Christian social philosophers … surveyed about three thousand teenagers asking what they believed about God. What they found is that teenagers were basically believing that there is a God and all he wants for us is to be happy and nice. You don’t need God unless anything infringes on one of those two goals. As long as you’re pursuing happiness and niceness, you’re going to go to heaven. Other than that, you don’t really need the Lord.
That philosophy of moralistic therapeutic deism evolved into this sort of believe-in-yourself-ism. The message became: You’re all you need. You don’t need the Lord for anything else as long as he’s helping you to be happy and nice. Everyone can conjure up some happiness and some niceness, so we sort of shelve God and decide we don’t really need him. We just need to believe in ourselves, to invent who we are and what we want to do, and we need to just go for it.
They are looking to God as a “pie in the sky,” thinking he exists just to make us healthy and wealthy. We may think, Because I’m a Christian, things are going to go well for me. I shouldn’t expect too much hardship or to endure too much suffering because God wants me to be happy, to believe in myself, to be nice, and to be good.
A False Gospel
This kind of gospel is not the gospel at all. This is actually a false gospel and it has really infiltrated our churches. It tells
you to believe in yourself rather than to turn your gaze upon our almighty God.
We’re looking inward, constantly self-reflecting about our gifts, skills, and abilities and thinking, What can I do? What can I make? What impact can I have? Instead, we should be asking, Who is God? Who is our good, true, and beautiful God? What is his character like?We are constantly looking at our own behavior in a legalistic way thinking, I’m going to act one way and do this so that I can produce that, rather than beholding the Lord our God.
The almighty God of the universe created you and me, and he made us for a purpose. When we neglect that just to be happy, nice Christians, we ignore the greatest truth of all time—the most beautiful, the biggest, and most profound truth that’s available to you and me as (the people) of God.
Jen Oshman