God, I Want a Happy Life

Good Housekeeping Magazine - Sept. 2000. The Happiness Report - Surprising News on How to Make Your Spirits Soar. It’s full of helpful information on how to be more happy. And interesting little tidbits like the following…

With the Olympics coming up, we’re interested in who’s going to win a gold medal. Did you know that a psychological study was done of the medal winners from past Olympic games? And it was found that bronze medal winners generally felt happier about their performance than silver medal winners. Silver medal winners tended to dwell on the fact that they had just missed the gold medal. But bronze medal winners tended to dwell on the fact that they had just missed not getting any medal at all! So they were happier. Isn’t that interesting?

On Sunday Aug. 6, 2000, the Toronto Star headlined its Body and Soul section: The Pursuit of Happiness. And that article stated that the greatest contribution to happiness is close, comitted, mutually supportive relationships, and a spiritual faith that gives you a sense of meaning and mission in life.

We’re hearing a lot about a new discipline in psychology these days—it’s called “well-being psychology”. More and more psychologists are trying to figure out what makes people happy. Because of all the human emotions, happiness is probably the one that is least understood.

Psychologists have traditionally tended to focus on dysfunction—negative traits like anxiety, depression, anger, or stress.

Psychologist David Myers recently wrote a book entitled: The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty. In that book, he reported doing an electronic search of all of the scholarly articles and abstracts on psychology that have been written in the past 100 years. He found…

8,000 on anger
58,000 on anxiety
71,000 on depression
but only 4,000 on the subject of joy or happiness

Well what have “well-being psychologists” discovered? They have discovered that the average person’s sense of happiness and well-being is largely dependent upon external factors. And those factors need not be major. They can be surprisingly trivial and changeable things.

For example, in one study, researchers asked office workers the question: How do you feel about your life? They asked this question to a control group. Then they asked the question to a second group of people who had just found a dime that the researchers had planted for them to discover somewhere in the office. Respondents in the second group were far more likely to respond that life was good if they had just found ten cents a few minutes earlier.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by these findings. Because the word happy is related to the word happening. Both of them come from the Germanic root “hap”, which means “chance”. When we say “perhaps”, we literally mean “per chance”. When we talk about someone being “hapless” - the opposite of “happy” - we mean that they are out of luck. Chance has not smiled on them; good fortune has deserted them. The popular notion of happiness is that it is based on circumstances. If good things happen to you, you’re happy. If not, you’re unhappy.

But is there not something more to life than this kind of happiness? Is there not some kind of deep inner joy that is NOT dependent upon our circumstances? Indeed there is, and the Bible speaks of it in Psalm 1.

It is the concept of “blessedness”, and it is much deeper and more profound than happiness, although some Bible translations use the two terms interchangeably. Happiness is a feeling—and as you know, feelings come and go. But blessedness is a permanent state of being. Blessedness is not about the things which happen to us; blessedness is about where we stand in our relationship with God.

Let’s look at Psalm 1 and see what we can discover about blessedness…

Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.

Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

Now it’s obvious that this Psalm refers to two kinds of people: the righteous and the wicked. The righteous are blessed; the wicked are not. And the purpose of this Psalm—the reason it was written—is to tell us what we need to do in order to be blessed. How can we achieve that state of being that the Bible calls blessed?

In verses 1–3, the Psalmist describes a person who is blessed. He tells us three things about him:

what he doesn’t do
what he does do
what the outcome is

1. What doesn’t he do?

There are three things that I need to be sure I don’t do if I want to be blessed:

A. I’m not going to walk in the counsel of the wicked

Now the word “wicked” brings to mind all sorts of horrible images. When we describe someone as wicked, we think of a person who is devious, evil, hateful, cruel, deceptive, manipulative. Someone who would do well on the TV show “Survivor”.

But that is not the primary meaning of the Hebrew word that is used here. The word is “rasa”, and it simply means “ungodly”. It means someone whose lifestyle doesn’t include God. Someone who has just left God out.

A person who lives as though God does not exist. A person like this gets up in the morning, never turn to God in prayer, never thanks Him for the food they eat, or for life, or health. Never goes to church, never worships, never reads the Bible. A person like this just goes through life treating God as though He isn’t there.

Now you can live like that and be very respectable and well thought of in the community. You can be very successful from the world’s point of view. You can achieve a certain measure of happiness. But that kind of lifestyle puts you in the category that the Bible calls the ungodly; the wicked.

