Happiness…as God Created It

“God wants me to be happy.”

With that excuse, many rip out whole portions of the Bible to justify their self-centered actions. The motto becomes “Do as you please.” It permits divorce, greed, and adultery. Personal happiness trumps all things written.

Yet, what people indulge in doesn’t make them happy. It makes them miserable. Drug addicts started out wanting to be satisfied. Lonesome people who jettison spouses find their happiness turns sour.

I have said, “God doesn’t want you to be happy,” but that’s wrong. God does because he gives us the ingredients for what makes us happier people.

Arthur Brooks calls them the “macro-nutrients” of happiness. As a nutritious meal has protein, carbohydrates, and fat, happiness has God-given ingredients.

All are part of God’s glorious creation.

Faith

Since the Garden of Eden, God has created man to want a relationship with the Almighty. When the juice of the fruit rolled down Adam and Eve’s cheeks, they lost something: their dependence on God.

Faith means we reach out our hands to God to care for us and sustain us. We need to believe there is more than earthly labor and that someone cares for us.

Man needs something to live for and something to die for. That is what goes beyond daily existence. We can call that faith. It propelled Abraham to leave his comfort, Moses to suffer, the prophets to look, and the apostles to lay down their lives.

Without it, men and women become vacant.

Happy people do something daily to strengthen their faith, and you will be happier. Read scripture. Pray. Stay connected with a God higher than you.

Family

In the beginning, only one thing was amiss in creation. The man was alone. So God made for him someone “fit” for him. It means that which complements and completes. In the family, we find encouragement, love, and protection.

Some might complain that their marriage is a mess and they would be “happier” if they were not married. It’s not the institution but the people who need to find out to work harder with their relationship.

Love each other. Care for children. Watch God work miracles in the lives of his family.  Do something today to build it.

Community

Community has become a washed-out word, thinned of its meaning. Yet, we need others–friends with whom to share interests and goals, to find completeness in life.

In Acts, God bursts into history, and on Pentecost, something called “church” comes about. It was God’s idea, not a human invention. Someone said that perhaps God’s greatest gift was the church because isolated Christians are stillborn spiritual children.

Like the family, the church nurtures, spurs, corrects, and protects. A believer in the wild becomes the weakest of the herd, and the devil is waiting to devour him.

In the church, we learn to love, even those with whom we disagree. Paul says we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. We find kinship, a word unfamiliar to the modern screen-pasted age.

Purposeful Work

Some view work as punishment. They point out that God made Adam to “plow by the sweat of his brow” as a punishment for sin. The punishment was the difficulty.

But in the beginning, God gave man the stewardship of the garden. He was to care for it. That was meaningful, to keep paradise paradise.

Work can become a calling.

Solomon said that it was the gift of God (Ecclesiastes 3:13).

When Paul turned to slaves in Colossae, he elevated even the worst of positions.

He told them to look at their work through a different lens.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,” (Colossians 3:23, NIV)

Even the worst task becomes a calling when you realize the supervisor is Christ.

If you hate your job, ask, “How can I make the world better where I am?” Do one thing each day. Listen to a co-worker or sincerely compliment someone for the job they did. Go the extra mile to make the company work better. Remember, you work for the Lord, not for a company.

God wants you to be happy. He shaped life in a way to create it. Deepen your faith. Love your family. Care for fellow Christians. Work to please the Lord. If you do that, you will always experience happiness.