Happiness

Sermon Transcript

I’m thankful to know and love many of you in the room today; I’m thankful also to see some new faces I don’t know, and some others I’m in the process of getting to know. Though I know some of you quite well, I don’t know any of you as well as I know my wife, and some of you I don’t know at all. But one thing I know about everyone here: You want to be happy, and today as we continue our series looking at various topics from the book of proverbs, we’re looking at what the proverbs teach us about happiness. As we do, we’ll see that they don’t exactly command us to be happy. Happiness isn’t something you can so easily choose, like you might choose to stand up or sit down. They don’t even necessarily command us to desire happiness. That would be like commanding you to breathe oxygen, eat food when you are hungry, or take your hand off the stove when it’s hot. It’s natural to desire happiness; we all already do it. But it’s not natural to be happy. We see from these proverbs that happiness must be cultivated. So cultivate happiness, and to do that we’ll first look at why the proverbs direct us to cultivate happiness, and then how the proverbs teach us to cultivate happiness.

 

Why?

 

Again, Proverbs assumes we want to be happy, so it doesn’t command it, but it does highlight the importance of it. Though we all want to be happy, it is possible for us to get so busy with our lives that we lose track of what is going on inside us. Compare it to bodily health: Everyone would rather be healthy than sick, but it is still possible to neglect the health of our body amid our other pursuits. Well, even though we all want to be happy, it is possible to neglect our happiness amid our other pursuits. So part of the wisdom God wants to give us through these proverbs is to reveal the importance of happiness. The first basic reason to cultivate happiness is because happiness is a big deal. It really matters.

 

So Proverbs 12:25 says, “Anxiety in man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.” Why pursue gladness? Because the opposite in this case, anxiety, will weigh you down. Fear is generally more localized to a specific threat and drives you to action—to fight or flee, famously. Anxiety is more generalized—there’s no fight to fight, no threat to flee, but you still feel afraid. And since you can’t resolve it by fighting or fleeing, what does it do to you? It just sticks around, and weighs your heart down. But you still have to go to work or school, you still have to get food and eat it, if you’re a Christian you probably still feel compelled to gather for worship with your church and build it up, and that’s all very good—one of the worst thing you can do for anxiety, in fact, is to just retreat into yourself and wallow in it. But with the anxiety, as you do all those things, it’s like you’re doing them while carrying a heavy weight around with you. When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike around the neighborhood in which I grew up, and sometimes as you’d do so you’d run into some friends who didn’t have their bikes with them, but wanted to come along to whatever you were doing next. So sometimes we’d have one guy stand on the pegs on the back tire, and another guy sit on the handlebars up front, while one person pedaled. The bike still worked, but it went much slower and generally not as straight. Why? It was weighed down. That’s what life is like for the anxious person. Now you can say, “Well then I just need to pedal harder,” but if that’s all you ever do, and you don’t address what’s adding the weight, that’s foolish. Just as a bike wasn’t designed to carry a person on the back and front in addition to the rider, your heart wasn’t designed to carry around perpetual anxiety. So if your solution to anxiety is only to push through and work harder without intentionally cultivating happiness, that’s foolish.

 

Proverbs 18:14 makes a similar point: “A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” Nobody likes being sick, but it is possible to be happy while you are sick. So the big priority of your life should not be to just never get sick or cultivate the optimal amount of physical health. For one thing, it’s an exercise in futility: Outwardly we are wasting away, and our bodies are destined to perish. You will get sick sometimes, and the good news is that if you get sick, your spirit can endure it. But you know what no one can bear? A crushed spirit. Compare the person with cancer who is joyful to the person with a clean bill of physical health who wakes up every morning wondering if they really want to even be alive anymore. Real people sometimes live like that, and some of you know it firsthand. A crushed spirit who can bear?

 

These proverbs show us the importance of happiness from the negative side: Cultivate happiness because its opposite is so undesirable. Anxiety in your heart will weigh you down, and a crushed spirit who can bear? But Proverbs 15:15 shows us positively what happiness can do: “All the days of the afflicted are evil, but the cheerful of heart has a continual feast.” This is showing us that it is possible to be afflicted, to have external circumstances, days, that are evil, and there evil doesn’t even necessarily imply moral evil, though it would include that. Another way to say it would just be, “All the days of the afflicted are bad.” You all know what it’s like to have a bad day. Can you imagine if all your days were bad days? Here the proverb proposes an afflicted person whose days are all bad, and yet, to the cheerful of heart, it is a continual feast. All your circumstances can be bad, but if you cultivate a cheerful heart, your life will be a continual feast. That doesn’t mean you’ll never be sad; we live in a fallen world, and both sin and its consequences should cause us grief. A cheerful heart doesn’t shield you from grief, but it does shield you from despair. Here’s one way the New Testament puts it: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8-9). That’s the kind of continual feast proverbs has in mind.

