A New Year Resolution, Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. Are we happy people?

We're supposed to be, but we're not. True happiness is not found in a life that leaves God out. Now, for a lot of us, we don't quite believe that, do we? And hence, God decided to put a particular book in the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes. And the reason is, almost everything you dream about that's going to make you happy is in Ecclesiastes.

Solomon decided to live his life without God. He said, I can do that. And he basically said, here's my conclusion about all of it. It's all vanity.

None of it worked. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. Here we are. The week between Christmas and New Year's. 2020.

By the end of this week. We'll be in 2021. And for many of you, that'll mean another attempt at New Year's resolutions. I do believe, by the way, that this year we'll have one resolution in common, I think for all of us. And that is that we really hope that this year is not like last year.

You know, we'd like 2021 to be different than 2020. But what I want to talk about today is this whole idea of resolution. I mean, we make a lot of them and there's nothing really wrong with them. There's nothing wrong with losing weight or being healthy or.

Getting yourself out of debt. You know, there's nothing wrong with the quit smoking. That would be a good idea. But all of those are temporary and have very little value. And like most of us, if you've done them in the past.

They've not been very successful. Way back when I was a student at the seminary. The big thing that was happening among the students and a lot of the graduates who were pastoring was journaling.

That became a very important thing for pastors to do. Get a journal and start writing down your thoughts. So I think for three years, my resolution was the journal and I bought a journal each time. And I never once in three years entered anything on February the first.

Every single one of them was gone. And I realized after three attempts that that's just not my thing. And I'm not going to really be able to journal. But what I want to talk about today is that you could make a resolution this year. In fact, you should make a resolution this year and I should too. That will change your life. That will make everything different in your life.

It has lasting consequences and benefits from making this resolution. I want you to open your Bibles to Psalm chapter 1. The first Psalm in the Psalter. It's an interesting Psalm because it's the first. And it's viewed by basically Bible scholars and exegetes as the Psalm that is the doorway to the whole book of Psalms. In fact, it almost has a proverbial or Proverbs idea behind this Psalm. It has no superscription. It doesn't tell you who wrote it or anything like that.

But it is an interesting. Psalm. You'll notice that it first two words are how blessed. And I've told you this before, but both in the Old New Testament. Blessed means happy.

All right. It's not it's not a religious word. It's not I bless you that it's happy. It says how happy. Now, that should give us a good inclination, by the way, is if I took a poll, how many of you want to be happy? You see, how many choices have you made in your life to be happy?

I mean, we live in a country with life, liberty and. Pursuit of happiness. We all want to be happy.

That's what we want to do. The choices I make are to make me happy. Now, they're not always good choices and they always don't make us happy at all. But this one says, how blessed is the man? How blessed? The Hebrew doesn't say that, by the way, the Hebrew says something just a little bit different. The Hebrew says blessed. Oh, blessed is the man. The word blessed is used twice.

It'd be like an exclamation point in English. It's just the idea by repeating the word, it means it's really if you want to be really, really happy, you need to do what this song says to do. And what this song will tell us is basically in life, there's just two ways to live.

That's it. Two ways. You can either live the way God would ask you to live, or you can live like the ungodly live in that choice is yours. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people choose the second and not the first. And so they're not happy.

That's not the way it works. So he says here. How blessed is the man, he said, who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. Now, there's two kinds of people in this song. There is the blessed man and the wicked. Whenever you and I think of the word wicked, it's a bad for us with regard to this song. If I say to you wicked, you think Hitler, Jack the Ripper.

These are wicked people. And that's not what the psalmist means at all. The psalmist means when he says wicked, he means ungodly.

That's all. In fact, all ungodly means is people who choose to live their life without God. I make my choice and I'm going to live my life without God.

That's who, in that sense, the wicked are. So he says, how happy you'll be if you don't do something here. And we're back to this idea of happiness. Why it's such an important thing for me, I think, to preach this song now is, over all these years, it's very, very sad in a truest sense as a pastor to know how many of you are unhappy. It's just sad.

And I see it all the time and I've seen it over all the years, just unhappy people. And Larry Crabbe in his book Inside Out, he says this. He said he's a Christian psychologist. He said, I have a friend who would describe him. I would describe him as a committed Christian, a very gifted counselor and an unusually clear thinker. And he's had very little difficulties in his life.

Everyone agrees that he's a solid, well-adjusted Christian. And yet after an hour of reflective rambling in my office, this man quietly asked out loud, I wonder what it would be like to feel really good for just 10 minutes. Crabbe goes on to say that for a lot of us, we're really honest with ourselves. We admit that we struggle with the same thing. And his question was, why aren't we happy?

