[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, Jess.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, good morning, everyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of amazing time we've had together already in the presence of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many good things happening across the life of our church.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me pray really quick as we begin into week
[SPEAKER_01]: three about questioning Christianity series.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me pray.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, thank you that we can be here together this morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thank you for what you're doing across our church and the lives of so many people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thank you for our alpha course.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for our mission exposure teams.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, I thank you for all the ways that you are working through people in this community, both seen and unseen.
[SPEAKER_01]: We give you praise.
[SPEAKER_01]: We honor you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as we look at this question this morning,
[SPEAKER_01]: about how we find happiness, I pray that you would open our hearts and speak to us in Jesus' name.
[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, week three of question and Christianity, we're asking the question during the series.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the Christian faith
[SPEAKER_01]: still plausible in the modern world.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still makes sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're looking at this through a bunch of different lenses or a variety of questions you can see on the screen.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this week we're looking at what it means to be happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now a number of people have asked me
[SPEAKER_01]: Last week in particular about my sources, where are my, you know, what am I drawing on?
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I'm drawing on Scripture, but also as I said in week one, I'm using Tim Keller's making sense of God and the podcast that goes along with that as an inspiration.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a number of other sources as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to post those in our social soon, so look out for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also, if you want to ask a question, if you feel like I have an address something important, or there's something that's burning in your heart that you'd love to explore in this series, that's relevant to one of these questions, please email them in, and I'll do my best to include that in the content as we go along.
[SPEAKER_01]: So last week we talked about meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we find meaning?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is meaning in life even possible?
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does the Christian faith have to say about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: So today we're talking about happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is happiness possible?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we find it?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And what does the Christian faith have to say about that?
[SPEAKER_01]: A number of people asked me last week also why I didn't refer to a ecclesiasties last week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Since when you're talking about meaning, that seems to be the obvious place to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one book in the Bible which is all about meaning and how we find it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a meaning and a apparently meaningless world?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the reason I didn't refer to ecclesiasties last week is because I wanted to keep my power to dry friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I want to look at ecclesiasties today.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you've ever read ecclesiasties, you'll know it starts out, well, it's pretty depressing stuff to begin with, actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chapter one verse one, meaningless.
[SPEAKER_01]: Miningless, everything is utterly meaningless.
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, there we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are people gain from all their neighbours as they toil under the sun?
[SPEAKER_01]: Generations come and go.
[SPEAKER_01]: The earth remains, the sun rises, the sun sets.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wind blows to the south, the turns to the north, round around it goes, ever returning on its course.
[SPEAKER_01]: All streams fall into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he says, well, say, all things are worrisome.
[SPEAKER_01]: More than I can say, Jerry stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, traditionally, ecclesiasties, it's understood that traditionally that was written by King Solomon, son of David, who became the king of Israel after David's death, after his father's death.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're talking here about someone who has everything that you could ever want in life, really.
[SPEAKER_01]: His rich, his powerful,
[SPEAKER_01]: But he's also miserable.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's deeply, deeply unhappy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing gives him satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything appears meaningless.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all weary, some to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he sets out in the book to try and find the source of happiness, the source of meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: He searches for wisdom to try and address this problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: So in chapter two, he goes through a list of things that he tries in order to find happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: In verse one of chapter two, in a paraphrasing, he says, I tried pleasure, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But that proved meaningless, all right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I tried laughter, I tried, I don't know if you've visited some
[SPEAKER_01]: What?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is three thousand BC comedy clubs?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that proved meaningless didn't last long.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why, then, he drinks his fill of wine, but that too was short lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he's determined.
[SPEAKER_01]: He keeps going.
[SPEAKER_01]: Verse three, he says, all right, what I'm going to do is work really hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to work hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I undertook great projects he says.
[SPEAKER_01]: I undertook great projects.
[SPEAKER_01]: I built houses for myself and I planted vineyards.
[SPEAKER_01]: I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've lost connection.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll go to the next slide.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also, on one back, sorry, there we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am asked silver and gold for myself and the treasure of kings and provinces, I acquired male and female singers and a herum as well, all the delights of a man's heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, yes, when I surveyed all that my hands had done, and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless.
[SPEAKER_01]: A chasing after the wind, nothing was gained under the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hated life.
[SPEAKER_01]: My heart began to despair over all my toil-some labor.
[SPEAKER_01]: probably a few of us might say, yes and amen.
