Heath and Happiness
The Joy of a Broken Heart: Finding Happiness in Helping Others
The pursuit of superficial goals will not make you happy, but worn-out and miserable. Your only real hope for happiness is enabled usefulness in redemptive service to others motivated by the heart of Christ for hurting people.
"Those who sow in tears will reap in joy." - Psalm 126:5-6
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
Happiness: The Assured Outcome of Good Health
Good health is not the absence of sickness; rather, sickness is the absence of God's faithful provisions to strengthen and sustain you. The difference is important and at the core of the grace message.
Good health and happiness are intimately related. Happiness is not really the absence of brokenness, but the assured outcome of the presence of good health.
"Dear friend, I pray that you are enjoying the prosperity (Gr. Euodoo: "happy circumstances") of good physical health even as (I know) your soul (Gr. psyche: "the inner you") is well." - 3 John 3:2 paraphrased
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
Health and Happiness: The Assured Results of Being Filled with Christ
God's blessings are not earned rewards for keeping the rules. The healing power of his resurrected life flows from him continually to usward. Our experience of health and happiness is the unfailing and assured result of abiding in (remaining connected to) him.
"If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit (experience and manifest the essence of who I am)." - John 15:5 (See also Galatians 5:22-23.)
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
The Pursuit of Health: Your Hope for Happiness
The pursuit of superficial goals will not make you happy, but worn-out and miserable. Your only real hope for happiness is enabled usefulness in redemptive service to others motivated by the heart of Christ for hurting people.
"Those who sow in tears will reap in joy." - Psalm 126:5-6
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
Happiness: The Assured Outcome of Good Health
Good health is not the absence of sickness; rather, sickness is the absence of God's faithful provisions to strengthen and sustain you. The difference is important and at the core of the grace message.
Good health and happiness are intimately related. Happiness is not really the absence of brokenness, but the assured outcome of the presence of good health.
"Dear friend, I pray that you are enjoying the prosperity (Gr. Euodoo: "happy circumstances") of good physical health even as (I know) your soul (Gr. psyche: "the inner you") is well." - 3 John 3:2 paraphrased
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
Health and Happiness: The Assured Results of Being Filled with Christ
God's blessings are not earned rewards for keeping the rules. The healing power of his resurrected life flows from him continually to usward. Our experience of health and happiness is the unfailing and assured result of abiding in (remaining connected to) him.
"If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit (experience and manifest the essence of who I am)." - John 15:5 (See also Galatians 5:22-23.)
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
The Pursuit of Health: Your Hope for Happiness
Happiness does not exist apart from health. You will rise higher, go further, and sustain longer pursuing good health than you will pursuing superficial goals.
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective
The Role of Grace Resources to Support Health, and of Service to Support Happiness
We will be disappointed if happiness is the goal for our relationship to grace leadership (parents, husbands, and pastors). That’s because
- grace resources (in the home and church) exist to meet health needs, not happiness needs, and
- happiness is the result of our enabled service to others.
(Again:) The goal/role/mission of grace resources is to support us for making choices which result in health, and our experience of happiness is only incidental to our service to others which is supported by our health.
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective 12B15
Reviewing God’s Goal for Resources
We will be disappointed with others in our service to them when our goal for the relationship is not about their health but about our personal happiness – that's because their response to us today will not make us happy the same way tomorrow.
However, “who Christ is” in us transforms us so that our relationship to others is not about us, but about them.
Also, we will be disappointed when the goal for our relationship with our resources is not about our health, but about our happiness.
God is not foremost in our lives to meet our happiness needs, but to support the choices we must make which establish us in health, and he calls us to connect to him (and his resources) to receive that support.
DonLoy Whisnant/The Grace Perspective 12B22
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