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Tuesday February 28, 2017

 

Life is tough. I do not know of a single person who has not been through hard times at some point in their life. What makes matters worse is that many of our hardships are unexpected. For example, nobody who gets married for the right reason does so with the expectation of getting divorced. Nobody invests their life’s savings into a business expecting to declare bankruptcy and no one expects to bury their loved ones when they are still young. Life is full of injustices and unexpected hardships, which is why there are a lot of unhappy people in the world, why there are people who are hurting, full of hang-ups, and who have bad habits.

 

Truthfully, we can choose to be happy in the midst of our difficulties and despite the fact that we live in an imperfect and unjust world. However, if we are going to choose to be happy, we must first deal with the root cause of our unhappiness. The root cause though is not the unexpected, unfair, or unjust circumstances we face. The root cause of our unhappiness is that we continually act as though we are God and the problem is that we are not God. Each time we attempt to control, we are acting as God because only God is in control. Truth be told, we are not in control of anything and this includes our own lives. If you know the right thing to do but do the wrong thing, that is an indication that you are not in control. If you have ever said, “I will never say this or that, do this or that or act that way again”, and then you went ahead and did it again, that is because you are really not in control.

 

We are constantly acting as though we are God and we do so every time we attempt to:

 

Control our Image – We do so when we act as though we are something or someone we are not and when we hide behind all sorts of masks and disguises.

 

Control Others – By playing psychological games, we attempt to control others using guilt, shame, silence, or praise.

 

Control our Problems – True there are problems that we could deal with on our own. However, the things that cause us to be unhappy, our hurts, hang-ups, addictions, and bad habits we excuse away by saying, “I can handle it”, or by denying that they even exist.

 

Control our Pain – By medicating the symptoms by using drugs, alcohol, and immoral behavior yet never dealing with the problem.

Control God – We are like little kids. We go before God and say, “you promised me”, or after behaving well for a few days, we go before Him and say “you owe me”.

 

Matthew 5:3 GNT

 

“Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!”

 

Choosing to be happy starts when we stop acting as though we are God, and when we face up to the fact that we are spiritually poor, when we accept that we are not in control, and when we get out of the way and allow God to play the role of God.