[SPEAKER_01]: In his book, the happiness hypothesis, the psychologist, Jonathan Hight, summarizes the ecclesiasties, the message of ecclesiasties by saying that the author of ecclesiasties wasn't just battling the fear of meaninglessness.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was also battling the disappointment of success.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't just battling the fear of meaninglessness.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was also battling the disappointments of success.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing, including his achievements, brought him satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so last week we were talking about that you need, we were saying, you need to find a meaning in life that is robust enough that's resilient enough to get you through periods of suffering, to get you through times of pain and loss.
[SPEAKER_01]: But today, we're kind of going in the opposite direction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what we're saying here is that if you want to be happy, if you want to live a satisfied life, a life of contentment, then it needs to be based on something that is greater than success, that's greater than pleasure, that's greater than wealth and achievement.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're kind of going in the opposite direction, saying, if you want to find happiness, well, first of all, you need a meaning in life that's going to get you through periods of suffering, but if you want to find happiness,
[SPEAKER_01]: You also need something that gives you happiness which is not based on success or pleasure or wealth or achievement.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if your meaning in life is based in any of those things and they're taken away from you, you fall apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's also true that if you attain all of those things and you find they're not enough, then what do you do?
[SPEAKER_01]: Where do you go?
[SPEAKER_01]: Who do you turn to?
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you give a person who has everything?
[SPEAKER_01]: The actor and comedian Jim Carrey once said, I think everyone should get rich and famous and do everything they have had dreamed of so that they can see that it's not the answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've all heard that money can't buy happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: But very few of us actually believe that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not me, we say.
[SPEAKER_01]: In my case, it'll be different.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know I'll be content.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I just have a million dollars or five million or ten million or a hundred billion.
[SPEAKER_01]: But.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you do get wealthy or successful or powerful or whatever it is that you desire, and there's probably a couple of billionaires we might think of at this point for all their wealth, their problems don't go away, just creates new ones and probably more complex ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's worse is that if you do get everything you desire and you're still unhappy, all that success ends up doing then is amplifying your dissatisfaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it becomes the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing, as Ecclesiasti says, it ends up just being a chasing after the wind.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're just chasing after the wind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And since Ecclesiasti was written about three thousand years ago, roughly five hundred years before the ancient Greek philosophers, this is clearly an abiding human problem, like there's nothing new here.
[SPEAKER_01]: As Ecclesiasti says, there's nothing new under the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was an old problem even then, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Three thousand years ago, people were still thinking about these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as Jonathan Hight says, there's also plenty of modern empirical research that backs this up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Several studies have found a very weak correlation between wealth and happiness or wealth and contentment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more prosperous the society grows actually, so do the rates of poor mental health, like depression and anxiety.
[SPEAKER_01]: According to the Harvard study of human flourishing, which was a multinational study of well-being, it was released just this year, a survey of twenty-two countries, over two hundred thousand people, found that meaning in life and composite human flourishing is negatively correlated with GDP per capita.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, the richer a nation becomes, the less happy it feels.
[SPEAKER_01]: Accepting Scandinavia, because apparently everyone's really happy they're no matter what.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the study's always tell us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got to move to Finland if we want to be happy, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, Alain Debutton says in his book, Stata Seng's ID that we attempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us an enduring satisfaction, we are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we'll live out the rest of our lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not reminded that soon after gaining the summit.
[SPEAKER_01]: will be called down again into the fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
[SPEAKER_01]: The things that human beings think will fulfill them simply don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: And no sooner do you achieve one marker of status or success that you think's going to make you happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're quickly gut punched with the realization that it didn't actually give you what you thought it was going to give you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the cycle continues.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, you can take this too far, of course, a certain degree of economic security and well-being, material comfort is important for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We all need that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So clearly, poverty.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying that the opposite at there for is better.
[SPEAKER_01]: Clearly, poverty is a terrible thing that makes
[SPEAKER_01]: life miserable, even unbearable.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on the other end of the scale, do we have a really ask ourselves, how much do I actually need to be content?
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do you think you need to be content?
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do you need to be happy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Various studies have put the number of different places, but it's often not as much as you might think.
[SPEAKER_01]: And anyway, a better benchmark is not really how much do I need to be happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: but perhaps how much do I need not to be miserable, which is a very different thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's another way of saying that the secret to happiness is having low expectations.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe that's how the Scandinavian's do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we said, there's an inflection point though, not having enough will make you miserable, but having too much will make you miserable as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we don't really believe that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's certainly not the way our Western culture works.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the whole advertising industry operates on the principle of FOMO, fear of missing out, and that more and better, always equals happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: More and better, always equal happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what we hear, day in and day out, get more, be more, do more, and you will be happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what does Ecclesiastes call it, a chasing after the wind, the rat race, all of us know, I think, instinctively or intuitively.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's something that's deeply wrong with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love this Dilbert cartoon for those of you who remember Dilbert.
