Friday July 20, 2018

 

Today I would like to begin my post by revealing one of life’s worst kept secrets: for the most part, we are all self-centered people. Let me now reveal one of life’s best-kept secrets: self-centered people will never attain full and consistent happiness. If you are going to choose to be happy, you will eventually have to consider investing in the lives of others.

 

If you have been reading my posts over the last couple of months, you know that I have been saying that happiness is not something that is going to fall out of the sky. Happiness is the by-product of the choices we make. At the start of this series, we discovered that our problem is that we have past hurts, present hang-ups, and bad habits that prevent us from being consistently happy. Therefore, the first choice we addressed when choosing to be happy was to admit to God that we are not in control and that we need some divine intervention. Today’s choice requires us to come to the realization that we will not be successful or consistently happy if we are only concerned with our happiness. In order for there to be true and consistent happiness, we need to make the choice to yield to God so that He can use our lives, as imperfect as we may be, to bring the good news of Christ to others.

 

But my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus—the work of telling others the Good News about the wonderful grace of God. Acts 20:24 NLT

 

An important aspect of investing in your own happiness is to know that your life has worth and that you have accomplished something of true and real value. There is no lasting happiness if there are no meaningful accomplishments in our lives, and there is no greater accomplishment than to help someone else discover Jesus as Lord and Savior and not simply as a religious figure. As we journey towards recovery and healing, we must always remember that we live in a world full of hurting people who are full of hang-ups, have bad habits, and who are in need of healing too. We cannot focus exclusively on ourselves because God wants to touch others through our lives and stories.

 

Investing in your happiness by investing in others

 

1. Don’t just attend church; ask to serve in a ministry in your local church.
2. Ask yourself, “Who are the people that God has placed around me that would benefit from hearing my story and what God has done for me?