Does God Want Us to be Happy?

TRANSCRIPT

Yes. What a good series. God never said that. I love picking things apart. I always question things, so it's always good to go. Did God really say that, or is that just something that we've just grown up believing? I wanna start this morning with Slido, actually. So if you guys can pull out your phones and scan the QR code on the back of your seat.

I want to get a little bit of your input before we start this morning. And when you scan the QR code on the back of your seat, or if you're online, you can jump on as well. It'll take you to our website. It'll say the question of the day, I think it says, and when you jump in there, I want Bed Wars.

Interesting. I want you to answer this question, what makes you happy? But then also what do you think makes other people happy?

Bed Wars is an interesting one. I'm not really sure what that is. Family, children, food concerts, baking comics. Your dog licking you. That's a bit gross. Stink. You know, significance. FA. That's an interesting one. Holidays PS five friends.

My wife. That's good. She told me to say that.

Barbecue shapes

gin. That's good. Hey. I never said it had to be good. I just said What makes people happy? What makes you happy? Money. A good night's sleep. My mommy. That's cute. Juujitsu. Oh, my husband, mark, who is the best? I think Mark wrote that.

All right. Hot shower. That's good. All right, so what if I told you this morning that God doesn't want you to be happy? Yeah. Which we heard earlier in the video. It doesn't sound very nice. God doesn't want you to be happy. Now what do I mean? Like what do you mean? God doesn't want me to be happy? That's not very Christian of God, to not want me to be happy.

It might upset some of you who've gone through life hearing that, that statement, and I know it's a bit radical, but it is somewhat of a true statement. And that's kind of what I want to explore this morning in this series that we've been in. God never said that is about the things that we might hear in and around church life, or if you've been lucky enough to grow up in the church, you might have heard it your entire life.

Like I've been lucky enough to grow up in the church and I've heard a lot of these statements thrown around, but when we dig a little bit deeper, just because something sounds nice doesn't mean it's true. And just because you've heard it over and over also doesn't make it biblical. And, but that principle doesn't just apply to faith, it also applies to everyday life.

Who's heard the saying? The great wall of China can be seen from space?

It kind of sounds legit, right? It's actually not true. Well, from the naked eye, you know, you could obviously zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and eventually find it. Hm. But to me it sounded legit. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. The, the Great Wall of China's huge. It's one of the seven wonders of the world. It's like 22,000 kilometers long or miles long, something like that.

Something ridiculously long. So it sounds like it makes sense, but did you know it's only about six and a half meters wide, which is about the same width as a two lane road. So when you think about it like that, you're like, ah, okay. When you start to dig a little bit deeper on something, sometimes it starts to reveal that it might not be true.

What about lightning? Never strikes the same place twice. I doubt the Q1 installed the lightning rod at the top for it just to be struck once. That's what some people believe, that it doesn't strike the same place twice, but you get what I mean. We hear these things and they sound true. They sound legit.

But when you actually start to ask more questions and peel back the layers, we realize that they might not be as true as we think they are. And Simon started off his week with, it doesn't matter what I do, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. That's something that we've heard, and then Meg's last week touched on, God won't give me more than I can handle, which I know I hear quite often.

And this morning I'm gonna be processing through that. God doesn't want me to be happy because when we say that statement, we have to dig a little bit deeper. We can't just take it as face value. So if we say, oh, God wants me to be happy, then that can lead us down the path and we can start to think, whatever makes me happy must be right.

And on the flip side, whatever makes me unhappy must be wrong. You can kind of see where I'm going with this, that that doesn't make sense, doesn't sit with us well, but that's what we start. We have to go down that path when we start to think God wants me to be happy, and if we start to believe whatever makes me happy must be right, and whatever makes me unhappy must be wrong, we can start to go down the path of discomfort.

And risk and inconvenience or delay can't be God's will because it doesn't make me happy with those things. And then we can end up with this distorted view of who God is. And this is why we have to question these things when we hear them. We have to make sure that they are biblical and true because when we live life with the lens that God wants me to be happy.

We start to chase after those things. Like we saw on the screen with Slido, we, we saw things like money, fame, success, comfort, pleasure, material things, drugs and alcohol, addictions, porn, perfect appearance, ideal relationships. Affairs, health. These are the things that make people happy that we can chase after and before we know it, these things can become idols because that's what we are, cha, we're chasing after happiness.

We get caught up in that pursuit of happiness without realizing it. Chasing more stuff, more happiness, more money, the next best thing. But the thing about happiness is there's no destination. There's no end. Happiness doesn't have an end result. It's just the next best thing. Happiness is circumstantial.

It is based on where you are in the moment, what you have, what you don't have. It's based on all of those things around us. And when we chase happiness, when we chase those things of the world, it actually distracts us from what really matters and what truly matters. And the byproduct of chasing happiness, it can cause damage to those around us.

