The Good Life: What Jesus Teaches about Finding True Happiness

Trying to find lasting happiness is like chasing your shadow; what starts as childish fun erodes into adult frustration, failure, and disappointment.

Jesus communicates that the entire Torah is summed up in these simple commands: love God, love self, and love neighbor. A fully transformed human is one who can love God, self, and neighbor through God’s presence and power, and by participating in the eternal-kind-of-life of Jesus.

To love our neighbors is to love God. To love God requires that we love our neighbors. Good grief. I’m convicted.

To love ourselves correctly is to see ourselves as God sees us and to allow the Word, not the world, to define who and whose we really are. The clearer we capture the vision of our new identity in Jesus Christ, the more we will realize that our deepest needs for security, significance, and satisfaction are met in him and not in people, possessions,

Jesus knew the secret to happiness. Jesus knew that his happiness had to be entrenched in something that was beyond this world but that gave him the grace to live here.

What if happiness is found by gazing into the face of God in Jesus Christ, and walking in his path of light, life, and righteousness?

Jesus’ circumstances were not the cause of his happiness, nor did they add or subtract from his happiness; they were the window through which he expressed his happiness.