{"id":5985,"date":"2019-09-30T04:11:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/churchedge.com\/illustrations\/index.php\/2019\/09\/30\/christianity-is-not-a-happiness-cult\/"},"modified":"2019-09-30T04:11:20","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T04:11:20","slug":"christianity-is-not-a-happiness-cult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/christianity-is-not-a-happiness-cult\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity Is Not a Happiness Cult"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The American evangelist Vance Havner wrote:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cChristianity is not a happiness cult; it is not a success cult.  At heart it is the process by which God makes saints out of sinners.  We are predestinated to be conformed to the image of God\u2019s Son.  We are not on a glorified picnic, a sanctified hayride.  We are afflicted nowadays with a cheap Christianity, a kind of religious popcorn diet &#8212; no cross, no discipline!  We receive the Word with joy, but we have no root nor depth and are soon offended.  There are too many religious hoboes trying to go to heaven as cheaply as possible, with just enough prayer, Bible reading, and service to get by.  Such lives will go up in smoke at the judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>________<\/p>\n<p>WHY NOT JUST BE CHRISTIANS (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1964), pp. 28-29<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The American evangelist Vance Havner wrote: \u201cChristianity is not a happiness cult; it is not a success cult. At heart it is the process by which God makes saints out of sinners. We are predestinated to be conformed to the image of God\u2019s Son. We are not on a glorified picnic, a sanctified hayride. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[395,337,359,114,1112,2950,832,929],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}