True Happiness
Message Description
Jonathan Thiede teaches about "True Happiness," focusing on Genesis 3:1-13a.
Message Transcript
Well, welcome once again to Orchard Hill Church. Let's pray as we begin:
Father, you are the reason that we have gathered here today. And so we pray that as Orchard Hill has gathered in many locations: in Wexford, and in Butler, and in the Strip, and in Bridgeville, in the chapel, and online. God, we ask you that you would make your voice very clear to us through your word, as we study your word. God, as we transition our lives to the new year, no matter how the past year has gone, I ask that you would help us ask the most important questions and receive encouragement today. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Well, if I haven't had the opportunity to meet you yet, my name is John Thiede and I serve on staff here at the Wexford campus. And it is my joy to be with you today as we transition from the Christmas season to what is merely January. I don't know about you, but for me, this is a tough time of year. Don't get me wrong. In general, I love the weather we get here, but there's just something so wonderful about the Christmas season that serves as a distraction for the weather outside. Because around here, after New Year's, let's be honest, it's just winter. It's January and February and March and sometimes even April. There's just this natural joy and happiness in the air in December. And not to be bleak, but I feel like we're about to lose it. We're finally going to have to respond to those emails that we've been putting off since November. We're about to lose some of that natural joy and happiness we've been feeling. And for that reason, I found it fitting to talk about joy and happiness today.
What does it mean to be happy? Something that's easier to experience than to define. You know, we plan for happiness, we order our lives around it, but it's hard to wrap your arms around, right? It's hard to define. My definition is very simply, it's the overflow of positivity into the heart. I feel lucky. I can actually remember the first time I had just this overwhelming feeling of positivity. I was in middle school, and I went to my first week of overnight church camp. And you might think that's kind of lame, but you need to keep in mind that I grew up in a town where, we hope, hung out in Walmart parking lots for fun. So the bar for fun was very, very low. And so church camp was the thing you looked forward to. It was the best opportunity to have fun.
I had such a great time at church camp and I made so many friends, but I can distinctly remember being a kid and coming home and thinking, you know, this is great, maybe I'll always feel this way. Well, I don't think I need to tell you that I was quite wrong. I remember coming home and sitting down on my bed as I got home and transitioning back to reality as I realized that these feelings were temporary. My point is that moments of great happiness, like the Christmas season or church camp, they tl us something about the nature of happiness, don't they? And that is that happiness is often circumstantial.
You know, like most feelings, happiness is a reaction. You wouldn't necessarily say that you are a happy person. You would rather say that you were happy about something. A new job, a new relationship, a new opportunity. And really, this is sad news. You know, we get so used to it, but you know, this reality that we all experience as we come down from the Christmas high, as much as fairy tales promise us this happily ever after, we find as adults that the fairy tales were quite wrong. That happiness just doesn't seem to last that long.
But let's dream together a little today. What if there was a way to feel this kind of joy in a non emotional, non circumstantial sort of way? What if there was this umbrella of joy around your heart that was able to protect you from the rain of life? This dream is actually not a dream at all. It's actually a promise within the pages of the Bible. No, it's not a high like going to church camp, but according to the Bible, a relationship with God is key to being happy or blessed. You'll see that throughout the Psalms. It'll say happy is the man who “blank”, or blessed is the man who walks in the way of the Lord. And so this means it's this consistent state of joy that instead of eliminating all the problems in your life, it actually gives you the tools to deal with the problems in your life.
And according to David, a relationship with God promises the kind of life that allows you to walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear and evil. According to the Psalmist, a relationship with God makes you this happy little tree that is planted by a stream of water that even when the heat of life comes in and beats down on you, you're able not just to survive, but thrive. According to Jesus himself, there's this promise of living water that gives abundant life to all who ask for it. What all of these metaphors in scripture point to is a promise. And again, what the promise is not is that life will be absent of valleys, absent of heat, absent of trials, absent of challenges. But what the promise is, is that the love of God will act as a fuel in your life and create in you the kind of person that can not only survive, but thrive in trying times.
I want to begin with an important, difficult, and sobering question. Do you think God wants you to be happy? Knowing what you know about God, whether this is your first time in church or whether you've been in church your whole life, do you think he wants you to be happy?
