New Year Happiness

If happiness is synonymous with a things like a job well done and contentment and satisfaction, then quite appropriately it’s a thing we should search for.  But really, even these things are a bit too vague if we’re going to get at the essence of happiness.

Marc and Angel Chernoff are life coaches who try to help people find happiness.  They recently wrote an article on their blog detailing 27 ways to find happiness.  Most of what they said could be summed up in ideas like change your thinking or interact with people more.  Their 27 steps weren’t bad.  But only one of their step really got close to what true happiness is.

Their fifth step was to start dedicating time to meaningful activities.

I would take that quite a bit further.  True happiness is living for something greater than yourself.  That’s it.

If you look around, we all have an inherent desire to worship.  Be it name brands or lifestyles or peer groups or even ourselves.  By worship I don’t mean literally bowing down in front of something, but rather it is what we value most in life.

This explains largely why the world is in the shape that it’s in.  Because, so often, we are not worshiping the only One that we should be worshiping: God.

This also explains why true happiness can’t really be found in simply changing by mind about things or being more productive.  These things are all good, but they’re not the key to happiness.

They key to happiness is living your life for something better than yourself.  And as it turns out, there’s only one cause that you can give your life to wholly and completely and still have more than when you started.

That’s God’s cause.

Jesus said focus your efforts on my cause, and I’ll take care of everything else for you (see Matthew 6:33).

If you want to read more about this fascinating topic, J.P. Moreland wrote a great book on it called Kingdom Triangle.  You can find it on amazon.  I highly recommend it.