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CURLY QUESTIONS
What If The Good Life Does More Harm Than Good?
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Do Christians drain the joy from life?
The message we often hear is to deny ourselves. To take up our cross. To follow the one who had nowhere to lay his head. This can be interpreted as not spending any money or effort on pleasure or beauty. Or the good life as no good.
On the other hand, another message we may hear is that God wants to bless us with good things. This can be interpreted as feeling we’re entitled to good things, and that being able to acquire good things is a sign God loves us. The good life as unfettered consumption.
But what if the problem is not that Christians shouldn’t pursue the good life, but that we have the good life all wrong? God neither wants to kill joy nor favour the rich. To put it another way, the Christian life is neither asceticism or materialism. It is both a life of joy and a life of sacrifice. More than that, joy and sacrifice are closely intertwined in Scripture, as we see in Hebrews 12:2: ‘For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross’.
For most of us in Australia, we realise that God does not call us to either a life of no pleasure or a life of pure self-indulgence. We bumble along somewhere in the middle, at times giving generously and at times spending it up. Too afraid God might call us to reject the good life, we fail to reflect seriously on what it actually is.
My concept of what I need and how I spend money is shaped by the culture around me. It is likely I justify consuming more than I should and not being as generous as I could. Why? Because I am a product of Western culture, which views the good life as individual consumption.
