Happiness

Happiness
By: Randy Alcorn

I really liked this book, but it is a long and dense read. I was ready for it to be over about halfway through though as it felt repetitive.

It was a well-researched book rich with Scripture and quotations from people and other books.

I gained a lot from reading this and will be a great reference in the future, but I think I would have had the same opinion and review if it had been shorter and more condensed.

A lot of good insights to happiness and how the Bible uses that word and defines it versus how culture or even the church uses and defines it.

It answers questions like- What’s the difference between happiness and joy? Is God happy? Is it okay to find pleasure in earthly things? How can we be happy when there is so much pain and sin in the world? Is pleasure an idol?

Here, feast your eyes!:

“Celebration and gladness of heart have characterized the church, including the suffering church, throughout history. Scripturally, the culture of God's people is one of joy, happiness, gratitude, eating and drinking, singing and dancing, and making music. It's not the people who know God who have reason to be miserable- it's those who don't. When our face to the world is one of anger, misery, shame, cowardice, or defensiveness, the gospel we speak of doesn't appear to be the good news of happiness. And we shouldn't be surprised if people, both outside and inside the church, aren't attracted to it. Why should they be?”

“...we're right to oppose the superficial self-centered happiness of prosperity theology. But we're wrong to suppose that God doesn't care about our happines.”

“Anyone who has tasted rotten fruit is right to object to rottenness. But they're wrong to object to fruit itself! There's good fruit and bad fruit. There's righteous happiness and sinful happiness.”

“Those who say 'It's my turn to be happy now' can rationalize nearly any sin.”

“John Piper writes, ‘If you have nice little categories for 'joy is what Christians have' and 'happiness is what the world has' you can scrap those when you go to the Bible, because the Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction.’”

“God created not only our minds but also our hearts. Sure, emotions can be manipulated, but so can intellects. God designed us to have emotions, and he doesn't want us to shun or disregard them. “

“To declare joy sacred and happiness secular closes the door to dialogue with unbelievers.”

“If we buy into, even subconsciously, the misguided perspective that bodies, the Earth, material things, and anything 'secular' are automatically unspiritual, we will inevitably reject or spiritualize any biblical revelation about bodily resurrection or finding joy in God's physical creation.”

"Accepting Jesus is not just adding Jesus. It is also subtracting the idols." - Ray Ortlund

“Tim Keller says, ‘to live for anything else but God leads to breakdown and decay. When a fish leaves the water, which he was built for, he is not free, but dead. Worshiping other things...cannot deliver satisfaction, because they were never meant to be 'gods.' They were never meant to replace God.’”

Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs spoke about the futility of finding happiness in anything other than God: "That is just as if a man were hungry, and to satisfy his craving stomach he should gape and hold open his mouth to take in the wind, and then should think that the reason why he is not satisfied is because he has not got enough of the wind; no, the reason is because the thing is not suitable to a craving stomach."

“It's fine for me to say that my wife, my children, my grandchildren, and my friends are joys if I remember that God made them and works through them to bring me happiness. They're not lesser joys to me, but greater ones- precisely because I know whom these gifts come from!”

J.R.R Tolkien put it beautifully in the Fellowship of the Ring: "The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

“If we see God as happy, suddenly the command for us to "find your joy in him at all times" (Philippians 4:4) makes sense. God is saying, in essence, "Be as I am." Paralleling "Be holy because I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16), the answer to the question 'Why should God's children be happy?' is 'Because our Father is happy.'“

“The logic is that since people are full of sin, God must be full of unhappiness. But this logic begins in the wrong place- with ourselves. We flatter ourselves by imagining we're the primary source of God's happiness, tilting him one way or the other by what we think, do, and say…”

“As believers we need to laugh a great deal more and a great deal less: more at ourselves and the incongruities of life, and less at immorality and mockery of what pleases God.”

“If you believe in the God of the Bible, if you've placed your faith in Jesus Christ as your Redeemer, then the following things are true: The price for your happiness has been paid; The basis for your happiness is secure; The resources for your happiness are provided daily; The assurance of your eternal happiness is absolute, providing an objective reason for your happiness today.”

“Happiness researchers have found that circumstances can contribute about 10 percent to our happiness...internal makeup, including genetic factors and temperament can account for 50 percent...final 40 percent is entirely within our control: our choices, behaviors, thoughts… God is sovereign over circumstances, genetics, background, and temperaments. So even the 60 percent of happiness factors we can't change are used by God to accomplish his purpose. And the 40 percent under our control are subject to the Holy Spirit's influence.”

“We should be wary of trendy reinterpretation of Scripture that just happen to correspond with popular culture's latest ideas. Culture, with its always- changing opinions, is not worthy of our trust.”

Spurgeon said, "There is nothing in the Law of God that will rob you of happiness- it only denies you that which would cost you sorrow."

“When duty is a joy and not a burden, love transcends obligation, and what's right becomes what's pleasing.”

“Prosperity theology isn't wrong because it values happiness. It's wrong because it tries to obtain happiness in secondary things rather than in God. It lays claim to out-of-context Scriptures while ignoring all the passages that expose its errors.”

“These two premises– that God is the source of all happiness and that sin separates us from God- lead to this conclusion: sin separates us from happiness.”

“Too often, in the name of love, we assist people in taking wrong actions which, because they are wrong, will rob them of happiness. We may congratulate ourselves for being "loving," but what good does our love do them if it encourages their self-destruction?”

John 1:16 "Grace after grace" is like the tide as we walk the shoreline. It comes in and goes out, but it's always either there or about to be.

**I received this book on a Goodreads giveaway**