Why? I think this psalm will tell us a lot about that. Why aren't we happy people?

We're supposed to be, but we're not. He first talks about this idea. The first point I want to make is true happiness is not found in a life that leaves God out. True happiness is not found in a life that leaves God out. Now, for a lot of us, we don't quite believe that, do we? And hence, God decided to put a particular book in the Bible, the book of Ecclesiastes. And the reason is, almost everything you dream about that's going to make you happy is in Ecclesiastes.

Solomon decided to live his life without God. He said, I can do that. And he had this great wisdom, this gift of wisdom that was given to God. He had unspeakable wealth.

He was considered to be probably the wealthiest man going. Now, if you had unspeakable wealth, Bill Gates kind of wealth, you'd be happy, right? Probably not. Well, maybe not that. But what if I accomplished a lot? He said, I built cities, I did all kinds of things. Well, what about if I had pleasure? What if I had pleasure? We had a thousand wives and concubines, so life was full of pleasure. He said, I didn't have a stereo, but I did have lively musicians and singers that were with me all the time at my whim.

And he goes through all this list in Ecclesiastes, and he basically said, here's my conclusion about all of it. It's all vanity. None of it worked. It's just all dust in the wind. It just blows away. None of it lasts.

None of it. Yet he has in excess everything that you and I think, well, if I had that, I'm going to really be happy. And if you live your life old enough and you're a materialist, you remember when you were young and you thought, once I get something, I'm going to be really happy.

And it was more so. I can still remember my first new car. I mean, I've always been a car guy, but the first new one, I was like, this is. This is arriving. My last several new cars, way nicer than the first one.

Just a car drives around. Law of diminishing returns. That's the way this works. And so he says, there's a downward pull here, though. How blessed is a man who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly or the wicked.

Walking means living. How happy is a man who does not listen to the ungodly as they try to make choices in their life on how to live. This is epidemic among Christians. It's one of the most consistent things that I run into as a counselor.

With unhappy people. Well, my mom says. And that's what I think. My best friend at work, she told me this is what she wouldn't stand for that.

She said this is what she'd do. We listen to this. We listen to this kind of stuff. We're so I mean, even in a bigger philosophical way as a culture, if you were to say, what is the essence of a man, Freud would say he's psychological. That's what he is.

What do you know what the heart of a man is? He's psychological. Now, there's a lot of psychological aspects about us. But at our essence, we're not psychological beings. We're spiritual beings. That's a very different kind of thing. The solutions in our life are not psychological. The solutions in our life are spiritual. They're different. And so if you look at the whole world of psychology or psychiatry, it's an amazing thing. First of all, let me say this. The American view of life isn't working.

Just ask yourself that. Oh, let's see, over the last 20 years on a continual incline, suicides are going up consistently. The amount of money that Americans spend on psychotherapy is staggering. The amount of medications that we take to cope are in the billions of dollars.

And how is it helping? It's not. Because the answer is not going to be psychological. You see, that's the problem that we run into. But we listen to this.

So how else do we listen to the counsel of the wicked or the ungodly? I see this all the time in the context of bad marriages. It's an amazing thing to watch and it's sad. Couples come in and they're having a very poor marriage.

Often what ends up happening in the poorness of their marriage, they're contemplating divorce. Now, that's an interesting thing. And then as we continue to investigate.

And I know the way to investigate. Is there any biblical ground for the concept of a divorce? Yeah.

Yeah. You can stretch and make a biblical case for adultery. You can, because in the Old Testament you could be stoned for it. That usually ends the marriage after the other person's stoned. But the truth of the matter is, is that Jesus entered a culture where the Jewish men decided there were a lot of reasons you could divorce your wife. She didn't have hardly any she could divorce you for, but you had a lot. And Jesus said, that's wrong. You can't, he said, you can't divorce your wife except for porneia, which isn't the word adultery because he uses that in the context. He said, except for that, you don't have any grounds. I deal with couples that have none of those grounds.

They have no biblical ground to stand on at all. And inevitably, what ends up coming out is, here's my reasons for it. I'm not happy. Therefore, I'm not I'm not happy. And my mom said, that's what she'd do. And the girl at work said, I'd get out of there, too, if you're not happy. Where does that come from?

Show me the text. Show me in the word of God where God said, that's your grounds. So who am I listening to when I say that? Am I listening to God or am I listening to the culture? You see, and I do, I listen to the culture and that ends up happening.

