God doesn't promise to make us happy

Nicole Cottrell identifies five lies that Christians believe. Number five is one to which I've been susceptible, the notion that God promises believers in Jesus that He will make us happy. But Cottrell is dead-on when she writes:

Happiness in scripture is usually mentioned in terms of a fleeting moment or a temporal, earthly event. Neither the scriptures or Christ (or anyone else for that matter) ever tell us that God wants us to “be happy.” He wants us to be a lot of things: righteous, holy, godly, pure, sanctified, etc … but “happy” ain’t in the list. 

It’s cliche, but man is it true: God is more concerned with our holiness than our happiness.

Read the whole amazing article.

Hard Pill to Swallow

Jesus doesn't promise that we'll be happy when we follow Him.

He doesn't even promise that, despite the fact that God never leaves us alone, we won't sometimes feel lonely. (Also here.) We most certainly will.

Jesus isn't some motivational speaker or religious guru.

He's God in the flesh. He died to overcome our unhappiness and our loneliness, along with our sin, death, and darkness.

This isn't heaven. And it never will be. "In this world you will have trouble," Jesus says. "But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

For now, we hobble on with no promise of an easy way (or, as the apostle Paul put it, we see through a glass darkly or a mirror dimly), but we hobble and we see vaguely with the joy of knowing that as long as we keep following Christ, we're never alone and that we have access to the "peace that transcends all understanding."

That can be a hard pill to swallow. If you're looking for easy answers, don't look for them in the Christian faith. But if you're looking for real answers from the real God Who has experienced and overcome all we deal with in the real world, check out Jesus Christ.

The Happiness Project, the Happiness Project, and the Happiness Project

Three years ago, I did a series of sermons based on Jesus' Beatitudes found in the Gospel of Matthew. The series was titled The Happiness Project. (You can find links to the entire series here, as well as in the right sidebar of this blog.)

Now, Gretchen Rubin, a wonderful author who has written interestingly on Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy, is working on a book called The Happiness Project. Along the way, she's blogging on happiness under the same title. I don't always agree with the things Rubin says about happiness, but she's engaged in an interesting project.

"A Good Object Lesson"

Here