Holiness Over Happiness

In 2014, Victoria Osteen made a statement that quickly hit the internet. “God wants you to be happy” she asserted. I remember rolling my eyes at her cheapened prosperity gospel. It’s not that God wants us to be miserable, but Scripture doesn’t support the idea that his chief aim is our happiness. The entire concept seemed not only naïve to me but an illegitimate concern in the circles of faith where I was a participant.

Fast forward five years, and I realized that some of that thinking had been illuminated in my own life. I’d been believing the same false gospel Osteen preached. I’d bought the lie that, if my life as a Christian looked happy, people would know Jesus is good. If my marriage looked happy, people would know Jesus is good. And if my husband and I were happy foster parents, people would know Jesus is good.

This idea is not only unbiblical; it’s downright dangerous.

Some seasons of my life didn’t fit nicely into this logic. I wrestled with God during some hard and unhappy times, and I now see they were the beginning of the undoing of my wrong understanding. The first came when I was nineteen and spending a summer in Africa caring for orphans. During that trip, I journaled that my heart was both brimming with joy and breaking with loneliness while doing one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done. But I felt the burden to present only the happy side of the story to my supporters and church back home. Several months later, I read Katie Davis’s words in her book Kisses from Katie:

The contradiction comes when I realize that all these experiences and emotions were real . . . My sense of certainty about being exactly where God wanted me was solid, but just as firm was the fact that I wondered at times what on earth I was doing here. The frustration…was just as deep and true as the unbounded joy I felt at other times. I loved my new life . . . But compared to the life I had been living, it was hard.

These words brought me so much comfort. While Scripture supports believers experiencing the entire range of human emotion, I often felt that the American church expected me to wear a badge of happiness as evidence of Jesus. I entered this same battle perhaps even more deeply when my husband and I became foster parents five years later. I knew this was something we were called to and equipped for, and some days I marveled at how God had prepared us for this moment.

But other days I hid in the bathroom and wept before emerging to make dinner. It was one of the loneliest seasons of my life this far. When you’re twenty-four, not many of your friends have thirteen-year-olds. Not to mention trauma. Parenting is no joke, and our first longer-term foster placement did not have a happy ending. I instantly worried that being honest about our experience would discourage others from pursuing foster care. Again, I was battling the paradox of being in the middle of God’s calling on my life yet feeling far from happy. But I’m learning that a life of holiness points to God far more poignantly than a life of happiness.

The gospel calls us deeper than happiness; it prods us toward holiness. The reality is not that our happiness leads people to the truth of Jesus but rather our pursuit of holiness does. We can spend our lives pursuing our own happiness, or we can spend them risking our happiness for the great reward of chasing Jesus. On the rare occasion I shared how overwhelmed I felt in our foster care journey, I was often met with an invitation to quit. So many people told us the risk was too big, the hurt too great.

People said similar things when I went to Africa, but the invitation of the gospel is for us to risk something—to risk everything—for the glory and renown of our great Savior. The gospel never asks us to be the savior. We make terrible saviors. But we make wonderful children sold out to a loving Savior. The invitation, as Jennie Allen says in her book Restless, is to “risk something. Step out and fail. Be the fool. Build a life that needs our God…If we know no place, no job, no marriage, no child is going to fulfill us perfectly, we can make the choice to quit fighting for happiness in all of it and start to fight for God’s glory in it.”

If we’re shifting our mindsets with holiness as our chief aim, how do we practically pursue holiness?

1. We pursue truth and righteousness with a reckless abandon.

When I was in college, Beth Moore challenged us to pray one simple prayer every day: Jesus, be the driving desire of my life. “If 13,000 students began to pray that prayer, we would begin to love Jesus with our whole hearts,” she said to us in convocation. What would happen if the church began to pray that prayer every morning before diving into God’s Word?

2. We get healthy.

If step one is to pursue God, fulfilling the greatest commandment, step two is to get healthy so we can fulfill the second greatest commandment. In Matthew 22:39, Jesus prods us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Writer and therapist Aundi Kolber says it this way: “We can empathize with people to the extent that we are available to our own emotional experience. This means when we do the interior work to honor our own journey, we have a larger container for the pain, hope, joy, and process of others too.” We get healthy, then, so we can pursue selflessness and actually love one another. We go to counseling. We do the necessary relational work and self-care.

3. We practice silence and reflection.

We have to make space to reflect and listen to the Holy Spirit. We make space for the Holy Spirit to prompt and guide us. We also need to give space for others to speak the truth into our lives and pray for a willingness to receive it.

May we be a generation that chases holiness over happiness.

Hannah Pannell is a sassy, Southern coffee lover who spends most of her days with a classroom full of little people. Hannah loves serving in the local church where her husband is an associate minister. She is passionate about gathering her people around the table over good food and even better conversation. Hannah blogs at thissweetlybrokenlife.com.

Photograph © Matthew T. Rader, used with permission