By Larry Young
Do you want to be happy? Are you generally happy? Are you generally unhappy? Is your happiness a revolving door? If you answer these questions honestly, you might shock yourself. Let’s change these questions a little: Does God want you to be happy? Do you think God’s way generally make you happy? Do you think God’s way generally makes you unhappy? Here is some great news: God has already taken all these things into consideration before man was ever created. Read on!
God is the perfect gentleman, so He doesn’t force our will or our power of choice. God has wired the secret to happiness into our DNA, but He doesn’t force us to follow its leading. The world can offer us really incredible happiness, but it will always end up incomplete or come up short. That’s because God has pre-programmed a place in every heart that only He can fill. Eventually every person will realize that; even those who have committed “the unpardonable sin” and no longer are able to hear or recognize God’s voice.
The devil is always shouting in your face, your ears, and is planting in your mind all kinds of lies and deceptions for you to follow him to “happiness”. But that little place pre-programmed in your heart by God will always keep you from obtaining permanent true and complete happiness… until you turn to God and let Him fill that reserved spot.
Those who have tasted the “happiness” that the world gives, and have realized what’s missing, and then have responded to God’s invitation to let Him in, will have a whole new perspective and view of happiness and of the world. The draw of the world will dim down to insignificance, but the draw of Christ will brighten to heights limited only by the ability of a person’s willingness or ability to take it all in.
If this doesn’t sound anything like your experience, not to worry! God accepts every one of us right where we are at. He will take us in for His glory… but also for our happiness. Christ himself summarized that happiness in the beatitudes, where blessedness is interchangeable with happiness (Matthew 5: 3-12):