“To the world, the dejected Christian seems to accuse God and His service, as if he openly called Him a rigorous, hard, unacceptable Master, and His work a sad unpleasant thing…You are born and new born for God’s honor; and will you thus dishonor Him before the world?” Richard Baxter.
Just as the joyful Christian makes others think well of God, the dejected Christian risks tarnishing God’s public reputation.
Now Baxter is not saying that Christians should be “Happy, happy happy, all the time, time, time.” There are unquestionably seasons where sorrow is not only appropriate but necessary – bereavement, illness, clinical depression, etc. But Baxter still has a point – a few actually.
Read the rest of this article at HappyChristian.net.