Christian Happiness: Part Two | Tim Henderson+

Alright. Good to see you guys again. Have you guys been having a good weekend? It's beautiful out there, provided that you like it when it's a thousand degrees, which it is. We helped one of our fellows move in yesterday—Caitlin and Andy, if they're here—and we were dragging stuff up to their 3rd floor apartment. It was hot, toasty, but we got it done.

Well, hope you're having a great day. Hope you've had a great week, and I hope that maybe the happiness of this last week was influenced by what we talked about last week. We're doing a series—just a short, two-week mini on Christian happiness.

Some time ago, I came across a sermon by Jonathan Edwards, a Bible teacher from a couple hundred years ago. He makes the case that Christians can be, should be, ought to be the happiest people on earth. We have resources of both magnificent happiness and durable happiness, and if we understood it, it would have a transforming effect in our lives.

The Three Reasons for Christian Happiness

Last week we started this, and I gave you his three main points from his framework for Christian happiness. Does anybody remember what they are?

Number one? Bad things turn out for good.

Number two? Good things can never be taken away.

Number three? The best is yet to come.

Bad Things Turn Out for Good

When we say that bad things turn out for good, we're referencing passages like this:

All things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purposes — Romans 8:28

And also:

Our light and momentary afflictions are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all — 2 Corinthians 4

God is a genius, and he takes all of our bad things and turns them for good. That's pretty extraordinary when you consider some of the bad things we've experienced.

I think Jesus' crucifixion is perhaps the ultimate example of this. The glory of his resurrection was predicated on the agony of his crucifixion. Even that most hideous darkness was turned into glorious good. What he did for Jesus, he does for us. He turns all things—even the bad things—to good for those who love him.

Good Things Can Never Be Taken Away

Not only that, but our good things can never be taken away. It's not just that insignificant good things last forever, although there will be plenty of additional things in our lives. Really, the nature of the things he gives us is absolutely permanent.

His overwhelming love, his grace, his unfathomable kindness—to make it possible for us to stand before him and not be destroyed, to stand before him and be loved and approved of—will never cease. We'll have it for all of time.

Whatever shame you drag around, whatever secret misery haunts you, whatever you've done, or perhaps even whatever you've become that nobody knows but you, is and always will be in Christ expunged. This will never cease to be true: his covering mercy is fixed and will never go away. Your inconsolable secret can be forever soothed.

Our bad things turn out for good, and our good things can never be taken away.

The Best Is Yet to Come

Number three: the best is yet to come. It is, you guys. The best is yet to come and it's going to be amazing.

Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to compress the future. Over the next year, a bunch of really horrible stuff is going to go down and a bunch of astonishingly beautiful stuff is going to happen. It's going to be a mix. Next year, same. Next year, same.

There will be high highs, low lows, and great complexity until one day—maybe it's tomorrow, but someday in a year or two years or five years, I don't know—someday, after all of this mixture of happiness and sadness and complexity and craziness, Jesus is going to come back. He's going to physically, actually, genuinely, really come back to the earth.

He's going to raise from the dead everyone who has ever lived, all of us, all humanity across the millennia raised from the dead to stand before him. When that happens, he will separate humanity as sheep from goats. He will destroy his enemies and he will grant eternal life to all those who love him. He will restore this very world to be what it was always meant to be—a place of love and creativity, of joy and worship.

And all those countless masses—I don't even know, is it millions, is it billions?—these teeming masses that have bent the knee to him and come under his saving mercies will live for a hundred million billion millennia, and then forever after that, in a world of endless and increasing joy. And it is going to be absolutely bonkers. And you want to be there.

The Bible talks about this all the time. It's filled with sometimes hints, and then sometimes more explicit descriptions of what this is going to be like. The Old Testament and the New Testament alike are filled with these anticipations of unimaginable happiness. You might have some passages that you know, that you're like, "Oh, this is the clearest picture I've seen." I want to share with you what might be my favorite. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I would say maybe Isaiah 35. If you have a Bible, turn to Isaiah 35. I think this might be my favorite passage about this world that is coming. It's not very well known, which is kind of weird. You might recognize a couple snippets because John quotes from it in Revelation. But just hear it.

