From His Heart Daily Devotional 29 December 2021
THE KEY TO A HAPPY NEW YEAR
For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?
Ecclesiastes 2:25
Let me be the first to wish you a Happy New Year! Happy New Year is an often-heard, post-Christmas statement of encouragement and well-wishing. To be sure, everyone desires a happy new year … but how does a person actually experience a happy new year? What is the key to having 2019 really be a happy one for you?
THE HAPPINESS CONFUSION
Many people equate happiness with money and materialism. To them, happiness is a million dollars. Others equate happiness with good physical health. To them, happiness is an in-shape body hitting on all eight cylinders. Still others equate happiness with personal achievement. To them, happiness is a big promotion, or graduation, or a milestone achievement.
Years ago, I read a true story about tennis star, Boris Becker. He was the youngest man to ever win Wimbledon, achieving victory in 1985 at the tender age of seventeen. In the late 1980s, Becker was on the mountain top of fame, fortune, and personal achievement. Yet, he was so unhappy and on the brink of suicide. Becker was quoted as saying, “I had won Wimbledon twice before, once as the youngest player. I was rich. I had all the material possessions I needed. It’s the old song of movie stars and pop stars who commit suicide. They have everything, and yet they are so unhappy. I had no inner peace. I was a puppet on a string.”
Isn’t that amazing? Becker had all the things the world says will make for happiness, yet he was so incredibly unhappy. Could it be that true happiness is not found in health, wealth, and achievement?
TRUE HAPPINESS
The Bible makes it clear that true happiness comes when you and I are right with God. When we are yielded to Christ and His will, then we can experience true happiness—inner peace and unspeakable joy. Are you right with God today? Are your sins confessed to Him? Are you living surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus Christ?
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and philosopher astutely said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
Let me encourage you to take sober inventory of your life today. Are you trying to fill the inner vacuum with health, wealth, achievement, or the like? Those things will never make you truly happy; they will never satisfy the deep longings of your soul. The only One who can do that is Jesus.
Start your year off right by bowing your knee and your life to King Jesus. Give Him first place in everything… for that is the key to true happiness.
Love,
Pastor Jeff Schreve,
From His Heart Ministries
