What Does It Mean to Be Happy?
By Christopher Reese
All normal human beings want to be happy. Aristotle observed that happiness is the goal of human life.1 For we Americans, the pursuit of happiness is even enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a self-evident, unalienable right. We can all agree that we want to be happy, but it’s much harder to find consensus when we ask what happiness is and how we can achieve it.
Despite disagreement on the finer details, for Americans (and most in the West), happiness is closely connected with being true to oneself, following one’s heart, and personal fulfillment. For example, 84 percent of Americans “believe that the ‘highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible.’ Eighty-six percent believe that to be fulfilled requires you to ‘pursue the things you desire most.’ Ninety-one percent affirm that ‘the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself.’”2
These ideals are part of the cultural air we breathe, and we find them embedded throughout popular culture. One song from Disney’s Mulan soundtrack advises listeners: “You must be true to your heart / That’s when the heavens will part. . . . / Your heart can tell you no lies.” In the 1994 animation Thumbelina, the narrator Jacquimo sings, “When you follow your heart, if you have to journey far, / Here’s a little trick. You don’t need a guiding star. / Trust your ticker, you’ll get there quicker.”
In her hit song “The Voice Within,” Christina Aguilera counsels listeners to “Look inside yourself. . . . Just trust the voice within.”
As theologian Thaddeus Williams humorously observes, “There are enough tween-targeted self-worship pop songs to fill a year-long playlist. We hear songs about bucking authority, songs about your wildest dreams all coming true, about being a super girl, or some roaring animal goddess who eats people’s expectations for breakfast.”3
Along similar lines, television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes contends that “Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.”4
At a commencement address at Stanford University, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told graduates, “And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”5
For Christians, there is an element of truth in this advice based on God’s sovereignty. Our individual personalities, interests, and desires are part of who God has made us to be (see, for example, Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5). These can all be indications (though not necessarily determinative) of the goals and dreams we will pursue in life. As Dallas Willard writes, “Because we are God’s colaborers, our wants and desires are . . . important to God and God’s plan for us (1 Cor 3:9 KJV).”6 Frederick Buechner notably observed that “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”7 It would go too far to make this a universal principle, but in God’s sovereignty, many Christians have found this to be the case.
The key difference for Christians is that our desires and goals must be submitted to God’s will and direction, and the ways in which we pursue them must accord with Scripture. As Thomas Tarrants comments, “When our desires are God-centered, they are good and fulfill their intended role. But when they are self-centered, when our desires are captured by the things of the fallen world and the sinful nature (the flesh), they are evil. These have been called disordered loves.”8
Even as Christians, we need to regularly evaluate our desires to ensure they aren’t the fruit of disordered loves. Martin Luther observed that due to the fall, our human nature became “deeply curved in on itself” and thus “not only bends the best gifts of God toward itself” but “wickedly . . . seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.”9
This is why the self-focused approach to happiness always fails, especially when God is excluded. In our fallen pride, writes Timothy Keller, “we labor under the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth and find a purpose big enough to give us meaning in life without God.”10 Further, if we “look to some created thing to give us the meaning, hope, and happiness that only God himself can give, it will eventually fail to deliver and break our hearts.”11
As actor Jim Carrey once insightfully remarked in an interview, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that that’s not the answer.”12
The Way of Shalom
If happiness isn’t arrived at by following our hearts and being true to ourselves, how can we obtain it? The concept of happiness in Scripture is best captured by the Hebrew word shalom, which suggests life in its fullness, well-being, contentment, and completeness.13 Its New Testament counterpart is eirēnē. Both are often translated into English as “peace.”14 Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff proposes that a better translation of shalom is “flourishing.” He writes, “To experience shalom is to flourish in all one’s relationships—with God, with one’s fellow human beings, with non-human creation, with oneself.”15 Because both we and creation are fallen, we won’t experience happiness to its fullest extent until the new heavens and earth (Revelation 21). But Wolterstorff’s categories encompass the essential elements for experiencing happiness in our everyday lives, and we’ll briefly explore each one below.16
Relationship with God
Our relationship with God is foundational and makes flourishing in the other two categories (self and others) possible. We discover in the early chapters of Genesis that God designed humans to exist in a relationship with him, and that relationship was severed because of the first couples’ rebellion (Genesis 1–3; Romans 5:12). As a result, humans are born into the world “dead in [our] transgressions and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). However because the Father sent the Son to rescue humanity, we now “have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 5:1). Because of this restored relationship, Christians are now “blessed . . . in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). We are united to Christ and draw life from him through the Holy Spirit (John 7:38; 14:16–18; 15:4–5).
Christians can flourish as human beings because we can now attain the ultimate end for which we were created—to know and love God. Blaise Pascal insightfully noted:
[T]here was once in man a true happiness of which there now remains to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings . . . But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.17
Relationship with Ourselves
As mentioned earlier, because of the fall, our humanity became “deeply curved in on itself.” Romans 1 describes the degeneration that occurred: our thinking became futile, and our hearts were darkened. We became idolators and God turned us over to evil, which corrupted us in numerous ways. We became “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity” (Romans 1:29). These vices led us in the opposite direction of flourishing. As Cornelius Plantinga Jr. affirms, “God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be.”18
In order to reverse what was lost in the fall and to bring us back to a place of wholeness, God regenerates us in salvation so that we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17). We have a “new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24). This new self is “being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” and we “are being transformed into [God’s] image with ever-increasing glory” by the power of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18).
