Is everyone well?   Is everyone happy?  

In the build-up to Christmas, amidst protests over tuition fees, fears of job losses and cuts in services, threats of strikes and expectation of price rises, the Prime Minister announced a desire to make people happy.  

 

The Office of National Statistics was to be given the task of measuring wellbeing and happiness. “Our success as a country is about more than economic growth” - just as well, you might think - “ …a national debate about how, together, we can build a better life.”

 

Now, as the new year brings VAT increases, the usual clutch of bills, and the peak day for new divorce instructions (the first working Monday in January), let me ask: Are you happy?

 

Richard Baxter was a 17^th-century vicar of Kidderminster, prolific in godly writing, powerful in preaching and indefatigable in parish visiting.   Apparently, he used to say to each household he called at, “Is everyone well?   Is everyone happy?”   I wonder what response he would get today.

 

The apostle Paul wrote: “I have learned to be satisfied with what I have.   I know what it is to be in need and what it is to have more than enough.   I have learned this secret, so that anywhere, at any time, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little.   I have the strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives me.”

 

However, not everyone thinks that the PM’s quest is even desirable.   One reader wrote to a national newspaper: “If we were all basically content and happy then society would stagnate. There would be an absence of any drive for betterment.”  

 

But would there?   Paul declared himself content in any circumstances, but he didn’t stagnate.   He travelled extensively and suffered greatly in the cause of ‘betterment’.   Betterment for others, that is, not for himself.   Here was a man who spent his life - post-Damascus, at any rate - in obedience to Christ, for the spread of the Gospel, for the benefit of others.   So he found that his needs were met, and he could be content.

 

The principles that Paul lived by also work for us, as individuals and as churches.   Get the priorities right, and other things are taken care of.   Or, as Jesus put it, “be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what He requires of you, and He will provide you with all these other things.”   We will be judged, not on what we have piled up for ourselves, but on what we have done for Him, for others, and what we have given.

 

So I can be content that my future, my eternal destiny, are in God’s hands; I don’t have to worry about them.   I can rely on His goodness to forgive my sins and warm my relationships.   I can be content that nothing - however painful or distressing - can separate me from His love.   But I am not happy that people suffer unjustly, or live in desperate poverty, or are persecuted for their faith, or live without Christ and without hope.   There’s plenty of scope for spending your life serving others.

 

Here, then, is the way to happiness and contentment.   Or - better and more Biblical - joy.   As many of us learned in Sunday School, and have seen demonstrated over the years, joy - unbreakable, creative, resilient joy - comes from putting Jesus first, others next, and yourself after that.   So, happy New Year!