happiness on Evil

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Wisdom Song It is not too far a stretch to imagine an eager young person sitting at the feet of a well-seasoned elder and receiving the words of thi...

No man chooses evil because it's evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

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...

Morality or duty . . . never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

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 ...

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...

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...

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the co...

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...

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.

For who wishes anything for any other reason than that he may become happy?

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...

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. RESPO...

He has no design upon us, but to make us happy. . . . Who should be cheerful, if not the people of God?

Go, as God’s people of joy, carrying in your hearts the good news that our God delights to seek and save all who are lost. May you know how deeply Christ values each and every person who you encounter...

We pray to You our Lord, our Savior, our Merciful God, that all our sins may be forgiven. Our sins are like a straight jacket, binding us, and keeping us from relationship with You. Although we know w...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

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...

If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither.

G. K. Chesterton was on cue when he suggested that a man knocking on the door of a brothel is in fact looking for God.

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...

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...

It’s hard to tell what brings happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

We believe, O Lord, that you have not abandoned us to the dim light of our own reason to conduct us to happiness, but that you have revealed in Holy Scriptures whatever is necessary for us to believe ...

One way to be unhappy is to lack what you most want. Another is to get all you could possibly want and discover that everything is never enough.

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 ...