This is what is coming. Check this out:

The desert and the parched land will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom like the crocus. It will burst into bloom. It will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it. The splendor of Carmel and Sharon, they will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God. Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way. Say to those with fearful hearts, be strong, do not fear, for your God will come. He will come with vengeance, with divine retribution. He will come to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool. The thirsty ground, bubbling springs. In the haunts where the jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow. And a highway will be there. It'll be called the way of holiness. The unclean will not journey on it. It will be for those who walk in that way, and wicked fools will not go about on it. No lion will be there, nor any ferocious beast will get up on it. They will not be found there, but only the redeemed will walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. — Isaiah 35:1-10

I'm telling you, it is going to be amazing, and you want to be there. Here, this is where it's gonna be. And when it happens, all of the sadness of these days—which is considerable—will flee away. Joy and gladness will overtake you. The image is like a tsunami, like a tidal wave coming. Joy and gladness will overtake you, and there will be no escaping it. Your life will be overwhelmed, flooded with happiness.

Now, there's a whole bunch of stuff in here. This is worth savoring and reading through and pondering. What does all this mean? I'll give you an organizing framework to think of it in three different lenses.

Three Things He Says

First, notice that it's gonna be a time of transformation. Watch what's gonna be transformed. He says, "The desert and the parched land will be glad. The wilderness will rejoice and blossom." Which is to say, everything that is dead and barren and ugly will become alive and beautiful.

I grew up in Southern California, which gets a reputation for being beautiful. But do you know the dirty little secret about Southern California? It is a desert. Everything is brown and dead and ugly. I think the ocean's nice because that's blue, but my sister lives out there and we love her family. We go out often to visit them in the summertime. We go in the summertime. And it's ugly. Is it not ugly?

Look out these windows. Do you see what I'm talking about? Nothing like that. It's all brown. It's all dead. There's like an occasional avocado tree, but it's just really, really ugly. I was talking to Robin—that's my sister—about it, and saying, I mean, okay, well, apologies to your entire state.

Everything's brown because you live in a desert. She's like, no, no, no. She said, you always come at the wrong time. You come in the summertime, and this is barren and ugly and hideous. However, you should come sometime in the spring. In fact, she said, what you should have done is you should have come here in 2019, because every once in a while in California, they get what they call a super bloom. Have you ever seen this? Do you know about this?

Apparently, latent in these hills that are all brown and dead and ugly are poppy seeds or poppy plants that are gonna turn into poppy plants, and when they bloom, they all bloom at once and it is extraordinary. Look at this. This is brown and dead and then, blat, it just goes insane. Robin says what's amazing about it—well, what's bad about it is that it ruins all the traffic because you're driving down these highways that are normally brown and then it just explodes into color and everybody stops. The highways just get all jammed.

This is what Isaiah is talking about. The day is coming that all the brown stuff, all the ugly stuff—literally and I think metaphorically as well—all the dead things are gonna come to life. It is gonna be a time of transformation.

Listen to the number of things that he says are gonna be different. Feeble hands become strong. Knees that give way become steady. I appreciate that one—my knees are dying and it really drives me crazy. Fearful hearts will become fearless. The wicked will be put down. All those that rule in evil, not forever. It's going to change. There'll be a transformation.

Blind eyes become seeing eyes. Deaf ears become hearing ears. Those that are lame, crippled, can't walk, will leap like a deer. Do you ever see children with cerebral palsy, strapped into a wheelchair and they can't—that is not a permanent condition. It's not permanent. Those that are in Christ and that are restrained, the lame, they will leap like a deer. Mute tongues will shout for joy.

I take all that to mean all of our physical maladies. What are yours? What aches? What have you lost? It's all reversed. It's all gonna be transformed. These broken, dying bodies will be transformed to be like Jesus' glorious body. And it's going to be extraordinary.

Not just our bodies, he goes on. Listen. He says, there'll be streams in the desert. Burning sand will become a pool. The actual place where it's just hot, worthless, dead sand will turn into a lake, turn into a pool, dry ground into springs. It's a picture of everything as Samwise Gamgee would say, everything sad comes untrue. This is what we're looking forward to. It is a time of radical transformation.