You know, imagine some of the closest people in your life, your family that you just spent Christmas with. Do you think they want you to be happy? Maybe go a tier below, your coworkers, your friends, people you see on a regular basis. You know, if it cost them nothing, do you think they would want you to be happy? Maybe go even below it, the tier three people of your life, the people you don't even know their name. You pass by them every day on the way to work. Do you think if it cost them nothing, they would want you to be happy?
Well, I think for most of us, unless we're just jerks and we've alienated people from our lives, you know, the answer for most of us is yes. When we think of people in our lives, even total strangers, we generally feel like people want to help us achieve our ends. But now go back to God, it's somehow different, right? Well, we may reason. You know, I'm not sure God wants me to be happy so much as he wants me to be a good person. I'm not sure he wants me to be happy so much as he wants to teach me a good lesson. I think it's fair to say that whether you've been in the church or out of the church, your relationship with God and happiness is complicated.
For so many of us, we treat God like a schoolteacher that is so concerned with our progress instead of a parent who longs to give us good things. For many of us, this pursuit of happiness just doesn't feel right as it relates to God. And if we're honest with ourselves, the desire to be happy as we, as we meet in our groups and as we spend time with other Christians, sometimes it feels a little immature.
Well, if you walk away with nothing else, I want you to remember that the pursuit of happiness is something we all long for. And what I want you to remember today is that true happiness is only found when we experience the love of God. True happiness is only found when we experience the love of God. And so I think to uncover true happiness, we have to go back to where it was lost. And so that's why we're going to be in Genesis 3, the passage that Bryce read for us earlier. And we're going to see the moment where the happiness offered by God was forfeited for a counterfeit happiness of the world. And so in Genesis 3, we're going to be looking at two major building blocks. Two things that have to, we have to get right if we're going to live happy lives.
First, we need our desires to be rightly ordered. We need to rightly desire the things that God desires. If God created us, we need to desire the things he wants for us. And secondly, we need to be free from shame. We need to be free from the greatest problem in our lives. So we're talking about two big things as it relates to happiness. Desire and shame.
Let's begin with desire. I don't think we can talk about the pursuit of happiness or joy in a meaningful way without talking about desire. Those who know me know that I love musicals. And something that most, if not all musicals have in common is what's called an “I Want” song. And this is exactly what it sounds like. It's the protagonist. They come center stage, and they tell the audience they set the stage for the musical. They tell you exactly what they want. They tell you their greatest desires, their greatest dreams, their greatest ambitions. And I'm not sure if you know this, but there's a movie about a musical that just came out, and it's called Wicked, and it's everywhere. I just have to rant about this. There's, like, this Xfinity commercial where it's basically just an ad for Wicked. And then at the end, it says Xfinity, and it's like, what do you have to do with that? You know, it's like, what was Xfinity have to do with it? Just feels like a cash grab.
But anyway, I haven't seen Wicked, so I can't tell you much about it. But my wife has seen it twice, so I like to think she's seen it for herself and for me. And so I asked her, you know, what is the “I Want” song in Wicked? And she said, it's this song called The Wizard and I. And really though, it sets the stage for the music, because Elphaba, the main character, she believes that if she could just meet the wizard, he could help her solve all of her problems. It's a song that sets stage for the musical, but it tells you something about Elphaba. It tells you that she desires to live a life of recognition and greatness. She desires a life where people notice her for who she is. We all have strong desires, and I think these “I Want” songs are why most of us, deep down, connect to musicals. Desire, in a sense, unites us as human beings. You know, when I go to see the musical Wicked, I've never had green skin, but I know that I'm going to see myself in the character.
We all have desires. We have everyday desires: to be in a relationship, to be left alone, to be noticed, to make the team, to live, to work, to play, to have fun. But then we also have the desires that go beyond the everyday, these deep desires: to connect with others, to love and to be loved, to be seen as a success at work, to be admired, to be respected, to be celebrated. Desire is the building block of the happiness puzzle. And I don't know where you've been with desire, but I think for so many of us, you know, we think that the key to happiness is actually just pretending we don't have desires, pretending we don't want anything out of life. Some of us are made to feel like our desires are inherently evil, while for others of us to suppress our desires, to suppress any appetite at all, would feel like suppressing our very selves.
