Guaranteed Happiness

Where is Happiness?

A few months ago, I became interested in the subject of happiness. I had listened to a podcast with a Harvard professor named Arthur Brooks who created a formula that H (happiness) = S (genetics) + C (circumstances) + V (voluntary choices).

Dr. Brooks proposes 3 pillars of happiness. The happiest people balance and prioritize enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.  According to him happiness is a skill and developing intentional habits are crucial. Also, he points out that taking risks and being vulnerable are essential to enjoying happiness. I suppose that maybe we could mine something good from his work.

  When I taught school my fellow teachers at the end of the 100 hall would put a CD player in the hallway during finals in May. Then we would turn up the volume for the song by Bobby McFerrin called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. It was fun to see the stressed-out kids come up the hall and begin to smile. People want to be happy.

So, the message this morning is titled, “Guaranteed Happiness”. One thing that I found in my study is that everyone is interested in happiness. Everyone from poets to philosophers to theologians and even scientists have asked the same question for millennia, “Where is Happiness”?

Guaranteed Happiness

My title is pretty bold. We don’t get a lot of guarantees but I’m guaranteeing happiness if we follow the Biblical pathway. The truth is, we accepted Christ to enjoy happiness.

One of the philosophers I mentioned a moment ago was Augustine. He would later become a Christian theologian, but it would be after listening to Bishop Ambrose speak. Augustine later said that he was startled to find answers to his own spiritual longing. Augustine later wrote:

“If I were to ask you why you have believed in Christ, why you have become Christians,” reasons Augustine, “every man will answer truly, ‘For the sake of happiness.’ ”[1]

For me to guarantee happiness we have to get a clearer picture of happiness. What happiness truly is. Modern happiness is defined as something individual and momentary. “If it makes YOU happy, great!” Happiness today does not include goodness, love, or generosity. Modern happiness emphasizes pleasure without virtue. It also excludes the reality of suffering. Without accounting for virtue and suffering, happiness becomes artificial – that’s the happiness that the modern world offers…plastic happiness. We post on social media our best pictures, our best meals, and our best moments and try to make the world think we are supremely happy, but we aren’t.

So, Pastor Mark, how in the world are you guaranteeing happiness?

How to Have Genuine Happiness

BJ and I recently took apart the church lawnmower to replace the blades. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they were dull, but I was surprised to see how well the steel was holding up. It seems like we used to be able to sharpen blades over and over but now they wear out so fast they have become disposable. The difference is that good blades are heat treated and made of a better steel. They are the real deal or the genuine thing.

Let’s consider a few things to understand what we are looking for in genuine happiness.

#1 – Be Happy by Permitting Happiness

Are we even entitled to be happy? We all know an Eeyore. “Well pastor, I know that glory is coming!” What is unspoken is…” but I’m miserable and considering my circumstances you’d be miserable too. I don’t deserve to be happy!”

Dennis Prager wrote this in his book Happiness is a Serious Problem written in 1998.

I once asked a deeply religious man if he considered himself a truly [religious] person. He responded that while he aspired to be one, he felt that he fell short in two areas. One was his not being happy enough.

He said unhappy Christians reflect poorly on their religion and on their Creator. He was right—unhappy religious people do pose a real challenge to faith. If their faith is so impressive, why aren’t they happy?

There are only two possible reasons: either they are not practicing their faith correctly, or they are practicing their faith correctly and the religion itself is not conducive to happiness. Most outsiders assume the latter reason.

Unhappy religious people should therefore think about how important being happy is—if not for themselves, then for the sake of their religion. Unhappy religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.[2]

It is all right to want to be happy! God created us to be happy. “He was the one who put into our hearts this longing for peace and wonder and delight. God is the one who bestows the gift of life for our enjoyment of himself and his creation. ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full,’ said Jesus.”[3]

Jesus didn’t talk about happiness as such, but He did talk about enjoying the “fullness of life”.

