I used to think that wanting satisfaction and joy and happiness was just selfish. After several conversations and a lot of thinking, I started to get confused about joy. I know that we only find true, everlasting joy in Jesus. But while I knew this, I began evaluating myself and began to wonder if me wanting joy was selfish.  Because after all, aren’t I supposed to suffer as a Christian? Isn’t that what 1 Peter is all about? If I’m supposed to suffer, I shouldn’t be selfishly seeking joy. How silly I was though!

What I have been learning recently is that we were created for joy. In The Explicit Gospel (A lot of this post today will be coming from ideas and quotes from this book since it is what has been captivating me the past few days), Matt Chandler puts it this way: “this deep longing in the core of who we are that cries out for happiness and delight was put there by him and he means for us to be satisfied.” Happiness is the driving force behind all we do in life-ever since we were born. Longing for satisfaction isn’t the sin. It’s the pursuit of happiness that often leads us to sin.

God created us with a desire for him that would provide us with ultimate satisfaction. But when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden of Eden after they gave into sin, we too (all of humanity) were kicked out of the garden into a vast wasteland. Now the answer to satisfaction is still easy-we just pursue the garden. Pursue what God intended for us. The garden is ultimately where we want to end up. That’s what we were created for. That’s what our hearts yearn for.

However the action is not so easy. Instead of pursuing the garden, we try to make the vast wasteland that we are stuck in into the garden. But that will never work. The vast wasteland is simply made up of broken pieces of what the garden could have been. You see, something else I have been realizing is that some of the things we pursue in this world were created by God for our enjoyment. In his book Matt Chandler says “Pleasure, partying, gardens, work, money, material things, and sex were all his ideas.”

But when you take a good thing and make it the ultimate thing instead of God, it will only lead us to unsatisfaction. Every good thing in the universe apart from God is too broken to satisfy us. Because although these are all good things when you use them the right way, they are only supposed to point us to the source. To the creator of these pleasures. And to the ultimate source of happiness and joy.

So basically what I am trying to say is that God wants us to seek satisfaction. He created us to be satisfied….in him! But we are broken creatures searching for happiness in a broken world full of broken people.

C.S. Lewis says it best: “We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us…we are far too easily pleased.” Romans 1: 23 basically says that when sin entered the world, we exchanged the infinite creator for his finite creation.

What I’m realizing is that when sin entered the world, it’s not like that is when we started wanting satisfaction. That’s something that God placed in us when He created us. When sin entered the world, we simply began seeking fleeting things to satisfy us as we desperately tried to fulfill the void that was put in our hearts when we lost the satisfaction of enjoying God in the Garden of Eden.

Looking back, I see how silly I was to question joy and seeking pleasure. Although we are called to suffer like Christ suffered for us, that wasn’t God’s original intent. Suffering came with the fall. However we are originally designed for pleasure and satisfaction. That was lost with the fall. But how grateful I am that Jesus restored that for us on the cross so that we can feel that satisfaction again.

One thing I know though is that the pleasure that we feel here on earth is still tainted with sin and brokenness and therefore limited. So if it feels good here, I can’t even begin to imagine the satisfaction and joy we will feel in Heaven when we are made complete and free from the broken world!

1 Corinthians 2:9 ” However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”