How to Have a Happy New Year
Notes
Transcript
Well, we are wrapping up one year and beginning a new one.
2020 was a long and difficult year for many people, and so as we go into 2021, a lot of us are really wishing this next year will be better.
For some of us, saying, “Happy New Year” on New Year’s Eve is hard, because we are nervous about what is to come.
2020 has been hard, and you are worried that 2021 wont’ get any better
Recently, we have talked about the hope we have in Christ. As we have celebrated Christmas, we have looked at the fact that Jesus came as a baby, born and laid in a manger. He lived and died to defeat sin and was raised from the dead to prove that he was victorious!
Reminding ourselves of those truths fills us with hope, but if you are like me, that hope can fade when I get out of church and into the busyness and frustration of life.
How, then, can I have a happy new year?
Open your Bible to Psalm 1, where we see the psalmist outlining for us the key to a happy life.
While you are turning over there, I want to be clear that what we are going to say this morning doesn’t mean that you should never be sad, and that you should always force yourself to smile.
Some of our church family battles with depression and anxiety in different forms, and those struggles can rob us of happiness.
Not only that, but it is normal and right for us to mourn a loss or grieve over sin we see around us.
The choir I was a part of in high school had the privilege of singing at Epcot Center in Walt Disney World—the happiest place on earth, right?
We were assigned a cast member who took us behind the scenes to our dressing area to get ready.
As she, with her bubbly, well-trained personality, led us backstage, for some reason I asked our guide, “So, what do you do when you have a really bad day and you have to come in to work at the happiest place on earth?”
Her face kinda twitched for a second as she smiled and said, in her happy, cheery, Disney voice, “Well, we are trained to leave our problems at the gate when we come in”
No one who works in the House of Mouse is allowed to have a bad day!
However, as those who have put our trust in Christ, we have bad days, and that is okay!
God doesn’t call us to check those things at the door when we come in and fake a smile and just grin and bear it.
However, in this psalm, God is going to give us a clear picture of what it takes to cultivate a deeply-rooted happiness and joy that can sustain us, even in the darkest times.
This is the same kind of idea of happiness that we found when we looked at the Beatitudes last January.
We defined this idea of happiness and blessing this way:
...that joy which seeks us through our pain, that joy which sorrow and loss, and pain and grief, are powerless to touch, that joy which shines through tears, and which nothing in life or death can take away. (William Barclay)
This is the happy life that we long for. It isn’t the absence of pain, but it is a joy that is deeply rooted in Christ and his love for us that holds us in the middle of the pain.
To help us see how to cultivate this kind of happiness, God is going to contrast for us the righteous and the wicked.
As we will see, the righteous is one who delights in God’s word and dwells on it, where the wicked disregard what he says.
What makes this psalm so powerful is that the attitudes and actions in this passage are ones that we can work on not only in spite of but because of what we see going on in the world around us.
In fact, if you catch nothing else this morning from our time, I want you to hear this: To have a happy year this year, delight in and dwell on God’s word.
Let’s read through this short psalm together, and then we will take a closer look...
Did you see the contrast? Those who delight in and dwell on God’s word will lead lives that are truly happy, content, and satisfied, while the wicked will lead only to ruin.
Let’s look at three different contrasts between the righteous and the wicked from this passage.
The first area of contrast is:
1) The advice we follow.
1) The advice we follow.
The first contrast we see in this psalm is where the righteous and the wicked go for advice.
Read verses 1-2 again.
Here, he tells us what not to do: we cannot get our advice on life from the world around us who doesn’t know Christ.
The world around us does not have the answers to living the life that God calls us to live, and the sooner we realize that, the better off we will be.
Sounds kinda arrogant, maybe even a little "tinfoil hat"-ish/" “conspiracy theory" to some, doesn't it?
It may sound that way, but it isn't in actuality.
You see, people who don't know Jesus are looking at life through a completely different set of lenses.
Actually, the Bible describes it as blindness.
In their case, the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
Because people without Jesus are still blind, they can't give you good instructions on how to live life!
No offense to those who are physically blind, but if I knew you couldn't see, I wouldn't ask you to help me pick out wall colors. I wouldn't ask you for help read a map!
You might be able to give me some good principles, but you are still missing something because you can't actually see what is going on.
That's the same with getting our advice on life from anywhere other than the Bible. There might be some helpful ideas you find, but ultimately, they can't explain it all.
Think about some of the advice you hear:
There is a big emphasis in our culture about “self-care,” which has a tendency to go from taking care of yourself to putting yourself in the middle of the universe to the exclusion of others. The Bible teaches us that rhythms of rest and Sabbath are important, but it also teaches us in places like Philippians 2 to put others needs ahead of our own.
