[Transcript may not match broadcasted sermon word for word]

Happiness Point #43: Caught Between Two Different Worlds

       It is definitely true that some individuals out there will find themselves caught between two varying worlds—worlds that are different, each with their own promises. Yes, indeed. That’s where many in fact can find themselves in, especially if you were raised in a stricter church setting. We know, if we are a student of the Scripture, that we cannot serve two masters. That’s Christianity 101. It is like Luciano Pavarotti said one time, “if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.“ Definitely true.

       The truth is, I think there are two kinds of people. There are the people who are okay following the crowd, who are okay following the status quo. For them, letting other more important people make all the necessary decisions is good and comforting. They really don’t have to do anything but follow. Even though it may seem like a harder life, I think actually it is an easier life. No big decisions have to be made. Other the other hand, there are those people who just cannot follow rules that usually don’t make sense to them. Perhaps a few of them make sense, or even half of them, but then there are the many rules that don’t make sense. The ones that seem hypocritical. These people die at the lack of individuality.

       So, the question everyone must ask is, “Which type of person am I?” Can you be content your whole life letting others tell you what to do, tell you what the Bible really says, tell you you have to give your money, and try to point you where you should go? Or, are you the type of person that wants to decide all these facts on your own? Does it really annoy you when people are trying to tell you this and that? Has God gifted you with such a mind as to know better? Certainly, we all have to figure out where we stand because trying to live in the wrong group will only produce a miserable life.

Happiness Point #44: Your Family is Your Responsibility

       Let’s get a little tuff here for a moment. Why do we see so many children with single parents these days? Is it because one person goes off and cheats, which in turn leads the other person in the marriage to file for divorce? Sometimes. Is it because people don’t make the commitment for marriage in the first place? Certainly a lot of times. Is it due to the fact that the children are undisciplined which causes the home to wind up in turmoil and the parents to separate? I suppose that happens. The root, however, behind all these kinds of situations is that fact that one person, or both people, in the relationship are failing to take responsibility.

       No one said anyone had to get married. No one said anyone had to have kids. If you’ve made those choices, then you have taken a certain, specific, important, in fact crucial responsibility upon yourself. Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. Each partner in the marriage is responsible to do his or her part. That’s in how they act and how they treat. That involves give and take. That involves sharing the responsibility of caring for the children. Again, you don’t have to take on these responsibilities if you don’t want to. God doesn’t demand everyone get into a relationship and get married. Isn’t all this talk of mine just vain though? Am I just talking to the drywall?

       Well, in a way perhaps what I am saying about responsibility is vain. That’s because it certainly is true that a person needs to have values in the first place in order to implement those values. Where do we get our values, as Christians? Where do we get our morality? How we are supposed to live? All these things come from the Bible. If you don’t read the Bible, or know it, or follow it, then what I am saying is indeed vain. It’s pointless for you. Unless, perhaps, just perhaps, you decide today that you are going to change directions. Perhaps things have come tumbling toward the edge of the cliff in your family situation. Well, it’s not too late. Pick up your Bible and start reading it. Start praying to God about what you should do.

       I suppose for those who did get married in the first place that you didn’t do so to end up failing. I don’t think anyone goes into something, especially something big, expecting to or even wanting to fail. So, you must have some good drive inside of you somewhere. If you’ve taken the responsibility, now is the time to take it all seriously before it is too late. You don’t want to live a lesser life because you, yourself, failed to do what is right. You don’t want to fail at being a good husband, or a good wife, or good parents. What you really want is to take the responsibility now and make correction where needed. There is still time to do that.

Happiness Point #45: Love with No Strings Attached

       One fundamental thing I have had to learn over the years is that if I truly love someone then I do not fear what they will do and I am not too attached to them. Perhaps you’ve come to this realization yourself. That is, when we truly love a person, we are not afraid of A) what the person may do, and B) actually losing the person. We want those we love to make the right choices. We don’t want them to make choices that harm themselves. We also don’t want a loved one to leave us. That could be either actually dying or even just exiting our life. But, with all this said, if we truly love a person, we aren’t permanently attached to them.

