Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

by Timothy J. Keller

if a Christian is feeling downcast and meaningless, it is because, in a sense, she is not being rational enough. She is not thinking enough about the implications of what she believes

Christians believe that there is a God, who made us in love to know him, but that as a human race we turned away and were lost to him. However, he has promised to bring us back to himself. God sent his Son into the world to break the power of sin and death, at infinite cost to himself, by going to the cross. Christian teaching is that Jesus rose from the dead and passed through the heavens and now is ruling history and preparing a future new heaven and a new earth, without death and suffering, in which we will live with him forever. And then all the deepest longings of our hearts will find their fulfillment.

He believed that we are happy only if we make our meaning in life something greater than our happiness.36 Royce therefore believed that finding meaning in life could be done only if we rejected individualism. “The individualist puts self-interest first, seeing his own pain, pleasure, and existence as his greatest concern.” Modern individualists see loyalty and self-sacrifice as an alarming mistake, leaving oneself open to exploitation and tyranny.

Without socially shared discovered meaning we have no basis for saying to somebody else: “You need to stop doing that!” Created meanings cannot be the basis for a program of social justice.

Frankl discovered that the only way for the prisoners’ humanity to survive was to relocate the main meaning of their lives to some transcendent reference point, something beyond this life and even this world.

the Meaning of life cannot be destroyed by adversity. If, for example, your Meaning in life is to know, please, emulate, and be with God, then suffering can actually enhance your Meaning in life, because it can get you closer to him.

Studies find a very weak correlation between wealth and contentment, and the more prosperous a society grows, the more common is depression.

The principle was this: We are unhappy even in success because we seek happiness from success. Wealth, power, achievement, family, material comfort, and security—the external goods of the world—can lead only to a momentary satisfaction, which fades away, leaving you more empty than if you had never tasted the joy. To achieve satisfaction you should not seek to change the world but rather to change your attitude toward the world. Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, wrote, “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

In short, don’t try to fulfill your desires; rather, control and manage them. To avoid having our inner contentment overthrown by the inevitable loss of things, do not become too emotionally attached to anything.

He argues that modern research shows some external circumstances do correlate with increased satisfaction. In particular, love relationships are important, and therefore the advice of emotional detachment may actually undermine happiness.

Another obvious problem with the ancient happiness hypothesis was that it undermined any motivation for seeking major social change. Rather than change the world as it is, we were to resign ourselves to it.

In so many ways human life has been transformed, and yet though we are unimaginably wealthier and more comfortable than our ancestors, no one is arguing that we are significantly happier than they were. We are struggling and seeking happiness in essentially the same ways our forebears did and doing a worse job

the problem is masked rather than revealed by the term “happiness.” The very word is a “feeble, holiday-camp sort of word, evocative of manic grins and cavorting about.”13 For most people—including those who answer researchers’ survey questions—the term does not have much depth to it.

To get at our condition more accurately, we should ask about joy, fulfillment, and satisfaction in life. Are we achieving those things? The thesis of this chapter is that we have much thinner life satisfaction than we want to admit to researchers or even to ourselves. On the whole, we are in denial about the depth and magnitude of our discontent.

One reason can be seen in a line from the poem “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens. “But in contentment I still feel the need for an imperishable bliss.”15 As we have seen, travel, material goods, sensual gratification, success, and status give quick spikes of pleasure and then fade.

The ephemeral nature of all satisfaction makes us long for something we can keep, but we look in vain. However, this is not the whole problem. We do not only want a satisfaction that lasts longer but also one that goes much deeper.

Within Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, a life illusion is the belief that some object or condition will finally bring you the satisfaction for which you long. But this is an illusion. At some point reality will destroy it, and nothing destroys it like actually achieving your dreams.

There are at least seven strategies that people take toward their discontent. There are two broad approaches—you can either live life assuming that satisfaction in life is quite possible, that “it” is still out there, or you can live in the conviction that satisfaction is not possible, that there is no “it.”

James Wood refers to the pursuit of “jobs, family, sex, and so on—the usual distractions” by which we hide from ourselves the emptiness of our lives.20 Actually we may be quite discontent, but we don’t recognize it because we are so busy in the process of getting ready to be happy.

What happens if, unlike the young and resentful, we find we actually reach many of our material goals? We will, as the ancients did, still find something significant missing. What do we do? Many people begin to blame the things we have. We assume that if we got a better spouse, a better job, a better income, or a better home, then we would feel much better too.

We go through houses and spouses and jobs and the constant reinvention of our lives, assuring ourselves that at the next level “it” is going to finally be there. But psychologists call this merely speeding up the “hedonic treadmill.”

But many have pointed out the problems that result when people turn to benevolence and social activism as a way to find more fulfillment for themselves. This approach is ultimately, and ironically, extremely selfish. Your supposed generosity is really just building yourself up. The most famous of the critics is Nietzsche, who argued that modern people help the needy out of a sense of moral superiority.24 They feel superior to their former, unenlightened selves, as well as to earlier times and societies which were not committed to equality as they are.