[SPEAKER_01]: This one is, you know, it kind of gets you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you see what's written on the machine?
[SPEAKER_01]: Life suck, three thousand.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what do we, what should we do to be happy?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is Christianity teaches here?
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, I guess one of the questions is, don't all religions, essentially say the same thing about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a familiar script, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The world can't give you happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what you need to do is deny the world and ultimately
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, find your happiness in God, look to God for your happiness or, you know, some transcendent powers, people say, well, I'm spiritual, but not religious, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They're kind of in the same thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm looking for, I'm searching for my fulfillment, my happiness and something that's beyond this world, something that's beyond the material.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you don't really get that or if that doesn't really work for you but you are still a Christian or a religious person you can kind of push your happiness forward and say well I guess life isn't so great but my hope is in what I'll get after death you know my hope is in heaven on the other side life after death now in a sense like those things are broadly true but what they mean across various religions is vastly different and what I want to show you today is why I think
[SPEAKER_01]: Christianity in particular is unparalleled in this regard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why it offers something to us that no other religion can or does?
[SPEAKER_01]: First let's have a look at some of the options.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ways that particularly one of the most ancient ways that people have dealt with the problem of finding satisfaction in life, finding happiness, is what's called detachment, detachment.
[SPEAKER_01]: So interestingly the ancient Greek philosophers had an approach to this.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was essentially the same as the comic religions like Buddhism and Hinduism.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is that happiness, or at least avoiding unhappiness, is achieved by essentially pursuing a kind of detachment from the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the path where we detach ourselves from worldly cares, worldly wants, worldly desires, and that's how we find a sort of inner contentment and inner peace.
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy, epic Titus, a Greek stoic philosopher once wrote, do not seek to have events happen as you want them, sorry as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen and your life will go well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, Buddha taught that when plays are all pain comes, the wise rise above, plays are in pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's a sort of detachment arising above, a living separate from,
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, we're worried having our inner contentment overthrown, you know, by the inevitable loss of things, by inevitable suffering, do not become too emotionally attached to anything in your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't love anything too much or hope for anything too much.
[SPEAKER_01]: So epic Titus once wrote that when you're kissing your child, either, you know, to bed or when you say goodbye in the morning, remember to murmur softly to yourself, tomorrow you will die.
[SPEAKER_01]: So even as you kiss your child, goodnight, you are reminding yourself not to love them too much, not to get too attached because when the inevitable happens, you'll be destroyed by it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I heard the reaction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something within us kind of rightly recoils at that idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels deeply wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: As Tim Keller says, here I saw with the modern research that supports a deep human intuition, namely that diminishing your love for others, or diminishing your attachment to the world, does now increase your satisfaction in life, but greatly undermines it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now maybe the ancient, you know, stoic and calmic idea of attachment is a better approach than the sort of jaded sophistication of Western cynicism that sort of snares at everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet that too ultimately hardens your heart and dehumanizes you.
[SPEAKER_01]: As I mentioned last week, friend of mine who left his Jewish faith to try Buddhism, which included living in a monastery and meditating like all day for several years in Sri Lanka, he discovered that in the end there is something deeply dehumanizing about treating the world like it's an illusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: or that the best way to kind of free our hearts from suffering, from the free ourselves from pain, is to get rid of all desire and all attachment, including pleasurable things like love, and there's something that is deeply alien about that to what it means to be human.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the light of those ancient approaches, if we had to stand back and ask what we've learned about pursuing happiness over the centuries, our lack of progress, if you go back to Ecclesiastes, which was written three thousand years ago, and we're still asking the same kinds of questions, our lack of progress in this regard feels deeply humbling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tim Keller says goes on to say that think of how we have surpassed our ancestors in our ability to travel and communicate in our accomplishments in medicine and science and technology think of how much less brutal and unjust to minorities many societies are today compared with even one hundred years ago in so many ways human life has been transformed we are unimaginably wealthier and more comfortable than our ancestors yet no one is arguing
[SPEAKER_01]: that we are happier than they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a pretty confronting statement, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So we are still struggling and still seeking happiness in essentially the same ways that our four bears did.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you might even say we're probably doing an even worse job of it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: If the massive rise in poor mental health is any indicator, especially among young people in our societies, we are not doing very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the pace of our lives is not helping either.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have more resources at our fingertips than any other society in history.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have more information available to us than any other society in history.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are more comfortable and wealthier and successful in just about every measure than any other point in human history and yet we feel far less fulfilled.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was trying to find ways to express this, but I came across this video by the British Performance poet Shamaya, which I think power for the captures the way we feel, the absurdity of contemporary life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're just going to watch this, we're going to dim the lights.