 

I remember speaking with another pastor in the city once and learning that they had lost their music director, and he had a background in music, so each week he was preparing the songs, leading the musicians in practice, and then during the service, leading the singing. Then he’d take the guitar strap off his shoulder, put the guitar on the stand, and go preach the sermon that he’d also spent hours upon hours preparing that week. I said something like “Oh I’m so sorry that you’re having to go through that,” which I thought was compassionate, but I could tell it kinda bugged him. He responded to me joyfully, “Well but he’s a persevering God.” The extra work and preparation wasn’t a burden to him; why? At least in part it is because he was cheerful of heart, and so it was all still a feast. Pastor Timothy Keller is maybe the person most commonly quoted in my sermons; he died in 2023 of pancreatic cancer, and in the years leading up to his death, he did a number of interviews. In one I heard, he talked about how the experience of cancer has strengthened his hope of the resurrection, and he just said somewhat matter-of-factly of he and his wife, “We’ve never been happier.” The cancer was destroying his body, and what did he say? We’ve never been happier. How can that be? It can be because the cheerful of heart has a continual feast. Cultivate happiness because its opposite is so devastating, and cultivate happiness because it is so powerful. A cheerful heart can make even the hardest of circumstances into a continual feast.

 

And, you must cultivate happiness, because only you know you. Proverbs 14:10 says “the heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.” Just verses later Proverbs 14:13 says “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” These proverbs point out that whatever you are feeling, only you can really feel it. Marie Curie is alleged to have said that her sore throat is worse than others’, the point of course being that all you can know is how your sore throat makes you feel; you cannot know how someone else’s sore throat makes them feel. So also if your heart is bitter, only you really know what that feels like, and, on the flipside, if your heart is joyful, no stranger, no one outside your heart, shares that joy. You may try to explain how you are feeling, you may even express it physically, but that will always have its limits. In fact, Proverbs 14:13 adds that even laughter, which would appear to reveal a joyful heart, may just be hiding an aching one.

 

Have you ever felt frustrated that no matter how many times you try to make yourself known and explain yourself to people, nobody seems to really get you? Proverbs 14:10 is telling us we should expect that. So what do you do with it? Well, it’s another reason that you must take responsibility for cultivating your own happiness, rather than expecting others to know how you are feeling and change what they are doing to fix it. They don’t know what you’re feeling; only you do, and when you take that demand off people, it frees you to love them rather than being bitter with them for not loving you as well as they would if they knew everything you were feeling the way you did. In the early years of my marriage especially one of the most common sources of quarrels between me and my wife was my foolish demand that she be able to perceive exactly what I needed to hear and say it. Take that off others, and recognize that whether it is your joys or your sorrows, only you really know them.

 

And then, if you do actually want to be known to some extent by others, which is possible, and if you do want the help from others they actually can give, that means it is your responsibility to make what you are feeling known and to ask for it. Of course it’s great when someone knows you well enough that they can just tell when something is off—who doesn’t want that? But if it’s not there, there is something you can do: You can tell people, “Hey, I’m dealing with some above-average anxiety these days. Would you pray for me?” May saying things like that be normal in this church.

 

And, on the flipside, as we seek to be instruments in God’s hands for one another’s happiness, this reality should compel us to push past surface-level interactions to know one another more deeply, while recognizing the limits of our ability to do so. Since we know that even in laughter the heart may ache, we should not assume that just because someone looks happy, they really are. Let’s be a church whose members regularly take the time to ask questions like, “How is your heart?” “How are you really doing?” and sometimes, the answer truly is, “I’m doing great. Life is a continual feast,” but sometimes it is not, and we want to give people space and permission to say when it is not. Because only they know what they’re feeling and what it feels like to feel it, we should be slow to assume that we know everything is fine, or that we know things are hard for them! Think of my earlier example with the other pastor in Philly—I thought he must be weighed down, when in fact he was enjoying a feast! Point being, wise love for others means taking the time to actually know them, rather than imposing on them what we might feel in their situation or what we assume they must be feeling in their situation. And as we do that, we just need to keep our limitations in mind—love compels us to desire the happiness of others, but you can’t make someone else’s happiness your ultimate responsibility. You aren’t them, and more importantly, you aren’t God, but you can be an instrument in God’s hands for the cultivation of their happiness.

