we can never have the type of happiness that I’m
about to tell you about apart from Him. Satan has a myth and that myth that floats around is that
people or circumstances or possessions are the key to happiness. And so consequently, people
often spend money they don’t have to buy the things they don’t need to unfortunately impress the
people that don’t even like to start with. Isn’t that ironic? Our Lord stated in John 15:11,
“These
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things have I spoken unto you so that,”
that’s a purpose clause in the Greek New Testament, so
that, “
My joy
[My joy]
may be in you and that your joy may be made full.”
Our Lord taught these
disciples many things. They didn’t sign up to be criminals, they didn’t sign up to watch Him go to
the cross, they thought they were signing up to go into the kingdom with Him and to serve in the
kingdom. And yet there were many things they had to face and many persecutions they went
through and yet it was possible.
Jesus taught them the Word, taught them how to live by faith,
taught them how to pray, taught them that in spite of all the adversity and the difficulties,
they could have the same joy that He had in those times of trouble.
What type of joy is this?
What’s it like? What’s unique about it? The evangelist Billy Graham said, “This happiness is the
happiness that brings enduring worth to your life. It’s not the superficial happiness that depends on
circumstances but rather the happiness and the contentment that fills your soul even when you are
under the most distressing of circumstances.” That’s pretty well said. Here is the sad truth, an
unbeliever, a person that is not a Christian, a person who is disadvantaged in the fact they’ve never
accepted Christ as their Savior, they cannot have this happiness. They cannot have this lasting
happiness. The best thing they can hope to have is a sort of temporal happiness, a happiness that is
related to circumstances, a happiness that is related to people and possessions, but they can never
have the type of happiness that I’m speaking about. They will search and search and search and
never find it. Celebrities have said this, I remember one particular celebrity was asked, “You’re
rich and you’re famous but are you happy?” And he said, “No, I’m lonely, I’m very lonely.” If you
look at the world today and you find the rich people in the world, they’re not happy, apart from a
relationship with God and using this happiness that I’m talking to you about. This is a supernatural
happiness. This is a happiness that only the Christian can possess and why do I say that? Why
can’t a person that’s not a Christian have this happiness? Listen to Galatians 5:22,
“The fruit of the
Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control;
against such there is no law.”
Now what did it say?
“The fruit of the Spirit,”
you receive the Holy
Spirit the minute you believe in Jesus Christ. Ephesians 1:13,
“You are sealed by the Spirit unto
the day of redemption.”
Now if you don’t have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you’re not a
Christian, you can’t possess this happiness that I’m talking about. Let’s go back and remember
something. A person that is not a Christian has two parts. He has a body and he has a soul and
that’s all he has. He has two parts to him, he’s dichotomous. But if he comes to Jesus Christ and
receives Christ as his Savior and is in fact born again, then he becomes three parts. He still has his
body, he still has his soul, but now his human spirit that was dead at birth as associated with
Adam’s original sin, the human spirit is made alive when the Holy Spirit indwells him and that’s
the secret to it. Once the Holy Spirit indwells you and indwells me, He can help us convert the
Word of God into the most phenomenal thing in the world that we could ever have. You see, we
can hear it but if you’re not a believer, you don’t have the power of the Holy Spirit to convert it
into what the Bible calls
pneumatikos
and that’s spiritual phenomena. A person that’s not a
Christian can hear the Bible and never convert it, never take it from what he hears to make it what
he applies, which gives him wisdom. There’s a whole process, I think we’ve talked about this
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before. Without the Holy Spirit, the joy that I’m speaking about can never, ever be purchased, it
can never be bought, it can never be acquired. You cannot have it apart from being a believer in
Jesus Christ. In Luke 11:28 Jesus said these words Himself,
“Happiness belongs to those who
hear My Father’s Word and keep it.”
Hearing the Word of God and keeping the Word of God
are traits that produce happiness.
Now, in regard to the unbeliever, can he be happy? Yes, if he
observes for example, if he lives by the laws of establishment, if he honors volition, if he honors
marriage, if he honors so many different establishment concepts and principles that God gives,
yes he can be happy. He can be happy in marriage, he can be happy having a family, he can be
happy in a nation of freedom such as America today. But this happiness is a neutral happiness, it
won’t last because people and circumstances can take that happiness away from him. I mean, you
can get married and you could say, “I’m happy, I’m having babies. I’m having children. I’m happy,
look at my beautiful babies.” But these same beautiful babies can make you unhappy, very
unhappy. Marriage is not a key to happiness. Marriage oftentimes is the key to unhappiness, we’ll
talk about that.
True happiness is a supernatural resource that is only available to the
believer in Jesus Christ and it comes by means of God the Holy Spirit producing that joy
and by means of the Word of God as you acquire and convert it and use it in your soul.