So I think it's important to look back at God's word and see how desire relates to this ultimate search for happiness. I think the passage that we read shows us three things about desire. First, the Garden of Eden shows us that desire was never fundamentally evil. You know, this story is an important one in the Bible. If you're new to church. If you're new to the Bible, Genesis 3 is often simply referred to as the Fall or the fall of humanity. And it's called this because it's an important moment in the overarching story of the Bible, because this is the story where this thing called sin enters the world. And sin has this ripple effect on everything after it. And so Genesis 3 becomes important because it shows us what things were present before the Fall and what things were introduced because of the Fall.
And so it's important to notice that desire is actually not a product of the Fall. Desire isn't something given to you by the devil. Rather, it's a good gift given to you by God. Here's what Shannon McCoy, a biblical counselor, says about desire. She says:
God gives us the ability to desire so that he can be the object of our desires. He wants us to desire him with all our heart, soul, strength and mind. Desire is a strong feeling, longing, craving, wanting or yearning (either good or evil), that drives us to seek fulfillment or possession of something.”
So this is an important note. Because we see desire as something before sin's entrance in the world, we have to conclude that God wants to do something with it. I don't know where you are with this, but God hasn't given you desires just to mess with you. God hasn't given you desires because he likes to see the struggle of humanity. No, God has given you desires because he is the ultimate key to those desires. He's desiring to call you to lead you into relationship with himself.
And this brings us to the second thing in this passage. Second, Eden shows us that our desires can be influenced for both good and bad, for both good and evil. I think the evil part is pretty obvious, you know, that's what the whole passage is about. You know, the serpent is tempting Eve. But I think there's a really important key to understanding what the temptation is. It's in verse five where Eve is tempted, that if you eat this fruit, you will become like God, knowing what? Knowing good and evil. That word good is important because it shows us what God is like. In the first two chapters.
You know, imagine if you only have these three chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1, 2 and 3. Imagine what you would know about God. Really, the only thing you would know about God to be sure is that he loves to point to things and say, this is good. That's what he's doing all over and over again. He's creating things. He's saying, this is good and this is good, this is good and this is good. And really what sets up the third chapter of Genesis is he finally points to something and he says, this is off limits. And so what's the temptation? The serpent is saying if you eat from this fruit, you will no longer be dependent on God to know what is good and evil. You will get to choose for yourself what is good and what is evil. In a phrase, you will become your own God.
And third, and finally what we see in this passage is that Eden shows us how our desires have become out of order. As a serpent manipulates Eve, something happens within her heart. Have you ever just assumed something is good, that everyone's going to love it? And then you show someone and they hate it? It's kind of an earth shattering thing. It makes you sort of question everything. I have a situation with my wife a lot because I'll show her like, anime videos and she's like, not impressed with Goku going super Saiyan. And I'm like, my mind is blown. Because I thought that was the universal appreciation. You know, you've been there, you're in a group and you're all showing each other your favorite YouTube videos and you're thinking, man, this is going to be a great laugh. They're going to love this. You know the video so well that you're like anticipating the laughs. You know, where the laughs should come. And if you're honest, when the laughs don't come, you start laughing to sort of see if you can prime the pump to get them to laugh. You know, we've all been there. But then the laughs don't come. It's a terrible experience, isn't it? Because you start to question everything. You're like, is my sense of humor broken? Like, the things I find funny, are they just so dark and so weird that no one else would find them funny? You know, the serpent is giving Eve that same feeling. You know, her whole life, God has been at the top of the desire puzzle.
You know, if I were to ask Eve the question I asked you 10 minutes ago, you know, do you think God wants you to be happy? Eve would have answered immediately. Of course he does. It's God. He is by nature someone who longs for my welfare, who desires to give me good things. I mean, that's all he's done so far. He points at things. He says, this is good. Look at all these good things that I've given you. But notice in our chapter, for the first time in Eve's life, that notion is being challenged. Because in all the serpent's questions, there is a bottom line implication. There is a question beneath every question the serpent has asked her. And the question is this. How can you be sure you're right about this God guy? How can you be confident that he has your best interests in mind? How can you know without a shadow of a doubt that the things he points to and says, this is good, is actually going to make you happy? If God doesn't want you to know the difference between good and evil, what else could he be hiding? And here's the result. Eve's desires have become disordered.
