Holiness, Happiness, and the Tip Jar
Author: Stan Guthrie
February 27, 2025
On a recent morning, our dishwasher was chock full of clean dishes, just waiting to go into their respective kitchen cabinets and drawers. I hadn’t enjoyed a good night’s sleep and was feeling tired and grumpy. So on her way out the door, Christine kindly said, “Don’t worry about unloading the dishwasher. In fact, don’t unload it.” (She is never unkind to me.)
“Okay,” I mumbled. The implication was that she would take care of it when she got home from work. She drove off, leaving me to my self-absorbed misery.
Before going over to the laptop to start my day, however, I thought I could manage to help Christine a little—so I unloaded about half of the dishwasher’s contents, feeling just a bit pleased with myself. Then, after lunch, I decided to unload the other half. Christine will be really glad, I thought. I always want her to think that (stealing a line from Andre’ the Giant in The Princess Bride) she is “doing well” with me.
That evening, as Christine was moving about the kitchen getting dinner ready—yes, she also does the post-commute cooking—she did something I wasn’t expecting. She didn’t express the expected gratitude for my dishwasher unloading. In fact, she didn’t even seem to notice.
Now I wasn’t miffed by her failing to return a thank you for such a small deed. But I did notice. My reaction got me thinking. I know that Christine’s love for me is as boundless as it is undeserved. Her daily ministrations on my behalf are without number. Yet she never waits around for recognition, as I sometimes do. She isn’t, like a hungry piano player, holding out a tip jar after playing her song. She doesn’t need my thanks, and she doesn’t keep score (thank God!). She apparently doesn’t even think about it.
When I asked her about this later, she said she isn’t motivated to do stuff for me by my responses. Instead, she simply does things for my well-being because she loves me (along with the occasional need to get things done). No thanks are sought or needed (but they’re still good to give!). She’s just living her everyday joyful, and dare I say holy, life. She is one of the happiest people I’ve ever known, and she wants me to share in her happiness.
My thinking continued, veering (for me) into uncharted territory. What if the goal of the Christian life isn’t holiness—the state of being morally pure and set apart for God—but a holy happiness? In the church, we sometimes have a one-dimensional understanding of holiness that almost sets it and happiness in opposition. This caricature of biblical teaching says, “You can be happy or you can be holy, but you can’t be both.” But what if holiness and happiness are two sides of the same coin, inseparable? I know that not everyone will agree, but hear me out.
“God saved us to make us holy, not happy,” Oswald Chambers intoned. “The destined end of man is not happiness, nor health, but holiness. God’s one aim is the production of saints.” Down through church history, Chambers’s view has had a lot of supporters. But is it true?
I’m uncomfortable drawing such a sharp distinction between happiness and holiness, as if they are mutually exclusive states of being. Wouldn’t it be more accurate, and more biblically faithful, to say that we need both, but one (holiness) is the foundation, the sine qua non, of the other (happiness)? This is not a health-and-wealth gospel, the idea that if you have enough faith, God will bless you with whatever you want. This heresy puts man at the center, with God merely the divine butler. In this false gospel, holiness (“without which no one will see the Lord”) is an afterthought, if it is thought of at all.
But in Psalm 16, David closely links holiness and happiness. He contrasts the multiplying “sorrows of those who run after another god” with “the saints in the land, [who] are the excellent ones, in whom is all my delight.” After vowing that he will not participate in the pagan worship of the unfaithful ones, the king reflects on his life:
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
Holy faithfulness is not the end for David; it is the pathway to God and to His blessings. Verse 11 clinches it:
You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Holiness need not be calculating and legalistic—in fact, it cannot be. True holiness will lead us to God’s “right hand,” and thus to eternal happiness. As Augustine prayed, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” Jesus is the cure for the restless heart. He is the source of lasting happiness—a holy happiness.
John Wesley rightly said, “As the more holy we are upon earth the more happy we must be.” Or consider this insight of Dostoevsky: “If I seem happy to you . . . you could never say anything that would please me more. For men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.”
Could this incredibly good news possibly be true? Now we turn to the Lord. What does He say about the matter?
“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” (John 15:10). At first blush, does this sound harsh and exacting, as if God’s love is conditioned on our performance—on our holiness? Let’s go to the next verse: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (v. 11).
There it is. The goal of our holiness is our happiness—in fact, the best kind of happiness, which is fullness of joy in Him—in this life and in the next. Yes, most of the Lord’s saints (“holy ones”) will experience a share of sadness and loss in this broken world. I have. Jesus, after all, experienced bitter tears, betrayal, and a Roman cross. But these woes are the means God uses not only to make us holy, but to make us happy. Consider the Lord, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2, emphasis added). First the cross, then the joy.
Is it any wonder, then, that Jesus assures us, “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance”? First repentance, then joy. As C.S. Lewis observed, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” Heaven’s serious business is joy—a holy joy with the capacity to look upon God, unadulterated by sin and score-keeping, seeing Him with clear, unashamed eyes. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism brilliantly states, our “chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.”
So let’s put away our tip jars and get on with the holy calling of finding our true happiness in Him, and sharing this happiness with others.
Stan Guthrie is Minister of Communications for New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois.
Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash.
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