 

Because, after all, the final reason to cultivate happiness is that it can be cultivated! We all want to be happy, we recognize that sometimes we aren’t happy, and some of us even find that to be happy at all is a big struggle. Happiness is not a simple switch you can flip, but you can cultivate it. Your emotions are not the victims of your circumstances or even of other people. One can be afflicted, yet cheerful of heart, and thus enjoy a continual feast. How, then, can we cultivate happiness? Let’s look at that next.

 

How?

 

There are four basic ways these proverbs give us to cultivate happiness: Make peace, pay attention to your body, listen to good words, and trust in the LORD. Proverbs 12:20 says, “Deceit is in the heart of those who devise evil, but those who plan peace have joy”. Those who plan peace have joy. Peace is not always attainable in this life, but this verse speaks to what we are planning for. What are we aiming at? Those who aim at peace have joy, whereas its opposites—deceit, evil, are enemies of joy. We saw earlier that anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down; you know what else can really weigh you down? Outstanding conflict—that sense that someone is mad at you, really doesn’t like you, or that something is still off with someone who does like you! Now again, I hasten to add that you can’t always avoid this—the fear of man lays its own snare (Prov 29:25), and you should not build your life around making sure no one ever dislikes you. As one book I recently read said about criticism, the only way to avoid criticism, or we could say, being disliked, is to say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing.

 

And yet, the question Proverbs 12:20 puts to us, is what are you aiming at? Are you working toward peace, or looking for a fight? It’s the one who works toward peace who will have the most joy in the long run. So if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all (Rom 12:14). Overlook smaller offenses, bear with one another’s weaknesses, talk about tensions when they are really damaging peace, but also know when you’ve talked enough and it’s time to just move forward in peace even though not every i got dotted and not every t got crossed. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you (Eph 4:31-32). We’ll talk about all this more in a couple weeks when we look at what the proverbs teach us about conflict, but for now consider: What are you planning in your relationships? To cultivate happiness, plan peace.

 

And next, to cultivate happiness, pay attention to your body. Proverbs 14:30 says that “a tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot” and Proverbs 17:22 says, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” We could easily have looked at this under the “why” as it does give us another reason to cultivate happiness: It affects the health of your body. You know the feeling of anxiety, for example: The increased heart rate, the tense shoulders, the sleep loss. More research is now being done into psychosomatic disorder and researchers debate it, but there is some link now widely recognized in the medical community between stress and things like chest pain, digestive problems, increased blood pressure, muscle tension, and even a weakened immune system. And as is often the case, scripture was there thousands of years earlier pointing out how a tranquil heart has a positive effect on the health of your body, while envy has a negative effect. It even describes a joyful heart as good medicine. So when I say pay attention to your body to cultivate happiness, I mean pay attention to physical symptoms that may indicate a lack of happiness. Certainly talk to a doctor, but don’t be surprised if your doctor suggests that your physical symptoms may be stress related. Your body, then, can be like another warning light on the dashboard, letting you know that something isn’t right under the hood.

 

There are also things you can do with your body to cultivate happiness. Proverbs 15:30 says that “the light of the eyes rejoices the heart, and good news refreshes the bones”. I’ll talk about good news in a moment, but for now just notice the first half of the verse: The light of the eyes rejoices the heart. Last month I spoke with 3-4 faithful Christians who are struggling with depression, and of course, last month was February, one of the coldest, darkest months of the year. It does seem to me that I don’t have nearly as many of those conversations in July. Why? Because, as Ecclesiastes 11:7 says, “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.” Here is some simple wisdom from proverbs: If you want to cultivate happiness, get off your screens, and get outside while the sun is out. And of course, we know of many other things we can do physically to cultivate happiness in addition to getting enough sunlight: Get enough sleep, eat healthy, exercise. These aren’t a magic bullet, but to neglect them and expect God to give you happiness is a bit like neglecting work and expecting God to give you money.

