Happiness is a state of well-being that yields contentment in our lives. It’s defined as delight, enjoyment, exhilaration, joy, and satisfaction. We all desire happiness and have a sense of what it is, but for many of us, it’s illusive. We can’t find the inner path to it. This is why renewing our minds towards happiness is perhaps one of the most challenging areas of our Christian lives. We think it’s a feeling thing when real happiness is a mind thing. We have been trained by society to be emotional creatures and to depend on our emotions to tell us how to be. This puts us at the mercy of conditions and circumstances, and God never intended that. If conditions or circumstances are optimal or the same, we feel okay, but if our environment is suddenly flooded with situations of upset and uncertainty, some of us will train ourselves to be stuck in sadness a lifetime. We need to know that this is a cycle that can and should be broken.
Adam and Eve were wired to be happy. They had no knowledge of evil before they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Before sin entered the picture, all they knew was good, and things were good all the time. There was no such notion of depression, sadness, lack, or loneliness. All they experienced was bliss. This shows us God’s intention and Will for His children. Jesus Christ said in John 10:10 that he came to the earth so that we could live not just an abundant life, but a more than abundant life. This means an abundant life mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Philippians 4:19(NKJV) declares, “And my God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” God has taken care of our needs, and His promise is to continually do so, but when we look at our personal situations, often we do not bring the promise of the Father to take care of our needs to the forefront of our minds. Instead, we see ourselves as lacking in some area of our lives. This perception of lack or loneliness can drive us to deep sadness. It’s not about someone taking something from us. In many cases, it’s not about us not having good health, food to eat or shelter over our heads. Often the sadness is about our perceived lack or deficit of something that we believe will bring us happiness.
Happiness from within
We’ve heard it from self-help gurus and many Christian leaders, teachers, and counselors of godly wisdom that we should never place ourselves in a position where our happiness is derived solely from external realities. God’s Word teaches us that our happiness should come from that place within us that has been recreated and made brand new by Jesus Christ. 2Corinthians 5:17(NLT) tells us, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” This is our reality in Christ, and we must renew our minds to it.
If we are dependent on external forces, external situations, and external relationships with other people to make us whole, there will never be a consistency or a balance in our emotional and mental lives. Our dependency on circumstances and conditions will drive us to instability. That is not what God wants and we shouldn’t want that either. So, sometimes it isn’t our present situation that brings up the emotion of sadness, but the lack of something we don’t have or memories of things that happened in the past that we fear will happen again.
The past
Our painful pasts are probably the greatest deterrents to our happiness in the present. The mind will revert back to what it is used to if it is not stimulated to change. Renewing our minds is God’s perfect and supreme strategy for disconnecting from our past and embracing what He has in store for our lives.
Our fear is that since our Heavenly Father allowed us to endure the circumstances of our past, He will allow it to be on repeat. Our minds search for a guarantee that this will not happen, and since faith is something we cannot see, some of us grab the low hanging fruit of doubt. With this way of thinking, we are imprisoned by our pasts. It can be a vicious cycle because we greatly desire newness, but we’re not facing the truth about all the guardrails we’ve put up to block it. We don’t know how get out of our own way. We’re afraid to embrace joy because of the loss we have experienced in the past.
Joy is here
Joy isn’t far from us, it’s in us, and that truth must be firmly believed in order to be the children of light that God has called us to be. Our greatest work in renewing our minds toward happiness is comprehending on the deepest level that happiness and joy cannot come from outside our own being. We live from the inside out, but for many of us, that is a level of responsibility and accountability that is ignored. We should be happy in Christ, but so many believers are not. They do not enjoy being saved, do not fully believe they’ve been rescued from darkness, and are living a life of waiting for the next satanic attack.
Happiness in Christ will press us into a place where brutal honesty is necessary. We might have to admit that we have no idea how to pursue joy within our own selves. The notion of celebrating our unique individuality is to us a foreign concept, and we cannot imagine enjoying ourselves in Christ with reckless abandon. We haven’t allowed ourselves the luxury of celebrating in Christ because of the burdens of sadness we feel tied to.
Our minds must be expanded above and beyond the boundaries of where they are today. Right now, even though joy is in you through Jesus Christ, you may not know enough about it to cause it to manifest. Behind the face that we put on for family and friends should be a life that we love, and if we are in Christ, this life is always in reach for us because of the hope of Christ that is in us through the Holy Spirit!
In Luke 14:28(NLT), Jesus Christ said, “But don’t begin until you count the cost. For who would begin construction of a building without first calculating the cost to see if there is enough money to finish it?” This truth about the practice of counting the cost is one that stretches across the board, weaving through every crevice of life. Everything, from the smallest, most insignificant detail to the greatest, most significant detail of life will cost us something. It doesn’t matter if it’s shinning our own shoes or picking daisies, it is an exercise that is going to cost us time and energy, so it had better be worth it to us. So, the question that you and I must ask ourselves is what has an un-renewed mind towards happiness cost us. What is the price we have paid for allowing our minds and emotions to betray us because we believe the wrong things about God’s love?
The reality is that we must choose our faith in God over our fear and dread of facing tomorrow. We might see that as a struggle, but that’s not because it is. It’s because our minds and emotions are telling us that we’re too tired, too weak, and undeserving to be happy. That’s not the truth. Over and over again, you must tell yourself what God says and not what your emotions say. You must surrender. Hold up the white flag to heaven and let God do in your life what only He can. You might feel that there’s no new place to go, nothing exciting and real to hold on to, but there is, and you’ll find it if you embark upon the journey of letting God guide you to it. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Renewing Your Mind towards Happiness”, written by Reverend Fran Mack. Edits by Kim Times and K. Stephens for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2023. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.