Christian people were never meant to be miserable or unhappy. And if you and I are, as it were, half turning back to the world, rather bemoaning the fact that we cannot enjoy what the people of the world are enjoying and that we cannot still be with them, if we are thinking that we are very wonderful in denying ourselves and taking up this cross and having this hard and difficult life, then we are in a terrible state. It means that we are proclaiming to the world that God’s way of living is a miserable one; that for true happiness and joy you must go into the world and that you cannot get it in the faith.

Your misery, all your problems, all your needs, arise from the fact of sin. They arise because you are in this terrible position face-to-face with God. That is the cause of all ill. And there is but one solution to the problem, the solution that God himself has provided in the person of his only begotten Son.

A man who sins suffers remorse; he has agony of mind, and the one thing he wants is to get rid of that agony. But what he really needs is much more than immediate comfort. Anything that merely gives us relief from the unpleasant symptoms of our disease or from our agony of mind is not enough. In fact, it is doing us a very grave disservice, for what we should always be interested in, in every realm, is health. That is the things to aim at—not merely an absence of trouble but the positive condition of health.