What's Missing

Now, second thing to notice: what's not gonna be there anymore? Listen to this list. Here's the things that won't be there anymore. He says, there'll be no more unclean people, no more wicked fools, and no more ferocious beasts. Okay? No more vicious, destroying things.

The first one, no more unclean people, should give you pause if you hope or expect to be there yourself. One of the most extraordinary things that God has accomplished, is accomplishing and will accomplish is devising a way to destroy sin without destroying sinners. I will be there. This is my inheritance. I'm gonna partake of all of it. But I'm not clean. How does this work? How is he gonna do it if there's not gonna be any unclean people there, and I have some hope of being there, and yet I'm not clean? How do we close that gap?

The brilliance of the gospel is that Jesus, through his own death and resurrection, has devised a way so that a banished person will not remain estranged from him. That though I have no right to any of this, I will be made right to be there. It's not that I've lived so clean that I deserve this, but that he has found a way to clean me so that I can partake of that which I do not deserve.

The gospel can be summarized essentially as a story of the unfathomable grace that purchases undeserving people unimaginable glory. That we will get in if we are in Christ—if you are in Christ, all this will be yours even though it's a place only for the clean. This is mind boggling.

The other things that are missing there are these things of destruction. He says, wicked fools will not go about on it. No ferocious beasts will be there.

All the damaging things, all the evil things, all the injurious things will be removed forever so that what remains can be enjoyed by an undeserving people who have been invited by grace into glory. It's exceptional.

Now if you could somehow get your head around this, what will be transformed? Let's say that you get a vivid snapshot. You could actually see footage of it. And then you recognize, my gosh, you get to be there, you don't deserve it, and there'll be nothing injurious or harmful. All of that—take that and possess it, grab it in your brain, but then you haven't really even scratched the surface. And here's what I mean by this.

One day, Kelly was at the beach with her father and they were looking out at the ocean, right, the vastness of the sea. Let's presume that you could somehow see forever and ever and ever, just oceans, blue, everywhere you look. He says to her, "Kelly, do you know what's really cool about the ocean?" She said, "No, don't know what." He said, "That's just the top. However vast and endless it is, that's like the top, you know, millimeter. It goes down for miles and miles and miles and miles."

Whatever it is that you get your head around about how glorious the world to come will be, you've only thought about it probably for like ten minutes worth, but it's never gonna stop being just like that. It goes down and down and down and down forever and ever and ever. You're only seeing the square miles. You're not even considering the cubic miles. There's so much more to it, and eternity is one of those things that you can't get your head around.

So let me try. I'm just gonna give you one single aspect of this infinite thing to try to help you begin to imagine what would it be like for all of this to be yours forever and ever and ever.

The Infinite Potential of Mastery

Think about it through the lens of your own competence or the competence of others. Have you ever noticed that you get better at things the more that you do them? Are you less stupid at things that you used to be really stupid at? Is this true? You better at your job or whatever?

Malcolm Gladwell's an author who kind of famously made clear this rule of the ten thousand hours of mastery. In general, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become, to master some skill. Ten thousand hours of violin. Ten thousand hours translating languages. Whatever you do, ten thousand hours.

I just got a motorcycle and I had been riding it for about ten hours. My mastery is appropriate to that period of time, which is to say, I'm uncoordinated. When I ride around in circles and figure eights, I'm still trying to remember: clutch, brake, to not die. That's ten hours, but in twenty hours, I'll be better at it, and in fifty hours, I'll be better at it. If I live long enough to get to ten thousand hours, then maybe I'll be really good at it. Right now, I'm just driving out all the ignorance, but I'm gonna get better as I go.

Think about what you're good at, that you love to do, that is a joy to you. What will it be like when you've done it for twenty thousand hours or five hundred thousand hours or ten million hours?

Or think of it like this. Think about Beethoven. I have no idea when Beethoven lived. Let's just randomly guess the 1600s. If he were still alive and he were writing music two, three, four hundred years later, how good would it be? Don't you think it'd be better? That he would figure something out that we don't know?