That’s the happiness that I’m talking about. The true happiness is the joy of knowing Jesus Christ
as your Savior. It’s the happiness of having an eternal future as well as having all the provisions in
time for the grace blessings by the grace assets God gives you. So the power of prayer, the power
of faith, the fellowship of the saints, and much more, no unbeliever has these resources. An
unbeliever that hasn’t trusted in Jesus Christ can’t use the faith-rest drill. He can’t pray and ask
God to help him with problems, he can’t lay them at the Lord’s feet. He’s not even in the royal
family of God. Thus Satan will often attempt to counterfeit the happiness that I’m talking about,
this supernatural happiness. He will try to counterfeit it, I mean after all he does like to keep his
constituents happy, doesn’t he? So he will freely give stimulation in many forms. I mean his myth
has always been that people and pleasant circumstances in life can provide happiness. Things like
a great social life, things like money and fame and sexual prosperity and travel and health, they
are all offered in the place of the real happiness that I’m talking about which is the eternal
happiness given by God through Jesus Christ. You know one thing that should make you happy is
knowing that if you die today, you’re going to heaven. You can know it, you don’t have to hope so,
you don’t have to try, you don’t have to wish. The Bible says,
“These things are written so that
you may know that you have eternal life. He that has the Son has life, he that has not the Son of
God has not life,”
1 John 5:11 and following. How do you know you’re going to heaven? Because
you have received Christ as your Savior. Well is that worth celebrating, that if you are absent from
this body, you’re face-to-face with the Lord and you’re not in hell? Yes, I would say that’s worth
celebrating. You know that Satan throws up all this false happiness, pseudo-happiness under some
form of stimulation. But once the sin nature raises its ugly head, well all the pseudo-happiness
will go out the window. Arrogance is the enemy of every person because arrogance will rob you
of your happiness. Arrogance can lead you into jealousy. Arrogance can lead you into self-pity
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Arrogance can lead you into the guilt complex. And sins like hatred and revenge motivation, all
rob you of your happiness. If you’re not a believer in Jesus Christ, if you’re one of these
disadvantaged persons without Christ, you’re never going to be really, truly happy. At best you’ll
have temporal happiness, a false happiness but not the real happiness that I’m talking about. That
comes as a result of the fruit of the Holy Spirit and as a result of hearing God’s Word and keeping
it on a consistent basis. The definition of happiness, interesting. Here’s a novel thought, unhappy
people take their unhappiness with them wherever they go. So for example, if an unhappy person
marries looking for happiness, than all that he or she is going to do is make the other person
miserable. Marriage doesn’t create happiness, it compounds problems, it doesn’t solve problems.
So if you’re dating someone that’s not happy and you think that by marrying them you can make
them happy, you’re just going to be miserable in the long run because unhappy people take their
unhappiness with them wherever they go, even in a marriage. A real Biblical definition of
happiness would be this. It’s to think in terms of sanity and to be rational without any illusion, to
think in terms of sanity and to be rational without any illusion. That’s what Romans 12:1-3 talks
about,
“Think in terms of sanity, don’t think in terms of arrogance but think in terms of humility.”
Rational without illusion means that you have God’s Word in your soul, you know your options,
you know your choices, you know what’s right and what’s wrong because you’ve learned it in the
Bible. You have in your conscience, in your stream of conscience you have norms and standards
there that guide you and lead you. All true happiness in life comes from thinking, that’s where it
originates.
The 3 R’s of thinking, happiness in your life, should be: reception, retention, and
recall.
They are critical for any believer who wants to experience this supernatural happiness that
I’m talking about. The supernatural way of living, and it’s not a weird way, it’s just simply the
Christian life. The Christian life is a supernatural life but without reception, without retention, and
without recall, the Christian life is not going to give you the happiness God intended for it to do.
You have the option. You can be a Christian and be unhappy or you can be a Christian and have
this great happiness I’m speaking of. What do I mean by reception? Reception, the constant
perception of God’s Word, taking in God’s Word, learning God’s Word. I was speaking to a woman
recently and her husband was kind of rough when they were married. He’s passed away now and
she told me and I thought it was very interesting, she said, “My husband drove me to study the
Bible because without that I couldn’t have stayed with him.” Interesting, she used the Biblical
problem-solving devices to handle the anger and the unhappiness that her husband had. She didn’t
have to have that, she didn’t have to live that way. She had reception. She listened to a qualified
pastor teach the Bible. This is one thing I constantly tell you. You must sit under the authority of a
qualified pastor, you
must listen to God’s Word be taught if you ever want to have this happiness.
I’m not talking about just on Sunday morning, I’m talking about a daily way of studying God’s
Word and I’m not talking about having a daily devotion where you buy a book at the bookstore
and read a little small chapter each morning. I am talking about sitting under a qualified pastor
who teaches you the Bible and you have a notebook, you have a Bible, and you sit there and take
notes and you listen and you learn, apply, and glorify, L.A.G., LAG, learn, apply, and glorify.