Because we use happiness as the justification for our choices, and that's when people get hurt. We can think things like, but it makes me happy. That's why I did it. Imagine in a relationship if all you did was just make you happy, would you be in that relationship still? If I just chased after being happy in my relationship with Porsche, would I still be in a relationship?

Probably not. 'cause I'd be lazy. I'd be playing Xbox all the time. I'd go out with the boys, I'd go and drink. You know, like you, if I'm chasing happiness, 'cause that's what God wants me to be, I wouldn't be in a relationship anymore. What about, well, God wants me to be happy, so it must be okay. Acting like this makes me happy, so it must be okay.

I'll just do what makes me happy. That could be relationships, maybe not apologizing, because that makes you unhappy. You don't like those feelings.

So if God doesn't want me to be happy, what does he want? We're gonna go to the book of one John, and this is we're reading from one John, which is in the second half of the Bible, and we call this the New Testament or the New Covenant. For those of you that are new on your journey. And it's the part where we, we read about Jesus' birth, death, and resurrection.

And this is the part that we live under. And this letter was written back then to the followers of the way of Jesus. And it was to encourage them to stay true to what they already knew, which is also us today. We are followers of Jesus trying to stay true in a world that constantly tries to pull us away.

So we're gonna go through the scripture one, John two 15 to 17. It says, do not love the world or anything in the world. It's pretty clear what those, what are all those things that bring us happiness? They're in this world, and what shouldn't we do with those things? Love them. It goes on to say, if anyone loves the world, the love for the father.

Is not in them. That's a heavy statement when you really read what it means. If anyone loves the world, the things of this world, love for the father is not in them. That's hard for me to reconcile, like, man, I, I struggle with loving things of this world all the time. What does this mean to me?

Goes on to say for everything. In the world, the lust of the flesh, we can change it to the desires of your heart. The pursuit of happiness is what the flesh desires. The lust of the eyes and the pride of life comes not from the father, but from the world. The things that we're chasing after that give us happiness aren't from the father.

These are the things of the world. And then what happens? It says the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of the God, of God lives forever. What he is trying to encourage him with is stop getting caught up in the things of this world. They will pass, they will be gone and people will move on.

That will, there will be an end to all of that stuff. But God lives forever.

Let me ask you this question. If happiness is the goal, why is no one truly happy? Happy?

Because happiness isn't a thing. It's the value you attach to something. If money made us happy as we hear all the time, then everyone with money would be happy. But they're not someone earning nothing. They'd be happy with $50,000. Someone earning $50,000 would be happy with a hundred thousand dollars.

Someone earning a hundred thousand dollars wants more. So if money doesn't make us happy, what is it? It's what they think it will give them. There is no universal happiness. And that's the problem with chasing it because what brings happiness to one person isn't enough for another person. That car that you want is a beat up bomb to somebody else.

So it's not the objects or the things that we're chasing that give us that happiness, it's the value we attach to it. So if we're not here to chase happiness, what's the alternative? Does anyone know It's Holiness? Did. It was probably already on the screen. Holiness. Someone sort of yelled it out to make it look like they knew what they were talking about.

Holiness. This is the thing we should be chasing. How do we know that? How do we know that we should be chasing holiness? Again in the New Testament, it's in one Peter one 15 to 16, and this is what it says, but just as he who called you is holy, so he who called us is God as he is. Holy. So be holy and all you do for it's written be holy.

Because I am holy because God is holy. We are holy. That's what we have to chase after God calls us to be holy not happy. This doesn't mean God wants us to live miserable lives. He delights in our happiness. But it's the pursuit, it's the desire, the idolization of happiness. That's what God's plan isn't for us.

But when we chase holiness. When we desire holiness, when we pursue holiness, when we seek God, the things of this world don't change. We change our values, change the things we once thought would make us happy, lose their power over us. They lose their value to us. So the first thing we need to do is seek holiness.

That's what we should be aiming for, not chasing happiness. We need to seek after God, seek to understand how we are made. Holy because He is holy. When we seek holiness, we start to understand and believe whose we are and when we know whose we are. We don't need those little pick me ups that life gives us, or life that the world offers.

We don't need to be defined by what we have or don't have. Seeking holiness as the first step gives us this confidence to go through life, to be in this world, but not of this world, not caught up in what this world has to offer. Seeking Holiness gives us the strength not to idolize the things of this world, but it does require discipline and to deny the temptations and the desires of this world to live in a way that the world does not encourage.

But why do we seek holiness the world and its desires pass away. But whoever does the will of the God, the will of God lives forever. Kev summarized it. Great. 'cause that was in my next point. If you were reading your devotions early this week, we touched on Ecclesiastes, how it said Life is meaningless.

Kev summarized my whole next point, basically, which is great. That's right. But he's so right, like life without God is meaningless. Jesus gives us meaning and purpose. Because when our time on earth ends, you'll end, generations will come. Eventually we'll be forgotten, and life just moves on and keeps going.

That's why it's meaningless when we can fulfill our all of our hearts desires on earth with our flesh and the lust of our eyes, but it all passes away. But with Jesus, we have meaning and purpose that doesn't end when we finish our time on earth. Finishes. When we seek holiness, we begin to have our meaning and purpose revealed to us.

