Proverbs 16:20 (AMP)
He who deals wisely and heeds [God’s] word and counsel shall find good, and whoever leans on, trusts in, and is confident in the Lord – happy, blessed, and fortunate is he.
God’s prescription for happiness is for you to make wise choices based on the principles contained in God’s Master Success Book. Acting on God’s counsel, practicing the principles contained in God’s Word, allows you to live a blessed life, which includes happiness. Your current happiness and your current sadness are states of mind that come and go depending on the circumstances that occur in your life. You can get off the emotional roller coaster by following God’s prescription for emotional stability.
Everyone has taken a ride at one time or another in their life on the emotional roller coaster. You know you are on the emotional roller coaster when the pattern of your life is waking up one day and you are happy and waking up the next day and you are sad. You are on the emotional roller coaster when your life exhibits a series of up and down emotions of happiness and sadness. When you identify the cause of your happiness and the cause of your sadness you will begin the process of minimizing the emotional mood swings you experience. The shorter and fewer the swings the better off you are. After you have identified the cause of your emotional mood swings, you can seek a solution that will allow you to live your life with more emotional stability.
Happiness and sadness are both states of mind that come and go. The objective is to find out how to be happy all the time. You may have been happy when you graduated from school. You may have been happy when you won a great victory or prize. You may have been happy when you got engaged. You may have been happy when you got married. You may have been happy when you became a parent. During your lifetime many events have made you happy. The problem with these happiness-causing events is that they are transitory, they come and they go. Events come into your life and then they are over; memories are all that remain. When events you expect to happen do not happen, you experience sadness. When you are expecting positive things to happen and they do not happen, then all of a sudden you become sad because the opposite of something that makes you happy is going to make you sad. The antithesis of happiness is sadness.
The term “true happiness” is really a misnomer because the positive events that make you happy are not going to happen all the time. Positive circumstances will not continuously occur in your life; that’s just not the way life is. The New Testament term for a continual state of happiness is joy. Joy originates and emanates from your re-created spirit. When you learn how to grow and release the joy within you, you will be “happy” all the time. Joy is the second fruit of your re-created spirit (See Galatians 5:22-23).
Happiness is a state of mind, but joy is a state of being. Happiness is a response to the circumstances of life, but joy is a way of living. Joy is the happiness you can experience throughout life regardless of your circumstances. Joy is what allows you to enjoy happiness through both the good and bad circumstances of life. When you placed your faith in Christ, you became a new creation and one of the characteristics of your new nature is joy. You have the ability to allow joy to dominate your emotions, and experiencing joy is what allows you to get off the emotional roller coaster!
I talk more about how to get off the emotional roller coaster in my book, Beyond Positive Thinking: Success and Motivation in the Scriptures. When you order one or more books this week, I will include a FREE Beyond Positive Thinking companion CD with each book purchase as my way of saying “thanks” for supporting this ministry! Click here to order