How To Be Happy No Matter What Happens - Part 1

Pastor Rick Warren opens with a confession: last Tuesday, he threw himself a good pity party. He thought about the chronic pain he had been feeling for three weeks, the pressure of deadlines he was not meeting, the people who needed his help and those who were upset with him, and finally all the problems in the world. Pain, pressure, people, and problems — these are what he calls the four common killjoys of life. But as soon as he thought, "I'm really not happy right now," he heard a question in his mind: "Do you want to stay unhappy?" He answered no. The point, he says, is that happiness is not something you find; it is something you choose and create, regardless of circumstances.

The Framework: Four Choices from Paul in Prison

The entire episode is built around the first chapter of Philippians, which Paul wrote while chained to a 24-hour guard in a Roman dungeon. In the four years before writing it, Paul had spent two years in jail on false charges, was shipwrecked, stranded on an island, bitten by a poisonous snake, and then imprisoned again for two more years. Yet he wrote the most positive book in the Bible. Warren argues that Paul modeled four principles for being happy no matter what happens. This episode covers the first two.

Principle 1: Remember That God Can Bring Good Out of Anything