The Battle for Happiness

In his Saturday Afternoon talk, The True, Pure, and Simple Gospel of Jesus Christ, President M. Russell Ballard shared a paragraph that sheds some light on what Satan is up to and what we ought to do about it:

The scriptures teach us that Satan desires to lead people into darkness. His every effort is to shut out the light and truth of Jesus Christ and His gospel. As Lehi taught his children, the devil “seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself.” If Heavenly Father’s “work and … glory” is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of [men and women],” Lucifer’s “work” is to bring to pass the misery and endless woe of God’s children. Sin and transgression dim the Light of Christ in our lives. That is why our quest is to bask in the Light of Christ, which brings peace, joy, and happiness.

Simply put, Satan wants us to be miserable, so he tries to lead us away from God, the source of happiness. This is important to know because it reveals that the spiritual war we are engaged in isn't just between righteousness and wickedness, but between happiness and misery. Happiness and misery aren't just the consequences of the actions we're being urged to take; those actions are the ones being urged because they're the ones that lead to the most happiness or misery. God's commandments are designed to bring about lasting happiness, true peace, and pure joy. Meanwhile, Satan uses every trick he can think of to pull us away from those things. Happiness and misery aren't just the stakes we're fighting for; they're the objects of the war and the entire reason why we're even fighting it.

God wants us to be happy, and Satan wants us to be miserable. All of existence was designed with those goals in mind. Everything that gives lasting happiness was designed by God to do so. Everything that brings us misery was designed by Satan to do so. We can tell, by whether something brings us joy or misery, whether it was designed by God or Satan and whether it will draw us closer to God or farther away. Of course, it's not always easy to tell which is which. Satan tends to counterfeit God's blessings, and God sometimes lets us endure temporary unpleasantness for our eternal gain, but when we look at the big picture, we can often tell whether something contributes to or detracts from our eternal happiness.

This knowledge both reinforces our desire to follow God (because really, who doesn't want peace, joy, and happiness?) and gives us a way to measure how well we're doing at that. If we're happy, we're probably doing alright. If we're not, there may be something we want to work on. Ultimately, I'm glad that God wants me to be happy and that He gave us guidelines that, if followed, will lead to eternal happiness. Ican't speak for the rest of you, but I know I have times when I could stand to be happier, and now I know both why that happens and what I can do about it.