The life of faith, and the instinct of faith are one and the same. It is an enjoyment of the goods of God, and a confidence founded on the expectation of His protection, making everything pleasant and received with a good grace. It is indifference to, and at the same time a preparation for every place, state, or person. Faith is never unhappy even when the senses are most desolate. This lively faith is always in God, always in His action above contrary appearances by which the senses are darkened. The senses, in terror, suddenly cry to the soul, “Unhappy one! You have now no resource, you are lost,” and instantly faith with a stronger voice answers: “Keep firm, go on, and fear nothing.”
Happiness
Leonard Ravenhill
If you want to be popular, preach happiness. If you want to be unpopular, preach holiness.
Michael Maiden
It is narcissistic behaviour to demand that other people be sensitive to your emotional triggers. When your personal happiness is dependent on other people’s behaviour, it guarantees you’ll be chronically unhappy and always see yourself as a victim.
Corrie Ten Boom
Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings…It’s something we make inside ourselves.
C. S. Lewis
Affliction is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
Catherine Marshall
I have observed that when any of us embarks on the pursuit of happiness for ourselves, it eludes us. Often I’ve asked myself why. It must be because happiness comes to us only as a dividend. When we become absorbed in something demanding and worthwhile above and beyond ourselves, happiness seems to be there as a by-product of the self-giving. That should not be a startling truth, yet I’m surprised by how few people understand and accept it. Have we made a god of happiness?
George Muller
Intimate experimental acquaintance with Him will make us truly happy. Nothing else will. If we are not happy Christians (I speak deliberately, I speak advisedly) there is something wrong. If we did not close the past year in a happy frame of spirit, the fault is ours, and ours alone. In God our Father, and the blessed Jesus, our souls have a rich, divine, imperishable, eternal treasure. Let us enter into practical possession of these true riches; yea, let the remaining days of our earthly pilgrimage be spent in an ever-increasing, devoted, earnest consecration of our souls to God.
Katherine Walden
The moment you resent another person’s happiness is the moment you diminish your own.
Randy Alcorn
Christians throughout church history understood that happiness, gladness, feasting, and partying are God’s gifts, yet many Christians today live as if faith drains happiness! Life isn’t easy, of course, but believers have the benefit of walking the hard roads hand in hand with a Savior and King whose love for us is immeasurable. Who has more reason to be happy than we do?
C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.