“See, I believe that if you were chosen—that if you were elected—I believe that if God has anything for you it’s not just to make you happy. God did not choose you and call you out of this world just to make you high. And God didn’t choose you and God didn’t call you out of this world just so that you could be pious. Because there are enough pious people
and there are enough happy people in the world. What God called you for
and what God called you to is to make a difference in the world.”—Rich MullinsHappiness is a good thing, and piety is a good thing. (Piety has a bad name with some folks, but that’s only because they’ve come across distorted versions of it rather than the real thing.) The limitation to each of them, though, is that they’re inner-directed. That’s not bad, it’s not a flaw, it’s just a simple fact: every person and every thing is limited, and this is their limitation (or one of them, anyway). Happiness is about me and my life and my circumstances, and piety is about me and my life and my relationship with God. Both are good and perfectly appropriate things; they just aren’t enough in and of themselves. God doesn’t call us to be primarily inner-directed (not that you’d know it from a lot of American spirituality); he calls us to be directed outward, in love, and grace, and gratitude. Indeed, the primary response God asks of us for our salvation is gratitude for what he has done for us and given us; out of that gratitude, then, he asks us to share what we have been given, and to love as we are loved. He calls us to make a difference in this world not out of a grim sense of duty, but out of a deep sense of joy, in simple thankfulness for the opportunity.
