“The felt joys of obedience exceed the felt pleasures of sin.” Is that true? Does serving God bring happiness all the time? Does the church marquee that reads, “We are too blessed to be depressed,” really sum up the Christian walk? I adamantly believe that each one of those statements would only be true if we lived in the Garden still. Otherwise, I must disagree with all of them. The Christian life is not some happy-go-lucky, smiles-all-the-time experience. If it were, adding “life” onto the end of that first statement would be a lie. Bad days do exist, and I believe that as a Christian, it is wrong to assume that having one is inherently sinful. That, to me, is a lie.
The book of Job is a story that imposes upon the reader this question, “Why do you serve God?” That question is relevant to all generations, to all times, to everyone. If we serve God because we want to get to heaven, we are serving God for the wrong reason. If we serve God because we don’t want to go to hell, we are serving God for the wrong reason. If we serve God because everything will work out for the good of those who do, we are serving God for the wrong reason. If we serve God because we believe that doing so brings about a never-ending joy as well as prevents us from ever experiencing elongated pain or even the “worldly” bad day, we are serving God for the wrong reason!
I completely agree with what Larry Crabb writes in his article, “On the Occasion of a Friend’s Retreat into Sin,” “If we live for an experience of joy, if we elevate desire to central status and live for nothing higher than its felt satisfaction, then we no longer are living by faith. We are idolaters worshipping desire. We are no longer living for God.” Amen from the Southern Baptist! Thinking and expecting everyone to have a peachy-keen life with no problems or no bad days or no sadness or no pain or nothing negative is a lie bigger than any I have heard! Living for God should not be based upon what joy you can get out of it. Living for God should be based upon the joy that is in Christ Jesus!
When I came to my university, I hated it. I felt that everyone believed that life is so good as a child of God that being upset, being hurt, feeling pain, or having a bad day was not only against the culture of my university, but against God Himself. I remember thoroughly breaking down in front of mom pleading for permission to transfer halfway through my first semester because I didn’t fit in. Everyone else had good days all the time. Everybody else’s away message said how great they were after quoting an old hymn or new praise song. Everyone else was “fine.” I wasn’t. I had bad days—visibly bad days.
Praise be to God, though, that I found a circle of friends that had bad days as well. Praise be to God, though, that I found a group of men and women who admitted that they had a hard time always being happy. God is good in the end, but sometimes we as Christians suffer and have bad days…and that, in my mind, is not a sin. I’ll close with the chorus from Casting Crowns’ song “Stained Glass Masquerade”:
Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
And smiles to hide our pain
But if the invitation’s open
To every heart that has been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade.