[SPEAKER_00]: Starting the day with your customized alarm, falling asleep listening to calm, routes to work on Google Maps, group chats on WhatsApp, podcasters, bloggers, influencers, bloggers, the one thing you must do to live longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bus feed headlines, climate deadlines, searching Google for answers, binge watching TikTok dances, tear gas placating the masses, organic food packaged in plastic, the great Pacific garbage patch, the ten-year challenge to essential steps to achieving a life of balance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thirty thousand dollars sneakers, robot teachers, Kim Kardashian's maternity dress, three vital habits that guarantee success, Generation X, Generation Y, Generation Z, Generation Alpha, Four G, Five G, Six G,
[SPEAKER_00]: A.I.V.R.
[SPEAKER_00]: through sixty, drive through pharmacies, pills to help you sleep, pills to keep you awake, pills to stop the side effects of the pills you take, same day delivery, targeted ad epiphanys, front your wealth,
[SPEAKER_00]: for a selfie, for important ways to getting more healthy, the political left, the political right, polar bears, standing on melting ice, Alexa, what's the meaning of life?
[SPEAKER_00]: Fast fiber, driverless cars, holes in the ozone, colonizing Mars, posting pictures of your best date ever on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Meta, five quick sheets to make your life better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fake fake news, January news, cancelled culture, guilty until proved Netflix Prime, YouTube TV, HBO crunchy roles, sunset via live stream at Black Friday, panic, space junk orbiting the planet, rising prices, hospitals in crisis, six tests to help you become more decisive, seven techniques that guarantee rest and ever growing sense of hopelessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight proven methods to help you worry less, where do I fit in all of this nine secrets for reducing stress?
[SPEAKER_00]: I searched for my soul in this modern wilderness ten top tips to have the best year yet, to make happiness increase, to find the life you seek, try to buy my piece, try to find myself, try to be like everyone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mean everything this world expects of me and I'm liked, I'm followed, I'm violent, I'm trending, life unending in this kingdom of plenty.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why do I feel so empty?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's only about that video, they're just...
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of kicks you in the guts, doesn't it?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we get off the hamster wheel?
[SPEAKER_01]: So detachment seems like an attractive option.
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite all our modern efforts, all our technological process, with regards to happiness, it appears we haven't made much progress at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, it feels like we might be going in reverse.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if detachment is dehumanizing, what are the other options?
[SPEAKER_01]: cynicism or despair, well that's ultimately a dead end because that might even be more dehumanizing or life denying than detachment because it's easy to be a critic, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_01]: But it achieves nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Denial, pretend everything is fine, maybe try and convince ourselves in an our case we really will be fulfilled by a success by getting what we want.
[SPEAKER_01]: Despite
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever analysis experience in history, it really will make us happy.
[SPEAKER_01]: All we become really driven, killing ourselves, working eight hours a week, to achieve a life that we have no time to enjoy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a chasing after the wind.
[SPEAKER_01]: Declisiosity says chasing after the wind meaningless.
[SPEAKER_01]: Another approach that I'd say one of the most common options for modern people is to try and find meaning in activism or altruism or benevolence or philanthropy if you're rich.
[SPEAKER_01]: But too often the problem is that when you go that route, you're not really serving others so much as serving yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: You might be using the pool or the latest outrage to find some sense of self-worth or to meet some deep need for significance by trying to make a difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: But helping others to try and heal our own discontent, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: doesn't work in the long run either for you or for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So where does that leave us?
[SPEAKER_01]: Lewis says most people if they really learn how to look into their own hearts would know that they do want and want acutely something that cannot be had in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: but they never keep their promises.
[SPEAKER_01]: The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or we first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us alongings which no marriage, no travel, no learning can really satisfy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not speaking of what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or trips and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm speaking of the best possible ones.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was always something we grasped at in that first moment of longing that just fades away in the reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: The spouse may be a good spouse.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scenery may have been excellent.
