God Already Gave Us the Secret to Finding Happiness

“For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16

Anyone who knows what it’s like to love a child knows the soul deep agony losing that child causes, because it lingers on the edges of their consciousness as their deepest fear. Can you imagine loving someone so much, even though they’ve been petty, and selfish, and cruel, and rejected you at every turn, that you would offer up your only child, subject him to an agonizing death, just so they would know the secret to finding happiness?

Most of us could never conceive of such a thing, willingly offering ourselves up as a sacrifice for the ones we love but protecting our children fiercely. We would never willingly subject them to an experience that was going to cause them harm just to guide someone else on the path to finding happiness. Yet that’s exactly what God did when he sent his son to earth to die on the cross. He sent his child, whom he loved dearly, for the sole purpose of allowing him to suffer persecution and prejudice, torture and rejection and eventually a horrible death on the cross just so a world full of sinners would have the chance to find true happiness in their lives and spend an eternity in paradise after their death.

Most of us spend our entire lives in the pursuit of our constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We go out on the weekends with our friends, spend quality time with our family, choose our jobs with care and work hard to achieve our career goals and believe that we’re living. We think we’re happy. Then the demons that lurk deep in our soul that tell us we’re not good enough, we’re not strong enough, we’re not pretty enough or thin enough, we’re not enough, not enough, can never be enough, start whispering in our ear, and all of that happiness we thought we had just floats away on the breeze.

We don’t know the secret to finding happiness, and so we never do.

In his book “The Big Lie” Stan Sanderson, from the Spiritual Coach Program, tells his readers that the world is full of lies about finding happiness. We spend our whole lives working ourselves to the bone to find the happiness we think we’ve been looking for only to discover that at the end we’re just as unhappy as we were when we started. We’ve made our career, our jobs, our family our idols and spent our time pursuing them in the pursuit of happiness when we should have been pursuing a deeper, closer relationship with Christ.

We can never earn happiness. None of us are so selfless, so giving, so pure of heart, that we deserve happiness. We all have our secrets, our flaws, our dark spots. The difference is, people who have discovered the truth about finding happiness have opened their hearts to God and allowed the blood of Christ, spilled so many years ago, to wash that darkness clean. To take advantage of the pure happiness he so selflessly gave us when he sent Christ to die for our sins so that we could be washed clean of sins we couldn’t begin to atone for and therefore deserve the paradise that he has waiting for us.

God’s already given us the secret to finding happiness, through the son he sent to die. All we have to do is open our arms and accept it.