John 10:10 NIV

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

Full in this instance means “beyond the norm” or “superfluous”. To the Samaritan woman he offered an exceptional life:

John 4:13–14 NIV

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Rene Breuel in her book The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits shares, “happiness is a valuable Christian quest because it is rooted in God’s own being: our God is a happy God.”[4]

#2 - Be Happy by NOT Making Happiness Your Personal Goal

Do you know how to catch a butterfly? You can either run around the yard like a madman, or you can stop pursuing it and wait for it to land. Here is a quote for the Hawthorne family with us today.

Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.[5] – Nathaniel Hawthorne

We find joy when we stop worrying about it.

Mark 8:34–35 NIV

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.

Mark 8:34–35 presents the greatest of Jesus’ paradoxes—the moment when Jesus focuses his teaching on the art of living in two sentences that are so poignant and surprising, but also so countercultural and paradoxical, that they make us look at the page again and ask, “Did Jesus really mean this?” In this crucial passage, Jesus teaches us that it is by losing and giving that we have life.[6]

I was reading my Bible the other day, and the passages were from the Gospels. Now what I’m about to say may sound bizarre but I told Cindy that I found reading the statements of Jesus as very difficult to understand…maybe more so, very difficult to live. It is common for people to say that Jesus is amazing and wonderful, but have they spent time figuring out, “How do I live this?”

In this case, how do I have the fullness of life by denying myself and gain my life by losing it? It doesn’t seem to make sense, but it works.

A car is made to run on petrol [gas], and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1952)[7]

We were not designed to run on the world’s definition of happiness. We are made in the image of God, Imago Dei, and we need to understand the fuel of our lives…the Spirit of God!

#3 - Be Happy by Selflessly Giving

Around 362 AD Emperor Julian had a problem in Rome. They were trying to revive their worship of Roman gods and goddesses, but it wasn’t doing too well. The empire was becoming Christian. Poverty was also a problem, but Emperor Julian realized that it was the Christians who headed relief efforts to care for the sick in a context that virtually lacked social services.[8]But, it was really bigger than that.

Historian Rodney Stark concludes, Julian’s mission failed because it lacked a core belief: “Paganism had failed to develop the kind of voluntary system of good works that Christians had been constructing for more than three centuries; moreover, paganism lacked the religious ideas that would have made such organized efforts plausible.”[9] In other words, these Christians had internalized the teaching of Jesus,

Mark 8:35 (NIV) 35For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.

Love is the pinnacle of giving. We can’t love if we are not willing to risk it all…our insecurities, our hopes and dreams, our opinions, and our treasures. But to love we have to put it out there. And, when love is reciprocated we are happy…genuinely happy.

So, to review, to be guaranteed happiness you must

#1 – Permit yourself happiness

#2 – don’t make happiness your goal

#3 – Give yourself away

Trust the Guarantee

The lie “I would be happy if _____” is really nothing new, is it? It’s the same lie the serpent whispered to Eve. You would be happy if you eat the forbidden fruit. Today, he hisses the same worm-ridden lies.

I would be happy if I had a child.

I would be happy if I had two children.

I would be happy if I had a husband.

I would be happy if my husband treated me better.

I would be happy if I had a different husband.

I would be happy if I had more money.

I would be happy if I had a better job.

I would be happy if …

That was not and never will be the path to happiness. 

Just try it and see if you’ll find happiness. Give it time to work and you will see. Did you know that a bamboo tree takes 5 years before it even sprouts? But, in a single year that bamboo can grow to be 90 feet tall? Don’t make happiness your goal, deny and lose yourself, but embrace Jesus and you are guaranteed happiness.

[1]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 12.

[2]Craig Brian Larson and Phyllis Ten Elshof, 1001 Illustrations That Connect (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2008), 74.

[3]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 12.

[4]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 13.

[5]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 45.

[6]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 3.

[7]Craig Brian Larson and Phyllis Ten Elshof, 1001 Illustrations That Connect (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2008), 407.

[8]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 69.

[9]René Breuel, The Paradox of Happiness: Finding True Joy in a World of Counterfeits(Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2013), 70.