The message of commercials is that you would be satisfied, or that your life would be somehow much better if you just had this thing or lost that weight or had brighter teeth or cooked this rice or whatever it may be. In contrast, the Bible teaches us to seek God’s kingdom first and trust him to meet our needs, cultivating contentment in every situation, no matter what you have or don’t have.
Our world teaches us that we should cancel anyone who says things we disagree with or offends us, where the Bible teaches us to forgive others and turn the other cheek when personally offended. We can’t flesh this out fully, but that doesn’t mean that you go back to having the same relationship with them that you once did, or that you don’t put wise boundaries in place, but you still seek to show others the same grace God has shown us.
This is just a few examples, but do you see how the message of the world without Christ runs contrary to what God says?
That's what God is showing here.
He gives us a progression in verse 1:
"walk in the advice of the wicked" - This is the idea of conducting life the same way that people who don't know Jesus do. However, notice that you are walking, which implies that you aren't fully involved. You can take someone’s advice without staying with them.
"stand in the pathway of sinners" - Here, you've slowed down a notch. You aren't just walking by, but you've stopped to listen. You are standing there, which means you are starting to identify with those who don't know Jesus.
"sit in the company of mockers" - Here, you are fully invested, sitting down and joining those who don't know Jesus and even go so far as to openly mock him.
These are metaphorical descriptions of our heart attitude.
We may think they have good ideas at first.
Next, we take the bait and start giving more weight to what they teach.
Finally, we sit down and join in.
Did you notice that the description of those who don't know Jesus gets stronger every time? By the time we buy into it "hook, line, and sinker", we are sitting down and agreeing with those who actively mock God and His Word.
The righteous person doesn't do that! He doesn't take their advice, she doesn't look to the world for answers, and he certainly shouldn't join in with their mockery of God.
Instead, the righteous has a different way of looking at life. Look at verse 2...
A righteous individual goes to God's Word for the advice she needs.
This is where we get our main idea for our message—the righteous person disregards wicked advice and instead, delights in and dwells on God’s Word!
We cannot live life the same way that those without Jesus do, so we look carefully in God's Word to find out how to live.
Did you notice that he actually delights to read God's word?
I hope this is true of you today; I hope you can say that you find joy in God's Word.
You can’t find joy in something you never read, though!
As we start this new year, you might be looking for a plan to read the Bible regularly.
Let me suggest that you get on our church’s Facebook page and look up a post from December 26 that has a link to a 5 Day Bible Reading Plan.
I used this plan over the last year, and I am planning on going through it again. If you are listening to this in January, it isn’t too late to start!
What I love about this plan is the pace. It will take you through the entire Bible in a year, but there are only 5 days of readings for each week.
That gives some wiggle room to catch up if you, like me, sometimes miss a day.
However, if you stay caught up, this plan helps you go beyond just reading through the Bible to the second part of verse 2, which is meditating on it.
With those extra days, you can loop back to a passage or two and really dig in deep to what God is saying there.
Now, let’s be clear on what the Bible means by the term “meditate.”
This isn't talking about folding your legs into the lotus position and contemplating your navel or sitting quietly and becoming mindful of your breathing.
Meditation in Scripture has the idea of looking at a passage of Scripture and running it through your head throughout the day.
It means we sit down and allow God's Word to sink into our heads as we read, asking questions and prayerfully seeking answers.
This is more than just reading a verse or two in the morning and never thinking about it again; this is actively mulling over his word.
When you do that, you will be amazed at how much God's word applies to your life.
I imagine you'll figure out that God has a lot better things to say than the blogs or influencers and Facebook posts and TV anchors have to say.
Here’s something else incredible to think about: remember that the majority of the Bible hadn’t been written yet when this psalm was written.
The writer would only have known shadows of the promises that we see fulfilled in Christ.
He delighted in God’s law and in the stories of how God worked in his people.
If that was true for the psalmist, then how much more true should that be for us?
We have God’s completed revelation to us, so we can see much more clearly that he loves us and was willing and able to save us from our sins and give us a relationship with himself.
As we meditate on all of God’s word, we see clearly that none of us is righteous, and that we cannot save ourselves.
Jesus is the only one who lived his entire life delighting in God’s instruction and avoiding the advice of the wicked. You see that clearly in his response to Satan when he tried to tempt him.
Because Jesus perfectly obeyed, he didn’t deserve any punishment because he had never sinned or done what God said not to do.
Each of us, though, has done what God told us not to do, so we are spiritually dead and separated from God—the Bible even says we are his enemies!
Here’s why we delight, though: while I was God’s enemy, he sent his only son to take my punishment so I could have his life!
Jesus took my death and offers me his life in its place!
We can find significance, not in what we have done, but in what Jesus has done on our behalf.
The fact that, through God’s mercy and grace, those who are saved are now identified with Christ is what gives us this lasting happiness and blessedness that the psalmist is getting at.
