Permission to Enjoy a Good Day

Paul says God gives us richly all things to enjoy

"Honey, I'll never get over this."

I say that to my wife all the time, and it's almost always about something small. One year it was a Christmas tree. We'd traded our big nine-foot tree for a little six-footer, and I caught myself just standing there staring at it. Other times it's a kitchen full of noise, or the simple fact that our kids are healthy. I've learned to say it out loud because I want to taste the goodness of the moment while I'm in it.

A lot of believers can't do that. The evening is good, the food is good, the people around the table are laughing, and somewhere in the back of the mind a voice starts in. Don't get too comfortable. You haven't earned this. Shouldn't you be doing something more spiritual with your time? Some of us were raised to feel that joy is a little suspicious, that happiness is the thing right before the bad news, and that a serious Christian keeps one eye on the door.

The Picnic Table

Picture a plain Saturday evening in late September. Somebody's uncle is working the grill and narrating every burger. Two kids are chasing each other around the trampoline. A neighbor brought a pound cake nobody asked for, and it's the best thing on the table. There's no sermon in it, no breakthrough, no answered prayer anyone could point to. Just people who love each other, eating outside while the light goes gold.

And a woman at the end of the bench feels the old flicker of guilt for how much she's enjoying it.

"Eat, Drink, and Be Merry"

There's even a verse that seems to back the voice up. Jesus told a story about a rich man whose fields produced so much he had to build bigger barns:

And I will say to my soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry." But God said to him, "Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?" So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. (Luke 12:19-21)

Eat, drink, and be merry, and God calls him a fool. Read quickly, that sounds like a warning against every cookout you've ever enjoyed.

But look at what the man was leaning on. Many goods laid up for many years. His confidence was in the barns. The meal wasn't his problem. He was trusting what he'd stored up to secure his life, and he was talking to his own soul as if he were the one keeping it.

Paul draws the same line, and he lands somewhere very different:

Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy. (1 Timothy 6:17)

Same warning about trusting riches. Then Paul tells you who to trust, and he describes that God as the One who gives us richly all things to enjoy. Enjoyment isn't the danger in either passage. Misplaced trust is. When your trust is in the living God, the meal becomes a gift you receive from Him instead of a fortress you build against tomorrow.

The Son of Man Came Eating and Drinking

Jesus wasn't a stranger to a good table. His critics had a nickname for Him:

The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, "Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!" (Matthew 11:19)

When I preached that passage, I told our church I wasn't encouraging anybody to drink or not to drink. My point was that we've turned Jesus at the dinner table into something to be nervous about, when the Gospels keep putting Him there. His first sign in John's Gospel happened at a wedding party that ran out of wine, and the master of the feast tasted what Jesus made and told the bridegroom, You have kept the good wine until now! (John 2:10). The beginning of His signs, where He manifested His glory (John 2:11), was a celebration that didn't have to end early.

Your Works Are Already Accepted

The writer of Ecclesiastes saw more of life's emptiness than most, and he still wrote this:

Go, eat your bread with joy, And drink your wine with a merry heart; For God has already accepted your works. (Ecclesiastes 9:7)

In Christ that sentence lands with a weight the Preacher couldn't have imagined. Your acceptance isn't pending. Jesus finished the work, so you don't have to earn the evening or apologize for it. I put it this way once: my joy isn't measured by what just happened, it's found in what happened two thousand years ago. That's what frees you to enjoy the moment you're in, instead of storing up every tomorrow.

That same fall I asked our church a question I'd ask you now. What if you experienced the life of God in the grocery store aisle, or in your cubicle, and not only in the prayer closet? I'd add a picnic table on a Saturday night to the list. His life in you is as real at the grill as it is at the altar.

There will be evenings when the bad news does come, and joy will feel far away for a while. That's real, and God is with you there too. But the hard days don't make the good ones fake, and they don't make you foolish for receiving them.

Out in the yard somebody turns the string lights on, and the conversation at the picnic table keeps going long after the plates are empty. Pull up a chair and stay a while. This evening came from the One who gives richly, and He meant for you to enjoy it.