Been reading

My lovely god-brother, Anthony (yes, he will be so happy I mentioned him here :P) sent me this birthday gift all the way from NZ because I said I wanted to read Desiring God after reading Dave Chang’s blog. I m half-way reading it coz I got tons of other books to read at the same time. Another reason is that I m trying to sleep early these days (not quite succesfully yet) to get rid of my terrible eye bags, dark circles and most importantly the non-stop yawning in office. Haha!!

The whole book is about delighting yourself in God. It is about joy, about happiness, about being satisfied in God when He is most glorified.

It is such an irony that I was struggling with the term joy and happiness myself last week while chatting with some friends. Somehow when I said it out from my mouth, it sounds so childishly naive and superficial. Perhaps I m not much a good speaker. I guess people couldnt comprehend how can you be happy when you dont have certain things in your lives. By the world standards, at least.

As I went back to my room one night and think about happiness and joy, the late Mother Teresa and Princess Diana came to my mind. Two respectable famous women, living in 2 totally contrast lifestyles. The former lived at the streets of India, serving the poor, the orphans, the outcast of the society. The latter, lived in the British high society, brushed shoulders with the rich and famous and lived in a luxurious lifestyle most of us couldnt afford. I remember 2 of them passed away around the same time and as I read through the lives of the 2 women in magazines and newspapers, I couldnt help noticing that Mother Teresa is the happier one between them. Her life magnified the love and serving nature of Jesus Christ so greatly that it is such an inspiration just reading about it. You can see God’s goodness flowing through her, blessing people around her.

True joy….comes when you draw it from God. Not from men as we tend to dissapoint people around us because hey, we are not perfect after all! It comes when you walk according to His perfect will. It comes when He lives in you, and you realised that all other material things are nothing compare to the hope you have in Him. I m still learning to depend my joy on God every single day, to see His goodness and remember the price He paid for my sins on the cross and because of that it sets me free!! Yes, you read me right. Free!

John Piper’s book started with these words :

This is a serious book about being happy in God. It is about happiness because that is what our Creator commands : " Delight yourself in the Lord" (Psalm 37:4). The heroes of this book are Jesus Christ who "endured the cross for the joy that was set before him" ; and St Paul who was " sorrowful, yet always rejoicing"; and Jonathan Edwards, who deeply savored the sweet sovereignity of God; and C.S Lewis  who knew that the Lord "finds our desires not too strong but too weak" and all the missionaries who have left everything for Christ and in the end said " I never made a sacrifice"

The first paragraph already got me hooked. Go get this book if you are serious about finding real happiness.

If I were to ask you why you have believed in Christ, why you have become a Christians, every man will answer truly, " For the sake of happiness"                    -St Augustine-

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