Eight Ways to Be Happy, According to Jesus

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. In the Sermon on the Mount, he's going to give us eight ways to be happy. Now I'm going to warn you that what Jesus tells you in these 12 verses is upside down from everything else you're ever going to hear on this topic. It's revolutionary. But even if you're not a Christian, I think you'll have to admit that these things, even though they are counterintuitive at first, are going to make a lot of sense. Welcome to another week of trusted biblical teaching here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. Happiness, it's something we all crave and yet it often seems so elusive. We pin our hopes on something in the future like marriage, kids, career success or retirement. And if we think we can just get there, then we'll be happy. And yet nothing ever seems to be enough.

So what is the solution? How do we escape the rat race and find true lasting joy? Today we're discovering eight ways to be happy according to Jesus. It's part of our teaching series called The Whole Story.

Let's dive right in. I want to spend the core of our time together talking about what many consider to be the core teaching of Jesus. It is from something called the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew Chapter five. If you got your Bibles, love for you to take them out and open them to Matthew Chapter five. It's the most famous sermon ever given called the Sermon on the Mount. You really look at the first 12 verses of it.

But Jesus begins the sermon with a question that everybody in the world at some point has asked themselves. And the question is this, how can I be happy? How can I be happy? Let me just ask you to consider that personally. Are you happy right now?

I don't mean like at this very moment while you're listening to me preach, but I mean, like, are you happy in this season of your life? Google auto complete verifies that this is a very pressing question for our culture. When I typed in, how can I be?

The very first thing that came up was happy. How can I be sure was number two? Sure about what? I don't know. How can I be saved? I wrote a book on that. How can I become a baller lyrics? Why that came up on my feet?

I'm not sure. And then of course, how can I be pretty? Now I know that at this point, a bunch of y'all, when I bring up this question, how can I be happy? A bunch of y'all roll your eyes inwardly, if not outwardly, because you're like, oh, the pastor wants to talk about being happy. I wonder if he's going to say Jesus has something to do with it. So I know that you think that, yeah, I'm gonna be like, you got to have a relationship with Jesus to be happy. But Jesus's answer to the question of happiness is a little more complex than that.

And the sermon on the Mount, he's going to give us eight ways to be happy. You see, Matthew chapter five opens up with a string of, of blessed are blessed are the poor and spirit and works through this list. The Greek word for blessed is the word Makarios, which comes from the word happy.

The Greek word for happy is Makar. Jews would use the term to describe a person in a state of salvation, someone who is experiencing the blessing and the favor of God in their lives. So these eight things are descriptions of a saved person's heart, a heart that is blessed by God, a heart that is filled by God, a happy heart. Now I'm going to warn you that what Jesus tells you in these 12 verses is upside down from everything else you're ever going to hear on this topic.

It's revolutionary. But even if you're not a Christian, I think you'll have to admit that these things, even though they are counterintuitive at first, are going to make a lot of sense. You see, Jesus was nothing if not logical. And he had a profound understanding of the human spirit, which is why throughout history, many people who have not regarded him as the Messiah have still thought of him as the greatest moral teacher of all time.

People like Thomas Jefferson, Muhammad Ghandi, Oprah Winfrey today, people that would not say that he is the Messiah, but believe that he's a great moral teacher. You'll see that in these 12 verses. Chapter five, verse one, seeing them the crowds, he went up on the mountain. When he was up there, when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened up his mouth. And he taught them saying, verse three, here's your first one, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this one because it is the key to understanding all the others.

In fact, once you get this one, all the others kind of fall into place. Poverty of spirit means that you don't feel like you have sufficient resources in yourself to face life's challenges. Poverty of spirit has less to do with being monetarily rich or poor, but whether you embrace daily dependence on God for all that you need.

And so if you're taking notes, and I hope you are, that's the way I would write that one down. Poverty of spirit means that you embrace daily dependence on God for all that you need. You see in Greek, there are two different terms for poor.