So you see this all the time. I see it often with forgiveness issues. So many of us have a bitter spirit. We've been wronged by a lot of people in our life.

Everybody is. And so you become bitter because you're unforgiving. Now, does God speak at all about forgiving?

Well, let's see. Paul said, you and I are to forgive exactly the same way Christ forgives us. Is Christ forgiving you a few times in your life?

A few thousand? You see what I mean? He's forgiven us. Are there conditions on us forgiveness? No.

You see, not at all. Now, in our culture, what have we learned? If you wrong me or hurt me. Then one time, then shame on you. But if it happens twice, shame on me. Three or four times, that's outrageous. I'm not going to let you hurt me again. So how many times did Jesus tell Peter to forgive?

Seventy times seven. You see what I mean? That's what God said.

I'm not listening to that. Those people are taking advantage. They're giving me trouble. You see, it's one of a matter of how I look at things. Book of Proverbs says, as a man thinks, so he is.

And that's what happens to us. This gets into our thought process. Notice. Secondly, secondly, he says this. He said, does he nor does he stand in the path of sinners? That word stand means a confirmed in an action.

In a course or an action. He's he's now aligning himself with the ungodly. And that's how I live my life and that's how I make my choices. The word sinners are simply those who miss the mark, which is all of us who sin from that point of view. Again, this becomes epidemic.

We start taking a sinner's view or the ungodly view of life for us. Let me illustrate this. I got a text from someone this week and I'm not going to mention names of anything, but they had pictures of four men there. And these four men are nationally known men that we would all know. And these are men that get very high, favorable rank, rank at ratings in the evangelical community. These are men of great power. OK. And these men have got a lot of their power because they stand for a couple of things. They stand for strong marriages.

That's what they stand for. And strong marriages of only a man and a woman. And they have very, very strong family values. And that's how we love them. Those four men have had 13 marriages and publicly were found out for at least four affairs.

These men who stand for strength in their marriage have had 13. You know what that's called in the Bible? Hypocrisy.

That's all that is. That's hypocrisy. And yet we say we admire how they stand. Why?

They don't live at all. The unbelieving world looks at us and says, you know what's wrong with you? You talk the talk. But you don't walk the walk. You see, you don't have and I don't have a platform when we live this way. I can't tell someone about the good news of Jesus Christ and how to change your life now and forever when he says your life looks exactly like mine. You do the same things I do.

And the sad part is he's right. Everybody from George Gallup to Barna who have done polls say evangelical Christians live exactly the same as their unsaved neighbors. No different. But we talk differently. But it's hypocrisy. We end up standing with sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers. What happens to us when we live this way? To sit in the seat of scoffers, we become cynics. That's what we become.

We become cynical just like that. In fact, in Proverbs, in Proverbs chapter one, listen to what Solomon writes. Solomon says this. He says, How long on naive ones will you love being simple minded and scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Solomon said it's so easy to be a scoffer. It's so easy to be a cynic. But it's not the way of God. It's the way of the culture.

That's the way the culture thinks. I mean, you could turn cynicism into a TV reality show. You could anchor a news station by simply being a cynic. Just everything that you hear, you're skeptical of. And think about when you see anything or hear anything on TV, how many of you have real trust in what they're saying?

Not many. Then we become cynical about it. And he said, we start scoffing. And I think what's interesting about it, the scoff ends all the way back to God and his word. And so you even find believers today that will say things we have to change in these areas.

This is 2020. The Bible is an old book written in old times, and I don't think it means anything now. We have different views now. You do have different views now. But there aren't the views of God.

These are the views of the culture. What he calls here the wicked, the sinners and the scoffer. He said, that's the way this whole thing works. So he says, true happiness does not is not found in a life that leaves God out.

It can't be. Make sure when you're making a choice, you ask yourself the question, what does God say? Not what does my colleagues say, what does my neighbor say, what does God say? Now, notice, then he moves on and he says, true happiness is built on God's word. Verse three.

He's going to talk first about. A verse to first about their responsibility. He said, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and in his law, he meditates day and night.

That's the responsibility. His delight is in the law of the Lord. The word law of the Lord is Torah is simply the Old Testament can mean specifically the law, but I think he's talking Torah, God's revelation or what we would call the Bible. Now, he says. Here's what he doesn't say, but it's his duty to look at the Bible. It's his obligation. To look at the Bible.

That won't help you. He said this is delight is in the law of the Lord. The word is delight. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts, or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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