[SPEAKER_01]: It turned out to be a good job, but it has evaded us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many people look for this elusive eat, especially in romantic love, kind of finding a soul mate.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that ultimately fails us as well, because we only find in other people what people forget about this is that we only find in other people the same problems, longings, needs, and disappointments that we already feel in ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love what our land-debutton says about this, to be loved by someone is to realise how much they share the same needs that lay at the heart of our own attraction to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: We fall in love with people because from the outside they look so whole, so physically whole and emotionally together.
[SPEAKER_01]: When subjectively we feel dispersed and confused, we would not seek love if there were no lack within us, but we are dismayed by the discovery of a similar lack in the other person, expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now maybe that's a bit of a cynical view, I don't know, but it's not a cynical as what he says next, although it's probably true, which is that in the end, I found that it doesn't really matter who you marry.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance that you'll end up thinking they're all right later on.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we say in the beginning, the secret to happiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, expectations, friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I'm clean.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all about my marriage here.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you do think there's an it out there, some secret to your happiness, which some people look for in romance, of course, or achievement, or having amazing experiences like travel or music or film or food or possessions, whatever it is, yet it continues to elude us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We may hold it briefly.
[SPEAKER_01]: but not for long, happiness satisfaction like the wind dissipates quickly.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we think, okay, let me just have to get over this hill through this challenge, get around this corner, overcome this thing, and then I'll find it, then I'll find the happiness I'm looking for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just gotta get through this season.
[SPEAKER_01]: How many times have I said there?
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just gonna get through this season, everything will be great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just gotta get through this week, everything will be great.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gonna have it as a day, and things will be so much better on the other side.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that starts to sound like the way an addict speaks, which of course, as we all know, just leads us in the end to despair.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Canada says we want something that nothing in this life can give us.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we keep pursuing it in this world, it can make us driven or resentful or self-hating.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we try to hard now heart so that it doesn't bother us, then we harm our humanity and those around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: If, however, if we don't hard now selves and fully feel the grief of desires lost hope, we may find self-destructive ways of drowning it.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these approaches look like dead ends.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, is there a better way?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there is, I think it's the way of Christ, which is the Christian way, to how do we find happiness or satisfaction in a Christian framework?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you remember last week, I said that from one John four, the ultimate meaning of life is to receive and to live in the love of God, because God is love, John says, and so to live in the love of God is to find what it is that you are made for.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we find our deepest meaning.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's not just loving a general sense where we might say, well, I feel really loved or I feel really loving, because that feeling fades, we all know, it comes and goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of love that the Bible is talking about here is, is a love that doesn't change, that is stable and remains forever, despite how we might feel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a love that, as Scripture says, can only be experienced in Christ and because of Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is that if I want to live both a meaningful and satisfied life, I have to learn how to receive and to give the love that I have received in Christ, just as I have seen in the way that Christ did, in the way that He lived, because Jesus shows us that even in the midst of suffering and pain we can have meaning
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the same way, we can experience a kind of deep happiness, a deep contentment that is not destroyed or maligned by our circumstances, a happiness that is more powerful than our circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Christian answer to this
[SPEAKER_01]: The Christian way is that what we need to do is rightly order our loves.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to have rightly ordered love.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what the gospel teaches.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we order our loves correctly or rightly, what that means is when we love each thing in our lives with a love that's appropriate to it,
[SPEAKER_01]: Not more or less than it should be, then will experience contentment or to use the Christian word for this actually, because the Bible doesn't really talk about happiness all that much.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what it says instead, what it talks about is joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll have a deep and abiding joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Happiness comes and goes, but when you learn how to rightly order your love, you will experience a deep and abiding joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: which is something much, much deeper than our circumstances and our circumstances cannot reach them, or cannot reach it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this idea of ordering your love, which comes from Scripture,
[SPEAKER_01]: which I'll show kind of right toward the end here, but it was really an Augustine writing in the fourth century who drew this together and expressed this the best.
[SPEAKER_01]: Augustine grew up in North Africa in a province of Rome.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was well educated, but before he became a Christian, he was a head-ness, he was a pagan, he was a pleasure-seeker, he drank a lot, he had a lot of lovers, he had a child out of wedlock, he had all the material comfort the person could want, but he was miserable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he turned to various religions to try and find the answer to his problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: He eventually turned to philosophy for consolation, but that didn't help.
[SPEAKER_01]: And eventually, he really threw the influence of his mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: He became a Christian.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of his lifelong projects after becoming a Christian was to discover why most people are so discontent and bereft of joy, even if they have everything that they could ever want.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what he concluded was, this was his life's work, that our discontent stems ultimately from the fact that our loves are out of order, our loves are incorrectly ordered.
