In 1994, two famous philosophers sang a duet somewhere in the African savanna. As they soothed their pupil in song, they taught him their vision of the Good Life:

Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase!
Hakuna Matata! Ain’t no passing phaaaaase!
It means no worries, for the rest of your days!
It’s our problem freeeeeee, philosophy (eeee?), Hakuna Matata!

With this famous song, Timone and Pumba joined the ranks of Plato, Gnostic, and Escapist philosophers before them. In other words, their vision of the Good Life is…well…..

blah.

What the Good Life is Not and what it Is

Christian morality is often preached in one of two ways. Either Jesus came to save us so that we could live better lives than all the rest of those wretched sinners (thank God we’re not like them, we might say with the Pharisees), or Jesus came to save us out of this world for another. Sometimes these things are preached together. I submit, however, that Christian morality is neither about living lives that show our superiority, nor about living and leading lives focused on escaping this world.

According to the Bible, the good life is the life which sees, savors, and treasures the God who made all things. The Good Life is a life of beholding, being, and becoming; the beauty of God, being an image bearing priest who reflects God’s beauty into the world, and increasingly becoming like Beauty Incarnate (Jesus Christ).

Beholding

Have you ever noticed that you become what you love? A man who loves violence will exude violence; he will be driven to grab power, delighted to kill, and desperate to destroy. His joy will be the decimation of others. As he views violence, he becomes bloodthirsty and violent.

However, a young lady who loves to see people flourish will become a servant to others. As she increasingly desires the flourishing of human community, she will be the kind of person who relentlessly works against threats to human flourishing. She will be a delight to have as a friend, because she is the kind of person who has everyone’s best interests in mind.

You see, our passions constitute our personalities. We are what we repeatedly love; our actions are an overflow of desire, and solidify us in our desires. Human doing, then, simply reflects and solidifies human desiring. This is why human life is so messy. We are a mix of desires that most people would consider “good”, and desire that most would consider “jacked-up” (dare I say…”evil”?). We find ourselves wanting things we ought not want. During the day, an opponent of the porn industry might speak eloquently and powerfully of the industry’s exploits; at night, he (or she) might find himself (or herself) clicking away on site after site. During the day, we might speak of cooperation and humility, but we drive with road-rage that betrays our not-so-humble views of ourselves (“how dare you cut ME off in traffic?”). Some of us are tireless advocates for racial harmony, but we almost cannot resist casting suspicious glances towards the black guy (brown guy, white guy, take your pick) sitting next to us in class or at work. If we’re all honest, we all have desires and thoughts we’d prefer to keep secret. Human life is messy because we are walking messes.

How, then, do we change into the kinds of people who, well, aren’t messes? If our personalities are constituted by desires, then we have to desire the right things. We must begin to want the Lord Jesus, in all of His excellency and majesty.

Desiring, I think, starts with tasting. Suppose you want to cultivate a desire for steak (you wanna become one of THOSE steak snobs). You sample steak after steak, until you find one that you like. What happens when your tastebuds touch that juicy, medium-rare, cooked-to-perfection steak-manna-thing-from-heaven? As soon as you taste a steak you like, new desire comes into being. Desire flowers forth from a seed of delight; and as you encounter this new joy, you start to want more of it.

Tasting the goodness of the Lord, then, is the initial seed from which desire springs forth. But what does it actually mean to “taste” the goodness of God? More or less, it means to behold His glory in the text of Scripture, and in the book of His world. Tasting the beauty of a sunset, for example, means beholding the unified meshing of diverse colors against the backdrop of the horizon. In the same way, tasting the beauty of the Lord Jesus means beholding the diverse excellencies of God in Scripture, and placing your faith in Jesus’ saving death and resurrection.

Being (through Faith)

Faith in Christ is a response to beauty beheld. Therefore, faith alone in Christ alone is a response to His beauty; it is the heart’s cry, “I WANT you! I want all that you are for me in Christ!” Faith is a sinner’s “yes!” to God’s “YES” to all who would trust Him. Faith trusts Jesus as the satisfaction of our souls, and consequently embraces Him as such. It sees what Jesus is for us, what He has done for us, and embraces Him for all that He is–Savior from sin, and Lord of our life. (John 6:34-35)

By faith alone, one embraces Jesus as the source of all Joy, and by faith alone is a new creation with new, spiritual affections for God. Through the death of Jesus, the old man is dealt a death blow, with its old affections, and through the resurrection of Jesus one is reconstituted with new affections. Faith springs from beholding God’s beauty, and embraces God in the Messiah. As a result, your whole “ontology”–what you are–completely changes. You do not have to wait to be a new creation; you simply are one by faith alone.

Becoming

If we are what we repeatedly love, then becoming like Jesus is a matter of training ourselves, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to love the right things. And this change itself comes through continually beholding the beauty of God, and as a result, becoming like Christ in His death and resurrection. Paul, for example, contemplates the life of Christ Philippians 2:5-11 as a pattern around which he conforms his life. Contemplation and beholding leads to conscious and unconscious imitation. In other words, as I think the thoughts of God after Him, and as I start to delight in God’s character as God Himself does, then I start to imitate the Lord I love. The Christian life is a life of beholding the glory of the Lord, and so moving to higher degrees of glorious God-reflection.

Virtue, then–developing the right characteristics–is a matter of taking on repeated practices that form us to love like Jesus loves. Acquiring the right virtues is the goal of the Christian life, but this consists in engaging in repeated practices of beholding God in Christ, recognizing your own identity in Jesus had by faith alone, and consequently engaging in right, obedient action which solidifies virtue. Becoming virtuous, then, is a matter of holistically becoming like Jesus. The pursuit of virtue is a pursuit of the Virtuous One, the Lord Jesus.