God’s will is not that we should every moment feel happy, but that we should every moment be holy. If we live holy lives then we will also worship the Lord our God in spirit and truth with our lives. These holy lives are not guaranteed to be free of suffering. In fact, the opposite is true.
7 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. 11 All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Hebrews 12:7-11 (NASB)
As we have been discussing lately, only a fragment of the visible Church is holy. Only a Remnant is truly saved. There is actually a great gulf fixed between this Remnant and professing Christians who are in apostasy. This gulf has many aspects, but one of the main things that separate the two groups is that the Remnant is made up of those who are true worshippers of God. They worship the Father in spirit and truth. Those in apostasy may very well have stirring worship services and sing praise song after praise song in their Sunday Worship Services, but that is as far as it goes. It is simply music, and in God’s ears it is nothing more than a clanging gong. Genuine worship of God in spirit and truth comes from the heart of the regenerate who worships Him with every part of their lives. They serve God in all they do. He is their all-in-all. They do not seek for God to make them happy in all things. Instead, they seek to walk holy before the Lord.
“Eudaemonism is an uncommon word for which I should perhaps apologize. I use it because it is the only word I know that fits. It has nothing to do with demons. It comes from the Greek for “happy,” eudaimon, and Webster defines it as “the system of philosophy which makes human happiness the highest object.” I use the word as a label for the view that happiness means the presence of pleasure and freedom from all this unpleasant. Eudaemonism says that since happiness is the supreme value, we may confidently look to God here and now to shield us from unpleasantness at every turn, or if unpleasantness breaks in, to deliver us from it immediately because it is never his will that we should have to live with it. This is a basic principle of much contemporary religion. Unhappily, however, it is also a false principle. It loses sight of the place of pain in sanctification whereby God trains his children to share his holiness. Such oversight can be ruinous.” – J.I Packer from Hot Tub Religion, 75
God’s will is not that we should every moment feel happy, but that we should every moment be holy. If we live holy lives then we will also worship the Lord our God in spirit and truth with our lives. These holy lives are not guaranteed to be free of suffering. In fact, the opposite is true.
29 For to you it has been granted for Christ’s sake, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake, 30 experiencing the same conflict which you saw in me, and now hear to be in me. Philippians 1:29-30 (NASB)
In my younger days I was a long distance runner. In the warmer months of the year I could easily run over 40 miles a week. I competed in races that were anywhere from 5K to 10 miles long. To do this, I had to train. I had to build my endurance. There is no way to build endurance for long distance running other than running long distance. However, no matter how much I ran to train for racing, I could not compete unless I had the desire to do so. When I trained well I believed that I could do well and I wanted very much to excel in it. Christian endurance is the ability to live lovingly, joyfully, peacefully, and patiently under conditions that we wish were different. Another way to describe this is Walking by Faith.
