If You Want To Be Happy

Tuesday on the Run
November 17, 2015
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Abraham Maslow, one of the giant thinkers of the twentieth century, brought a radical shift of perspective to psychology and began an entirely new approach to therapy as he realized the importance for persons to find purpose outside themselves.  Since Freud, practitioners in the field of psychology and psychiatry were oriented toward the pathological.  They studied sick people, dysfunctional persons.  Maslow took the opposite approach, studying people who were vitally alive and fully functioning, radiantly happy whole persons.  In the process, he developed a theory called self-actualization, and described a composite person whom he designated self-actualized.  In his search for the secret of self-actualization he wrote, “Without exception, I found that every person who was sincerely happy, radiantly alive, was living for a purpose or a cause beyond himself.”
Maslow’s discovery has been a great blessing, for the cause of mental and emotional wholeness.  It is no wonder he named Jesus as a fully actualized person.  Without doubt, the most fully actualized person who has ever lived.
The apostle Paul encourages us as followers of Christ, to live the same way.  We need to live with a purpose.  We need to quite living for ourselves and focus our attention on others.  Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2: 3-4 “Let nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
If you want to be happy ..  If you want your life to have meaning, focus your attention on ministering to others.
 
Have a great week!
Pastor Barry