Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 37

New Happy Rant: Reformed Masculinity, Snake Handlers, and Pastoring Skills

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Barnabas, and Ronnie do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics:

The changes in reformed masculinity in recent years
Snake handling churches
MLM for snakes: the next big thing
Misogyny: Ronnie’s word of the episode (because it’s so fun)
What practical skills do pastors need?
Pastors as experts in everything

BONUS EPISODES

[image error]For some time now a number of listeners have supported us at Patreon. This has been invaluable in helping cover production costs, enabling us to do the occasional extra episode, and more. But it’s about time for us to do something for the supporters, so we have begun releasing short bonus episodes exclusively for Patreon supporters! If you want in on those you can sign up to support us at any amount per month that works for you, and at certain tiers you also get free signed books. Check it out.

New Happy Rant: Politics are Terrible and Everyone is Mad

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do, well sort of. They wander to and fro through mostly one topic, one they generally avoid: Politics.

The “presidential” debate
People’s outrage over the predictable
Insane expectations
Where can we find hope?

BONUS EPISODES

[image error]For some time now a number of listeners have supported us at Patreon. This has been invaluable in helping cover production costs, enabling us to do the occasional extra episode, and more. But it’s about time for us to do something for the supporters, so we have begun releasing short bonus episodes exclusively for Patreon supporters! If you want in on those you can sign up to support us at any amount per month that works for you, and at certain tiers you also get free signed books. Check it out.

SPONSOR

[image error]Thank you to our sponsor for this week’s episode: Dwell Bible App. Dwell is a Bible listening app that we love! If you are looking for a convenient, fresh way of spending more time in God’s word Dwell is ideal. Go to https://dwellapp.io/happyrant to get 20% off your subscription.

NEW BOOK

[image error]In his brand new book, Hoping for Happiness, recovering cynic Barnabas Piper helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun. He shows how having a clear view of the reality of the fall and the promise of redemption frees us to live a life that is grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy. It’s available October 1, but you can pre-order now.

Get Your Coffee

[image error]WE ARE COFFEE MOGULS AGAIN. We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.

Be sure to visit HappyRantPodcast.com where you can:

Order your Redbud coffee
Connect with Ted, Ronnie, or Barnabas to speak for your church, organization, or event
Support the podcast through our Patreon page . This helps us cover production and hosting costs so we can keep this thing rolling

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher
Listen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out there
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #315

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Published on October 06, 2020 13:36

New Happy Rant: Bonus Episode – Hoping for Happiness

In this episode of The Happy Rant you’ll get to listen to a free chapter from the audio book of Hoping for Happiness, my newly released book.

If you have ever asked the following questions this book is for you.

Why I am always disappointed in the end no matter how hard I chase happiness?
What does it even mean to be happy in the messed up world?
Is happiness a guilty pleasure?
Is happiness opposed to holiness?
What’s the difference between happiness and joy?
Is it ok for Christians to pursue happiness?

New Happy Rant: Book Promotion, Slapdash Podcasting, and Taking Ourselves Seriously

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics:

Why don’t publishers market books any more?
How authors promote books
Podcasters taking themselves seriously
Book blurbs as fame credentials
Why don’t endorsements work for all books?
Ronnie’s marketing decadence for Hoping for Happiness
Swanky New England Boys schools

SPONSORS

[image error]The fine folks at Paul’s Leather know that the Bible is the most important book on your shelf. That’s why they make finding the perfect Bible (or keeping your perfect Bible perfect) a simple process. Using full-grain leather and hand stitching they create beautiful, classic bibles that will last for decades. They will even re-bind that old, heirloom Bible you love so much that’s falling apart. Check out their selection today.

[image error]Thank you to our sponsor for this week’s episode: Dwell Bible App. Dwell is a Bible listening app that we love! If you are looking for a convenient, fresh way of spending more time in God’s word Dwell is ideal. Go to https://dwellapp.io/happyrant to get 20% off your subscription.

RELEASING THIS WEEK

[image error]In his forthcoming book, Hoping for Happiness, recovering cynic Barnabas Piper helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun. He shows how having a clear view of the reality of the fall and the promise of redemption frees us to live a life that is grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy. It’s available October 1, but you can pre-order now.