[SPEAKER_01]: Augustine taught that we are most fundamentally shaped not as much by what we believe or think or even by what we do as much as by what we love.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that everything that we might call kind of human virtues, things, you know, are really just forms of love.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, courage is loving your neighbor's well-being more than your own safety, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Honesty is loving your neighbor's interests more than your own, even if it hurts you to tell the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And because Jesus himself said that all of God's law can be summed up to loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind, strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Hall of the Scriptures, the Hall of the Law can be summarized in those two statements.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love God and love your neighbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Augustine then believed that all human brokenness, all sin, all pain, all suffering was ultimately due to our disordered desires or to put it as he expressed it, our disordered love, our disordered loves.
[SPEAKER_01]: So look at injustice, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You might say that you believe in social equality and you believe in social justice and think that you do, but if you make business decisions or investment decisions that exploit
[SPEAKER_01]: Workers in other countries, or if you buy clothing that's made in sweatshops, it's ultimately because you love your own prosperity and your own comfort and convenience, more than you love your neighbor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: You care about your own comfort more than the consequences that your actions and choices will have on other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, you are love, what you love most will control the way that you act, will control the way that you live.
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, put it really simply, you are what you love.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are what you love.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the problem is not a lack of love.
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem is what you love, how you've ordered your love, and what Augustine argued, is that your loves have an order to them, and that we often love less important things more than we should, and we love more important things less than we should.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ultimately, all unhappiness and disorder in our lives are caused by this disorder of love.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he says, a just and good person is also a person who has rightly ordered their love so that they do not love what is wrong to love or fail to love what should be loved or love too much what should be loved less or love too little what should be loved more.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's he saying?
[SPEAKER_01]: He's saying that there is nothing wrong with loving your work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing wrong with loving your family.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing wrong with enjoying pleasure in life.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's nothing wrong with those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you love those things more than you should, then your love is out of order.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you love making money more than you love justice, then you make your work as your employees, because your love is out of order.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the ultimate, so what is this, the ultimate disorder that causes all of our misery?
[SPEAKER_01]: The ultimate source of our discontent and unhappiness is our failure to love the most important thing first, which is our failure to love God supremely above everything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our failure to love God supremely above everything else.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then His confession's Augustine praise for there is He says this, for there's a joy that is not given to those who do not love you, but only to those who love you for your own sake.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is happiness and there is no other.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but there's is not true joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nevertheless, they will remain drawn to some image of that true joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're loving things that are not going to fulfill them, but nevertheless they're constantly seeking it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're desiring it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their will is drawn to something that will fulfill them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Augustine saying that whether we acknowledge God or not, we were created by him who is love, and therefore it's only in his love that we can find the infinite joy that we were made for.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is, he says, what we were created for, ultimately, like this is the first thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the most important thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The very first love is to experience loving communion with God, our Creator.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now if we don't have that, what Augustine said, if we don't have that, or it's not the first and most important thing in your life,
[SPEAKER_01]: then we look for it in everything else and this is the reason why even the most amazing things in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: The best houses, the best cars, the most money, the best sex, the best food, the best body will never ultimately satisfy you because you are created for a kind of delight and a kind of joy, a kind of fulfillment that nothing in this world can produce for you that can give to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a joy for you that is far beyond them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what Augustine famously said, you may know this quote, you stir us to take pleasure in you alone because you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You stir us to take pleasure in you alone because you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're made for God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So nothing else can give us the kind of fulfillment, enjoy and rest that only God can.
[SPEAKER_01]: We will be continually restless until we find that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And until we do, there'll be an emptiness, a neediness,
[SPEAKER_01]: a desire in us, that eats away at us.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we love anything more than God, we end up, as I said before, becoming kind of like addicts.
[SPEAKER_01]: It will be like an addiction.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know how addiction works.
[SPEAKER_01]: The substance, the drug, gives you a high at first.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, but it wears off.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we, you know, as the law of diminishing returns, you need more and more and more and more of that thing, just to feel normal.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you become enslaved by it and increasingly empty.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what Augustine says is that
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything in this world can be like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you love anything more than God, the same process applies.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives you a rush initially.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you do retail therapy, for example, you buy the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives you a brief rush.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: This piece of clothing or whatever is going to be the best thing I've ever bought.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you wear it twice and then you don't ever wear it again and you go through the same process.
[SPEAKER_01]: We become driven by this need to find something that will fulfill us, but it's always elusive.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the process, we can often harm ourselves and the people around us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for example, what do I mean by that?
