THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS - GOODNESS, SERVICE AND HOPE
“Blessed (happy, to be envied) are you who mourn, etc…
Matt. 5:3 / Luke 6:20
We are all searching for the same thing. Some seek it by getting married, and others by staying single. Some turn to God to find it, and others turn away. Some seek it in possessions, and others in vows of poverty. Our approaches differ but our aim is the same – we all want to be happy.
And perhaps the saddest fact about life in America is that in the land where we are guaranteed “life, liberty, and the PURSUIT of happiness,” so many never find it. Behind smiling faces we hide our quiet desperation. Ann Landers, after receiving thousands of letters from troubled people, wrote, “I know that millions of Americans earn an Academy Award every day, as they struggle heroically to present a cheerful face to the world and give no hint of the civil war that rages within.” The Oriental philosopher, Lin Yutang, remarked, “Americans must be a very unhappy people. They laugh so much.”
The symptoms of misery ooze from the pores of our land. Our suicide rate is steadily climbing. Our youth and adults turn away from life by turning to drugs, the worst of which is alcohol. The prevalence of drugs and crime and our obsession with pornography and violence are all symptoms of an unhappy people.
A few years back, John Steinbeck, the great American author, traveled across America in a camper with a dog named “Charlie.” For months, he traveled incognito, not as a famous author but as just another citizen. He got to know the American people and in his book TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE, concluded that most Americans are unhappy. Nearly everyone, he says, wanted to be somewhere else or to be doing something else.
In his book PEACE WITH GOD, Billy Graham said is well, “The more knowledge we acquire, the less wisdom we seem to have. The more economic security we gain, the more boredom we generate. The more wordly pleasure we enjoy, the less satisfied we are with life. We are like a restless sea, finding little peace here and a little pleasure there, but nothing permanent and satisfying.” And so, when Jesus begins His greatest ethical sermon with the word MAKARIOS - “Blessed, happy, to be envied” (Amplified Version), we all sit up and take notice.
Jesus, in the Beatitudes, gives us eight character traits He wants us to possess. And I take MAKARIOS, happiness, blessedness, peace, joy, as the ninth. It is the one He will give us as we seek the other eight. The Beatitudes give us the secret of happiness according to Jesus.
And in showing us the way to true blessedness, He exposes the errors of our way. Jesus gives a totally different way than that we are taught to travel.
He differs FIRST by teaching that true and lasting happiness must be independent of CIRCUMSTANCES. He says, “Blessed are the POOR...THE HUNGRY...THE MOURNERS...THE PERSECUTED.” We say the opposite, “Blessed are the RICH...THE LAUGHERS...THE UNTROUBLED.” His strange words must have seemed like a slap in the face to those who looked for Him to be their Champion and change their lot in life. Alexander Maclaren says His words were like Gideon’s test, to sift out those whose appetite for carnal good was uppermost.
Happiness can never be found in circumstances. The Greeks used this word MAKARIOS to describe the life of their gods on Mount Olympus, where they were sheltered from the bad side of life. But we do not live on Mount Olympus, we live in a real world where life can come crashing down at any minute. Our word “happiness” betrays our dependence on our surroundings. It comes from the Scandanavian word HAP which means luck, chance, or fortune. We say, “I would be happy IF I could be married...IF I could be single...IF I had a job...IF I didn’t have to work.
The trouble is, everything does not go our way. We have no control over some circumstances and we must learn that happiness does not depend on what happens to us but what happens to what happens to us.
But Jesus differs from us SECOND by teaching that true and lasting happiness is always a BY-PRODUCT of something else. He says, “Blessed ARE you...” It is a pronouncement. It is a congratulatory exclamation of something which IS. We are never told to seek to be MAKARIOS. It is a bestowal of God. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.” An inviolate law of life is that happiness eludes the pursuer of happiness and comes to the ones who seek and find what God places above personal satisfactions. Seeking to be Christ’s kind of Christian, we find true joy as a by-product.
I. A BY-PRODUCT OF BELIEVING (Matt. 5:3-6)
Both Matthew and Luke stress that the promise of blessedness was for the disciples. The first four beatitudes describe the man who passed through conversion. He realized his poverty of spirit, weeps over his sins, meekly submits to the Lordship of Christ and becomes one whose primary passion in life is for righteousness. The Book of Psalms says, “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust” (Ps. 40:4). Happiness comes as a by-product to the person who lifts all phases of his life up to God and trusts Him for each of them.
He lifts up the PAST. David said, “Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered” (Ps. 32:1,2). What a joy it is to know we can let the past remain in the past. How blessed it is that a person with a dirty, shameful, degraded past, can be as clean as a newborn baby in the sight of God. Chesterton says God paints with many beautiful colors – the gold of the sunset, the many splendors of the rainbow, and the blue of the sky - but His best painting is done in WHITE, when He washes our past as white as snow.
The blessed person lifts up the PRESENT. The Christian of the Beatitudes does not have to wait until he goes to heaven to receive his awards. Every one of these blessings is received in part in the here-and-now. Here we know what is means to walk with the God of mercy who fills us with righteousness. Here, the pure in heart catch glimpses of God.
