk at a party, everyone tries to make it look like the secular approach to flourishing is working for them. Look, I’m really happy, content, and satisfied with my life!
But underneath the polished facade, this approach to life isn’t creating a deep sense of real flourishing. No matter what people are presenting in public and online, it’s just not working.
Why do I think this? Because everywhere I look I see the following red flags:
A constant restlessness: people are besieged with constant restlessness. Nothing ever satisfies them for long. They're always looking for the next new thing to them the sense of flourishing that the old thing promised but couldn't deliver. And so they're always trying new products, new techniques, new exercise routines, new jobs, new relationships, new cities, new clothes, new everything, hoping that they can find the missing piece that will finally help them feel like they're flourishing.
An unsolvable angst: When you listen to people share about their lives in private, you quickly realize the deep angst that so many people struggle with. Despite the material and financial prosperity of our culture, our lives are filled with anxiety, fear, emptiness, cynicism, hopelessness, drifting, and loss of purpose, as well as exhaustion and burnout. So many young people have followed the recipe for external success, yet they're struggling with these invisible ailments.
A need to numb: Because of our unsolvable angst, people use all kinds of things to numb themselves from their lack of flourishing, whether it’s alcohol, dating apps, weed, drugs, casual sex, pornography, risky behavior, non-stop travel, constant eating out, social media scrolling, online shopping, or binge TV watching. We all hope these little endorphins hits will numb our emptiness and give us a shot of pleasure.
An industry designed to help us cope: The greatest evidence that our culture's approach to flourishing isn’t working is our self-help psychological culture that’s sprung up. People are hungry for more and more pop psychology techniques, so that they can cope with their lives. But no matter how much you meditate, use mantras, attend yoga, practice positive self-talk, or start following Buddhism, you’ll never solving the real underlying problems.
Our culture tells us that if you follow the secular approach to flourishing you’ll soon be happy. But when you dig into the lives of the people who are most trying to live this way, whether it’s in a big city or a small town, you’ll see that it’s just not working.
Sure, it can create a lot of external success, but it can never give people the peace, joy, and sustained happiness that they are looking for, no matter how successful they are.
why doesn’t the secular approach work?
You can do everything possible to build a flourishing life by trying to satisfy your inner desires by creating your own personal kingdom, but it will never work. No matter how hard you try, no amount of external success will ever create lasting internal flourishing.
Why is that? Because of these three reasons:
You will never be satisfied: No matter what our culture tells you, your external circumstances will never give you lasting satisfaction. You might get a temporary buzz from each new achievement, but you will always need more and more achievement to give you that hit. This will create a state of constant dissatisfaction, no matter how successful you are.
And even if you are successful, you'll soon realize what so many other people have throughout the history of the world: getting the external things you've always dreamed of doesn't actually satisfy the desires of your heart. This is what leads to all kind of quarter life, mid life, and end of life crises: the things I was putting my hope in isn't satisfying me.
The Samaritan woman in John 4 struggled with this. She tried to find flourishing through her appearance, sex, and the approval of men, but yet could never quench her insatiable thirst for satisfaction.
You will never be at peace: if you try to find flourishing through creating a personal external kingdom big enough to satisfy your own desires, then you’ll idolize and obsess over your life, causing you to do whatever it takes to make sure you win.. This will cause all kinds of conflict, tension, and friction with the people around you. This is exactly what James described in James 4:
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.
Trying to find flourishing through the size of your own personal kingdom has led to so much death, destruction, and suffering in the world. It’s what’s at the root of every war, conflict, and power struggle. Sure, people can appear nice at first, but if something comes in between them and their kingdom-building project, the ugliness of their true heart will come out.
You will never feel secure: if you base your sense of flourishing on your personal kingdom, you’re building your life on very shaky ground. Why? Because your kingdom is out of your control in so many ways. No human being can avoid financial downturns, job loss, office politics, sickness, disease, accidents, family struggles, and ultimately, death.
When you place your hopes for a flourishing life on your external circumstances, you’ll never feel safe and secure. Even if things are going well you’ll be filled with anxiety, fear, and “what if’s” about what could go wrong if and when you lose some or all of your success. No one can escape the difficulties of life forever, and if you base your flourishing on having good circumstances and plentiful success, you will crumble when you experience difficult times.
so what’s the solution?
Deep down, though, even these problems are symptoms that spring out of the main reason for why the secular approach to flourishing doesn’t work: because no human being can ever find true flourishing outside of God.
That’s because God is the only place human beings can find the satisfaction, peace, and certainty that we need to flourish.
The temptation to try to flourish apart from God has always been with us, though. It’s what caused Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Satan told them:
You know, if you follow God’s path to flourishing you’re going to be miserable. After all, God’s holding out on you. Here’s my tip: if you really want to flourish, then get rid of God and become your own god with your own kingdom.
Unfortunately, the results of this decision has been disastrous. Human beings were not made to find their flourishing outside of a relationship with God, and so when we try, we create all kinds of sin, brokenness, and pain.
This is the problem with every human attempt at flourishing. The more we try to flourish apart from God, the more we experience the sin and misery of life apart from God.
So then, what is Jesus’ approach to flourishing?