[SPEAKER_01]: If you love your child, more than you love God, you will essentially rest your need for significance and security in them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you'll need too much from them, like you'll need them too much to succeed or to be happy or to love you and return.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're a significance, if you're a sense of happiness and meaning is rested on your child or on a spouse, it doesn't matter who it is, anyone that you're trying to get something from to fulfill you, what you're doing is putting a weight on them, a burden on them that they cannot possibly fulfill, and it will crush them, your expectations of what you need from that person will destroy them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply cannot give you what you most deeply need.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some have passed anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Work, career, money, whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it sounds like what I'm suggesting is detachment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so then we stop loving these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: We detach ourselves from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But actually, the Christian faith says, no, no, no, that's not how you do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not what this means.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Augustine's not smuggling a kind of Buddhist or stellar attachment in here.
[SPEAKER_01]: The solution is not to disdain those things, but neither is it to become overly attached to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So neither of those options are going to help you.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the Christian faith says is that all those things are good, all those things are right.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can only actually enjoy them properly.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can only really enjoy them for the gifts that they are to us.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they remain good things, rather than ultimate things.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they remain good things that we enjoy as gifts, the love of our spouse, love of our children, good food, good wine, travel whatever it is, the things that this world can, if you love them as good things as things that are gifts, but don't turn them into ultimate things that you need in order to give you meaning or happiness, then we can enjoy them for what they are and not try to make them more than they should be.
[SPEAKER_01]: An example for, you know, here it could be like wine.
[SPEAKER_01]: You might enjoy a glass of wine and appreciate it for what it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Excellent.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you have an addiction to alcohol, you will never actually enjoy the wine for what it is because you will need it to fulfill something in you constantly that it can never actually give you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you don't enjoy the wine, but you need it in order to survive.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that happens to everything, anything that we put our hope in more deeply than we should.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the solution, Augustine says, is not to love the things of your life less, not to love those things less, but it's to love God more.
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem is not really that you love your family or your job too much, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the way we go about healing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: by trying to not love those things as much.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, we love those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what you need to do to heal that wound in your soul is love God more than you love those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the Christian answer is that you should not love your child less, like Epictitas says, but you should love God more than you love your child.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you can love your child rightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love God more than you love your spouse, and then you can love your spouse rightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Love God more than you love your job, and then you can love your job rightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we love God first, as the ultimate thing, all the other loves in our lives will eventually find their rightful place.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that becomes rightly ordered love.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is the way we enter into joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: So don't love those things less, love God more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tim Keriss says, consider this.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you live alone life, it will tear you up to see the people who matter most so you put in the ground one by one.
[SPEAKER_01]: If your greatest source of contentment and love is your family, that will be intolerable to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you learn to love God more, even more than them, your greatest source of consolation, hope, joy and value will not be diminished by loss and grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, the sorrow will drive you to drink more deeply from the love of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: You will not find yourself empty.
[SPEAKER_01]: You won't harden your heart in order to deal with how your losses tear you up.
[SPEAKER_01]: The love of God can never be taken from you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in his love, the Bible says, you will live with your loved ones forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, okay, I'm going to plan this plane now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of us, no matter how long we've been Christians.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a Christian and you've been following the Lord for a while, we all know that none of us love God perfectly.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of us can love God enough to just kind of sort this out to make this work.
[SPEAKER_01]: No matter how much you might love Him, there's always more to grow in, more to discover.
[SPEAKER_01]: And neither can you just simply, like if you, and if you're not a Christian, by the way, and you're hearing this going, okay, well, this sounds good, this sounds reasonable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you can't just say to yourself, okay, God loves me, okay, I'll say that, God loves me, I believe that, and then expect your life to change.
[SPEAKER_01]: And neither can you just simply say, all right, okay, I hear this, this is good, from now on,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to love God within my heart and then just expect that your life will change.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't work that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for this kind of love to be kindled in us church, we need to first understand the reason that we have failed to love God and our neighbor in the first place.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we want to enter into this kind of love, we first have to understand how we got ourselves into this predicament.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why we don't love God?
[SPEAKER_01]: with all our hearts, why we don't love our neighbors as we should.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Christian answer to that is because we are sinners, we are fallen, broken people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, the Scripture say, in our natural state, we don't want to love God at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, we hate Him.
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't want anything to do with Him.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something in us that pushes Him away, even though He loves us eternally.