She looks at the serpent's temptation and she says, yes, I do want independence from God. I can't trust God. I need to seek independence. And she takes things that are good and that the heart should long for like, independence and like protection, but the serpent disorders her desires and makes her think those are suddenly more important than God. And notice, friends, it all stems from a lie. And the lie is that God is not the type of person to give you what will really make you happy. What we believe about God and His character makes all the difference. She believes the lie that we all believe about happiness. That because no one else is going to look out for me, including God, that true happiness comes when I put myself first. When I put myself above my friends and my family and above God. Namely, when I become my own God.
Be honest with yourself. Is this how you feel? You know, if your life was a musical, what would be your “I Want” song? And in what role does God have to play? I think for most of us, if we're honest with ourselves, when we think about God's role in this happiness puzzle, we would be far more excited if we were independent from Him. Because for most of us, we have been wired, we have believed this lie that God is somehow standing in the way of our happiness. But friends, I tell you today that because God has created your desires, he's created your happiness, He longs for you to satisfy his desires in a relationship with Him.
If you're honest, God's character has been assassinated in your heart. We have all believed the lie that true happiness is not found in God, but it is found in career, success or money or a relationship or a marriage or maybe just to be able to be with whoever you want, and God's role is to get in the way. But this is where the love of God comes in. Because if it's true that our desires become disorder when God's character becomes assassinated in our hearts, what is the secret to fixing that? In order to reorder our lives around the right desires, we have to reorder our minds around the right truth. And this can only be done by combating the voice of the serpent with the voice of God. And this can only be experienced by hearing and experiencing the love of God. And friends, what better place to experience God's love than at the cross of Jesus Christ?
When you picture the cross in your mind, something beautiful happens. Because when the voice of the serpent whispers in your ear that God doesn't care for you, point him back to the cross and you say, how can this God not care for me? How can this God not love me? How could I not trust this God? When the voice of the serpent leads you to believe that God isn't safe, you point him back to Jesus, who sacrificed his own safety so that you could be with him. The cross is the place where God's character is restored in your heart by experiencing his love. And when you come to him, something wonderful happens, because you see that his desires are for you, and it allows you to trust him again, to undo the curse of Adam and Eve. That's what the gospel does. It allows us to see God's character at the cross, to say God, you are worthy of my trust. And so, even though I desire these things, even though I desire things that are contrary to what your word says, I will trust in you and I will put my faith in you. When we experience the love of God, we see that the God who created our desires deeply longs to satisfy those desires in our relationship with him. Happiness comes when our desires are ordered by God. Do you believe that? Well, sadly, disordered desires come at a price. And as we see in this passage, that price is shame.
Let's move now to our second element of happiness. That in order to be happy, we need to be free from shame. You know, the experience of shame and the experience of happiness really could not be any different. Shame, in many ways, is the opposite of happiness. It is a weight, and it is crushing. CS Lewis says this in his book A Grief Observed. He says:
“I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”
What's he saying? He's really saying that shame is the greatest enemy of your life. That if you could get this shame thing figured out, that you would be a much happier person. And so I think it's important for us to understand shame. What is shame? Well, shame is actually more of a mood, more of a feeling than a definition. I think you'll learn a lot more about shame by experiencing it than you ever could by opening a textbook. Shame is the bully who calls you names. Shame is the feeling of rejection over and over again. Shame is that condemning voice that says, how could you do this? Shame is that isolating feeling that looks around and says, I don't belong in a room like this with all these good people. Shame always begins with a failed standard. You know, shame focuses on how we have not lived up to that standard. The standard can be religious or it can be irreligious. But as you zoom into your life, you will begin to realize that we all have standards of what makes a good person. Whether you're religious or not, we all have standards and scales by which we weigh what is good and bad Because we've been created in God's image, we are like God and we point to things. We say, this is good and this is not good. You know, if your standard is that you are the person at work who is reliable, you're going to feel shame when you mess up and you create roadblocks for other people. If your standard is that you're the person who always has it all put together, you're going to feel shame when you feel belittled or when you come undone.
