Sacrifice and serving are two of the keys to lifelong happiness
“If you insist on saving your life, you will lose it. Only those who throw away their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will ever know what it means to really live.” Mark 8:35 (TLB)
Real Happiness Comes from Serving
God wired the universe so that happiness does not come from anything the world has to offer.
Happiness comes from service. God designed you to be happiest when you are giving your life away. Why? Because he wants you to become like him—and he gave himself away in love. It’s all about love!
“If you insist on saving your life, you will lose it. Only those who throw away their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will ever know what it means to really live” (Mark 8:35 TLB).
To have a happy heart, you have to practice service and generosity every day.
Matthew 20:28 says, “Even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many” (NLT).
Jesus came to serve and give. Those two things will bring more happiness than anything else in your life, and they define what it means to follow Jesus. If you’re not serving, if you’re not giving, then you’re not following Jesus. It’s very simple.
God also wired the universe in such a way that the more you give yourself away, the more God gives to you and the more blessed and happier you are.
Is your heart growing more generous every year? Are you more generous with your resources this year than you were a year ago? Or are you stuck at the same level of generosity and wondering why you’re also stuck in unhappiness?
In Philippians 2:17-18, Paul says, “Your faith makes you offer your lives as a sacrifice in serving God. If I have to offer my own blood with your sacrifice, I will be happy and full of joy with all of you. You also should be happy and full of joy with me” (NCV).
Your faith compels you to offer your life as a sacrifice and to serve God by serving others. Sacrifice and serving are two of the keys to lifelong happiness as you generously give your life away for the sake of the Gospel.
Daily Effective Faith Quotes
Don’t Plan Without God - Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. Psalm 37:5
God seems to have a delightful way of upsetting the plans we have made, when we have not taken Him into account. We get ourselves into circumstances that were not chosen by God, and suddenly we realise that we have been making our plans without Him— that we have not even considered Him to be a vital, living factor in the planning of our lives. And yet the only thing that will keep us from even the possibility of worrying is to bring God in as the greatest factor in all of our planning.
In spiritual issues it is customary for us to put God first, but we tend to think that it is inappropriate and unnecessary to put Him first in the practical, everyday issues of our lives. If we have the idea that we have to put on our “spiritual face” before we can come near to God, then we will never come near to Him. We must come as we are.
Don’t plan with a concern for evil in mind. Does God really mean for us to plan without taking the evil around us into account? “Love…thinks no evil” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5). Love is not ignorant of the existence of evil, but it does not take it into account as a factor in planning. When we were apart from God, we did take evil into account, doing all of our planning with it in mind, and we tried to reason out all of our work from its standpoint.
Don’t plan with a rainy day in mind. You cannot hoard things for a rainy day if you are truly trusting Christ. Jesus said, “Let not your heart be troubled…” (John 14:1). God will not keep your heart from being troubled. It is a command— “Let not….” To do it, continually pick yourself up, even if you fall a hundred and one times a day, until you get into the habit of putting God first and planning with Him in mind. Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One Who is leading.
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