Happiness

My dad led a revival in San Jose last week. Ohms saw his picture on some poster at a Korean restaurant. Random. Anyway, the theme of it was happiness. One thing he said was, Christians are supposed to be happy. This is clear from Scripture. And, we spend so much time thinking and arguing about commands that are unclear or vague in Scripture. Which isn’t bad. But why not spend more time on commands that are clear? And be happy?

It reminded me of a discussion we once had in small group. The idea came up that joy and happiness are two different things. And that Christians are supposed to be joyful always, but that doesn’t mean being happy always.

I’m not sure I agree with that. I dunno, it kinda sounds nice, but I’m not entirely certain that’s an idea in the Bible. Is it? I think I tried looking up a little there and it seemed to me there were verses that commanded us to be happy in the Lord, not just joyful. And in any case, I’m not sure if I found anything from the Bible that said you can be joyful without being happy.

So yeah, I might be wrong about this, since I haven’t looked into it too much. But my current belief is that yeah, you can be happy without being joyful. But I don’t think you can be joyful without being happy. I dunno, my claim.