I have lowered my expectations of life and learned to enjoy what I have, and I’m getting by fine.” As sensible as this sounds, it is problematic in at least two ways. One is that this stance almost always creates a certain amount of condescension toward anyone who is not as sophisticated and as ironic as you.

As we heard from Martin Heidegger, what makes you a human being and not an animal is that you want joy, meaning, and fulfillment. If you decide that fulfillment, joy, and happiness are not there, and you harden your heart against hope, you can dehumanize yourself.

But here I must side with the modern research, which supports a deep human intuition, namely, that diminishing your love for others does not increase satisfaction but only undermines it. Even though ancient stoic detachment has a better philosophical pedigree than the jaded Western cynicism that sneers at everything, it ultimately also hardens your heart and dehumanizes you.

We want something that nothing in this life can give us. If we keep pursuing it in this world, it can make us driven, resentful, or self-hating. If we try to harden our hearts so that it doesn’t bother us, we harm our humanity and those around us. If, however, we don’t harden ourselves, and fully feel the grief of desire’s lost hope, we may find self-destructive ways of drowning it, as did the woman in Peggy Lee’s song. All of these approaches look like dead ends.

“Progress Principle.” People find more pleasure in working toward a goal than they experience when they actually attain

The functional cause of our discontent is that our loves are “out of order.” Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe, or think, or even do, but by what we love. “For when we ask whether somebody is a good person, we are not asking what he believes or hopes for, but what he loves.”

For Augustine, what we call human virtues are nothing more than forms of love. Courage is loving your neighbor’s well-being more than your own safety. Honesty is loving your neighbor’s interests more than your own, even when the truth will put you at a disadvantage. And because Jesus himself said that all God’s law comes down to loving God and your neighbor (Matthew 22:36–40), Augustine believed all sin was ultimately a lack of love.

In short, what you love most at the moment is what controls your action at that moment. “A body by its weight tends to move toward its proper place. . . . My weight is my love: wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”31 You are what you love.

The ultimate disordered love, however—and the ultimate source of our discontent—is failure to love the first thing first, the failure to love God supremely.

All things are precious, because all are beautiful, but what is more beautiful than He? Strong they are, but what is stronger than He? . . . If you seek for anything better, you will do wrong to Him and harm to yourself, by preferring to Him that which He made, when he would willingly give Himself to you.

If you love anything more than God, you harm the object of your love, you harm yourself, you harm the world around you, and you end up deeply dissatisfied and discontent.

Though idolatrous attachment to earthly goods does indeed lead to unnecessary pain and grief, the solution was not to love the things of life less but to love God more. The problem is not that you love your family or job too much but that you love God too little in relationship to them.

Of course, not even the strongest believers love God perfectly, nor does anyone get close to doing so. Yet to the degree you move toward loving him supremely, things begin to fall into order, into their proper places in your life.

Money and career, for example, become just what they are supposed to be. Work becomes work, a great way to use your gifts and be useful to others. Money becomes just money, a great way to support your family. But these things are not your source of safety and contentment. He is.

Paul Bloom, in his book How Pleasure Works, argues that what matters most for pleasure is not the simple impact on our senses but what it means in relationship to other persons who matter to us.

“we enjoy things most when we experience them as a sacrament—as carriers of the presence of another.”

Christianity teaches that we are saved by God’s free grace and pardon. Unlike some forms of religion, Christianity does not say that we merit blessing through depriving ourselves and turning our backs on the world in order to earn heaven.

We see everything as a free gift from Father and a foretaste of the glory and goodness to come in our eternal inheritance. In short, as Miroslav Volf puts it, “Attachment to God amplifies and deepens enjoyment of the world.”44 It does not diminish

Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction.

You won’t overprotect them, you won’t overexpect things from them. You won’t be constantly furious with the...

That is the Christian view of satisfaction. It avoids the pitfalls of both the ancient strategy of tranquillity through detachment and the modern strategy of happiness through acquisition. It both explains and resolves the deep conundrum of our seemingly irremediable discontent.

Even if this all makes sense to us, how do we actually know that love? You can’t just tell yourself “God loves me” and expect your heart to change. Nor can you just say, “From now on I will love God.” Love cannot be generated simply by an act of the will.

So we cannot love God just by thinking of an abstract deity who is loving in general. We must grasp and be gripped by the true story of God’s actual sacrificial, saving love for us in Jesus.

The heart of the Christian faith is the simple Gospel message of sin and grace. Because we fail to love God and our neighbor, we sin, and for God to forgive our sin, the Son of God became mortal and graciously died in our place on the cross. This is an offensive idea to many people, but for the moment just consider the two ways this message can bring about the love relationship with God, which solves the human dilemma.

First, the knowledge of our sin softens our hearts.

Second, the knowledge of his grace ignites our hearts.

“I am God become breakable, killable, vulnerable. I die that you might live. I am broken so you can be whole.”

Only if you see him doing this all for you—does that begin to change your heart. He suffered and died for your sake. Now out of joy we can love him just for his sake, just for the beauty of who he is and what he has done. You can’t force your heart to love.