Happy Reflections
Your craving for genuine happiness is very real. And [for example, a good relationship with] your earthly father can give you a taste of that kind of happiness - but he cannot satisfy your appetite for it. Because the real delights that you long for can only be found in a growing, loving relationship with your heavenly Father.
You see, here’s the deal: your heavenly Father loves you, and he wants you to experience the deep, satisfying kind of happiness that you long for. And if he could just wrap that kind of happiness up in box and give it to you like a Rolex, he would. But he can't.
Because the kind of deep, satisfying, happiness that you crave, the kind of happiness that your heavenly Father wants to give you, doesn’t depend solely upon his desire for you to be happy. Even God can’t give this kind of happiness to an unwilling child.
In fact, the very kind of happiness that you crave can only be experienced when you actively embrace your heavenly Father - not his gifts, not his wealth, not his help. Your heavenly Father!
Because when you embrace him, you will begin to reflect Him - which brings a special kind of happiness to you as his child, and a special kind of honor to God as your Father that is called glory.
You see, God is constantly investing himself in you as your Father, because he loves you. He invests his values, and his morals and his wisdom in you. He invests what he knows to be true about life, about work, about commitment and about relationships in you. He invests his character and his affections, and his love for what is good and noble in you. And he invests all these things in you, in the hope that who he is will shape who you become, because he knows that as you begin to reflect him you will begin to experience the kind of happiness you crave; a happiness that fulfills you and honors him.