The first term is what we typically think of as poor, monetarily poor, those who struggle financially, those who can barely afford enough to eat, that would be your first term. The second was one of my favorite Greek words, potokos. Potokos is one of my favorite Greek words because it's onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia where the word sounds like what it is. What do you think of when I say potokos? What does it sound like? It sounds like I'm spitting.

Potokos, right? The word means someone who is so despised that they literally were spit on in society. This is the word that Jesus used for poor here.

He's talking about those who are so weak and so outcast that it's like they're spit on. This is the poor that Jesus says will inherit the kingdom itself. Now, because these eight things are so core to Jesus' teaching, at some point in his life and teaching, he's going to illustrate every single one through an expanded story or some kind of illustration. As we work through these, I'm going to try a few places to point you to a couple of those parables because even though they're familiar to you, they really help you get the concept of what he's saying.

And for this one, being poor in spirit, the story that he told that encaptured it was the story of the two men that came into the temple to pray. One of them Jesus describes as being the religious elite. He is the best of the best. He knows the Bible. He's a leader in the synagogue or the church. He doesn't have any gross immoral sin in his life.

Reads his Bible every day. So he comes up with the front of the church because that's where he belongs. And as they're worshiping, he puts his hands up and Jesus says he begins to pray with himself, not even talking to God to himself. He says, Lord, I just want to thank you that I'm awesome. And that I, you know, I thank you that you've enabled me to read my Bible every day and that I'm not like all these people who have all these struggles.

I thank you for all these great things. And he's just thinking about how happy God has to be to have a son like him on his team. Jesus said at the very back of the church or the synagogue, the exact opposite of this man, the tax collector who was the worst of the worst. And that day he would have been regarded as a lying traitorous thief comes in so overwhelmed with the sense of his guilt that he won't even come any farther than the back of the temple.

He lays down on his face in the very back corner and all he can say to God is God be merciful to me, a sinner. And Jesus said, surely I tell you, he went home justified right with God and not the religious man. Because see, listen to this, the religious man came in with a sense of richness about his own righteousness. And because of that, he left with his own righteousness, which before God was no righteousness at all. But the tax collector came in poor in the spirit regarding his righteousness. And because of that, he left with the gift righteousness of God.

You see, God only fills empty hands. The what keeps you from the righteousness of God is not your moral inability. What keeps you from the righteousness of God is your moral ability because that keeps you blinded to your need for grace. Now, Jesus is first and foremost, the first application of that principle is how you get saved. You get saved when you come to the poverty of righteousness and you say, I can't be good enough to earn your favor. And you receive the gift righteousness of Jesus Christ.

But it's also a principle that you can apply across the broad spectrum of the Christian life also. Those who feel capable as parents will not experience the power of God in their parenting. It is not your poor parenting that's going to screw up your kid. It is your confidence in your good parenting.

That's what's going to screw up your kid. Because those who have a poverty of spirit regarding their ability as parents, they're the ones who lean into the power of God for their children. It is your feeling capable in your ministry that cuts you off from the power of God.

It is your capability in your relationships or your careers. It is when we depend on God and not on ourselves for provision and wisdom and power and guidance that we access his gift power because God only fills empty hands. You see, most of us have spent our entire lives shaped by a culture that is trying to get us to become anything but poor in the spirit. I mean, we want to be rich in the spirit, at least middle class in the spirit. We want to feel like we are sufficient for the task, like we got it under control, like us and our children don't need to be afraid of going into the future because we got all the internal resources and external resources like money that we need to face the future without fear. But see, not only does this keep us cut off from God's help, it also corrupts our spirit. It keeps us from being happy.

And that's where you start to see the profound wisdom of Jesus's way. You see, like the man in the story that Jesus told about the religious man and the tax collector, being rich in ourselves makes us proud and disdainful of others. Because when you're proud, your life becomes an endless cycle of comparison and competition.

C.S. Lewis talked about how the essence of pride is competition. To pride, it does not matter that I'm smart. It only matters that I'm smarter than you. To pride, it does not matter that I'm good looking or that I'm athletic.

