How to Have a Happy Life

Have you shopped for a new car lately? If you have, you may be suffering from what consumer experts refer to as “sticker shock”. Each new car comes with a price sticker on the window. When you look at that sticker, you go into shock. Because that sticker tells you, among other things, that the base price of that particular car will get you only the sticker! You have to pay extra if you want things like wheels, an engine, transparent windows, etc. There is a whole long list of options that you can get.

When we come to the Sermon on the Mount, we find that it begins with a list of short, pithy statements called the Beatitudes. (The word beatitude comes from the Latin beatus, which means blessed.) Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are those who mourn; blessed are the meek, and so on.

Now it is a very common mistake to think that this list of Beatitudes is to the Christian life what a list of optional equipment is to a new car. Nice if you can get them, but not absolutely essential.

Nothing could be further from the truth! The Beatitudes are not optional to the Christian life. The Beatitudes are not the exclusive province of people like Mother Theresa who are especially devout, especially pious. They are the very essence of what it means to be a Christian, and therefore they are for every Christian.

You see, it is no accident that the Sermon on the Mount begins with the Beatitudes. It is not as though Jesus was looking for a place to put them and thought they might make a nice introduction to his sermon. They are at the beginning of the Sermon, because they are at the beginning of the Christian life. Everything that follows the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount is possible only if the characteristics described by the Beatitudes are present in a person’s life. The Beatitudes are definitive.

I am not an expert in the ballet, but I understand that in ballet, there are five basic positions. A dancer begins to learn ballet by learning those five basic positions. All the virtuosity of a Rudolf Nureyev or a Mikhail Baryshnikov comes from his mastery of the five basic positions. That is what the Beatitudes are like for the Christian. They are the basic positions of Christianity. You simply cannot live the Christian life unless the Beatitudes are true of you.

Having said that, let me tell you three things you need to understand about the Beatitudes, and then we’ll look at the first Beatitude.

1. The characteristics described by the Beatitudes are impossible for you to produce in your own life. These things that Jesus refers to - being poor in spirit, being one who mourns, being meek - are not characteristics that are in any way native to us. They aren’t natural tendencies, or personality traits that God is going to reward if He finds them in us.

Many people mistakenly assume that this is what the Beatitudes are all about. They think they refer to people who are just naturally meek, or naturally melancholy, or about people like the diplomats in the UN, who are always trying to be peacemakers, or people who are always taking in stray cats and dogs and showing mercy to them. They think that the Beatitudes promise that God is going to bless those people because that is how they naturally are. Listen, God doesn’t bless someone for having a certain personality anymore than He blesses someone for being born with red hair and freckles.

No, the Beatitudes are not referring to any of these natural characteristics. The Beatitudes are talking about characteristics that only God Himself can build into our lives. To the extent that any of the Beatitudes are true of us at all, it is because God Himself has done a special work of grace in our lives.

2. The Beatitudes are the polar opposite of the way of the world. The Beatitudes describe people who are not only held in low esteem by the world, they are actually ridiculed and hated by the world.

Look at the things that the world places a premium on. Blessed are the poor in spirit? No. The world values a person who is self-confident, and self-assured. We idolize the self-made man. Our bookstores are just full of books that are supposed to help you get that way. You gotta believe in yourself.

Blessed are those who mourn? You have to be kidding! Life is a party! Let’s have a good time. Blessed is the man who can laugh his way through life.

Blessed are the meek? Come on! Being meek is a good way to get stomped on, especially here in New York! The good life is just waiting out there for anybody who has the drive and the single-minded ambition to grab it. So let’s go for it. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

That’s the way the world thinks, and that is light years distant from what Jesus is teaching here in the Beatitudes. Jesus is teaching about living in a different kingdom. The Christian and the non-Christian belong to two utterly and completely different realms. Although they may rub shoulders every day in the workplace or on the subway, they are headed in totally opposite directions. They are marching to different drummers. Their allegiances, their values, their priorities are totally opposite. The Sermon on the Mount is about the difference.

That’s why I think it is so important for us to study it in 1991. I think that we have lost sight of the fundamental difference between Christians and non-Christians. When you look at the way most of us Christians live, the way we spend our time, what we do with our money, what we think about, what we dream about - there is really very little that is different about us. Maybe that is why we have so little impact in our world, and on the people we rub shoulders with. They simply can’t see anything different about us.

But Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that there is a whole world of difference. And it all begins with the Beatitudes.

3. I have to confess that my sermon title - How to Live a Happy Life - is somewhat misleading. The Beatitudes are not about happiness, they are about blessedness. There’s a big difference.

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. Good fortune has deserted them.

The point I am making is that happiness is based upon circumstances. If good things happen to us, we are happy. If not, we are hapless. This is not what the word blessed means. It is unfortunate that many modern translations have substituted the word happy for the word blessed here in the Beatitudes.

The word blessed is, in Greek, the word “makarios”. It comes from the Gk. word “makro”, which means “large”. We use the word “macro” in English as the opposite of the word “micro”. So to be “makarios” is to be made large.

In the ancient world, the island of Cyprus was a legendary place. Travelers who visited Cyprus were impressed with its beautiful climate, its rich soil, its many resources. It was an abundant and fruitful land. Because it was an island way out in the middle of the Mediterranean, it was protected from the wars that raged on the mainland. The really wonderful thing about Cyprus was that it was self-contained; it didn’t need to import anything from the outside world. For those reasons, the people of the ancient world called the island of Cyprus “Makaria” - the Blessed Land.