It isn’t that I can point back to how well I have studied God’s word and avoided wicked advice, it is that in God’s word I learn that he has come to ransom me.
As I surrender to him drawing me into a relationship with him, I can live a life that is overwhelmed by his goodness.
I pour through the Bible, not to gain standing with God, but to see who he is and who I am and what he has done for me.
I find in these pages how I should live now that I am his, and that understanding works itself out in how I live.
That leads us to the next contrast in this passage:
2) The fruit we produce.
2) The fruit we produce.
Next, the psalmist moves to talk about what comes out of our lives. Look at verse 3-4...
This should just make sense, shouldn't it? If I live by good advice, my life should produce more than if I don't, right?
Let's say I was baking a cake. When it came to the step where it called for adding oil, I looked around the house and found a few different kinds: vegetable oil, canola oil, coconut oil, Murphy's furniture oil, and 10w40 motor oil.
Now, if I googled "what kind of oil to use in cake", I might find a multitude of responses. In fact, some person might unwittingly say, "Since you don't use a lot of oil, any oil would be fine."
I put in the 10w40, and the bad advice I receive causes me to make the nastiest cake known to mankind.
Bad advice brings bad results, good advice produces good results.
What kind of fruit is your life producing?
Verse 3 tells us what we should strive for.
As we devote ourselves to loving and living out God's Word, we find that our lives are firmly established.
Isn’t that what we saw back in Matthew 7 when we talked about the man who builds his house on sand versus the rock?
The one who heard Jesus’ words and obeyed them stood firmly when the storms came, while those who ignored God’s word fell.
It is interesting to note that both Psalm 1 and Matthew 7 seem to indicate that the righteous man or woman stands firm, even in the midst of storms and difficulties.
Again, there is this understanding that storms or, in Psalm 1, dry times, will come.
Even when things are drying up around her, the righteous person doesn’t wither.
Also notice that this tree bears fruit. It actually produces fruit.
That's what Jesus said He desired for our lives:
I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me.
What does this "fruit" look like?
A fruitful life is one that demonstrates the work of God through it.
That's what Paul highlights as he lists out for us the fruit of the Holy Spirit:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.
Is that the kind of life you're living? Are you living out a life that bears fruit, demonstrating that God has transformed you from the inside out?
Remember, we aren’t saying that we are trying to cultivate these things on our own. Rather, the fruit of our lives comes from the fact that they have been transformed by Jesus’ death, resurrection, and lordship!
Then, as I delight in and dwell on God’s word, I start seeing how his life should flow out of mine into the fruit of love, joy, peace, etc.
I am not trying to get what I don’t have; I am simply living out what God has already put in me.
Verse 4 gives us the opposite picture, though.
The life of the wicked doesn't produce any kind of lasting, helpful fruit.
Instead, it simply produces dust.
That's basically what chaff is.
Chaff is the dry, worthless outer covering on grain.
Have you ever picked the head off a piece of hay and rubbed it between your fingers? Know the fluffy stuff that comes off the seeds? That's chaff.
Here's what the Bible teaches us: If you live your life based off the advice of the world, all it will result in is fluff. Your life won’t produce God-honoring fruit that is designed to last for eternity.
So, let's ask again: Is your life bearing fruit or fluff?
That's important, because of the last contrast we see in Psalm 1:
3) The direction we go.
3) The direction we go.
Verse 5 has some pretty direct words for us about the outcome of a wicked life...
There is really coming a time when you will have to stand before God and give an account for how you have lived your life.
If you have lived your life off the world’s advice, then you will not stand in the judgment.
Even if you have done all kinds of good things, you will not make it.
It is only by surrendering your life to Christ, building it upon him and his word, that you can stand in the day of judgment.
For those of us who are in Christ, whose lives are hidden in him, though, we have an incredible promise.
Look at verse 6.
God is watching over the way we are going. He is leading us, he is guiding us, and he knows where we are headed.
Although God knows everything and is certainly aware of where the wicked are headed, the Bible tells us that they are heading for ruin and destruction.
However, for the righteous, as we delight in and dwell in God’s word, we can have deep, unshakeable joy, knowing that God will guide us, strengthen us, support us, and welcome us home.
No matter what happens in 2021, we now know how to have a happy new year.
So, what are you going to do?
First, surrender to the God who has revealed himself in his word.
If you have done that, spend some time this afternoon evaluating where you get your advice on life? Is it from God’s word? If not, ask his forgiveness. Make a plan now to start spending time in God’s Word, whether the plan I mentioned or something else.
Evaluate what kind of fruit is coming out of your life. Where do you need God to prune and trim to help you bear more fruit in your life?
Are you trusting God with the outcome of your life? Ask him to help you rest in his plan.