No matter how carefully we try to promote and protect our interests, we will not always succeed. Even when misfortune does not befall us, its possibility makes us anxious, and this keeps us from being perfectly happy. This is why the Scriptures tell us that it is only when our hearts are fixed upon that which cannot be shaken that we can face the prospect of bad news without fear (cf. Ps. 112:7; Heb. 12:26–29). 

In our relativistic age, happiness is seen as a matter of personal taste. If you come across someone whose happiness aesthetic differs from yours, you are expected to shrug and politely say, “Whatever makes you happy.” This makes sense to those who see human beings as more authentic when they act in accordance with their feelings. On the other hand, those who see all people as sharing the same human nature will conclude that some things are universally conducive, and others universally detrimental, to personal fulfillment. These differing perspectives correspond to two different paths to happiness, only one of which can lead to a happy end.
The Path of Deified Desire
It is widely assumed in our time that happiness consists in having positive feelings (or at least not having negative ones). Closely related to this is the notion that subjective preferences should be the determining factor for how objective reality is ordered. As C.S. Lewis once put it, modern man has rejected the approach to life that focuses on how to conform the soul to the natural moral order, replacing it with an approach that seeks to subdue everything to his desires.[1] This outlook is now in full bloom, and it is being implemented politically on the basis of various supposed “existential threats.” In the words of professor Russell Berman, the formidable “nexus of government, media, major corporations, and the education establishment . . . aspires to a permanent state of emergency to impose a new mode of governance by intimidation, censorship, and unilateral action.”[2] The powerful in our society claim to have the knowledge and expertise needed to fashion a new world that corresponds to their imaginations, all the while ignoring the constraints of the actual world. Psychologist Mattias Desmet explains this rise in coercive control as “the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”[3] Theologically, it is a manifestation of what Martin Luther was talking about when he said that “man cannot of his nature desire that God should be God; on the contrary, he desires that he himself might be God and that God might not be God.”[4]
The same dynamic is evident at a personal level in the embrace of expressive individualism, which Carl Trueman defines as “a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say ‘feelings’ or ‘intuitions’—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.”[5] Note how expressive individualism undergirds the response of William “Lia” Thomas (winner of the 500 meter freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships) when he was asked about his biological advantage when competing against women:
There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy, and sophomore year, when I had my best times competing with the men, I was miserable. . . . Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.[6]
As anyone who followed Thomas’s story knows, the thing that made him happy brought unhappiness to female swimmers who were forced to share a locker room with and compete against a biological male. When one person’s pursuit of happiness gets in the way of someone else’s pursuit of happiness, the conflict has to be adjudicated by something beyond individual feelings. But in a relativistic and therapeutic society that makes feelings ultimate, it simply boils down to which side has more power. This is exactly what happened in Thomas’s case, as the cultural ascendancy of transgender ideology resulted in his teammates and competitors being bullied into silence.
Such things are to be expected when a society unmoors itself from any sense of objective moral order. Trueman shows how the modern West has done this by employing Philip Rieff’s taxonomy of “worlds” to describe the various types of culture that societies embody. In this taxonomy, first worlds are pagan, second worlds are epitomized by the Christian West, and third worlds describe modernity. Trueman explains,
First and second worlds thus have a moral, and therefore cultural, stability because their foundations lie in something beyond themselves. To put it another way, they do not have to justify themselves on the basis of themselves. Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds, do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent. Instead, they have to do so on the basis of themselves. The inherent instability of this approach should be obvious. . . . Morality will thus tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism, with the notion of what are and are not desirable outcomes being shaped by the distinct cultural pathologies of the day.[7]
Lewis foresaw this when he wrote, “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[8] And as Desmet notes, this produces a level of destabilization and anxiety that causes people to long “for an authoritarian institution that provides direction to take the burden of freedom and the associated insecurity off their shoulders.”[9] This is why today’s West is simultaneously marked by libertinism and legalism. The rise of authoritarianism (or what Rod Dreher describes as “soft totalitarianism”)[10] is yet another manifestation of how fallen man slavishly looks to law for his deliverance. This is what the apostle Paul is talking about in Galatians 4 when he speaks of being enslaved to the “elementary principles of the world,” a phrase that describes the legalistic religious principle that was active for Jews under the law of Moses and for Gentiles under the law of nature. In the words of John Fesko, the phrase “elementary principles of the world” in Galatians 4 refers to “the creation law that appears in both the Adamic and Mosaic covenants.”[11] Because of fallen man’s enslavement under the law, when a society makes feelings and desires preeminent, the inevitable result is not happiness, but tyranny. This further demonstrates that the good order for which human nature was designed cannot be restored by human effort but only by receiving salvation as a free gift through faith in Jesus Christ, in whom we are accepted as righteous in God’s sight and renewed in the whole man after the image of God.[12]
The Path of Rightly Ordered Desire
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) expounds on the other path to happiness in his dialogue On the Happy Life, written soon after his conversion to Christianity.[13] In this dialogue, Augustine discusses the connection between desire and happiness by saying, “If [a man] wants good things and has them, he is happy; but if he wants bad things, he is unhappy, even if he has them.”[14] In other words, happiness cannot be separated from goodness, which is defined not by individual desires but by the objective moral order that God has inscribed in his world. What matters is not desire itself, but whether what we desire is good or bad.