If Lin Manuel Miranda is in Christ, his first couple plays were pretty good, his first music. Hamilton is where he kind of blew up. What would his tenth musical be like? Or his twentieth? Or his fifteen thousandth? He will have forever to hone the skill. What will the arts become like?

Or let's say this. Let's say that you have a glorified body, and it never grows faint, and it never grows weary, and you live in a world where there is no death, and you push it, and you decide to spend a millennia working on being a gymnast. You've always wished that you could be a gymnast, but in the world to come you can, and you've got a thousand years to crack it. Do you understand that in a thousand years of practicing your life as a gymnast, you will be able to do far, far beyond what Simone Biles can do?

And then if you get bored, you can take up rock climbing. You can spend a couple hundred years, and you can be Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell and Adam Ondra all rolled into one. If you don't know who those guys are, look them up because they are some of the greatest athletes on the planet, but they are not as great as you could become in a perfect world of endless love that goes on forever where you have no limits to what you can do.

It's going to get better.

And when I say the best is yet to come, we're not gonna all get it on day one. It's gonna get better and better and better and better. And if all those things are not your deal, how about let's say what you're into is scientific discovery. Okay? Think about this. Can you imagine the wonders that we will still be discovering in a hundred million years? You're never gonna get to the end of it.

How many years elapsed from Kitty Hawk to Apollo eleven? The answer is '66. From 1903, you guys, we had our first powered flight. It lasted twelve seconds, went 120 feet. Sixty six years later, in 1969, we went 250,000 miles to the moon. Okay? That's in sixty six years. What will we discover? What will we accomplish in sixty six thousand years? Sixty six million years? Do you understand that we're gonna go on the world's greatest Easter egg hunt?

You know how every once in a while you read something in National Geographic that scientists discover some weird thing that lives in the bottom of the ocean and who knew there was anything there, but it's this weird shape or color or whatever? We're gonna have a 100,000,000,000 galaxies to explore. What are we going to find? We have infinite time over infinite space to discover all the things that the great creator God made. I'm telling you, the best is yet to come.

And not just that we're discovering creation, but we're going to be discovering the creator, for he too is infinite. You will live, if you are in Christ, in a world of perfect love, intimately connected to the God who made you for himself and made you for joy, not just marveling in creation, but in the creator who is better than all of it. Infinite happiness awaits those who are in Christ.

How Future Hope Transforms Present Life

So here's how this works, guys. If all of this were to seize your mind and you were to think of all the happiness, the endless joy that is to come, that future anticipation of good would flood back into present pain. There's all kinds of bad stuff going on. Right? But properly consider that future happiness floods back here to produce real joy. Because if you know and believe and accept that your bad things will turn out for good, that those good things will never be taken away, and that the best is yet to come, if you will anchor your life on this, and you should by the way because it was purchased for you by Jesus, then not only will you be happy in him forever, but you can savor it now and it can shape and change the way that you walk through this world.

That's why he told you about it. Not just so that it would come and you'd recognize it, but so you could begin to be happy. Because this vision helps you to release your grip on worldly things because more is coming. You don't need to spend all your money being as happy as you can right now because more happiness is coming and that becomes a greater and more transcendent source of joy.

And you can spend your time, you can spend your money, you can spend your energies, you can spend your whole life in service to others. There will be time for unimaginable happiness, but these days, right now, are fleeting and the opportunity that we have to love and to serve people, to invite them to come with us, to be partakers of it, transforms absolutely every part of our lives because the opportunity is fleeting and the door will soon be closed.

This vision can awaken us to the urgency to care about people right now, to love them and to do all that we can knowing that we will never lose in the transaction. We should be a people that communicate the gospel with overwhelming urgency, that we spend our money with overwhelming urgency, that we develop our talents with an overwhelming urgency to help people leave this domain of darkness and make it into the kingdom of the sun that he loves.

And by the way, it's somewhat paradoxical, but this vision also enables us to cheerfully bear with whatever suffering this world deals out. There's real evil, but ultimately, it can do no real harm.