Get Your Coffee

[image error]WE ARE COFFEE MOGULS AGAIN. We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.

Be sure to visit HappyRantPodcast.com where you can:

Order your Redbud coffee
Connect with Ted, Ronnie, or Barnabas to speak for your church, organization, or event
Support the podcast through our Patreon page . This helps us cover production and hosting costs so we can keep this thing rolling

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher
Listen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out there
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #314

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Published on September 30, 2020 02:53

“Evangeliguilt” and Finding Happiness in This Life

How does a recovering cynic learn to be happy?

What is “evangeliguilt?”

What does happiness look like in this life?

Can happiness be genuine and lasting?

In this short video introducing my book Hoping for Happiness I pose these questions and point toward the answers (obviously the book gives more full ones). But let offer a bit of a spoiler: happiness is expecting the right things of the right things the way God designed them. That is the message of the book and the thing I set out to explore and explain. If you struggle with finding happiness, holding on to happiness, feeling OK about being happy, or even defining what happiness is, I wrote this for you.

Hoping for Happiness releases this week, on October 1. You can order a copy (or copies!) here:

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Published on September 28, 2020 02:56

New Happy Rant: Handsomeness, Show Ponies, and Christopher Nolan

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through various topics:

Caring about being handsome
The benefits of being handsome
Show pony professors
The Jared C. Blurb
Ronnie and best friends
Christopher Nolan characters (or rather, not characters)

SPONSORS

[image error]Most believers live in the state of “being a Christian” without ever being deeply formed by Christ. Our pace is too frenetic to be in union with God, and we don’t know how to quiet our hearts and minds to be present. During our chaotic times, discover five forgotten values that can spark internal growth and help us reconcile our Christian faith with the complexities of race, sexuality, and social justice. The Deeply Formed Life, by Rich Villodas, is a roadmap to live in the richly rooted place we all yearn for: a place of communion with God, a place where we find our purpose.

[image error]Thank you to our sponsor for this week’s episode: Dwell Bible App. Dwell is a Bible listening app that we love! If you are looking for a convenient, fresh way of spending more time in God’s word Dwell is ideal. Go to https://dwellapp.io/happyrant to get 20% off your subscription.

Get Your Coffee

[image error]WE ARE COFFEE MOGULS AGAIN. We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.

Be sure to visit HappyRantPodcast.com where you can:

Order your Redbud coffee
Connect with Ted, Ronnie, or Barnabas to speak for your church, organization, or event
Support the podcast through our Patreon page . This helps us cover production and hosting costs so we can keep this thing rolling

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher
Listen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out there
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #313

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Published on September 24, 2020 02:26

4 Questions to Help You Find Happiness

The questions that follow are ones with which I wrestled in the writing of Hoping for Happiness, and which I continue to think about regularly. I hope these thoughts will help you to find real happiness and rest in it.

1) What is the difference between joy and happiness?

Many Christians think of joy as deeply spiritual and virtuous, and think of happiness as experiential, untrustworthy, and fleeting. Joy is rooted and unshakeable while happiness lives on the whim of a mood and the serendipity of circumstance. As we saw in chapter 10, these definitions are unhelpful and cause people unnecessary turmoil.

Certainly, people can have a version of happiness without having joy in the Lord. Temporal happiness is all around us all the time. Happiness, in this sense, is not the purview of Christians alone. Matthew 5:45 tells us that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust,” so it’s clear that the good gifts of God are enjoyed by all people to some degree. People eat and drink. People fall in love. People marvel at the beauty of the Matterhorn or an Edgar Degas oil painting. But this happiness—a tug toward the eternal—is incomplete. It is meant to lift people’s eyes to the things of God. Instead most people make their way through life moving from one temporal happiness to another.

This version of happiness is the beginning of something lasting and magnificent. But without an eye toward the eternal, it is happiness without joy—a fleeting pursuit of the next good feeling. However good it looks on the surface, at its root it is idolatrous and dangerous.

