The Ultimate Lifestyle July 14, 2007
Posted by reformedville in : Uncategorized , trackbackThe Ultimate Lifestyle: Living Joyfully (Philippians 1:12-26) Most people don’t enjoy life; they just endure it. They think that they can’t be happy because of all the problems in their life. Their life has to be perfect before they’re happy. But there’s not such thing as a problem-free life. If you wait to be problem-free, you’ll never be joyful. If you’re going to learn to be joyful, you’ve got to do it in the middle of the problems of life. Who do you think lives the ultimate lifestyle? Millionaires? Celebrities? Executives? Retired people? I’ll tell you who is living the ultimate lifestyle: joyful people. The people who are really living the ultimate lifestyle are those people who have joy in their lives. The sad thing is – most of us aren’t joyful. If we did a joy audit, we would find most of us simply existing from day to day, and trying to get by. The motto of many of our lives would be TGIF, “Thank God it’s Friday.” We live for the weekends. We simply exist the rest of the time. We’re not joyful. Now, all of us once were joyful. If you go to a schoolyard, I think you will find that about 90% of the children there are joyful. Do they have problems? Absolutely. Are they joyful? Absolutely. Joy is not the absence of problems; joy is the attitude that you carry regardless of your problems. “Happiness” comes from the word “happenstance” from which we get the word “happy”. It depends on happenings. Joy is internal. Happiness is external. You have a happy time at Disneyland, you leave and you lose your happiness. Joy is constant. How do you have happiness in spite of what is going on in your life? Paul was one of the most joyful people who ever lived. Paul was in miserable circumstances. He in prison on trumped up charges awaiting a trail whose outcome could result in his execution. We don’t know exactly where he was, but he was facing a trial before Nero, who was not exactly known for his niceties towards Christians. On the way to Rome, he would have faced shipwreck, being stranded on an island, bitten by a poisonous snake, all before arriving to Rome and spending another two years there. In Rome, he would have no privacy. Every four hours he would get a new guard. He would be chained up 24 hours a day. I think you could say that Paul was in miserable circumstances. But what does Paul say? In Philippians 1:18 he says, “I rejoice. And I will continue to rejoice.” What’s Paul’s secret? How can he be so joyful in prison? He knew the difference between joy and happiness and the source of the joy.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?