And when we have that revealed to us, what happens is we learn contentedness, which I know is not a word. But I wanted you to remember it, and if I make a mistake it, you will remember it then. So learn contentedness for all those teachers out there. I do know English. When I was writing it, my Google Doc kept trying to change it to the right word.

I'm like, no, I want the incorrect word for that reason. When we seek holiness to become content, we learn to be grateful for what we do have and what, and not what we don't have. And the things that we used to desire or held to be the desire of happiness, they shift and we no longer seek happiness in those things.

The lens we see and live life through changes, we get a new prescription for life because we start to see life through a different lens. We're not seeing life to give us happiness 'cause we're not worried about that. We're chasing holiness. We go through life with a full cup and a full heart and a full mind, and it's so full that nothing that this world can offer can get in.

'cause we are full of holiness. We're full of, um, contentedness that we don't even need to put anything in. We are so full. We're full of the brim. You pour it on, it's just gonna spill everywhere. 'cause it doesn't need to go into my life. 'cause we are not chasing those things. So first we seek holiness, then we learn contentedness, which leads to joy and happiness and I'll get to that happiness at the shortly.

This is the way that God desired us to live. Start with holiness, learn contentedness, experience joy and happiness. But what happens is the world tells us to skip these two steps and go straight down to here, and that's not the way it should be done. That breaks the cycle that God created, and this leaves us unsatisfied when we follow the right process.

We experience real joy and I believe. Uh, we, as we go through this process, we will ex, uh, experience more happiness because we will see life through a different lens. It's a natural outworking. If we are content and we're seeking holiness, things that would make us unhappy, may not bring us that unhappiness.

When we are here in joy, we experienced joy when we didn't before. It wasn't because the world changed, it's because we changed. The circumstances in our life might not have changed, but now we feel joy 'cause our hearts had changed, our views had changed, our desires had changed. Our expectations changed.

Our expectations of what the world can give us change. We might still not have a lot. But we feel joy. We might not be a hundred percent healthy, but we feel joy. Why? Because we first sought holiness, learned contentedness, and experience joy. This is how God has called us to live, not just to be happy, because that's subjective.

This is the natural progression that God designed for us. And we know that following Jesus doesn't promise us a perfect life, which is why God doesn't want us to aim for being happy

when we seek happiness above all else, with try and fill a hole inside of us that we were never meant to fit with happiness. And sometimes chasing after those things, chasing after happiness, it can actually pull us away from holiness. So seeking holiness, what does that look like? It can be quite a complex, uh, thing to understand.

Uh, and especially for those that may be new to faith that haven't been journeying with us for a while. Uh, and it's not really a terminology used outside of the faith. Context. So I asked my village this week what it means for them to see holiness, and I got so many awesome answers that I couldn't keep up with writing them down.

But there were two that stood out to me the most, and one, this was it. This is what they said. Recognizing that you are set apart, so set apart by God and live life according to this, reflecting his glory. And the other one, which was so beautifully simple, and it was simply walking toward the heart of God.

That's it. Seeking holiness, simply walking toward the heart of God. So if we focus on that, on seeking holiness, the natural result is content learning to be content. And not the kind the world promises, but the the kind that God intended, seek holiness, learn contentedness experience, joy. I'm just gonna invite the, the band back up if that's okay.

Imagine if we stopped chasing after what made us happy and we started seeking holiness. Imagine if we stop making idols out of comfort or appearance or wealth. What if we stop seeking control to make ourselves happy and started trusting God? What if we let go of the idea that happiness is our right man?

We would see long lasting relationships. Yeah, because people wouldn't walk away the moment. Things got hard to chase happiness, the grass is greener. We would see people living others focused lives because we'd care more about what we give than what we got. We'd see more generosity because our joy wouldn't depend on our money, our storehouse.

Imagine if all of us here lived lives seeking holiness above all of our, all else, what the community would see, they would see the glory of God every single day. If we sought holiness over the pursuit of happiness, people's lives would be changed. It would be less selfish and more selfless on how we can help other people.

God doesn't want you happy, not if that happiness pulls you away from him. He wants you to be holy, and when you seek him first, you'll find contentness joy and peace that your heart is really searching for. So seek holiness, learn contentedness, and experience joy and happiness. I'm just gonna pray. Lord, we just thank you.

We just thank you for your son, Jesus, that you sent to this earth for us to have meaning and purpose. Father. I pray that you reveal to us the, the enormity of what that means. That our lives are no longer meaningless and the chasing after the wind. Lord, we pray that you just instill value into us, that we don't seek value from this world.

We seek our value from you. Lord, I pray that you just reveal to us how we are holy to you, father. I pray that as we go on this journey to, to seek holiness over happiness. Father, I pray that you reveal and teach us how to be content, Lord, and I just pray for those moments that we can experience true joy regardless of our circumstances.

Your name, amen.