So you can have a version of happiness without joy, but you cannot have genuine joy without happiness. To be joyful is to be glad, to rejoice, to be grateful, to be at peace. Joy should be magnetic and compelling, not life in the doldrums. In short, to be joyful is to be happy in those things that are lasting and transformative. A professed joy that lacks happiness is nothing but an articulated belief system, and it is hypocrisy.

When we recognize the inextricable wovenness of genuine happiness and joy it relieves a burden of unnecessary guilt over enjoyment (evangeliguilt) in life’s pleasures. It gives us permission to—and even compels us to—find laughter and peace in the midst of life’s worst circumstances. The complex reality of human emotion is that we rarely experience just one feeling at a time. We find that we can be truly happy in the midst of suffering even though we are grieving and burdened because of the suffering. We don’t need to extricate our joy from our happiness or put one on a spiritual pedestal while the other plays in the yard. To do so is to falsify both.

2) Is unhappiness sin? How about unhappiness in the midst of suffering?

Well, that depends.

In chapter 4 we took a long look at how we live under a curse because of sin. Nothing is as it is supposed to be. And every human knows this at a visceral and often subconscious level. We feel the wrongness of injustice, unkindness, illness, brokenness, and death. They make us unhappy, and this unhappiness is a reflection of God’s image in us. We are designed to abhor what is evil, what is wrong, what shouldn’t be. This kind of unhappiness is right.

This means that when we suffer, we are free to lament—to grieve with faith that God is in control. We should abhor the pain that a cursed reality has brought about. We ought to yearn for resolution, for healing, for justice, and ultimately for the return of Jesus to set things right. The Gospels tell of Jesus weeping over the death of a friend, mourning over the plight of a city he loved, and pleading with God for a way out of the suffering of crucifixion. He was rightly unhappy with the devastation wrought by sin.

But he was never selfish. His unhappiness did not turn to complaint, to blaming, to bad moods, or to mistrust of his Father. Just the opposite. When Jesus asked, “Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me,” in the same breath He prayed “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36). He was unhappy, but trusting. He was unhappy, but obedient. He was unhappy, but he did not let it direct him away from the course God called him to.

Our unhappiness becomes sinful when it focuses on the self. We instinctively do this all the time—and the effects can be devastating. We allow the brokenness in one area of life to splatter its acid all over other areas of life, so that we become blind to that for which we should be thankful. Or we experience a wrong of some kind and our reaction is disproportionate and causes even more wreckage. Or we wallow in unhappiness, as if that will somehow make us happier, rather than seeking the happiness Christ offers through his Spirit and through so many good gifts.

Unhappiness is part of life until we go to meet Jesus or he returns. We will never be completely happy, completely satisfied, or permanently at peace in this life. And this does not have to be sinful. In fact, it can be God-honoring as we respond to life’s unhappiness in the manner Jesus did—selflessly, joyfully, trusting God, pressing on.

3) Are my expectations right, realistic, and godly?

So much of happiness is tied to what we expect. But how do we know if what we expect is right? Here are some filters we can run expectations through to help determine if they are realistic and god-honoring.

Who are my expectations benefiting?

The easiest thing in the world is to think of ourselves first and only. It is our sinful nature to prioritize ourselves at the cost of anyone else, and it is contrary to everything Scripture teaches about serving others, considering their needs, bearing with one another, and taking up our crosses as followers of Jesus. If the primary, or only, beneficiary of your expectations is yourself, you need to consider how they align with what God says is right and true.

When you head into a relationship, are you thinking primarily of how it will be good for you, or how it will be good for the other person? When you join a church, are considering only what it offers you or what you can bring to it? In any decision, are you considering the cost to yourself or only the benefit? Are you willing to absorb that cost for the good of others, even if it is unpleasant? And have you considered how the benefit to you might actually be a cost to others?

Who do I depend on to meet my expectations?

This question goes hand-in-hand with the one above. It is impossible to have expectations that truly depend on God and are also self-centered in their outcome. To depend on God (to “fear God”, Ecclesiastes 12:13) is to put him first. When we do this, it rearranges or replaces our selfish motivations and orients us toward expectations that truly please God. When we have expectations that are selfish we can be sure that they are dependent on ourselves, or other people, to fulfill them.

