by David Murray
Rate your faith with a positive or a negative. Now rate your life: positive or negative?
They’re connected, aren’t they? A positive faith produces a positive life; a negative faith, a negative life. That shouldn’t surprise us. King Solomon wrote, “As a person thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7, author’s paraphrase).
We are what we think and believe.
What we think and believe about God, about ourselves, about others, about our problems, and about our world dictates and determines the quality of our whole lives: our happiness, our relationships, our creativity, our productivity, and even our physical health.
You’re a bit cynical, aren’t you? Perhaps it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve experienced lately. It could be that you have too many negatives in your life to be positive. Or maybe you think “positive faith” or “happy Christian” sounds like a contradiction in terms. That’s certainly how the media wants us to think about faith—as a liability, not an asset.
As a recovering skeptic, I understand your cynicism. Although you may have a deep and painful horizontal line engraved right across your soul, subtracting joy from every area of life, I want to show you how to add one vertical line to that negative symbol, transforming it into a positive sign and renewing your whole life in a positive direction.
The positive symbol I’m referring to stands at the center of Christianity. It’s the cross of Jesus Christ, a symbol that graphically demonstrates how God can transform the most unimaginable negative into an almost inconceivable positive.
Christianity doesn’t deny the difficult and painful reality of sin and suffering that runs through our lives, but with one vertical line from heaven to earth, with the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity promises to change the equation of our lives into a positive result. That’s what God is all about. That’s what the Christian faith is all about.
I’ve written The Happy Christian to help you live a powerfully optimistic and meaningful life in an increasingly pessimistic culture. Through daily faith in Jesus Christ, there is a way to overcome the deadly plague of negativity that’s infecting our whole culture and rapidly spreading through the church.
I long to heal adults who have gotten so used to their own negativity that they have no idea now what healthy joy looks like. I want to grab young people before this demoralizing virus contaminates them and to inoculate them with biblical principles and practices that will enable them to stand up and stand out in their despairing generation.
I yearn to attract unbelievers to a faith that has been too often misrepresented by its friends, never mind its enemies. I aim to encourage Christians to be countercultural missionaries in our negative culture by demonstrating the positive power of the gospel in their lives. I aspire to see churches transformed into beacons of bright hope in a world of dark despair.
I’m eager to show that where sin and suffering abound, grace can abound much more (Romans 5:20). I dream about Christians being the happiest people in the world.
Content adapted from The Happy Christian by David Murray. Used by permission of Thomas Nelson, 2015.
