Happiness Comes Only Through God

Today’s reading: John 1:1-18

A broadcast of Joyce Meyers is quietly playing on the television in the next room as I type this. I could hear bits of her sermon just now as I was reading today’s scripture.

“You are responsible for your own happiness!” she said. “And God is waiting for you to make that transformation to happiness.”

I heard those words just as I was reading this about John the Baptist:

“He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” (Verses 8-11)

It occurs to me that John is the perfect example of the truth behind what Joyce was saying. (Though I believe her sermon was in reference to yet another part of the New Testament.)

The World did all it could to discourage John the Baptist. And it still does. Just this year alone, for example, I’ve heard several preachers describe John as “mean,” “wild” and even “crazy.”

But yet his peace was complete in God. Only in God.

John was the first to know Jesus’s story (He knew it years before the actual events would unfold for the benefit of non-believers). And, like Jesus, he knew he was doomed to a tortured life and death at the hands of The World.

Yet he lived God’s plan obediently — without waver. That’s something only a truly happy man can do. (An analogy from the modern world: only a person who is truly happy while working out can stick to a gym routine day after day and year after year.)

I, for one, don’t think there is anything mean, wild or crazy about that.

Thanks be to God for the complete happiness that is eternally accessible to me (and all of us) through Him (and only through Him).