That’s not to say we don’t need other people or that leaning on them is wrong. God has designed us for relationships in which we depend on one another. But there is a significant difference between the kind of depending on people that puts all our faith in them and the kind that recognizes their need for God to empower and enable them. The former places a burden of expectation on people that will inevitably lead to disappointment. The second acknowledges their God-given abilities and capacities with gratitude, while resting in God’s ongoing work through them. This is freeing and gracious.

When our expectations are God-dependent they become God-defined. We simply can’t expect God to do anything that God didn’t say he would do. Remembering this keeps us from hoping for things that dishonor God, while enabling us to expect remarkable, mind-blowing things from God by faith. We often will not know what to hope for or expect in particular situations, but when we depend on God, we know that he will do what is best—whether or not our expectations come to fruition. When we depend on ourselves, or on others, we risk becoming proud or embittered, depending on whether our expectations were met or not.

What do I know of the one I am depending on?

When we depend on God, we know that our expectations are in perfect hands—but they are also in mysterious ones. God will do things we never thought possible and that we never asked for. His wisdom is too great and wonderful for us, so we will never know the full picture of why and how he does what he does. However, if we know him well—his character, his word, his promises—we will find peace and happiness in the outcomes he gives. If we don’t have a firm grasp on God’s character, we’ll struggle to believe and find peace in outcomes we did not expect or want.

When we depend on people, even in a healthy way, we need to be equally aware of who they are—image-bearers of God with an incredible capacity for good and evil. We are fools if we don’t let this shape our expectations of people. They can bring us great joy and do us real good, but they will inevitably let us down too. There is only one person who works for our good in all things, all the time—and it’s not our spouse, or our friend, or our pastor (Romans 8:28). This is why we depend on God even as we depend on people. It is only through God’s work that people do good and can be trusted. Another way to put it would be: who does the one you depend on depend on?

4) How do I freely enjoy life without guilt? How do I keep enjoyment from becoming idolatry?

One of the main reasons I wrote this book was because I was tired of wrestling with guilt over having fun and enjoying myself. It seemed strange that God would give so many wonderful gifts only for me to feel guilty for enjoying them. On the other hand, I could also recognize my propensity for turning good things into idols, and that wasn’t ok either. Thus began my efforts at wrangling these tensions into a (hopefully) coherent and biblically faithful book. In the spirit of Ecclesiastes, and hopefully a dash of Solomon’s wisdom, I’ll conclude with the following thoughts.

Be grateful in everything. If you acknowledge and thank the source of your blessings it is so much harder to turn them into idols of any kind.

Appreciate good gifts as God intended. Savor the delicious things. Laugh at the humorous things. Thrill at the exhilarating things. Enjoy the entertaining things. Cheer at the joyous things. Ponder the deep things. Rest in the peaceful things. Reflect on the somber things. Wonder at the beautiful things. Cherish the precious things. And share them all, for happiness is multiplied when gifts are experienced together.

Live the life God has given you to the fullest. Imagine taking a child to the playground. If she continually came back asking, “Am I swinging right?” or, “Am I sliding right?” you would eventually say, “Just go play! Enjoy yourself. Have fun.” We are like that child when we worry too much about how to enjoy life rather than simply being fully engaged and enjoying it.

Repent often and eagerly. We will get things wrong dozens of times every day for the rest of our lives. We will sin in our hearts, minds, and actions. We can either let our sins drive us from God, or we can remember the work of Christ and take our sins to God, our good Father, who stands ready to forgive and is generous with good gifts. When we repent the Holy Spirit changes us, by degrees, toward holiness, where perfect peace and happiness are found.

Fear God and keep his commandments. These words are the final instruction of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, and they are the perfect summation of our pursuit of happiness. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). It is the grounds for all gratitude. It is the orientation of our hearts to truth and right expectations. It is dependence and honor and trust. From it flows a desire to keep God’s commandments because we see them as life-giving and good. In God’s words we have freedom to enjoy, strength to overcome, and a promise of true happiness.

[image error]This is an excerpt from my book Hoping for Happiness. A biblical framework for living a grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy life, this book gets far beyond the topic of work and helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun.

