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Emotions are Divine: Why Pastors Need Biblical Permission to Feel
When the Professor Weeps: A Personal Story About ten years ago, I was teaching a course on the psalms for my seminary students in the midst of a personal health crisis. It wasn’t in my notes, but I ... -
liturgy
May you refuse to do battle against
May you refuse to do battle against the parts of yourself that need love the most. Set down your sword. Say hello to every shard. Hello, grief. Hello, sadness. Hello, anger. Hello, madness. ... -
liturgy
Seeking Forgiveness in God's Grace
Leader: When our Lord Jesus was about to ascend into heaven, He lifted His hands in blessing, promising to be with us always. Even though His Word confirms His presence in our lives, we are a sinful... -
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Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go -
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People shoot for happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning…People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering…Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefi... -
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Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds and glitter for the moment. Cheerfulness keeps up daylight in the mind, filling it with steady and perpetual serenity. -
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If I could just come down on that telling phrase – God wants us to be happy… but God doesn’t want us to be happy. God wants joy for us. But joy is something rather different from happiness. Joy is s... -
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People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic securit... -
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Joy in Persecution
The first thing the group of American church leaders noticed about the Central Asian pastor they were meeting was his smile. It was huge. It was so big that anyone who looked at it had to smile too!... -
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I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning b... -
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Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be. -
illustration
What Suffering Does
People shoot for happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning…People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering…Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefi... -
liturgy
Confess Sins, Seek Gods Forgiveness
Pastor: Let us then confess our sins to God our Father. People: Merciful God, we confess that too often we have failed to put on the armor You provide. We try to protect ourselves with th... -
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There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes. -
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While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy. -
illustration
Now What?
Indeed, there comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where a voice inside us simply asks, Now what? After we have been introduced to Jesus and have found peace with God through... -
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Let me be clear, nobody is happy all the time. In fact, to be happy all the time is indicative of a disorder. -
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Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. -
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It is as natural for the reasonable creature to desire to be happy, as it is for the fire to burn… But we do not make a right choice of the means that may bring us to that happiness that we desire. [H... -
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In times of joy, we all wish we had a tail we could wag. -
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There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he ... -
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It is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery ... -
illustration
Happiness Levels in Children and Adults
There’s a cartoon that makes a profound statement about happiness. The first panel shows happy schoolchildren entering a street-level subway station—laughing, playing, tossing their hats in the air. T... -
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God doesn’t “just” want you to be happy; he wants you to be holy as he is holy and to find true, lasting joy in him. -
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No man chooses evil because it's evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks. -
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People are realizing that what seemed important to them in their lives-materialism and consumerism-doesn't work at all to make a happy heart. It actually makes an unhappy heart. And an unhappy wor... -
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George McDonald’s Great Fear
George MacDonald, The Scottish author who had a profound effect on C.S. Lewis among others, once wrote a letter to his father about what he believed would be a great obstacle to his faith; that once h... -
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If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither. -
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Money exerts a certain control over us because it seems to hold out so much (false) promise of happiness. It whispers with great force, "Think and act so as to get into a position to enjoy my ben... -
illustration
The Father is Fond of Me
Brennan Manning shares a true story about a priest from Detroit who traveled to Ireland to visit family. One morning, he walked along the shores of Lake Killarney with his uncle. As they watched the s...
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