Being loved = happiness.

My flesh thinks I’ll find love from accomplishing.  Love from others, love from self.  But this is conditional love.  Selfish.  Prideful.  And the flesh is a bottomless pit of need — it will never be satisfied through performance-based, conditional love.  Self-contempt-avoidance becomes the defining motivation on the fleshly path to happiness.  Ever striving, never arriving.  Pitiful.

The soul also wants happiness through love, but unconditional love.  Only two sources of unconditional love: Jesus, and self.  Both are necessary for happiness.  The only way to experience, be wowed, by unconditional love from Jesus, is through fresh conviction of my sin of independence, so I’m wowed afresh by His amazing grace, amazing love, for such a big sinner.  And the soul who experiences unconditional love from Jesus, but not unconditional love from self, has more sin to confess, so will still lack happiness, and just as badly, also lack the capacity to unconditionally love others, especially enemies.  The sin of self-contempt goes unconfessed in the Church today.  Self-contempt is pride, not humility.  Is this why we believers are so unfruitful today with the skeptics of this world?  Seems we are woefully lacking in the contagious happiness that flows from experiencing unconditional love from Jesus and from self.  Pride, not humility.

–DumbSheepDave, baby steppin in healthier directions because of the work of Jesus in his heart in 2013

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