And if you want to be blessed, you’re not going to walk in the counsel of these kind of people. You aren’t going to think their thoughts, you aren’t going to adopt their priorities, you aren’t going to buy into their worldview, or take their advice on how to live. If you want to be blessed, you aren’t going to fall in with them and go their way because they are headed in an entirely different direction from where you want to be.

B. You are not going to stand in the way of sinners

Notice it goes from walking to standing. If you walk in the counsel of the wicked long enough, pretty soon you’ll find yourself standing in the way of sinners.

Sin, according to the Bible, is simply missing the mark. Imagine taking your rifle to a shooting range. But just before you are ready to shoot, someone comes along and puts a blindfold over your eyes and then moves the target. What’s going to happen? You are going to miss the mark.

In the same way, people who live as though God doesn’t exist are missing the mark. They are not living the way that God wants them to live. Their lifestyle isn’t coming anywhere near to the target of righteousness and holiness that God has set for us.

And it doesn’t matter how well they think they are doing, because it’s God’s opinion that ultimately matters in this.

Proverbs 14:12 There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.

Go back to the shooting range. You’re all set to shoot, but you’ve got this blindfold on. Still, you set up in your ready position, you aim as best you can, and you pull the trigger. And you say to yourself “Boy, that felt like a good shot. I just know that that shot must have hit the target.” And so you reload and take another shot. You may believe that you are hitting the target, but you’re missing it by a country mile!

You know what? The Bible says that all of us are like that.

Romans 3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We have all missed the mark.

So what to do about it? Very simple. You need to turn your life over to the expert marksman who has hit the bullseye every time. And that marksman is Jesus. He lived a life of total perfection. In every thing he did, in every word he said, in every inner thought, Jesus hit the center of God’s holy target.

And he offers us his performance as ours. His record becomes ours if we receive him by faith.

And when we receive Jesus, we go from standing in the way of sinners to standing under the favor and grace of God.

Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

That’s a blessed place to be. If I want to have a blessed life, I am going to have to come to Jesus. Because He’s the only one who can usher me in to that place of special standing with God.

C. If I want to be blessed, I won’t sit in the seat of mockers.

What is a mocker? Well, the Bible says that a mocker is someone who thinks he’s got life all figured out, and you can’t tell him any different. He’s left God out of his life; he’s thinks he’s right on target spiritually even though he’s missing by a mile, and you can’t tell him otherwise. He’s become proud and very satisfied with his lifestyle. His theme song is “I’ll do it MY Way”. That’s what the Bible calls a mocker.

And the book of Proverbs has some interesting things to say about mockers.

Proverbs 15:12 A mocker resents correction; he will not consult the wise.

Proverbs 14:6 The mocker seeks wisdom and finds none

Proverbs 21:24 The proud and arrogant man—“Mocker” is his name; he behaves with overweening pride.

Proverbs 3:34 God mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.

So if I want to be blessed, I’m not going to walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of the sinner, or sit in the seat of the mocker.

2. Well, what AM I going to do?

Two things: I’m going to delight in the law of the Lord and I’m going to meditate on it day and night.

What does it mean to delight in the law of the Lord?

Let’s think about this for a minute… Do you remember the feeling that you had when you bought your first new car? You drove it home from the showroom, you breathed deeply and smelled that new car smell. You parked that baby in your driveway, and then when you went inside the house, you found yourself going back to the window over and over again just to admire that gleaming new vehicle. You probably washed it 29 times in the first month you had it! That’s delight.

Do you remember when you fell in love? You went around with that silly grin on your face, and everybody knew what had happened to you. You found yourself daydreaming—thinking about your beloved every hour and minute of the day. You wrote poetry, maybe even songs, about that special person. And you sat and you read and re-read the love letters that went between you, poring over every line and every word. That’s delight.

Do you remember when you brought your first child home from the hospital? Holding that little one in your arms. Marveling at the perfect little fingers and toes? Thinking that no baby had ever been so beautiful. That’s delight.

And if you want to be blessed, that’s the way you are increasingly going to feel about the things of God. About God’s will. About God’s way.

The blessed man meditates on God’s law day and night. Interesting word, that word for meditate. It comes from a word that literally means “to mutter”, or “to moan”.

You have to understand that when the Psalmist wrote this Psalm, virtually nobody had a written copy of the Bible as we do today. If you wanted God’s Word for yourself, you had to memorize it. And that’s what many people did. They memorized huge chunks of the Scriptures—whole books of the OT; and eventually even the entire OT.

Now have you ever had to memorize something? How do you do it? By repeating it over and over again to yourself, right? You kind of mutter it under your breath. When a person memorized the Bible, that’s what they did—they repeated it over and over again under their breath, so that it looked like they were muttering, or moaning.