Shame is interesting because it takes things that are not moral in nature and it makes them moral. It takes things that are not moral in nature and it says, I am now a bad person because I have not lived up to my standard. Well, if these standards are so important, I think it's important to ask, where do we get these standards? Well, if we see now, you know, that shame and desire are linked because we desire to be a certain kind of person, we're going to feel shame when we don't live up. But I think shame is often influenced by others. Parents, friends, co workers. And their words can stay with us long past when they're spoken. You know, we see this in the Lion King, when Mufasa dies and Scar is there to impress shame on Simba. Do you remember what he says? He says something along the lines of, Simba, if you were not here, your father would not have died. And what's so interesting is we see that Simba physically leaves that place, and yet Scar's words ring in his ears for years and years to come. This is why, as we see in our passage in Genesis, that the voices we listen to are so very important.
So having established that, you know, what is the result of shame? Let's look back to our passage. What do Adam and Eve do? I think this passage is interesting because it gives us a really clear understanding of what shame does. What does Adam say to God? He says something along the lines of, I noticed that I was naked, and so I was afraid, and so I hid. This is always the nature of what happens to us when we experience shame. Shame brings with us this naked vulnerability. We notice all of a sudden that we are failures, that we are faulted, and what do we do? Just like Adam and Eve, we hide from God. Shame always makes us hide.
I don't know what your family's like, but growing up, I was a middle child. And so it was my duty, it was my responsibility to annoy both of my siblings, both my older and my younger sibling. But sometimes the tables would turn, I'd be in a bad mood and they would sense that, and so they would really annoy me. And I can remember one time my, my parents were still at work and we were, we were probably in high school and we were hanging out. My siblings were really annoying me. And I can remember going to the kitchen to get a snack. I guess I was, you know, compensating. I was like, forget a snack, I'll be happy. And I remember grabbing the cabinet just a little too hard and I yanked the cabinet clean off its hinges. Yeah, pretty strong. Pretty strong for a 15 year old. Thank you. And so what happened next was interesting because I don't even really remember doing this, but I immediately put the cabinet down and I ran to my room and just laid in my bed until my parents got home. And what's interesting about this is that my parents weren't home. What's interesting about this is the moment I knew I'd done something wrong, this feeling of punishment washed over me. And my immediate reaction was to run, was to hide. And this is what shame does. Shame always brings this punishment paradigm, this feeling that if I can somehow punish myself enough, then maybe my parents will go easy on me. Shame always makes us hide from those who love us.
So we've defined shame, we've seen how it works and we've seen the result, but I think to end our discussion here would actually be a disservice, because we haven't asked the most important question about shame. How does God handle your shame? When you are in a place where you have done wrong, how does God interact with you? I think this passage shows us two ways God handles our shame.
First, God handles our shame with searching. With searching. It's interesting it takes God so long to speak in our passages. And you know, if this passage is so foundational, why does it take God so long to speak? And even more interesting, the first thing he says is not a statement, but a question. He merely looks around the garden and he says, where are you? You know, you understand this dynamic if you have a dog. We had a few dogs growing up, but the ones I remember best were like the high energy dogs. If you have a high energy dog, you know how this goes. It's kind of like a love hate relationship with your high energy dog. Because you come home at the end of the day and honestly, all you want is some peace and quiet. But you make one little sound, the doorknob turns one degree, and there the dogs come roaring around the corner. They're jumping on you, and they're so happy that you're home.
And what happens is really a beautiful thing because you get used to this dynamic. You get home, the dogs come running. You get home, the dogs come running. You get home, the dogs come running. Home, dogs, home, dogs. And it's for that reason that the silence of a dog is so deafening. Have you ever had that experience when you come home and there's no sound, you can't find your dog, nothing. And there's something deeply ingrained inside you that asks the same question that God asks, where are you? You see, this is a bit of what Adam and Eve's relationship with God was like before all this happened, before they experienced shame. I hope I'm not too casual when I say that Adam and Eve liked God.