Dr. Henry Brandt told of an experience he had in the contracting business. A huge skyscraper he was building crashed to the ground. As he calmly walked through the rubbish, his foreman, greatly upset, noticed his composure and said, “Mr. Brandt, don’t you care?” Brandt said, “Of course, I do. But this is not the end of the world. My heavenly Father is still in control and has promised that ALL THINGS work together for my good (Ro. 8:28). I cannot see it now, but I believe there is a loving purpose behind this rubbish we see.” Such a man is MAKARIOS, blessed, happy, to be envied.
The blessed person also lifts up his FUTURE to God. The Bible says, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them” (Rev. 14:13). All nine Beatitudes have some kind of reward connected with them. We are promised: the kingdom of heaven, comfort, the earth, satisfaction, mercy, the sight of God, sonship and rewards in heaven.
We receive a portion of each one of these in this life, but the full realization will not come until eternity. In Bunyan’s PILGRIM’S PROGRESS there was a fellow who never looked up and saw the angel looking over his shoulder. Why? He was too busy scratching in the dirt with his rake. That is the miserable life. The happy life is one lived in the light of eternity.
The Bible connects happiness with hope. Paul wrote, “May the God of HOPE fill you with all joy and peace in BELIEVING” (Ro. 15:13). Without hope, says Paul, we are of all men most to be pitied (1 cor. 15:19). The Blessed Man must be able to see the unseen. I knew such a man in Forth Worth, Texas. He was pastor of the Broadway Baptist Church.
A few years ago his little girl was found to have leukemia. During the ordeal of her death he still had to preach to his people. He was not, at that time, a “happy” man. Who could be? But he was MAKRIOS. He was blessed. One Sunday he shared with his people that he could not rejoice and he could not do anything to stop the approach of death to his little girl. But he said God had given him the gift of endurance, the grace to plug along. He closed his message with these words:
“Here I am this morning – sad, broken-hearted, still bearing in my spirit the wounds of the darkness. You can tell by looking at me that I have no wings to fly or any legs to run–but listen, by the grace of God, I am still on my feet ... I am hanging in there ... enduring with patience what I cannot change but have to bear ... And I am here to thank God for that!”
II. A BY-PRODUCT OF BEHAVING (Matt. 5:3-9)
Psalm one, which is a summary preface to the whole Book of Psalms, says the happy man is the man who lives for God. And Jesus in the Beatitudes, His preface to the Sermon on the Mount, connects happiness with Christlike character traits like humility, mercy, purity, and peacefulness. True and abiding happiness is second, the by-product of being the kind of person Christ wants us to be and behaving like Christ wants us to behave. The nine character traits that introduce the Sermon on the Mount give us Christ’s portrait of what a Christian should be.
Joy, says Paul, is the FRUIT of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Joy is God’s gift. But the gift is not given arbitrarily. It is given to those who seek first the Kingdom of God, who place holiness of life above happiness in life. The Apostle Paul teaches that the Spirit filled Christian - the one who surrenders himself to the controls of God the Holy Spirit - will bear the fruits of the Spirit. The first and the fundamental fruit (Gal. 5:22) of a surrendered Christian is love - agape, sacrificial love.
The next fruit, the one that follows right on the heels of Christlike love is JOY and the next one is PEACE. There you have God’s order, holiness and then happiness.
Several of you have said to me, “Pastor, I’m going to climb the Sermon on the Mount with you this year.” Well, now I will tell you a secret. The way will be hard and the journey will be long, but as you climb with your eyes on the goal of being like Jesus, a wonderful realization will come upon you somewhere along the way. You will realize that you are happy. You will have a peace which you long sought but never found. And you will praise God as never before. Happiness, not being sought, will be found. This is a truth we have sung since childhood.
but we never can prove
the delights of His love
until all on the altar we lay
for the favor He shows
and the JOY HE BESTOWS
Are for them who will trust and obey
III. A BY-PRODUCT OF BEING USED (Matt. 5:9,10,13,14)
The Beatitudes picture not only what we ARE within ourselves but what we DO within our world. A “Christian according to Christ” makes peace in a troubled world (Matt. 5:9). His loyalty to his God makes him willing to suffer persecution and abuse (Matt. 5:10). He is the salt that preserves a rotting world from decay (Matt. 5:13). He is a light that shines forth the glory of God in a world darkened by sin and spiritual ignorance (Matt. 5:14).
In short, he is useful and involved and busy and being used and caught up in something worth living for and dying for, and this is why he is happy. Creative “busyness” and a feeling of usefulness go hand in hand with joy. The reason is, when we are occupied with something else, we are not preoccupied with ourselves. Wallace Hamilton calls this the little key that opens up the big door to true joy. Michelangelo said, “It is well with me when I have a chisel in my hand.” And this sense of well-being is intensified when we realize we are helping “chisel” out the Kingdom of God.
One demon that robs our lives of joy is uselessness. This, not aching bones, is the real hell of growing old. The elderly no longer feel needed and when that happens, the joy of living departs.
Harry Emerson Fosdick says that meaninglessness has made more gamblers than greed, more drunkards that thirst and perhaps as many suicides as despair. Carl Jung, the late Swiss psychiatrist said, “The central neurosis of our time is emptiness.”
And right here, Christ, who puts a chisel in our hands and teaches us to carve away at our inner evil and at the world’s evil, gives our lives meaning and usefulness. Climbing this mountain we are like Nehemiah in the Old Testament, who said while working on Jerusalem’s walls, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down” (Neh. 6:3).
