We tend to view happiness as an outcome of our circumstances – but it’s truly connected to our relationship with God. Listen as Peter and Carolyn Haas, pastors of Substance Church, join Susie to discuss the truth about success and happiness.
“Every overnight success was actually 10 or 20 years in the making; we just didn’t see the back story.”
According to Peter’s new book, , we sometimes have a distorted sense of timing in our lives. We think that we need to be making a profound impact on the world throughout our entire lives.
“Everything we know about Moses, all of his great feats didn’t even start until he was 80 years old.”
How will we respond if all of the great exploits that God has for us don’t begin until our later years?
“We don’t even think about how long Moses had to wait, and unfortunately we don’t see that in other people’s successes as well. We don’t see who actually paid the price.”
Substance Church is opening a new campus in downtown Minneapolis and Peter has received calls from many pastors talking about how much Substance has been blessed by God.
“But what they don’t realize is that we’ve had eight different buildings fall through, they didn’t realize all of the legal problems, and they didn’t realize that for several years we couldn’t get a single city to sell land to us.”
Sometimes all we see is the success and we don’t see the time and effort that brings about the success. Peter admits that he does the same thing in his life.
“It’s really an issue of being happy with God’s timeline, even if He wants to take me until I’m 80 years old before He does something awesome.”
Discontentment in God’s timeline for our lives is foolish because the things that we strive for so desperately won’t deliver like we expect.
“These things won’t even make me happy anyway. So Substance is getting a new building, it’s not going to make my life more simple and happy.”
So often we believe the lie that if we just had more money, a bigger house, or a new relationship we would finally be happy and fulfilled.
“It’s actually going to make your life more complex. When we imagine a dream house; we don’t imagine the extra square footage to clean. We idealize every one of our dreams.”
Peter reminds all Christians to keep life in perspective by remembering what really matters.
“We have to take a step back, coming back to the original idea that my soul finds rest in God alone.”
Key Scriptures: Psalm 62:1
Featured Songs: Christmas Time Again by Steven Curtis Chapman; Christmas Is Here by Danny Gokey; O, Holy Night by Mercy Me
