How to be unhappy

The Blazing Center:

You’re stuck in a happiness rut and you want to know how to get out.

I understand. I’ve been there before. Sometimes I just get so sick of being happy that I’ve got to take drastic action.

There is one sure fire to get yourself out of a happiness rut:

Make yourself the center of everything.

It’s so simple yet so beautiful. Put yourself and your personal fulfillment at the center of everything that you’re doing. Push God’s glory out of the way and bring your own fulfillment smack dab into the middle.

This solution works with pretty much anything. Parenting is painful when it’s all about you and what you want. Ministry becomes miserable when personal satisfaction and public accolades become the top goal. Work is a nightmare when you’re constantly aware of how unhappy it makes you.

Whatever you do, keep God and his glory and his purposes out of sight. Don’t get tangled up in that stuff. You might accidentally forget about yourself and start being joyful.

Trust me on this. I’m an expert. Make it all about you and you can be unhappy all the time.

 

 

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A cure for worry and fear

“A doubting, fretful spirit takes from us the joys we have. You have not all you could wish, but you have still more than you deserve. Your circumstances are not what they might be, but still they are not even now so bad as the circumstances of some others.” – C.H. Spurgeon

“As we feel a thousand deaths in fearing one, so do we feel a thousand afflictions in the fear of sorrows which will never come. Probably the major part of our griefs are born, nourished, and perfected, entirely in an anxious, imaginative brain. Many of our sorrows are not woven in the loom of providence, but are purely homespun, and the pattern of our own invention. Some minds are specially fertile in self-torture; they have the creative faculty for all that is melancholy, desponding, and wretched.” – C.H. Spurgeon

(HT: Eric Young)

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The best preaching, life, and man

Tony Reinke shares this stirring quote from Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon dated November 2, 1884:

The best preaching is, “We preach Christ crucified.”

The best living is, “We are crucified with Christ.”

The best man is a crucified man.

The more we live beholding our Lord’s unutterable griefs, and understanding how he has fully put away our sin, the more holiness shall we produce.

The more we dwell where the cries of Calvary can be heard, where we can view heaven, and earth, and hell, all moved by his wondrous passion—the more noble will our lives become.

Nothing puts life into men like a dying Savior.

Get close to Christ, and carry the remembrance of him about you from day to day, and you will do right royal deeds.

Come, let us slay sin, for Christ was slain.

Come, let us bury all our pride, for Christ was buried.

Come, let us rise to newness of life, for Christ has risen.

Let us be united with our crucified Lord in his one great object—let us live and die with him, and then every action of our lives will be very beautiful.

 

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