 

What about medication? Is taking medication something you might do with your body to cultivate greater happiness? It is common today for people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression or anxiety along with a host of other psychiatric diagnoses to be prescribed medication; I know some of you in the room who have been helped by such medication. Proverbs doesn’t name that as a way to cultivate happiness; as we’ve already seen, it actually says a cheerful heart is like medicine for your body, rather than prescribing medicine to bring cheer to the heart. That said, scripture nowhere prohibits it and does hold up to us the value of cultivating happiness, which medication may help with. So whether you should take medication is really a matter of wisdom, and to that end let me read you these words from Dr. David Powlison, the late former director of the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation. Powlison writes specifically of anxiety medication:

 

“Medication, as any honest doctor will tell you, is about alleviating symptoms. It doesn’t deal with the underlying issue of how a frail human being, living in a very threatening world, deals with life. Does that mean medication is always wrong? No. If you are in a complete panic and medication helps to calm you down, that can be a good thing. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that because medication (or a vacation, a good movie, a beer, or sexual intimacy, etc.) takes the edge off your anxiety, you don’t have to do the hard work of learning to trust God and depend on him. Medications for anxiety are notoriously overprescribed, and they all have unpleasant side effects. In our culture medication is often the first resort. But it is better to use medication as a last resort. If you and your doctor decide you should use medication, make a commitment to not ignore the troubles that are making you anxious. Instead, use the temporary relief the medication provides as the context for learning to deal with your problems in a godly way. Also make sure you have a trusted, wise, and godly friend to talk with about your troubles. Don’t depend on your medication to heal you; learn to depend on God for the real, deep-down change that will fill you with peace in the midst of your troubles.”

 

So medication may help, it may not, but what do you really need to cultivate happiness? You need good news. The light of the eyes rejoices the heart, and good news refreshes the bones. Through your eyes you can see light that cultivates happiness, and through your ears, the parallel to light is good news. So to cultivate happiness next, listen to good news. Remember earlier we saw in Proverbs 12:25 that anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but what makes him glad? A good word. So Proverbs 25:25 adds, “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” If you are thirsty, what do you need? Cold water. If you are anxious or depressed, what do you need? A good word, good news. In the book of Genesis we read the story of a man named Jacob who had twelve sons, his favorite of which was Joseph. But one day when Joseph was out working in the fields with his brothers, his brother sold him into slavery. Only they didn’t tell their father that; instead, they made it look like a fierce animal had devoured him. The text tells us then that his sons and daughters tried to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, “No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning” (Gen 37:35). What’s that? A crushed spirit. But later God raised Joseph up to be the second-in-command in Egypt, and when Joseph’s brothers discovered this, they returned to Jacob and told him: “Joseph is still alive, and he is ruler over all the land of Egypt” (Gen 45:26). One they convinced Jacob this was true, we read that his spirit revived. He said he was going to die grieving because he thought his son was dead, and so what did he need? He needed the good news that his son was alive, and his spirit revived. The worst news he had ever received, that his son was dead, could only be offset by the good news that his son was alive.

 

What is the good news we need to hear, then? Well, it must correspond to the worst news, and in a sense, the worst news of our lives is right there in Proverbs 14:13, which we already read. Did you catch it? “The end of joy may be grief.” We are sometimes happy in this life, aren’t we? And yet here’s the bad news behind it all: In this world, even our joys end in grief. So you work toward peace in your relationships, and finally you resolve your outstanding conflicts…and then another one arises. You pay attention to your body, you get enough sunlight, you get enough sleep, you exercise, you eat healthy, and then what happens? Eventually, your body starts to decay, and you die. The last couple years of Tim Keller’s life may have been a continual feast, even through pancreatic cancer, but his life still ended. Build your happiness on anything that is confined to this life, and it will end in grief.

 

But maybe you’ve been around church before and you’re thinking, “But what about life after death?” Yes, the Bible, along with the vast majority of humans in the world today and throughout human history, affirms that our souls live on after death, but that is not necessarily good news. Alongside the Bible’s affirmation of our ongoing personal existence after death, the Bible affirms that after death we will face the judgment of a perfectly just God, and that any who appear before him without a perfect record of righteousness will be condemned, with no hope of redemption. Left to ourselves, then, that means our grief won’t merely last until death, as Jacob said of himself. It means our grief will last beyond death, into eternity. Can you imagine an eternally crushed spirit, one that not even death will relieve? Life after death is bad news if that’s all there is.

 

What good news could possibly lift our spirits from that bad news, then? It is the good news at the very center of the story of the Bible, what we call the gospel, a word meaning “good news”. It is the good news that though we were full of deceit and evil, God had a plan to make peace with us. The plan began with God the Father sending God the Son to become human, and when the Son became human, do you know how he was described? “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:2). Wait what? Why would the God-man, the eternally happy one, become a man of sorrows, and acquaint himself with grief? The text goes on to tell us: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4-5). He bore the grief our sins deserved, and paid the penalty for them in full! And the good news doesn’t even end there. The good news is that even his life didn’t end in grief, because he rose from the dead, body and all, not into judgment, but into eternal life!

