“Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8 CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a culture that obsessively pursues happiness. Whatever it is that makes you happy is what you should do. That’s the message we receive. You shouldn’t have to feel bad feelings. If you do, there’s a way to make them go away. Get rid of that habit. Change your job. Sell your house. Cut off that relationship. Take this pill. Go on that vacation. In fact, not only should you never have to be unhappy, but you shouldn’t even have to be inconvenienced, uncomfortable, or bored. There’s an app for that. As a pastor who can trend a bit in the direction of cynicism, but who has spent a lot of time over a lot of years in the Scriptures, my first reaction is to roll my eyes at all of this and offer up the standard line about happiness being a fleeting emotion while joy is the deeper and richer virtue. Happiness is circumstantial, but joy is a state of being. But for just a minute this morning, let’s assume on the importance of happiness. If happiness is really what you want to experience, let’s take a look at what the data says about how to achieve that.

King David once wrote the person who is happiest is the one who trusts in the Lord or takes refuge in Him, as my translation puts it. That seems like an easy enough thing for a king to write, except he didn’t write it when he was a king, sitting comfortably on his throne, surrounded by all the wealth convenience he had available to him that most people did not. No, he wrote that years before when he was in circumstances that were anything but happy.

The context note at the beginning of Psalm 34 tells us that David wrote it when he was pretending to be insane in the presence of Abimelech, who then drove him out. What this is likely referring to is the royal title of King Achish of the Philistines. The name Abimelech means “son of the king,” which would not have been an uncommon title for a king whose father was well-regarded. David fled to Gath, the Philistine capital when Saul first started hunting him down to kill him. He first went to Nob to get supplies – a kindness on the part of the priests there that was repaid with violence when Saul had all of them slaughtered – and then fled the country.

He went to the land of the Philistines hoping that the whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing would play in his favor. We actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago when looking at Psalm 56 in the first part of our current preaching series from a couple of Mondays ago. Here’s that link if you need the refresher. Psalm 56 was written early in the experience when David was still not at all sure he was going to survive it. Psalm 34 here came on the backside when God had rescued him. In Psalm 56 he resolved to trust in the Lord even in the face of frightening, dangerous circumstances. In Psalm 34 he is reflecting on the results of that trust. The results were happiness for him.

A couple of years ago, the Pew Research group asked Americans about how happy they were with their lives. They asked a lot of people from every generation. They also asked a whole bunch of other demographic questions that allowed them to see a number of different trends. What is significant about this data is that the happiness question was asked independently of the various demographic questions. This means that the folks who can now sift through the data are able to look at who selected that they are very happy and who selected that they aren’t very happy at all, and then examine the other things they said about their life to see what kinds of trends point to greater or lesser happiness.

Statistician, Ryan Burge recently took some time to examine this data and offered up some really interesting reflections on it. He started by presenting the basic data and sorting it by generation. Across the nation as a whole, 28% of the country reports being very happy with their life right now. Only 15% report being fairly miserable which is good. Most of the country – 57% are pretty happy. If you break that down by generation, older generations tend to report being happier than younger generations. That tracks. Young people aren’t as happy thanks to being so online and because of the scourge of social media. Older people don’t deal with that as much and in the same way as young people so their happiness levels are higher.

The next filter Burge put on the data was religion. This is where things get a whole lot clearer. Religious people are happier than non-religious people. That’s not just some religious person spouting an opinion. That’s what Americans are saying about themselves. Self-described agnostics and atheists report being very happy at a rate of 19% and 23%, respectively. By contrast, Mormons, the group that reports the highest level of happiness, report being very happy at 38%. That’s a huge jump. Hindus are second on the list in terms of being the happiest at 37%. Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and Black Protestants are all above 30%. Interestingly, Muslims report being unhappy at the highest rate – 23%.

Here, though is where things start to get even more interesting. Burge sorts the data once again, but this time for two particular religious practices. And I should clarify that he is not somehow deceptively presenting the data or manipulating it. He is merely presenting it with different filters that the Pew Research group has made available. He didn’t go to the dataset looking to make a particular point, he was simply exploring it to see what it had to say.

The first trend he looks at here is in-person attendance at religious services. In other words, how often do you go to church. For folks who report going never or only seldom (less than once a year), their reported rate of being very happy with their lives is only 22% and 23%, respectively. That fits with what we saw about the rate of being very happy for atheists and agnostics. Even those who go to church just once a year, though, are only very happy 28% of the time. That’s not great. Meanwhile, the rate of being “not too happy” of the never and seldom go to church group is 19% and 18%, respectively, which is higher than the national average. In other words, if you want to be unhappy in life, don’t go to church. There’s a pretty good likelihood that you’ll achieve your goal.

Meanwhile, for those who are in church every week – they never miss a Sunday – their level of being very happy with their life jumps up to 35%. That’s almost double the very happy rate of the never and seldom groups. And, accordingly, their reported “not too happy” rate drops to just 10% – almost half. That seems like an obvious notch in the belt of the folks – like me – who argue that you should be in church.

But one of the things I tell my church and will this coming Sunday is that simply being in church on Sunday mornings isn’t enough. You aren’t going to get the full benefit of being a part of the community if you only come to worship on Sundays. If you want to really experience the wonder of the church, you’ve got to be involved and invested. You’ve got to be in fellowship and studying the Bible in smaller groups and serving with a team in some capacity. And the data backs this up. There’s one more category for the in-person (not online) religious service attendance: those who are there more than once a week. Their reported rate of being very happy jumps all the way up to 43%. Just so you don’t miss it, that’s another 7 points higher than people who are just there weekly. It’s almost like the preachers have been right all along.

The other filter Burge uses is how important someone thinks the Bible correlates to their reported level of happiness. I suspect you can already guess the numbers. Those who say the Bible is “not at all” or “not too” important report being very happy at only 22%, which is right in line with what we have come to expect from atheists and agnostics. You can walk down that path, but you shouldn’t expect it to bring much happiness to your life. In fact, if you walk down that path as an act of walking away from the church and the Christian faith, you should go in expecting your happiness to decrease quite a lot. For all those atheists who boast online about how much happier they are now, there are a whole bunch more who aren’t. And this really shouldn’t surprise us. When you walk away from a worldview that assures you of a God who loves you and who has a great and glorious purpose for your life to a worldview that says there is no God and thus no objective purpose or meaning to anything, that’s not going to be a recipe for greater happiness.

To repeat my line from before, here’s where things get even more interesting, though. For those who consider the Bible to be just “somewhat” important, their rate of being very happy only goes up 1 point to 23%, and they report a level of being “not too happy” at the same rate as those who consider is “not too” important. Those who consider the Bible “very” important are very happy at 29%, which is a pretty big jump. But those who consider it “extremely” important report that number going all the way up to 39%, almost double the difference between “somewhat” and “very.”

To interpret this just a bit, folks who consider the Bible to be just very important will read it often, but probably not regularly, not daily. Or they will read it, but they won’t invest much time in actually studying it. By contrast, the folks who consider it to be “extremely” important will do all of those things. They will invest time in it daily. They will study it. They will memorize it. They will meditate on it. And because of all that, they’ll gain all the benefits from it.

So then, do you want to be happy? The data here show an obvious and clear pathway to reaching that mark in your own life. The happiest people in the country are those who are actively involved and invested in their church community and who are actively and eagerly engaged with the Scriptures. To put that more directly: if you want to be really happy, go to church and read your Bible. A lot. You’ll wind up not just happier than most of the people around you, but a lot happier. There’s just one more question to consider: Now that you know, what are you going to do about it?