It only matters if I'm good looking or better looking and more athletic than you are. For that reason, C.S. Lewis says, people who are proud can never get along. He says people who have other sins in common, they can get along. People who like to get drunk like to get drunk together. People who like to be immoral like to get together and brag about the people they've been immoral with. He said, but people who are proud always hate each other because their pride is always in conflict with somebody else's pride. So C.S. Lewis says the quickest way to tell that you have a pride problem is that somebody else's pride bothers you.

How about that? You want to know how you're proud? Somebody else's pride ticks you off because they just think they're something. And that means that they don't think you're something. And you know that you're something, not them. And so they're something. This is getting in the way. You're something this and you're the real something.

They're not the something. So they should just shut up and sit down, right? Because it's the essence of its competition. Furthermore, when we become rich in ourselves, we become competitive. We then become unbelievably self-focused. I mean, the guy in Jesus' story prays to himself.

He prays to himself because that's all he ever thinks about. I've been reading this book recently about parenting that talks about how we are raising the most me-focused generation in history. It's like we are fashioning kids to grow up, to be rich in the spirit. And you can just see that reflected in our habits on social media. This book talks about our obsession with selfies. Every year, I mean, every day in our country, one million selfies are posted onto the internet. Cameras used to be used for the taking of pictures of other people and other situations.

Now we turn it around so we've got that weird-looking duck face so that we're the center of every scene that we're, you know, a part of. Social media outlets like Twitter are not built on displaying your poverty of spirit. They're built on displaying your richness of spirit. So you post all the awesome things about your life so that other people will admire you and be jealous of you. You don't put boring stuff. Had another peanut butter and jelly sandwich today followed by ramen noodles, right?

You don't say that. Now you're going to put up the awesome steak dinner, the cheese you got to have. You're not trying to show your desperation but your surplus, even when you pretend to be humble about it. Oh, my teacher said I was the greatest student she'd ever had. Hashtag humbled by this. You're like, you are not humbled by that. Don't put that hashtag. You are proud of that.

That's why you put it up there. And when we become proud and me-focused, we start to look ridiculous to everybody like this man does. I mean, if you're like this.

I mean, if this man knew that other people could hear him pray and he was talking to himself, he would have felt foolish. You see, every once in a while, something happens that reveals to me how self-focused I am. And I feel full. Like what happened not long ago, my assistant said, hey, the Raleigh News and Observer is on the phone for you. And I said, well, of course they are.

You know, that's what I thought. Okay, they want to talk about a church. They want to talk about perspective on something. And so I, you know, I was like, so I kick her by my office and I answer the phone and God says, yeah, this is so-and-so from the News and Observer. We see that your subscription is about to run out and want to know. And I was like, you want to renew?

I said, no, I do not. If you don't love me, I don't love you. So, but we end up looking foolish because it's just, I mean, it's just all we can ever think about is ourself. Maybe the worst effect of being rich in yourself is that you become ungrateful because you're always focused on what you think you're entitled to. And now other people aren't giving it to you. You always feel like you deserve more, like you're being wronged. And that makes you unhappy because see ungrateful people are always unhappy people. It's when you realize that every breath you take, every step you take is a gift from God and grace that you begin to become grateful.

And when you become grateful, you become happy because grateful people are happy people. See, so what we need is not this mighty richness of the spirit that goes out and conquers the world. What we need is the spirit of Gideon, who says, Lord, I'm the smallest man in the smallest tribe.

Why would you choose me? The spirit of David that says, who am I that you would choose me in my house to make these kinds of promises to the spirit of Isaiah that says, woe is me for I'm a man of unclean lips. And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

Why would you show me your favor? Because see, not only will that give us access to the power of God, it'll also make us insanely happy. Blessed are the poor in spirit. They're the ones that have the kingdom of God. Now we got to move faster.

She all got to quit slowing me down. Verse four, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Jesus doesn't say why we're mourning here, but mourning clearly goes along with being poor in the spirit, right? When you feel powerless, weak and unrighteous, you mourn. And so God says, I comfort you. But I also think based on Jesus's future teaching that mourning here means a willingness to enter the pain of others voluntarily and mourn with them, even when you don't have to. So here's how I'd write this one down. Mourning means being relationally connected to others. Mourning means being relationally connected to others. I thought here of Jesus's most famous parable that he ever told, the Good Samaritan.

