As I stood in line waiting for my pumpkin-spice latte, I overheard a conversation between two women standing in front of me. One woman shared about how distant she had been feeling toward her husband the last few years. She spoke of loneliness, frustration at his callousness to her needs, and the lack of spark and passion. Empathetic to her sadness, I waited to hear how her friend would respond. “I think it’s time for you to move on,” she said flatly. “God wants you to be happy. If your husband isn’t making you happy, you should leave him so you can see what else God has in store for you.”
The friend’s counsel haunted me all day. I was broken for this stranger’s plight. But I was more devastated by how her friend used God’s name to validate her poor counsel. As I considered this conversation, I was reminded of something Charles Spurgeon once said: “Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.”
The majority of the messages from social media, popular books, and podcasts fall into this gray gap between “right and almost right.” Many of these messages come from Christians, applying a thin veneer of Bible to current social issues to justify a half-truth. This is a scary prospect, especially when we realize that this is how Satan uses Scripture: presenting a truth out of context and slightly altered, resulting in a lie (Matthew 4). The Bible categorizes false teaching as anything that is contrary to the Word of God or that does not conform to the character of Jesus. More often than not, false teachings confuse Christian blessings with secular self-fulfillment.
The Bible tells us to beware of those who selectively obey Scripture, who take the promises of God out of context, and who make earthly blessings more ultimate than the Giver of blessings. The Bible exhorts us to grow in the ability to discern almost-truths. The Holy Spirit is our Helper, the driving force to help navigate the often-difficult road of “right and almost right.”
Let’s look at a few often-heard messages:
God Wants You to be Happy.
Most confusing of this message is that both Christians and non-Christians use it to their benefit. Discerning between what is right and what is almost right in the realm of happiness is tricky business.
• Does God want us to be happy? Yes.
• Does God want us to be happy at the cost of holiness? No.
• Does God use earthly gifts to make us happy? Yes.
• Is happiness found in earthly gifts? No.
Culture tells us that true happiness is found in self-fulfillment. It sets us on a track to do whatever we think will make us happy. The entitlement to happiness through self-fulfillment normalizes absolute selfishness and self-indulgence. “If it feels good, do it,” becomes an anti-Christ mantra. This is why we hear stories of people abandoning families for the sake of happiness or who deny all forms of self-control or self-discipline for the sake of pursuing complete satisfaction.
The Bible tells us that true happiness is found in God alone. God has created us with an insatiable appetite for happiness. He has created our souls with the capacity to dream as big as eternity (Eccl 3:11). God has not made us with small souls or small desires. We can chase after things to make us happy, but the reality is they will never satisfy. We were made for infinite joy. The Holy Spirit will never lead you to do something in the name of “happiness” that is contrary to what God has already said.
God Wants You to be Successful.
The answer to the question “Does God want me to be successful?” is an unsettling and often unwelcome “maybe.” The follow-up question to discern between what is a right and almost-right answer to this question is “Who or what is determining the definition of success?”
Culture defines success as having achieved status, wealth, power, education and/or fame. Or perhaps success is measured in the amount of weight you’ve lost. This definition of success correlates with the idiom keeping up with the Joneses—or today’s rendition—keeping up with the Kardashians.
The Bible defines success very differently: “My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments, for length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you. Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.” (Proverbs 3:3–4)
If we examine our hearts honestly, we might find that we have taken the promise of “good success in the sight of man,” but rewritten the path that God laid out for us to attain this promise. Rather than meditate on the words of God, we are surrounded with mantras of “you can do it” and pictures of what we want—all to motivate us to persevere through hard days of work. We take God out of our work, yet ask him to bless our work and give us favor. We use Him as a sort of cosmic self-help guru.
Success is not found in our list of achievements. Success is when we are men and women marked and shaped by the truth of God’s word. The Holy Spirit always guides us toward God’s glory, not our own.
God Wants You to be Free.
The magnificence of this statement is that it is fully, absolutely, unequivocally true. God is the designer, source, and guarantor of true freedom. The half-truth resides in how freedom is defined and obtained.
To the world, freedom is found only in absolute autonomy, defined as being the master of your own life through striving for complete self-reliance.
The Bible tells us that true freedom is found and experienced when we belong to Christ. Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever, the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” John 8:34–36. The beauty of the gospel is that freedom has already been purchased for us. When we put our faith in Christ, the sin that used to enslave us no longer has power over us. We don’t have to rely on ourselves to strive and work for freedom, we get to rely on the mercy and grace of Christ who purchased freedom for us.