[SPEAKER_01]: So naturally, we don't really want to love God, but until we come to understand that we do need to and that we need His love to survive, that we are in desperate need of salvation, that we need forgiveness, that we need grace, then we can't come to this place of surrender.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, for God to forgive our sins, the Son of God became human, became mortal, became one of us, and graciously died in our place on the cross.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is an offensive idea to many people, but just let me put two things to you and then I'll finish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two ways that this message, this understanding, can bring about the love of God in your heart and can change you forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first thing is,
[SPEAKER_01]: that we need an acknowledgement.
[SPEAKER_01]: We need to come to a place of acknowledgement where we recognise that our lives are not working.
[SPEAKER_01]: that we're not healthy, that we're not whole, and that we need grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we come to that acknowledgement, that we actually need help, and we surrender ourselves to God, and we say, God, I need your help.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need you to help me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm broken, I'm falling apart, I can't make my life work.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you humble yourselves, this is humility.
[SPEAKER_01]: And humility is what softens our hearts to kind of receiving the love of God, opening up our hearts to receive the love of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second thing when we that happens is when we acknowledge our need, then the offer of His grace and His forgiveness through Christ then ignites our hearts with love.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we surrender and we say our need help, when we humble ourselves, we say our need help and need your help.
[SPEAKER_01]: That softens our hearts, opens our hearts to receive His help and His love.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when we do receive that offer of grace and we say, God forgive me and help me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I open my life to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then His love fills us and ignites us and begins to transform us.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let me put it to you like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want to forgive someone who has wrongfully cost you a great deal of money and can't afford to pay you back.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got two options.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can either press charges.
[SPEAKER_01]: or you can absorb the debt and pay it yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, if God was going to forgive us, he had those two options.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could either condemn us forever, or he could absorb the debt and pay it himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what we believe that he did when he sent his son Jesus to die on the cross for us.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a great debt that we could not pay, but God himself has come and paid that debt, has absorbed that debt on our behalf.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we receive that, when we acknowledge our need of that, it softens our hearts to receive His love and it ignites our hearts with His love.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's one verse I want to leave you with, I'll get the band to come on up as we finish.
[SPEAKER_01]: One that'll be very familiar to you, or for many of you, and it's this, John three sixteen, for God so loved the world, so loved you, that he gave his only son, and that whoever believes in him will not perish, will not fall apart, will not be destroyed, that will have everlasting life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that life is not just something that happens after we die, it happens the moment we humble ourselves and say, God, I need you, I need your help.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you say, Jesus, my life isn't working, come and help me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what Jesus says in response to the meaninglessness of ecclesiasties.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus once said that if you come to me,
[SPEAKER_01]: And you abide in my love, but my love fill you and live in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus says, I will give you fullness of joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll make your infectious words, or I'll make your joy complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that is the way, the Christian way that we enter happiness, in just contentment, satisfaction, into joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where it begins and then it becomes a lifelong journey of learning how to live into and order our loves in a way that will enable us to have an experience that fuller, the joy that is promised and Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we stand?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to pray and then we're going to sing our final song together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Father, we come to you
[SPEAKER_01]: And some of us here might be, maybe those have walked with you for many, many, many years.
[SPEAKER_01]: There may be others here this morning who are hearing this come the last couple of weeks maybe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, you know, I want to know what this is all about.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to know what it means to
[SPEAKER_01]: no God in the way that Jesus invites me to know Him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so one John one says, if any of us says that we're without sin, then we are deceiving ourselves, but if we humble ourselves and acknowledge our need and ask for mercy, God who is faithful and just
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll forgive us about sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll set us on this path toward what is right, toward a rightly ordered love, to a rightly ordered life.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is full of joy, even in the hard times, even in times of pain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so for those of us here in the room who are followers of Jesus,
[SPEAKER_01]: I just invite you for a moment to renew your faith in Christ.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you Jesus for what you've done for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I humble myself again and confess my need.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thank you for all the wonderful things that you have done in my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: How you've changed me and transformed me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I give you praise.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thank you that I have learned that only in you and in your love can my heart and its rest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if there's anyone here this morning that wants to begin this journey for the first time, that all I need to say is Lord Jesus, help me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to believe in you and follow you, walk with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to know what this love is like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I soften my heart toward you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I open myself to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Come and fill me with your love and presence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Forgive me, way.
[SPEAKER_01]: My wrongs, my brokenness, transform me, I pray.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I ask that you would lead me through my life, into the joy, the fullness of joy that I've been hearing about today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in Jesus' name I pray.
[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.
[UNKNOWN]: Amen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's sing together.