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The believers who abide in Christ are also walking the Walk by Faith. They are running the race set before them. They are genuine disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. They are taking on His character. Along with the spiritual growth, these processes also draw the believer into a deep desire to know God intimately. How does a believer do this? The Bible is our source of knowledge about God and Man. The believers who draw close to God experience God drawing close to them. (James 4:8) He will put into them the hunger to study and learn the truth about Him and His ways that He desires to teach them. 

31 Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31 (LSB)
Some have said that God’s demand that He be glorified above all things (Isaiah 43:7; Colossians 1:10; 2 Timothy 2:4; John 8:29; Romans 8:8; 1 Thessalonians 2:12; 1 Thessalonians 4:1; Ephesians 4:1; 2 Corinthians 5:9) while commanding that His people remain humble, puts Him in a bad light. The scriptures tell us that God created humankind for His glory. Doesn’t this make God selfish, vain, and overly proud? That viewpoint comes from a distorted view of God and Man. That viewpoint is at the core of Humanism.
Each of our sinful natures is still very much alive. If we do not live self-denying lifestyles, the sin that lives within us will consume us. It will push for self-gratification above all things. It sees genuine humility as a losing proposition. Since our Souls are especially vulnerable to the appeal of self above all, we must learn to live Spirit-led lives. The Spirit-led walk puts our Souls on the cross and Jesus on the throne of our hearts.
The call to do all for the glory of God is not God selfishly demanding His due for His sake alone. Instead, God knows that His people maximize their fulfillment, joy, and peace when they are most satisfied in Him.
7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. 9 Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. 11 These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. John 15:7-11 (LSB)
Abiding in Jesus Christ carries with it a remarkable guarantee for the believer. Those who abide in the savior are fruitful in the Kingdom. The abiding believer will also bring glory to God by doing so. God’s joy brings believers fulfillment and it is their strength to abide and be obedient to the Lord. Who is excluded from abiding in Jesus Christ? No one can abide in Christ while being dominated by self-focus. Abiding requires our hearts to become directed to the Lord for fulfillment rather than what our fleshly sin nature wants. We maximize our fulfillment when we seek God’s glory in everything we do. Our fulfillment diminishes when we seek our own glory in anything.
One of my favorite books is The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. There is a place in this book called the Valley of Humiliation. This place allegorically represents the time in each believer’s walk with God when he or she departs from all self-focus while fellowshipping and communing with God in a warm, deep, personal way. Bunyan represented the Pilgrim’s time in the Valley of Humiliation as the time of deep spiritual growth and satisfaction in the Lord. On the outside looking in, however, the world would see a Christian who is a walking paradox. He or she would be suffering in a way that would consume a non-believer, but the suffering saint is joyful and full of inner strength that makes little sense to them.
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In his book, Inventing the Dream, author Kevin Starr writes: “Hollywood, as Horace and Daeida Wilcot envisioned their city-to-be, would be a model Southern Californian community: Christian, righteous, and very dry—no saloons, no liquor stores, with free land offered to Protestant churches locating within the city limits.” (p. 284) The city incorporated in 1903, eleven years after the death of Mr. Wilcot.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood sign. It used to say “Hollywoodland.”
But today the city is on hard times. A recent headline at deadline.com is, “Hollywood Jobs Down Nearly 20% This Year, & Not Just Because Of The Strikes, Study Says.”
The article notes, “Despite the now-resolved writers and actors strikes shutting down Hollywood production for several months, the loss of tens of thousands of Tinseltown jobs this year actually is part of a larger economic contraction, a just-released study claims — and those gigs might not be coming back.”
I see these constant stories on how Disney is producing one flop after another in the box office. In their effort to be as woke as possible, they purposefully violate the maxim that “the customer is always right.” They also seem to have forgotten the adage of “Let kids be kids.”
Whether you’re a person or a company or a nation, you can never escape from an important principle in life found in the Bible.
Paul said, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” We can never escape the consequences of our actions, good or bad. That’s why we need the Savior whose birth we celebrate at this time of year.
There was a time, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the movie moguls were not at war against America, against Christianity, against Biblical morality.
Dr. Ted Baehr is an author and the publisher of Movieguide, which provides a Biblical perspective on the movies. I reached out to him for a statement along the lines of: “What, if anything, did the Church have to do with the Golden Age of Hollywood?”
His email to me was so lengthy I posted his whole answer here.
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