Eight Ways To Be Happy, According To Jesus

Summit Church at all campuses, let's put our hands together.

We celebrate incredible power of life change in the midst of really dark days in our society and our country. We celebrate the new life in Christ and the heartbeat of this church is seeing that displayed through baptism. Our hope and our prayer has been that we would baptize no less than 50,000 people from Raleigh-Durham over the course of our lifetime. We are a decade into it and we baptized 5,200 plus and so we are really excited. So to that end, at all 28 of our services this weekend across all nine of our campuses here in the Triangle, you are going to have a chance to be baptized today if you never have to actually come forward and be baptized on the spot. Some of you will decide over the next hour that you are going to, your whole family is going to be baptized.

Every time we do this, we have whole families that do it and it's amazing. It is identification with Jesus. It is the going public of your faith. You are declaring to everybody, I have made my decision and I am ready to go all the way. Many of you came into this weekend prepared for this because we've been talking about it for quite a few weeks now. But others of you are going to decide today on the spot that it's time.

You say, well, I don't know. I mean, you know, the people that came in were thinking about it. Maybe it's better that I spend a little time preparing for it.

And sometimes that may be true. In the New Testament, every single one without exception is spontaneous on the spot. So you are in really good company if you decide today. You see, for many of you, you know exactly what God wants you to do.

It's not a lack of knowledge. It's that you've just been putting it off for a long time. And today it is time for you to stop putting off to tomorrow what God has told you to do today.

And it's time for you to take bold action. Well, because baptism is identification with Jesus, I want to spend the core of our time together. This weekend 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 5. If you've got your Bibles, I'd love for you to take them out and open them to Matthew Chapter 5. The core teaching of Jesus, I will warn you as we're getting into this, that this is not a typical message that I would preach before an invitation to be baptized. But this passage really captures what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. And when you get baptized, this is what you're committing to. It's the most famous sermon ever given called the Sermon on the Mount. We're only going to look at the first 12 verses of it.

But Jesus begins this 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?

It's very active in the church. I would say pretty mature in her faith who said, you know, I'm not sure I've ever been totally happy at any particular season in my life. It's always felt like it was close, like I could almost be happy, but it's always been just a little bit beyond my grasp. Google autocomplete 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? Full disclosure, I was actually looking up.

How can I be pretty when I stumbled across this? This is sermon research at its most sophisticated. Ladies and gentlemen, I love Google autocomplete.

I feel like it's playing Family Feud every single time that I type in a sentence. I get to see what the top answers are. 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. It's 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. And I've told you it reminds me of the Sunday school teacher who wanted to use squirrels as an example of prepared workers. So in her little third grade Sunday school class, she starts the lesson by saying, okay, boys and girls, I'm going to describe something. And when you know what it is, I want you to raise your hand. And so all the kids kind of lean in and she says, okay, it lives in a tree and it likes to eat acorns and it's gray.

Pause. And so all the kids are kind of just staring at her and she says, it has a bushy tail and all the kids are kind of looking awkwardly at each other. And one kid finally, you know, shyly raises his hand and says, it sure sounds like a squirrel, but I know the answer has to be Jesus, you know, because we're here in Sunday school. So I know that you think that, yeah, I'm going to 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. In 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 in 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. The Messiah has 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 then the crowds, he went up on the mountain. Now that's actually a really important detail that gives you the key to understanding the whole passage.

And we'll come back to it right at the very end. When he was up there, he, 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, what we call college students today. Okay.

That would be your first term. The second was one of my favorite Greek words. Potokos, just one of my favorite Greek words because it's onomatopoeia, where the word sounds like what it is. What do you think of when I say Potokos?