 

And now he comes to you by his Spirit, through his people, proclaiming to you good news of peace. Be reconciled to God. The conflict that will only steal your joy is to keep fighting against him and to keep looking to things in this world that are destined to perish to make you happy. Your happiness is a big deal. Don’t try to bear an eternally crushed spirit. Stop fighting against God, stop trying to be good enough for God, and trust his promise instead, that whoever believes in Jesus will have eternal life, and you will be at peace with him.

 

If you do, you will find in Jesus the friend for which your heart longs, which no other human can be. My Hebrew teacher in seminary used to tell us that in order to teach a language to beginners, you have to lie to them. Of course, she didn’t actually lie to us, but what she meant was you give them rules like, “When you’re forming a verb, this is what you do” that are generally true, but as you get deeper into the language, you realize aren’t always true. Well the Bible does that too. It never lies to us, but it doesn’t give us the whole story at once. So Proverbs 14:10 says “The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy” which is true as far as it goes, but if you are in Christ today, you do actually have a high priest who knows exactly both the bitterness and joys of your heart, and who sympathizes personally with you. It’s when you get to know him like that that you can stop demanding that others be that which they can never be, and when you know him like that and stop demanding that of others, guess what? It tends to cultivate your happiness.

 

The good news concerning him is the good news that is like cold water to a thirsty soul. If you want to cultivate happiness, keep listening to that good news, over and over again, from every angle of its glory. When your body alerts you that happiness is lacking, and only you know your own bitterness, where do you turn? Here are some ways to cultivate happiness: Keep gathering with your church to hear the preaching of the good news of Christ, to sing the good news of Christ, to see the good news of Christ, to confess the good news of Christ, and to pray in response to the good news of Christ. Pick up your Bible and read the good news of Christ. Listen to recordings of the preaching of the good news of Christ or songs that sing the good news of Christ. Call a Christian brother or sister, tell them that you’re anxious, depressed, bitter, whatever it may be, and don’t ask them to fix it; just ask them to say something true to you about God. Ask them to give you the good news of Jesus, and don’t nickel and dime them on whether they did it just right. Just listen to good news. And speak good news to yourself, so that you can listen to it that way too! In Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ classic work Spiritual Depression, he says that one of your problems is that you are listening to yourself more than you are talking to yourself. In Psalm 42, the depressed Psalmist says to himself, “Why are you cast down, o my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 42:5). What’s he doing? He’s telling his soul good news: “I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God”! You may also be helped by talking to someone who has more experience speaking the gospel to people dealing with similar issues to you; that could be a pastor or what we commonly call a biblical counselor today. We are thankful to work with some biblical counseling organizations and even have some funds available to subsidize such counseling if it seems wise to do so; if you are considering that kind of assistance, please let us know.

 

And brothers and sisters, as we seek to be instruments in God’s hands in one another’s lives for one another’s happiness, what our brothers and sisters need most fundamentally from us is the good news of Jesus, not good advice. That’s not to say there is no place for good advice—we see scripture itself giving it: Get some sunlight if you’re depressed, yes. But doesn’t it go deeper to hear that Jesus is near, that he sympathizes and fully understands everything you are going through, that your sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and you bear it no more, that he has overcome the world, that his Spirit is now in you and will never leave you, that he is coming again to raise even your lowly body to be like his glorious body, and will wipe away every tear from your eyes? In that day the light of his face will render the sun obsolete, and our hearts will rejoice.

 

So what is the ultimate way to cultivate happiness? Trust in the LORD. “The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it” (Prov 10:22). “The hope of the righteous brings joy, but the expectation of the wicked will perish” (Prov 10:28). “Blessed is he who trusts in the LORD” (Prov 16:20). “An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices” (Prov 29:6). The path of wisdom, the path of righteousness, the path of faith in Christ, fellowship with Christ, and increasing conformity to the likeness of Christ, is the path to happiness. You can’t control the timing or amount of it you experience in this life. If Jesus was a man of sorrows, the path with him will involve sorrow for you too. It led one of his first followers, Paul, to imprisonment, but then he sang from the jail cell (Acts 16:25). It led him to be counted sorrowful in the world, though he testified that he was always rejoicing (2 Cor 6:10). You may wake up tomorrow and the depression, the anxiety, the pain, the grief, and the bitterness are still there, but Jesus will be there too, and one day, he will take it all away.