This redemption is a continual source of peace and joy for the believer because it reminds us that we are “more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”19
Relationship with Others
Just as the fall fractured our relationship with God and with ourselves, it also ruptured our relationship with others. After Genesis 3, we see how shame and blame distorted the harmony once enjoyed by Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:7, 12). Instead of living in the unity and mutual support God intended, humanity became prone to hostility, division, and violence (Genesis 4:8; 6:11–12).
Scripture testifies that in Christ the “dividing wall of hostility” between peoples has been broken down (Ephesians 2:14). By His death and resurrection, Jesus creates “in himself one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:15) and invites us into a new family where earthly differences do not divide us. Paul reminds us that “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” because all are “one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In this new community, we learn to bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), forgive one another as we have been forgiven (Colossians 3:13), and spur one another on “toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).
When we come to Christ, the Holy Spirit begins a process of sanctification in order to shape us to be more like Jesus and less focused on our own agendas (2 Corinthians 3:18; Philippians 2:3-4). In the process, we experience more shalom in our relationships with others. Trevor Hudson’s description of this change is especially apt.
We sense [our heart] becoming more open toward others than ever before. No longer is it curved in on itself. We begin to become aware that the person next to us has an infinite, irreplaceable, and precious value in God’s eyes, just as we have. There is a new gentleness with others, especially in moments of failure and struggle. . . . We know intuitively that we are joined with our neighbor, and with the whole creation, in an unbroken connection with God’s heart.20
Much more could be said about how God has restored shalom to the three relationships just examined, but the key point is that these are the true sources of our happiness rather than anything we can dream up ourselves based on our individual desires and ambitions, especially when self seeks to occupy God’s throne. Thaddeus Williams thus concludes: “[T]he more you worship your self, the less you become your self. You become a shadow, a specter, an unself. The longer and deeper you stare into the mirror, looking for answers, the more it will feel like looking at Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This is the strange paradox of self-worship.”21
Notes
1. The term Aristotle used, often translated “happiness” in English, was eudaimonia, which conveys the idea of holistic flourishing. It wasn’t a state of emotional satisfaction but involved a lifelong pursuit of moral and intellectual excellence. This concept is closer to the Bible’s understanding of shalom (also translated as “happiness” or “flourishing”) than popular views of “happiness.”
2. Thaddeus J. Williams, Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2023), Logos edition. Williams cites “The End of Absolutes: America’s New Moral Code,” Barna, May 25, 2016, https://www.barna.com/research/the-end-of-absolutes-americas-new-moral-code/. I’m indebted to Williams’s discussion for a number of insights here in relation to the modern focus on self.
3. This quotation and the three preceding songs are found in Williams, Don’t Follow Your Heart.
4. Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 286.
5. Cal Newport, Study Hacks, “What Steve Jobs Meant When He Said ‘Follow Your Heart,’” https://calnewport.com/what-steve-jobs-meant-when-he-said-follow-your-heart/.
6. Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, The IVP Signature Collection (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 73.
7. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 95.
8. Thomas A. Tarrants, “The Transformation of Our Heart’s Desires,” C. S. Lewis Institute, https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-transformation-of-our-hearts-desires/.
9. Martin Luther, “Lectures on Romans” (1515–1516), in Luther’s Works, Vol. 25, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 291. Luther likely drew this description from Augustine, who said, “Man did not so fall away as to become absolutely nothing; but being turned towards himself, his being became more contracted than it was when he cleaved to him who supremely is.” Quoted in Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine: An Introductory Guide to His Most Important Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 127, citing City of God 14.13.
10. Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy (Chorley, England: 10Publishing, 2012), 14.
11. Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), 3.
12. Quote Investigator, “I Think Everybody Should Get Rich and Famous So They Can See That That’s Not the Answer,” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/11/09/rich-famous/.
13. Graham A. Cole, “Shalom,” in Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, ed. G. K. Beale et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), 779. Depending on the context, shalom can have other meanings as well, including health, prosperity, security, friendship and salvation.
14. Passages containing shalom include Numbers 6:26, Psalm 29:11, and Isaiah 26:3. For eirēnē, see, for example, John 14:27, Acts 10:36, and Galatians 1:3.
15. Cole, “Shalom,” quoting Wolterstorff, “Justice and Peace,” in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology, ed. D. J. Atkinson and D. H. Field (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 17–22.
16. For the sake of brevity, I’m omitting the category of non-human creation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the same relationships that were corrupted by the fall, which disrupted our experience of shalom in the first place.
17. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (New York, NY: Philosophical Library/Open Road, 2016), #425.
18. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 14.
19. Timothy Keller and Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God (New York: Dutton, 2011), 48.
20. Trevor Hudson, Seeking God: Finding Another Kind of Life with St. Ignatius and Dallas Willard (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers/NavPress, 2023), 31.
21. Williams, Don’t Follow Your Heart.
— Christopher L. Reese (MDiv, ThM) is the founder and editor of The Worldview Bulletin and a general editor of the Dictionary of Christianity and Science (Zondervan) and Three Views on Christianity and Science (Zondervan). He is the author of 100 Old Testament Quotes by Jesus: How Christ Used the Hebrew Scriptures (Rose/Tyndale), and his articles have appeared in Christianity Today, Bible Gateway, Beliefnet, Summit Ministries, the C. S. Lewis Institute, and other sites.
*This article originally appeared at Summit Ministries.
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I’m happy when I’m free.
The truth sets me free.
I’m happy when I’m blessed.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.”
I’m happy because I know and trust God.
There is no other real happiness.