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Published on September 23, 2020 02:54

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writing

Stephen King is one of the most prolific and gifted American novelists. I say that as someone who does not particularly enjoy his bent toward the dark and terrifying but who absolutely recognizes him as a brilliant writer. King’s book, On Writing, is my favorite resource of both an example of good writing craft and tips on how to do it. Any writer or aspiring writer should read it.

Some time ago the Barnes & Noble book blog shared King’s 20 rules for writing, as drawn from his book. Their post includes Kings’ brilliant commentary on each rule, so go read it in full. For the more opaque rules I included King’s explanations.

Here are the 20 rules. If you can follow even a few of these your writing will notably improve.

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience.

2. Don’t use passive voice.

3. Avoid adverbs.

“The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar.

6. The magic is in you.

“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”

7. Read, read, read.

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy.

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV.

10. You have three months.

“The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success.

“When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it.”

12. Write one word at a time.

13. Eliminate distraction.

14. Stick to your own style.

15. Dig.

“When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”

16. Take a break.

“If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps.

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings.

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story.

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing.

“You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels.”

20. Writing is about getting happy.

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

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Published on September 21, 2020 03:21

New Happy Rant: Gen Z, Fallwell, and False Yoda Work

In this episode of The Happy Rant Ted, Ronnie, and Barnabas do what they always do and wander to and fro through a variety of topics:

Woke Ted
Sunday Cool and the Gen Z Bible Study that wasn’t
Bible verses read by generations
Fallwell Falls . . . well?
Endorsers for a Happy Rant Book
Correcting false Yoda tweet accusations
Simon Sinek: Leadership Yoda extraordinaire

SPONSOR

[image error]Thank you to our sponsor for this week’s episode: Dwell Bible App. Dwell is a Bible listening app that we love! If you are looking for a convenient, fresh way of spending more time in God’s word Dwell is ideal. Go to https://dwellapp.io/happyrant to get 20% off your subscription.

FORTHCOMING BOOK

[image error]In his forthcoming book, Hoping for Happiness, recovering cynic Barnabas Piper helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun. He shows how having a clear view of the reality of the fall and the promise of redemption frees us to live a life that is grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy. It’s available October 1, but you can pre-order now.

Get Your Coffee

[image error]WE ARE COFFEE MOGULS AGAIN. We’ve joined forces with Redbud Coffee, based out of Auburn IL, to bring you deliciously roasted and beautifully packaged coffee. Check out their variety of roasts and be sure to use the code HappyRant at checkout to get a 10% discount off your purchase.

Be sure to visit HappyRantPodcast.com where you can:

Order your Redbud coffee
Connect with Ted, Ronnie, or Barnabas to speak for your church, organization, or event
Support the podcast through our Patreon page . This helps us cover production and hosting costs so we can keep this thing rolling

To listen you can:

Subscribe in iTunes.
Listen on Google Play
Listen on Stitcher
Listen via just about any podcast app/streaming service out there
Leave us a rating in iTunes (it only takes 1 click and it really helps us).
Listen using the player below.

Episode #312

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Published on September 17, 2020 04:29

Do You Feel Guilty for Being Happy?

This is Randy Alcorn’s foreword for Hoping for Happiness, my new book which releases on October 1.

Spoiler alert: I loved Hoping for Happiness.

Barnabas Piper hooked me when he said, “One of the main reasons I wrote this book is because I was tired of wrestling with guilt over having fun and enjoying myself. It seemed strange that God would give so many wonderful gifts only for me to feel guilty for enjoying them.”

I grew up in a home with no knowledge of Jesus or the good news. I was often unhappy, spending night after night listening to music that promised happiness but failed to deliver it. Gazing at the night sky through my telescope, I longed for a connection to the wonders of the universe but couldn’t find it.

When I was in high school, Jesus drew me to himself. Everyone, first my mom, noticed the change. The most obvious difference? I became much happier.

I loved my first-ever church, but it struck me as strange when the pastor said, “God doesn’t want you happy; he wants you holy.” Well, I was holier than I’d ever been, but I was much happier too. Was something wrong with me?

That wonderful pastor often cited Oswald Chambers’ great book My Utmost for His Highest, which I eagerly read. But at the time I didn’t know enough to disagree when Chambers said, “Joy should not be confused with happiness. In fact, it is an insult to Jesus Christ to use the word happiness in connection with Him.”