They were thinking about God’s Word so much that it actually became part of them. It burned its way into their memory banks. It became a permanent part of their gray matter.

That’s what this word “meditate” means. It doesn’t necessarily mean setting aside a special time in the morning or the evening for meditation. It means thinking about the Word of God as you go about your daily routine. It means turning it over and over in your mind, day and night.

Deuteronomy 6:6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Joshua 1:8 Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

3. What is the outcome of this kind of lifestyle?

Verse 3 tells us that you’ll be like a tree planted by streams of water. Now this is not any old tree beside any old river.

The expression “streams of water” refers to an irrigation canal—a stream that has been intentionally dug by a farmer to water his land. And this tree has been intentionally planted by the farmer beside that stream. The farmer plants that tree for a purpose—to give shade and to yield fruit.

And the tree yields its fruit in season. It is not always yielding fruit. It yields fruit in the season for fruit. But the rest of the year, the tree is preparing to be fruitful.

And its leaf does not wither. When do leaves wither? Well, in Canada, pretty soon because Fall is coming and after that, Winter. In the Middle East, there is a dry season in the summer which lasts from about April through September. It gets very hot and very dry. And that’s when leaves wither.

And if that tree did not have a source of water, its leaves would shrivel up and die. But because it has its roots down into the stream of water, it has a sustaining source of life even in the dry season.

That’s the kind of life you have when you are blessed. It doesn’t mean that your life is free from pain or suffering—it doesn’t meant that you are never going to experience the dry season. But you are going to have the resources to get you through those times because you have your roots down into the Word of God.

Jesus said in John 7: “Whoever believes in me…streams of living water will flow from within him.”

It says in verse 3 that if you are living this way, whatever you do will prosper.

Now this doesn’t mean that you’re going to get rich in financial terms. It means something far better than that. It means prosperity of life. It means that the blessing of God is going to be on your life. He’s going to take care of your needs.

Psalm 37:25 I was young and now I am old, yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.

The favor of our God is going to be upon us, as it says in Psalm 90, and he is going to establish the work of our hands.

Now Psalm 1 takes an abrupt turn in the next few verses. In verses 4–6, the Psalmist talks about the wicked. And remember, that word “wicked” means simply “the person who leaves God out of his life”.

What are they like? He has already told us what the blessed man is like—he is like a tree planted by streams of water. But the wicked are like chaff that the wind blows away.

Back in those days when they harvested their grain, they would take it to the threshing floor. And they would literally walk on it, or roll heavy stones over it to separate the kernel of wheat from the hull or the shell that enclosed it.

Then they would scoop up everything onto big flat pans and winnow the grain by throwing it up in the air. The kernels of wheat, which were heavier, would fall back into the pan. But the chaff—the residue which had been separated from the wheat—would blow away in the wind because it was lighter.

So this is a pretty vivid image: People who leave God out of their life are like chaff. They just blow away. Their lives are ultimately meaningless.

And verse 5 says that they will not stand in the judgment. This is the Great White Throne Judgment that is referred to in Revelation 20 where the ungodly will be raised to life and judged.

Revelation 20:12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.

Now when the Psalmist says that the wicked will not stand in the judgement, he doesn’t mean that they won’t be there; he means that they’ll be there but they won’t have a leg to stand on. Because they have left God out. They lived their lives as though he didn’t exist. And that is why, in eternity, they will not stand in the assembly of the righteous.

And then Psalm 1 concludes with the statement: “The Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.”

That expression to “watch over” is a beautiful expression in Hebrew. It means to thoroughly know, to be intimately involved with someone. When the Bible speaks of a man having sexual relations with his wife, it uses the same word: “the man knew his wife”.

Jesus said that in the day of judgement there would be people—religious people even—crying and clamoring to get into the kingdom of heaven. And yet, he will have to turn them away with the words “Depart from me; I never knew you.” You never let me get to know you.

When we turn our lives over to God; when we make it our determination to go his way—to put Him at the very center of our lives, he becomes involved with us on this deep, intimate, personal level. The Lord watches over us.

So God, I want a happy life. But I don’t want the kind of happiness that just results from pleasant circumstances. I don’t want the kind of happiness that can change like the weather.

God, I want what you’re talking about here. I want blessedness. I want the kind of peace and contentment and sense of well-being that comes from knowing that things are right between you and me.

_______

If that’s what you want right now, then you want Jesus. Because he’s the only way to be right with God.

There is no other name under heaven whereby we can be saved. There is no other way…

Jesus said: I am the way the truth and the life—no one comes to the Father but by me.