It’s counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense. You would think that the way to happiness would be by serving ourselves, but a self-centered life ends up being very depressing. At first it might seem to work, but as time goes on it produces anger. Life never seems to give us all we feel that we deserve and people seldom love us the way they should, so resentments build, leaving us angry. And that anger invariably drives people and happiness farther away, until, at some point, we realize that life will never give us the satisfaction we longed for. When that moment arrives there is a real danger that hopelessness may set in, and if it does we will look at the rest of our life and wish we didn’t have to live it.

But there is a solution. We don’t have to end up angry and depressed. Jesus says there is a way to find true happiness, the kind of happiness that only God can give. On that final evening, in the upper room, He showed His disciples the secret and then said, “If you’ve watched what I’ve done and understood what it means and then actually put that truth into practice you will find true happiness” (paraphrase). And what they had just watched Him do was to humbly serve them. So that’s the secret: A life of humble service produces true happiness. But how? It just doesn’t make sense