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There are a lot of great pastors that I know who teach their congregations weekly, usually an
hour at a time and they’re all free and all available on DVD or MP3 and some of them are even
available on live streaming video over the internet. Their congregations have the advantage of
taking in the Word of God every day. This is something that I do, I wouldn’t tell you something
that I don’t do. There is not a day, most of the time, I do sometimes get distracted but 95, 97% of
the time I sit down each day with my Bible, with my notebook, and I take in doctrine as my
pastor teaches it to me. Once I write it down, once I learn it, then I try to apply it into my life.
That is where we come to the word retention. Retention is you converting what you learn into
Biblical wisdom that’s in your soul. But in order to retain something, sometimes it has to be
repeated and repetition is very good. My pastor used to say, repetition is inevitable. You have to
have repetition to learn and he would give the illustration of being in the Army and when they
would march and they had to learn about face, forward march and left face, right face, over and
over and over again. And yet I think about some Christians that say to me, “Oh, I heard that
already.” Well, you need to hear it again and again and again if you hope to have any retention
because if there’s not retention, there’s not recall. You can’t recall what you did not retain.
Reception is the consistent perception of God’s Word. Retention is converting what you
learn to Biblical wisdom in your soul. Recall is the application of that wisdom to your daily
experience in your life every day.
Listen to Proverbs 3:13,
“Happiness belongs to the person
who finds wisdom, even to the person who gains understanding.”
Recall is the application of that
wisdom. When this verse says,
“Happiness belongs to the person who finds wisdom,”
it assumes
that first of all there’s been reception and retention because without reception and without
retention, there is no recall. In Psalm 31:7,
“I will rejoice
[there’s happiness]
and be happy in the
provision of Your grace.”
There is no doubt about it, the grace of God gives us an opportunity to
have an unbelievable lifestyle and that makes us happy. The first thing is the grace of salvation.
“For by grace are you saved through faith, it’s a gift of God, not of works,”
it’s a free gift,
Ephesians 2:8-9. That should make you happy, you don’t have to pay for it, you don’t have to
earn it, you don’t have to prove yourself. You just have to do what the Bible says,
“Believe in the
Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”
That’s why the Bible clearly says,
“Whosoever
should call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
The Bible clearly says,
“God is not
willing that any should perish.”
The Bible clearly says what I told you earlier in Romans 5:19,
“For by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, but by the obedience of One, shall
many be made righteous.”
When you come to Jesus Christ and receive Him as your Savior, you
receive His righteousness. You are made equally righteous with God through Christ. Psalm
119:1,
“How happy
[there it is]
how happy are those whose way is complete who walk in the law
of the Lord,”
and that is in parentheses, the life God provided for you. So if your way is
complete it means you have integrity, it means you’re mature, and you are walking, you’re living
the life that God provided for you. That is your grace provision, your spiritual life. If you want
perfect happiness it requires daily decisions from the right scale of values. Your number one
priority must be, has to be Bible doctrine, it has to be. You must be motivated to hear it, to study
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it, to learn it under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. Listen, learn and advance and grow, you
will have happiness not only in this world, but in eternity as well. You will hear,
“Well done My
good and My faithful servant.”
You will receive your rewards in eternity for faithful service, it’s
amazing. Psalm 97:12,
“Be happy in the Lord you righteous ones and give thanks for the
memory of His holiness.”
We have the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ in our lives since
we got saved and this qualifies us to be the recipients of God’s personal love. And the moment by
moment attitude of your soul should be, as the Bible says,
“In everything give thanks. This is the
will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”
Listen carefully, until you can give thanks for
everything, both the blessings and the adversity of your life, you are not even close to having the
happiness that I’m talking about. It’s there, it’s available. Therefore Philippians 4:4,
“Keep on
having happiness in the Lord at all times. Once more I repeat that command, keep on having
happiness.”
What is that happiness? It’s contentment. Contentment gives you capacity in
your life to live, love, and enjoy. Contentment is you not needing anything else.
Listen, if
you think you can’t be happy unless you’ve got a new home, unless you’ve got a new car, unless
you’ve got a new this or new that, that’s not contentment.
Contentment is being happy with
what God gives.
Therefore Paul said,
“I’ve learned to have a lot or a little, it doesn’t make any
difference to me. I am content.”
There’s nothing wrong with having possessions, there is nothing
wrong with buying things as long as you understand that’s not the key to happiness. They are
provisions, they are blessings that God gives you, but they are not designed to make you happy.
They are designed to be used and enjoyed.
All true happiness comes under the ministry of
God the Holy Spirit and through the inculcation of the Word of God – reception, retention,
and recall.
I hope you’re listening, I hope you’re learning.
Proverbs 3:13, happiness,
“Happy is
the one who finds wisdom and the one who obtains understanding.”
Finding wisdom, that’s
reception, retaining understanding, and recall. It’s there for you. It is an amazing life and it only
belongs to a few people, these few people are Christians. It’s an exclusive club. It is for
Christians. An exclusive happiness that the world can’t have is yours in Jesus Christ. Until next
week, this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line