You know the basic gist of it. You got a Jewish man who gets beat up by robbers and left for dead on the side of the road. And later another man comes by, another Jew, a religious leader, a man who was kind and good and should have stopped to help this guy, but he had things to do. And he just had a day that was too packed and so he thought, I can't do it. So he kept moving. The next guy that comes by, another good Jewish religious man, this guy thought, man, that's dangerous because if I go stop and help him, the robbers may be watching, may come back and rob me and it's dangerous.

So I don't want to get involved. Jesus said a third man came by a little later and this was a Samaritan, a man of a hated race, the societal enemies. And this man stops. He has all the same excuses the first two guys did. He was in a hurry. He was trying to get somewhere. It certainly was dangerous for him to stop and help that man, but he voluntarily entered into the pain of somebody else and took it upon himself.

And because of that, Jesus says he is blessed. You see, as we get older, I've noticed this tendency in myself, and I would assume that it's also there in most of you, the trajectory of our lives is to get more and more isolated. We don't really want to connect with our neighbors as we get older because we don't feel like we need to. We don't want to open up our lives to the needy.

I mean, just being in a small group is kind of a pain, right? Like, I don't know if I need this. I don't want people looking into my life and commenting on my marriage because I just don't feel like I need other people.

The average triangle professional, especially man, but I would say, you know, both genders, the average triangle professional thinks just give me my home, just give me my beach home if I can afford that one day, give me my hobbies, my kids, maybe one day my grandkids, and shut the rest of the world out. I don't need that for a happy and fulfilled life. And Jesus said, actually, you'll never be happy that way because as your heart closes in on itself, it gets darker and more self-focused and you'll never be blessed by God. Because see, you were designed by God, designed by God in His image to be happy when you poured yourself out for others.

The circle that God wants us to be in is not a circle facing inward, it's a circle that faces outward. So blessed are those who open their hearts and their homes to take in the pain of others, even when they don't need to. Blessed are the foster parents who take in kids, not because they need the money, but because they can't help but enter into the pain of that child and weep with that child. Blessed are those who are involved in ministries here in our church to the homeless, the orphan, the prisoner, the unwed mother, the high school dropout, not because they naturally belong to those communities, but because they are mourning with them. Blessed are those who sponsor compassion children or take overseas mission trips, not because they got a wanderlust or a sense of adventure or want to get their passport stamped, but because they can't help but enter into the mourning of people who are separated from Jesus and without the basic necessities of life.

Or how about this one? Blessed are you when you identify with a community right here in our city who is not your own. For example, when you are white, listening to the pain that our black brothers and sisters go through and acknowledging the fear and the struggles and sometimes the unfairness they experience.

Or it means when you are black, empathizing with what it's like to be a policeman or in the family of a policeman who puts his or her life on the line and faces backlash for injustices that they had no personal part in. Blessed are those who mourn, who voluntarily step out of their community and enter into and mourn with the pain of another community. Not only will you be happier in this life that way, you will be eternally comforted, Jesus said. Verse five, blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Now meekness means taking the second place instead of the first place whenever you can.

It means leveraging your power and your position to serve others and not yourself. I think here of the thing that Jesus did right before he died. In the moment leading up to his death, the last thing he does with his disciples is he gets down on his hands and knees and watches the dirtiest part of their body, their feet. Here he is the Lord and the master of the universe about to go into the most heroic activity ever ever done on earth.

And how's he, what's the prelude to that? Washing the disciples feet. But see Paul said, the apostle, because of that act of humility, because of that posture of humility, God exalted him. And God gave him the name that is above every name. And it's a pattern that Jesus is talking about here that when you humble yourself and you take the second place, not because you're powerless, but because you choose to use your power that way, God begins to exalt you, not only in the next life, but also in this one.

Here's how, you know what really makes me understand this? Being a parent. You parents, you'll follow me. If you got a, let's say you got a third grader and you pack your third grader's lunch to go to school that day. And after they get to school, let's say that you have the ability to watch them during the lunch hour. And you notice you're from a distance, you're in the, you're outside the playground with your binoculars.

