“Pursue peace and holiness with all people, without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14).
Holiness is a priority over happiness. It should rank above happiness on our scale of values, and maintaining its presence in our lives should be a more serious concern. The pursuit of holiness should be what we are known for.
To say that anything is more important than happiness certainly sounds absurd to our modern ears. This idea itself flies in the face of popular philosophy. Even when it comes to religious philosophy, most people nowadays take it as their basic premise that God “wants us to be happy.” We also use that benchmark to decide what God’s will is in the first place. Faced with different interpretations of the classical teaching, we choose the one we think will bring us the most happiness. And if someone challenges the correctness of our judgment, our answer is often predictable: “Well, I can’t believe that God wouldn’t want me to be happy.”
But although the “pursuit of happiness” may be a social and political priority, it does not top any classical list of criteria by which our conduct is to be judged. Although long-term happiness, properly defined, was His aim (Hebrews 12:1,2), Jesus often chose the difficult rather than the easy, and the painful rather than the pleasant: “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).
This does not mean that happiness is unimportant. Obviously this is important to some extent. But no matter how important happiness is, the way to achieve it is not to make it the main purpose of life, as many people do. Happiness mostly comes to those who are willing to suffer when necessary, while working toward goals of greater importance. God, our Creator, is a better manager of our happiness than we are, and in the long run, we will be happier if we seek Him first and let Him decide how much happiness we can handle without forgetting Him. If we had to do so, we could avoid the loss of any happiness, but no one can avoid the absence of holiness. So that’s what’s worth pursuing. . . And if we do not do this then death will be our destruction.
“No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in knowing and doing the will of God, and leave the matter to Christ to decide how happy he will be” (A.W. Tozer).
Gary Henry – WordPoints.com AreYouaChristian.com
