“Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1:16-17)

There is a pretty widespread belief out there that Christians can’t and don’t have any fun. The typical picture of Christians is a group of people who live lives of do nots and go through each and every day like they are sucking on lemons.

But that perception is wrong and if there are Christians who live that way, they would be hard pressed to find Biblical evidence that justifies their lack of enjoyment. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests that God does not want us to enjoy our lives. If we read the Bible objectively, thoroughly, consistently, that is not the picture we will get. Jesus did not say “follow me and I will make you miserable, you will hate getting up in the morning, you will never laugh or have fun, and your entire existence will be being unhappy and I want you to make sure that those who know you are unhappy as well.”  I am pretty sure that is not what the Bible says and it is frustrating to see it interpreted that way. To put all the verses together in one verse, God actually tells that He will “give us life and give it to us more abundantly.”  That sounds like fun to me.

Look at our verse for today in James, it doesn’t say that God

is trying to keep us from good things. He is actually the source of all good things. According to the dictionary, fun is “a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.”  There is a misnomer out there about what fun is.

There is the idea that fun is a static thing that remains the same throughout our life.  But our view of what is enjoyable changes as we change regardless whether we are Christians or not. Take the partying college student who sees fun as getting blasted, throwing water balloons off the dorm roof, while mooning passers-by. He may not think that is as fun when he is thirty years old with his own business and is raising two children.  Does that mean he doesn’t have fun anymore?  It means that the definition of fun for him has changed.

People try to paint a singular picture of fun that often includes activities that they think Christians wouldn’t be involved in, so thus, Christians don’t have fun. The opposite is actually true.  God created friendship and smiling and laughter.  Why would he not want us to enjoy them? People like people who seem to enjoy themselves, so does God want us to be people that no one wants to be around? Holiday Inn, when looking for 500 people to fill positions for a new facility, interviewed 5,000 candidates. The interviewers automatically excluded all candidates who smiled fewer than four times during the interview. If Holiday Inn wants to see smiling people, why wouldn’t God want that!

When we become Christians we change and our viewpoint of enjoyment, amusement, and pleasure will change. We no longer have to accept the world’s definition of fun.  For the first time, we can have real enjoyment in our lives, the way it was created to be experienced. Recently a big time celebrity excused his very public affair by saying God wanted him to be happy. This man purports to be a Christian so has brought God in as a co-conspirator in the affair. Our fun does not need to be outside God’s perimeters.  There is plenty of fun to be had within God’s framework.  God never wants to steal our fun, He wants us to experience the real thing, not the vaporous fun the world often supplies.  When we become Christians, we won’t stay the same. Like the middle-aged man who is living his life to the fullest and looks back on his escapades of the past and just shakes his head, we will often do that when we start truly living the Christian life.

David tells us, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forever more.” (Psalm 16:11)  That sounds like fun to me.  Pleasures forever more doesn’t sound like a life full of lemon-sucking and blah, blah, blah every day.

I have never been accused by anyone of never having fun, but I have been accused of not having their kind of fun. That is a different thing. When we let others define what our happiness, enjoyment, and satisfaction should look like, we are letting them define us as people. Six weeks before he died, a reporter asked Elvis Presley, “Elvis, when you first started playing music, you said you wanted to be rich, famous and happy. Are you happy?”

He replied with a line from one of his songs, “I’m so lonely I could die.”   He had lived the good life, according to the world.  He should have been happy, yet he was not. People look for happiness, when they should be looking for contentment. They look for fun in sin rather than fun in holiness. I know a lot of Christians and a lot of them have a lot of fun. They do cool activities, they goof around, they tell great jokes, and they enjoy life. Are there activities that would be hard to justify as Christians? Are there endeavors that we probably can’t tweak to fit the Christian life?  Sure, but if our idea of fun is snorting cocaine or running around with the neighbors wife, our definition of fun needs to be reexamined.

Many do not know what constitutes happiness but are killing themselves to reach it.  If our goal is happiness, we will never reach it.  But if our goal is to “strive first for the kingdom of God, then all things (happiness and fun included) will be added… unto us.”  A minnow flopping on a flat rock cannot be happy because it is outside where it should be.  We cannot be happy flopping around on the flat rock of this world when we should be in the deep waters of God’s love.  Fun is being free to be who we can be, not in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of God. Believe me, if we think our cup is full but it is of the world’s happiness, satan will surely jog our elbow.  If our cup is full of God’s contentment, He will steady us and we won’t spill a drop.