You probably get arrested for doing that, but whatever, you can see it. And you notice your little third grader, as he takes out his lunch, he notices another kid who almost always comes to school without his lunch because he's so poor that his parents hardly ever send him with food. And so you notice your kid look at his sandwich and take a sandwich and, you know, break it in half and hands half the other kid. And he's got his five Oreos and he takes three of those Oreos and gives them to this kid and kind of divides everything down the middle and gives it to this kid. What do you as a parent feel like at that moment? Are you like, oh, how is he ever going to survive in life? That's the whole capitalist system folding in on itself, right? No, you don't think that. You're proud.

And what happens when your kid gets home? Well, if you're like me, I'm like, you gave away three Oreos, I'm giving you 30 right now. Like I just poured out on them, right?

Because there's a sense in which I watch them take the second place and I want to pour out. You see, God, our heavenly father, that's the way he looks at his children, it seems. It seems that he just can't even help himself. He sees you taking what you have and leveraging it for others. He says, watch this, I'll exalt you.

It's why we always say around here, you can't out give God. What would your life look like, do you think, if consciously in every area of your life, whether with your resources, your position, your opportunities, you consciously took the second place instead of the first? You know what would happen?

Two things, one, you'd start to be insanely happy. Number two, you would find God himself got involved to begin to exalt you because that's what Jesus promises right there. Blessed are those, he says, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they're the ones that'll be satisfied. The hunger and thirst for righteousness means to crave fellowship with God above everything else. You see, Jesus understood, listen to this, we're all hungry. Our souls are hungry.

And the reason for that, King Solomon explained is because God put eternity in our hearts. The way Blaise Pascal, other philosophers have said this is God has created the human heart with a gigantic hole in it. And we spend all our lives trying to figure out what goes in that hole. And so we try money and we try the approval of others.

We try romantic love. He said, none of it works because that hole is in the shape of God himself. And it's the size of eternity. You all imagine a bucket that was so big that all the water in the Atlantic ocean, if you put it in that bucket would not even cover the surface area of the bottom of the bucket.

That bucket is your soul. The reason that money can't make you happy is not that you don't have enough of it. It's that it's not designed to do that to begin with. It's not big enough.

All the money in all the world's not big enough. You're created for something greater than money. The reason that relational romantic love as awesome as that is, the reason it cannot satisfy your soul is you weren't created to be satisfied in that kind of love. You were created to be satisfied in God. So I often tell you lonely insecure single people become lonely insecure married people.

Right? They go from being lonely to sitting in a counseling office. Because problems like loneliness and insecurity are not cured by the love of another human being.

They're only cured by the eternal love of God. It's why when you base your identity and your hope on the approval of people, it doesn't make you a happy person. It makes you this jealous obsessive person because other people can't give you what you're looking for.

You see money and romantic love and whatever it is that you give your heart to will corrupt your spirit. Not only will you be unsatisfied, your soul will disintegrate. It is when you hunger and thirst for righteousness that not only will you be filled, you will overflow with happiness.

So do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? That's our goal today and every day here on Summit Life. Pastor JD titled this message Eight Ways to Be Happy According to Jesus, and it's part of a teaching series called The Whole Story.

Remember, if you ever miss a message, you can always catch up at jdgrier.com. The online sermons are available completely free of charge because there's people just like you that have stepped up and donated to cover the production and hosting costs. So when you give to Summit Life, you're really giving to your fellow listeners. And to say thanks, we'd like to send you an exclusive resource. It's a set of books of the Bible cards. This set of cards will help you as you read to make connections with the context of the original audience. There's a card for each of the 66 books, and they each include details about when the book was written and to whom, three key truths gleaned from the book, where the book points to Jesus and the good news of the gospel, and a reflection question to help you apply the book's message to your life.

Request the books of the Bible cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220, or it might be easier to give and request the cards online. Our website is jdgrier.com. And be sure to come back Tuesday when we're continuing this message called Eight Ways to Be Happy According to Jesus on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.