The video above will save you from the idea that life is about happiness and reorient you to what the Scriptures promise us.
I mean, doesn’t joy sometimes seem to be an elusive thing for us? What about real life? You know, life is not always a joyful affair. Life is often sad. Life is often hard. Life can be heart-breaking. Now in thinking about joy, the Scriptures don’t deny that. The Scriptures aren’t naive, and the Scriptures are not happy-clappy. And the Scriptures are not calling Christians to pretend they’re something that there isn’t or something is not that is. “Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15 NLT). We have the book of Lamentations. We have the psalms of grief. Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33 NIV).
Sorrow and sadness are a real part of life. And often times things in this lifetime don’t go our way. Can I get a witness? Sometimes things just don’t go our way and so we’re bummed when this happens.
Because you know what we’ve been led to believe? We’ve been led to believe that life is about happiness. We’ve been told in our constitution that that’s a guarantee—“The pursuit of happiness.” But do you realize that we were never told in Scripture to pursue happiness? We’re never told that in Scripture, nor are we promised by God happiness in Scripture.
We spend a lot of our time trying to make ourselves happy. And that’s mostly a circumstantial thing. Right? We’re happy when things go our way. Happiness has to do with things going our way. And so we spend all sorts of resources, and money, and times, and effort—we will manipulate, we will twist, we will connive, we will do whatever we can to get things to go our way so we can be happy.
Happiness is about things going our way, but you know joy—the Scriptures do promise—is something altogether different? Joy is not about things going our way. Joy is about us going God’s way and about what God has brought to us in Christ. You see, it’s a deeper thing than mere happiness. And we have been deceived by our culture, and our constitution, and our own selves to think that the main pursuit is happiness.
There’s something different. There’s something deeper.
It’s not about getting our way. It’s about going God’s way.