He wasn't just their master, but he was their friend. And before this moment, they had no reason to hide from him. You can imagine anytime they heard God walking in the garden, they're roaring around the corner, they're coming up to God. They're saying, God, what are we doing today? They liked him and they loved him. So when God looks around and he asks, where are you? He's not just asking a question. He's acknowledging a new dynamic in their relationship. He's acknowledging that something is off.
But here's the good news. God is, by his nature, a searching God. He doesn't just leave Adam and Eve in their hiding. He doesn't leave this fractured relationship fractured. He searches Friends, this is who God is. Even though you hide your sins from him, Maybe for some of you, you left church years ago. You haven't been back in such a long time, and you're hiding your sin, you're hiding this feeling of shame. Maybe for others of you, you hide it through religious activity. You say, if I can just spend time in God's word every day, then maybe he'll finally be happy with me. We hide from God in so many different ways. But the Good News of the Gospel is that God is always searching for you. Even when you clothe yourself and leaves in righteousness and unrighteousness to hide your shame, God is always searching for you. And he's not just searching for the you that you present on a Sunday morning. He is searching for the real, vulnerable, naked you. And he longs to be with you again. And so he asks, where are you?
God handles our shame with searching. And secondly, he handles our shame with sacrifice. God handles our shame with sacrifice. Well, as the story goes, we not only see the presence of sin, but we see its impact. How the story goes is that because of sin, Adam and Eve have to leave the garden because God cannot be present with sin because he is holy. And how the story ends is that God, in his kindness, in his mercy, and in his grace, he clothes Adam and Eve's nakedness. But in order to do this, there has to be an innocent animal sacrifice. And this sacrifice anticipates a day where God would once again clothe us. But he does not clothe us with animal skins. He clothes us with that which our heart wants, which is his honor. But in order to do this, there must be a sacrifice of the innocent.
And this is exactly what happens at the cross, where Jesus, the perfect son of God, the one who never failed his standard, the one who never failed God's standard, the one who always lived up, the one who did always what is right, he volunteered to take on the punishment. You know, because of our shame, we are constantly living under the fear that punishment is coming. But at the cross, we see the good news of God, that he chooses to punish his perfect son in your place. At the cross, Jesus takes our shame. He becomes shame. In order to remove shame from us so that now our lives can be lived in freedom. Just like in the garden, God clothes us at great personal cost to Himself. But at the cross, he clothes us not with animal skins, but with that which our heart has been longing for since the beginning. He clothes us with honor. This is the Gospel, where those who have nothing to bring to the table except shame are able to trade that shame for the honor Jesus.
And I'm not sure where you're at with all this, but wouldn't you agree that shame isn’t getting in the way of your happiness? Wouldn't you agree that this is the greatest problem in your life? Wouldn't you agree that no matter how much you run, no matter how much you perform for God, that your shame just doesn't go away? And so today, maybe reflect on that. What standard have you not lived up to? How have you failed? How do you need to be reminded that God is searching for you and that he sacrificed for you in order to restore a relationship with you? The love of God on display in Jesus is that our shame might be taken away. And this is very good news.
You know, to close, it's all about the love of God. You can agree with a lot of things I've said today, but if you have not believed and experienced the love of God, it will make no difference in your life. True happiness is found when we experience the love of God when we allow God to come into our mess to greet us in our disordered desires and reorder them. When we come to God and we say, God, I only have shame. And he replaces that with honor. And so, just as God asked Adam and Eve, I think he's asking you the same question today. Where are you?
Where are you? Are you hiding from God? Is your relationship with him built on fear of rejection? Have you believed the lie that he is against you? I pray that the gospel sways you today. I pray that as you look at the cross, you would not believe the lie of the serpent, that God is getting in the way of your happiness, but that through the Gospel you would see that God is a joyful and happy God who wants you to be desired. And I pray that you would look forward to a day where you will be with him and you will finally have that satisfaction that you are looking for. Let's pray:
Father, we pray that we would understand what you have said in your word, God. We pray that we would understand how Genesis 3 relates to our happiness. And that as we search our happiness, that we would trust you fully. God, I pray for every single person in this room that we could ask ourselves difficult questions this week and to come to answers that are meaningful and satisfying. God, we thank you for this time to rally around your word. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
This transcript was automatically generated. Please excuse errors.