I certainly didn’t want to insult Jesus by saying he was happy or he made me happy! And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the difference between joy and happiness. (In fact, they are synonyms for everyone except Christians who’ve been taught otherwise).

After a steady diet of such teaching, I became wary of happiness. Had I seen this book Hoping for Happiness back then, I’d have thought, We shouldn’t hope for what God doesn’t want us to have. I’d never have believed I’d one day write a book titled Does God Want Us to Be Happy? And I would have assumed the answer must be a resounding no!

Like Barnabas, I felt guilty for being happy. The message seemed to be, “You could impress God if you chose a life of miserable holiness.” It took me decades to realize that wasn’t merely a misguided and thoroughly unbiblical idea; it was a lie from the pit of hell. It undermined the “good news of happiness” (Isaiah 52:7, ESV, NASB).

Barnabas writes, “Everyone, whether they believe in God or not, has a deep internal yearning for eternal significance and happiness.” That’s why it’s counterintuitive and counterproductive to pit happiness and holiness against each other. Jesus himself, the most holy human there’s ever been, got invited to parties and was the life of them. (His first miracle was rescuing a wedding celebration that ran out of wine). Children loved him. Had he been stern and unhappy, they wouldn’t have.

Instead of, “Don’t seek happiness,”—a command impossible to obey anyway—why not, “Seek your primary happiness in Jesus, and fully enjoy the derivative happiness in his countless gifts, including family, friends, food, work and play”?

We love and serve one who reveals himself as a “happy God” (1 Timothy 1:11; 6:15). We are to put our hope in “God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17).

Barnabas calls on us to see God as “a generous Father, who showers you with good things day by day and invites you to enjoy them freely, daily, for your pleasure. “

The years I devoted to researching and writing various books on happiness were life-changing. I discovered Scripture speaks of exactly what I’d experienced: not a flimsy superficial optimism, but a happiness that’s biblically grounded in the rock of Christ’s blood-bought promises. Truth is, the good news should leak into every aspect of our lives, even if we’re not consciously talking about God or witnessing to someone. The “good news of happiness” should permeate our lives with, well, happiness. True holiness is happy-making, and all ultimate happiness is holy-making.

Barnabas couldn’t be more right when he says, “A laughing Christian who relishes good things is a compelling, magnetic Christian—the kind who draws people to truth.”

This echoes what J. C. Ryle wrote 150 years ago:

It is a positive misfortune to Christianity when a Christian cannot smile. A merry heart, and a readiness to take part in all innocent mirth, are gifts of inestimable value. They go far to soften prejudices, to take stumbling blocks out of the way, and to make way for Christ and the gospel.

There is no greater draw to the gospel than happy Christians who are full of grace and truth, quick to laugh and quick to weep for and comfort those who suffer.

My wife Nanci and I have been married 43 years. In the last three, as we have faced her cancer together, we have found a deeper happiness in God and each other than ever before. We have known firsthand the “hopeful, grounded realism” Barnabas writes of. Trusting in Jesus has brought us great happiness in Him, even amidst suffering and the threat of death.

In this delightful book, you’ll see that Barnabas loves Jesus, family, sports, food, fun, God’s creation, and life in general. So do I. We don’t pass our peaks in this life. We don’t even begin to reach them. A New Earth awaits us. I envision Christ’s laugh will be the loudest and longest at all those great feasts ahead of us. But why wait? Why not frontload our eternal happiness into our here and now and give ourselves and others a taste of Heaven?

Hoping for Happiness says, “Hang your happiness on the right hooks, hang your hopes on God’s promises, fear him, and obey his commands—and in this you’ll find happiness, now and forever.”

I know how good this book is. I’ve read it. Now it’s your turn!

[image error]This is an excerpt from my book Hoping for Happiness – the foreword by Randy Alcorn. A biblical framework for living a grounded, hopeful, and genuinely happy life, this book gets far beyond the topic of work and helps us to throw off both the unrealistic expectations that end in disappointment and the guilty sense that Christians are not meant to have fun.

View more on Barnabas Piper's website »

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Published on September 15, 2020 04:42