This is the difference between being blessed and being happy. Blessedness springs from within. Happiness comes from without. Blessedness is not affected by external circumstances. Happiness is totally dependent upon them. The person who is blessed is self-contained - he has resources springing up within himself that have no outward cause. The person who tries to be happy is a slave to his circumstances.

Now Jesus says at the very outset of the Sermon on the Mount that there are certain things that need to be true of you if you are going to be blessed. Let’s look at the first one:

Matthew 5:3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

What is Jesus talking about here? What does it mean to be poor in spirit? Well, we need to understand what he means by “poor”.

I think that you’ll agree that there is poor and there is poor. When we go into the Bowery each month, we drive by some pretty poor sections of the city. The people live in dingy housing projects. Many of them are on welfare. They don’t have much. They are poor.

But then, when we get to the Bowery, we encounter another kind of poor. Men and women whose home is the street. People who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They not only don’t have much, they don’t have anything at all.

When Jesus said poor in spirit, He used the word that means the Bowery kind of poor. Spiritually speaking, you don’t have anything at all. You are completely and utterly bankrupt in spirit. Well, what kind of person is he referring to? They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Jesus painted a word picture of what it means to be poor in spirit in one of his parables. Listen to the story…

Luke 18:10-14 Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

The tax collector was poor in spirit. He realized as he stood with his head bowed before God that there was nothing he could do or say that could take away his unworthiness before God as a sinner. He sensed his own utter spiritual bankruptcy before God. The Pharisee trotted out his religious accomplishments, his good deeds, and he brazenly waved them in God’s face as the reason why God should bless him. But the tax-collector had nothing, and he knew he had nothing.

Jesus said “That is where you must begin if you would enter the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

To be poor in spirit is the opposite of to be proud. Pride is what C.S. Lewis calls the “great sin”. Pride is the original sin; the root of all other sins. Pride is what made the devil the devil.

Pride is competitive. It sets us against others. Pride is that sin that everyone hates when they see it in someone else, but which hardly anyone ever sees in himself. And the more pride we have in ourselves, the more we hate it in others. Other sins may sometimes bring us together. You may find laughter and good fellowship among thieves and drunkards. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but between man and God.

When we are proud, we tend to compare ourselves with others, just as the Pharisee did in Jesus’ story. Lewis writes “A proud man is always looking down on things and people, and of course, as long as you are looking down, you can’t see something that is above you.”

That is why a proud person can never know God. Because when we come up against God, we come up against someone who is utterly and completely superior to ourselves. Unless we know God in that way - and as a result, see ourselves as nothing, we cannot know Him at all.

That is why being poor in spirit is the gateway to the kingdom of heaven. You have to come to the end of yourself, to the end of your self-confidence, to the end of your self-reliance before you can honestly, and with genuine humility, turn to God to save you.

The Bible says that God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. God cannot help a proud man, because a proud man does not think he needs help.

Satan is always trying to encourage the growth of pride in us. He is very devious and subtle in his approach. He can use the highest and best things in life to foster pride in us. In fact, one of the things that Satan has used most to cultivate pride in the human race is religion. If he can get us thinking that we are busily working our way to heaven by our good deeds, he has us in the death-grip of pride. That is why the most religious person is the most difficult person to win to Jesus Christ.

Satan can even help us to overcome lesser sins by smuggling pride into our lives. He is quite happy to see us conquer bad habits if, in the process, we become proud of ourselves. He will gladly arrange to take away our flu symptoms if he can give us cancer in return.

And pride is spiritual cancer. It is what makes us think that God is our mortal enemy. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, it was pride that made them do it. They stopped seeing God as the center of their universe, and substituted themselves. They stopped thinking of God as their benevolent father and started to resent him and hate him for placing limits on their lives.

Pride and self-reliance will take you straight to hell. The only way out is to become poor in spirit. And only God can bring you to that place.

Isaiah 66:2 This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.

Isaiah 57:15 For this is what the high and lofty One says—he who lives forever, whose name is holy: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Lee Atwater is a name that may be familiar to you. Up until last year, Mr. Atwater was the Chairman of the National Republican Party. Prior to that he was the director of President Bush’s election campaign. Lee Atwater knew how to play political hardball and he didn’t care how many enemies he made along the way. He was a hard-nosed Washington insider.

But something happened to Lee Atwater last year. The doctors found a brain tumor. He had to resign from his prominent leadership positions. In a stroke, Mr. Atwater’s life was brought low. And somewhere along the way, Lee Atwater turned to God. He accepted Jesus Christ as His Savior.

When the word of his conversion got out, the cynics in Washington had a field day. They attributed his new spirituality to the fact that he was scared out of his wits that he was going to die. They relished the irony of it all.

But through it all, Mr. Atwater - a man who once would have lashed out at his critics - simply held his peace. He began to write letters of apology to all the people who he had hurt in political life. His repentance was genuine. He was a man who had become poor in spirit before God, and was now becoming meek before men.

Sometimes it takes a crisis like that to drive us to our knees. It may be a physical crisis such as Lee Atwater had. It may be an emotional crisis - the break-up of a marriage. It may be an economic crisis such as we are seeing today. But whatever it is, you can be sure that God intends it in your life to bring you to the place where you become poor in spirit. He wants you to realize emotionally, as well as intellectually, that you need Him. This is where the Christian life begins.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.