Audio Transcript
Everyone on the planet wants to be satisfied. That’s one of the baseline truths we make as Christian Hedonists. All of us are needy and hungry and will consume anything we can to find that satisfaction. And in seeking this happiness, we can turn to evil things. And we can turn a lot of good gifts into idols of self-fulfillment, like careers and money and food and relationships and friend groups. Self-fulfillment is a motto of our age, but it’s a false motto that ignores something far better. Today on Ask Pastor John: happiness myths to avoid.
We get there from this anonymous question: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast. Our modern therapeutic culture constantly frames the ultimate goal of life as ‘fulfillment.’ The quest is to find personal satisfaction in our careers, our relationships, and in our own identities. But is fulfillment and even self-fulfillment a biblical category? How does the Bible’s use of fulfillment language differ from this modern psychological concept, and how does Scripture redirect our focus away from asking, ‘How can I be fulfilled?’”
The English word fulfillment occurs in the English Bible (in the ESV) at least four times. That’s all. Each of them refers to the fulfillment of God’s word. If we expand our search to all the forms of the word — fulfill, fulfilling, fulfillment — the word occurs 107 times. And not one of those, not one, refers to self-fulfillment.
We might respond by saying, “Well, just because the Bible doesn’t use a term doesn’t mean it’s wrong or unhelpful.” That’s true. There are a lot of words that we use that aren’t in the Bible, like counseling, discipling, parenting, wholesome, Trinity. You can just do random searches; lots of English words aren’t in the Bible that are fine, good to use. That’s true. And it is possible to use the term self-fulfillment and mean something good and true and biblical by it. It is. But it’s always wise to ponder why a concept might be so pervasive in our culture and so absent from the Bible. There might be something to learn here. There might be some danger lurking here in that common usage which is so absent from Scripture.
And the danger, the defect, is not hard to find.
Fulfilled Without God?
If you ask ChatGPT (which I did), “How does contemporary psychology conceive of human fulfillment?” it gives you about seven popular psychological frameworks used in teaching and motivational literature and therapeutic settings. And if you walk through these seven frameworks, you find many concepts which, in and of themselves, seem harmless enough. What does human fulfillment involve? It involves engagement, relationships, agency, the power to choose, accomplishment, competence, positive self-regard or self-esteem, purposefulness, significance, meaning, being liked or appreciated, integrity, consistency with one’s values, clear conscience, and so on.
You could get into a pretty animated conversation about which of those is primary, and how they relate to each other, and how important they are, but what emerges if you look carefully (and I’m afraid it emerges all too slowly because of how blind we are to the obvious at times) is that the entire description of contemporary conceptions of fulfillment is absent of God. He is totally missing. He is never mentioned in the answer of ChatGPT for how contemporary psychology thinks about human fulfillment. He’s not a factor. He’s a nonentity, a nonissue.
“To be filled with God or with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with joy in God.”
So, what’s the problem with “fulfillment” language? The main problem seems to be that it is so closely and naturally and immediately connected in our day with self-fulfillment, which implies for most people that our fulfillment derives from some enhancement of the self. You can hear it in those descriptions of contemporary psychology: self-agency, self-determination, self-accomplishment, self-competence, self-regard, self-esteem, self-consistency, one’s own values, and so on.
Fulfillment is understood in terms of self-fulfillment, and self-fulfillment is understood in terms of finding satisfaction (or whatever term you choose to use for human flourishing — finding flourishing, finding satisfaction) through the enhancement of the self, as if the self is not just the one that experiences fulfillment but the one whose condition creates the fulfillment. That’s the problem. In the contemporary, secular, God-omitting mindset, fulfillment doesn’t just come to the self: It comes from the self.
Self-Focus to God-Focus
Amazingly, the Bible really does have a description of this kind of thinking and feeling. In 2 Timothy 3:2, Paul says that in the last days “people will be lovers of self.” The Greek word is philautos, and you can hear the word autos, like autopilot, like a self-driving car. And philos means love. So, philautos is “love of self.”
In other words, as sin increases in the last days, people will find satisfaction by focusing on the enhancement of their self and loving the self and what it can become — “loving” in the sense of “being satisfied by.” That’s what the text means. “Loving the self” in the sense of being satisfied by the self, delighting in the self, being content in the self. Well, who’s doing the loving? The self is doing the loving of the self. The self is finding its satisfaction in the enhancement of the self. There’s nothing new about this. It’s in the Bible. It’s a fundamental human flaw since Adam and Eve, and we don’t want to play into it.
And what’s interesting and really significant, really helpful, is to pose this question: How does the Bible use “fullness” language or “filling” language in regard to the human soul or the human heart or the human person? Those are biblical categories for what could be called “the self”: the soul, the heart, the person. How does the Bible speak of the soul’s fullness or the heart’s fullness? Or another way to ask the question would be, Well, if the self is not supposed to direct itself in love to the self, what should it direct itself in love toward?
And from cover to cover, the biblical answer is God. In Ephesians 3:19, Paul prays for us that we might “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” and “be filled with all the fullness of God.” Or, the most common way the New Testament talks about the fullness of God is that we should be filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God in the human soul or self.
So, the biblical alternative to self-focus is God-focus: the presence of the living God in the self, for the self, transforming the self into greater and greater likeness to Christ. When Paul says, “Put on the new self,” the word for self is anthrōpos, person, man (Ephesians 4:24). And that new person is being renewed in the Spirit of God by the knowledge of God into the image of God.
Fullness of Joy in God
But here’s the really practical question that connects the Bible’s fullness language with what we love to call Christian Hedonism: What would it actually mean in felt experience, real experience, to seek the fullness of God? What will that feel like? And the answer of the Bible is that it will feel like joy in God, satisfaction in God, delight in God, pleasure in God, contentment in God.
For example, Psalm 16:11: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” In John 15:11, Jesus, who is God, says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” In John 17:13, he says, “These things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves.” To be filled with God or with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with joy in God. This is the point of Acts 13:52, which puts the two together like this: “The disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.”
This is a thousand times better than the contemporary quest for self-fulfillment. That quest is conceived entirely without God as the source of fullness. And in his absence, the self curves in on itself so that the self itself becomes the source of the fullness, which is totally futile, hopeless. Human beings, the human soul, were meant for God, meaning we were made to be completely and eternally happy in God, with God, not the self as the essence of our joy.