Timothy reflects on this in his letter. It's kind of his last letter. He's sending things off and he's like, listen, Timothy, I believe all this to be true. I'm a herald of the gospel. My life is to tell people how great he is so they can know him too. He says, this is why I'm suffering as I am. I know the glories that are coming. He says, I know that God is able to guard what I've entrusted to him for that day, and therefore, I'm gonna leave it all in the field. Every day, I'm gonna lay down my life so that people that don't know him can come to know him, so that when I'm there, they'll be there too.

To live is Christ, to die is gain. — 2 Timothy

He says, listen, to live is Christ, to die is gain.

It's all gonna be amazing and I'm gonna do all that I can in these days, not only to obtain the world to come, but to help other people obtain the world to come so that they can have it too, so that they can have him too. And this is what our lives are to be about.

The more that this vision grips you—which is to say, the more accurately you see the world to come—the more that that drips in here, that you get it, the less you'll grip the world. It's gonna change the way you spend your time. It changes the way you spend your money. It changes what you do. You'll change your longings for the world to come and to bring others with you. Spend your energy, your life.

And I think the gambit here is that as we do that, as we wean ourselves from demanding joy from these present things to anticipating the joy that's a guarantee in the world to come, that it actually has a net increase of our happiness because our hearts are set on this thing that is coming.

The Expulsive Power of a New Affection

If you wanna explore this more fully, I don't have time—I gotta stop talking—but if you wanna explore this more fully, one thing I would recommend you do is just Google "the expulsive power of a new affection." Expulse, as in like not explode but to expel. It's a sermon preached by a guy named Thomas Chalmers, and it's brilliant. It explains me to me. It helped me understand how my life and how my heart work. It's not an easy read, but it is a worthwhile read. It's a sermon. It's not forever long.

Essentially, it says this: you love two things. This is true of you. You love that which you possess, and you love that which you don't yet possess but desire, and you will never consent to be without them. I will have to pry out of your dead cold hands that thing that you love, and if you somehow get the thing you don't yet possess and it becomes yours, you will instantly begin to want something else. This is just hard wired in you.

You love what you possess, and you love desiring something you don't yet have. And while you will never give up the thing that you possess, you will trade it in in a heartbeat for something better. A new affection expels an old one.

And if you understand how this works, I promise you it is operating on you every single day. What you desperately need is a greater affection to drive out the old ones. You will never stop loving the thing that you love until you present to yourself something greater.

This world to come is that something greater because the essence of the world to come is Jesus himself. He's the prize at the end of the whole thing. And if we will stop fixating on the thing in our fist right now and allow ourselves to see the happiness that is to come, man, it'll blow up your life. This is a sermon really worth reading: "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection" by Thomas Chalmers.

An Invitation to Let Go

Here's what we do have time for: for you to take and ask the question, what is it right now that's in your fist? Is there something you need to let go of, something that you're demanding joy at the condition of—"I gotta have this"? Maybe if you were to let go of it, greater joy would come.

Or maybe it's not some joy that you love, but maybe there's an inconsolable sorrow. Almost certainly, right? Is there some sadness that blocks you? "I just cannot see how God could possibly turn this evil thing for good." If that's you in either one of these categories, I'll just invite you to come down.

We're gonna have Eric play a little bit of music, and I'll give you just a moment or two to come down. If you wanna come to the curved rail—that's for you to be alone, just to come talk to Jesus. You go to the straight rails on the side; we'll have friends there who can meet you and can pray with you.

But I hope that you might consider: What is your source of joy? Is there something you need to let go of because it's so delicious to you and you won't let it go until you see something better? Or because there's some deep pain that you need to trust him and release to him?

Let me pray for you to that end, and then we'll take a minute here. We'll meet at the table and remind ourselves that we are partakers of glory and grace.

Jesus, you're the prize. However much fun it would be to be competent, however much fun it would be to see beautiful fields, however much fun it would be to leap where I have been lame—the good stuff is you. These are all appetizers. These are all incentives to draw us in, that we would be with you. Lord, I thank you for those things, the smaller samples, things that are manifestations of your goodness, your kindness, your beauty, your pleasure. But it's you that we want.

And Lord, I pray that all the things that hold us back, the ways that we choose to spend our time, our money, your talents, that you would wean us from them, that we would be fixed on the joys to be revealed. We love you. Amen.