Come On Get Happy!

001_SoM_ProjectionOk, many of you at MLC aren't old enough to even know where the title of this blog post comes from. Well, long before the Partridge Family wanted to get happy, Jesus was eager for you and I to be happy. He wants that so much for us He gave a sermon on a hillside dedicated to it. The Sermon on the Mount is where true happiness (blessedness) is found. Happiness, I think, shares something similar to death. They are both great equalizers. We share these in common; death will happen to all people, and all people want to be happy.

What the Sermon on the Mount brings to us is the way to find the moment of our earthly death, when we stand before God, we will be ultimately, eternally happy. And isn't that what every heart really longs for? Oh the destructive pathways people will go down to find happiness, when Jesus has already shown the way. It isn't a way we can accomplish ourselves. It's a way that drives us to Him, in dependency upon the New Birth and a life filled with the Holy Spirit. Maybe that is why few find it; it drives us out of ourselves; happiness has been defined by someone else. As we begin this series consider again the words of Martyn Lloyd Jones, and reread Matthew 5-7 this week friends!

“Happiness is the great question confronting mankind. The whole world is longing for happiness and it is tragic to observe the ways in which people are seeking it. The vast majority, alas, are doing so in a way that is bound to produce misery. Anything which, by evading the difficulties, merely makes people happy for the time being, is ultimately going to add to their misery and problems. That is where the utter deceitfulness of sin comes in; it is always offering happiness. The Sermon on the Mount says, however, that if you really want to be happy, here is the way.”1

1 Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in The Sermon on the Mount, pg. 24.

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