Sharing the happiness of God, part 20, Definition; John 15:11Title: Sharing the happiness of God, part 20, Definition; John 15:11.
The Doctrine of the Happiness of God.
1. Definition: Happiness is the enjoyment of and pleasure in one’s status, circumstances, and relationships in life, which are not altered by outside changes.
a. Happiness is the contentment of knowing that all things are fulfilled in one’s life and that there is no need to search out more.
b. Happiness is being convinced that your communion with God is enough. This is what the scripture calls “contentment.”
Therefore, from these verses we find that contentment results from:
Contentment results from: the spiritual life (1Ti 6:6), logistical grace support (1Ti 6:8), the indwelling of God (Heb 13:5), God’s grace work (2Cor 12:9), and mystery doctrine (Phil 4:11).
Where in all this is the money, houses, cars, promotions, fame, reputation, relationships, physical stimulation, etc? It’s not there. Notice what is there. These are supernatural things made specifically for the immaterial part of man (soul and spirit) that emanates directly from God.
c. Therefore, contentment becomes a technical word for capacity for life.
As we define happiness we must understand that happiness comes in gradient fashion, and it begins at spiritual adulthood.
Initial happiness at SSE becomes intense happiness at SA and supreme happiness at SM. As we know more about the source of happiness (TLJC) we experience more of it.
Happiness depends entirely on your capacity for it. If God decided to overcome your volition, He would pour the full extent of it directly into you, but this is not possible in such a conflict as we have, requiring our free will. If God removed your volition you would just be an automaton [toy soldier], which is unable to form relationships.
With our free will, though the desire is constant in God's heart to give us His happiness He cannot initially since no capacity exists. Just like we may have a desire to execute the plan of God for our lives at the beginning, but we don't know enough to really accomplish it, so God desires to fill us with His happiness, but is limited by our own capacity to really enjoy it.
No one can exceed their own capacity.
Stop the introspection and self-abasement and increase your capacity by gaining wisdom. Learn, metabolize and apply!
Our enemy’s ultimate desire is to squash any pursuit of God’s happiness by making us think it is impossible.
His deception consists of tricking us into thinking that it is impossible for us and that we are just meant for mediocrity and that at best. “Life sucks and then you die,” is the going mentality. And that our only end is probably misery and as such we should do what we can to make the best of a really bad situation for ourselves and others. Our only hope is socialism, utopianism and the waiting game, waiting for us to evolve yet farther into a higher being.
Ironically, this is the life that satan and the fallen angels have chosen for themselves and so they project this loser mentality on to us. Misery loves company.
Sharing God’s happiness is not impossible for us because God, through Christ, has satisfied His Justice so as to provide us with things that are impossible for man to produce alone.
Matt 19:25-26 "Then who can be saved [delivered]?" And looking upon them Jesus said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
Delivered from death, delivered from misery, delivery from the effects of sin, delivery unto happiness.
In his evil program satan desires to enslave man into thinking that he is not a created being in the image of God, but rather just an animal, worthy of no more than trying to make the best of a bad situation.
As we explored in the doctrine of the cosmos, the devil works with great effort to squash your individuality. When you lose your identity you lose your ability to separate yourself from the world and then you must fall into the world system as just another piece in a disjointed and unappealing jigsaw puzzle that has no real end or goal. If this happens, you have lost all hope of finding God's happiness.
I give a striking example of a man who was deprived of everything that would comprise his dignity. His B-24, the Green Hornet, went down in 1943 due to enemy fire in the Pacific in WW2, as did hundreds of others before and after. He, Louie Zamperini, was a bombardier and also an Olympic runner, slated to be the first man to break the impossible 4 minute mile. Only three of eleven survived the crash (should have only been ten, but one soldier bummed a ride - his last). Louie, his friend Phil, and another named Francis. Two of the three survivors lasted 47 days on a raft with no stores of water or food (Francis McNamara died after 33 days on the raft), a current record. They drifted all the way to the Marshall Island's only to be captured by the Japanese and enslaved in an internment camp. I read from the book, "Unbroken" by Laura Hillenbrand.
“The crash of Green Hornet had left Louie and Phil in the most desperate physical extremity, without food, water, or shelter. But on Kwajalein [their first internment camp], the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”
“On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.” [Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand, pp 182-183]
There is more cruelty and evil in this world than you and I know. But what God has given overcomes it all. What God asks of men despite all the cruelty and evil in this world, is faith. But we must have faith in something and that something must be specific, something to hang your hat on; it must not be vague. That faith is found in the hundreds of doctrines found in His word.
Why faith, why not God before my visible eyes, you might ask?
God's invisibility is the truest test of faith. To know who sees him, God makes himself unseen.
Jer 29:13-14 And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. 'And I will be found by you,' declares the Lord,'
In seeing Him, there is happiness, and this gets us closer to the real definition of God’s happiness.
d. Happiness is not a material possession or circumstance but a state of the soul. You carry your happiness or your misery with you wherever you go.
Based on circumstances you can be a changing person, in other words you have no idea who you are. What is your foundation? Are you built upon a rock, or are you built upon sand.
Matt 16:18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it.
“Peter” – Pe,troj[Petros] = a detached stone or boulder that is moveable. “rock” – pe,tra[petra] = a mass of rock that has a sure foundation, which is a reference to Christ.
Petra is a reference to Christ upon who is the sure foundation of the Church and each believer within her.
1 Cor 10:1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea;
1 Cor 10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea [identified with Moses by walking across the Red Sea];
1 Cor 10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food [manna];
1 Cor 10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink [water from the rock], for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ.
The Rock is not only your firm foundation, but also your unlimited source of food and water = Bible doctrine.
1 Cor 10:5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the wilderness.
The Exodus generation was among the most miserable group of people in human history, as they were being set free from slavery by God.
These miserable people took their misery with them and they would have taken it into the Promised Land and thus destroying their national freedom, therefore God did not allow them to enter and instead allowed their children to enter.
The Exodus generation had a pseudo-happiness that was based on overt circumstances, which is not God’s happiness. |