       One of the reasons for this lack of attachment is because every person is responsible for him or herself. You and I cannot be held responsible for the actions of others. Unless we have deliberately lead them astray, or done something against them, we cannot blame ourselves if they make choices that we don’t want them to make. Truly, everyone is independent to themselves. We desire for people, especially those we love, to make the right choices. But we should never be in a place where we suffer prolonged grief because someone has made a bad choice. We might be sad for a short time. That is only normal. But, they are ultimately responsible for themselves.

       Another reason is that we are secure in and of ourselves. This means that we don’t need anyone in our lives to make us complete. Our completeness comes from our redeemed nature in Jesus, our born-again personhood. That said, again, we love to have good, supporting people in our lives. At the end of the day, though, we don’t ‘have to have’ any of them there in order to feel whole. It’s nice for them to be there when they are there, but our new personhood doesn’t lack if they leave. This may even require giving up jealousy because the sin of jealousy shows us where we are too attached to people.

       Finally, you have probably guessed it at this point, and that is that we know that “All that matters is God.” Because he is all that truly matters, we are totally complete in him, by him, and for him. In our relationships with him we truly don’t ‘have to have’ anything else. We can survive perfectly fine if God is all that we have. This truth brings tremendous freedom for us. It means in our lives that we are not dependent upon any ‘human’ person for our happiness besides Jesus. Our happiness is found completely and entirely in our relationship with God, in our love for Jesus.

Happiness Point #46: You Never Know What People Are Going Through

       We all meet people in passing on a daily basis. Sometimes things seem okay for people, and occasionally it is obvious that something is wrong. But even for the many who appear to be okay, we don’t really know for sure. People can actually be going through quite a lot, and yet, unless they tell us, we have no idea. Life carries along for everyone, and as we know from our own lives, there are better times and there are times that aren’t as good. If we know that is true for us, it probably is true for others. That being the case, perhaps we should keep this understanding in our awareness if don’t already.

       So, understanding that the person we strike up a casual conversation in the coffee shop may indeed be going through a really difficult time, I think it’s good practice to treat everyone kindly. Why, the Apostle Paul mentioned kindness as one of the Fruits of the Spirit. Remember? He also said we should be gentle. It could be that our kindness and gentleness actually is what brightens someone’s day and encourages them to keep moving forward. That little spark from us could be the fuel that they ever so needed.

       Another thing too is we don’t know when someone is on the verge of giving up. It has been noted in psychology discussions that sometimes people who commit suicide showed no previous signs of any type of problem. When this is the case, the family members and friends are shocked. No one knew the person was suffering mentally, on the verge of giving up. Again, this is just another reason to treat others well. Our gracious speech, or an encouragement, no matter how simple, may be the very thing that God wants us to give to the other person.

Happiness Point #47: Stop Cutting the Grass in Your Head

       Every reoccurring thought that remerges in our minds has a root. That’s the simple truth. Nevertheless, we often deal with our thoughts by pushing them aside and not confronting them head on. That’s why the thought is reoccurring in the first place. It’s like your dog when you don’t feed him. He’ll ask for lunch, and you may just ignore him for the time being. Then a little while later he’ll ask again, and he’ll keep on asking until we feed him. Well, that’s what happens when we don’t properly deal with a thought in our heads that we don’t want there. We all have things that crop up inside our minds that we would prefer to get rid of. The good news is that this is actually possible.

       Now, if I have a reoccurring thought about someone who has said something against me, for instance, how should I deal with this? Well, every time the though comes to my mind I could just push it out of the way by thinking about something else. It may work for a few minutes, but odds are the thought is going to come back. That’s because I didn’t feed the dog, I didn’t deal with the thought. And like the dog, the thought comes back wanting attention. It wants us to really think about it and become miserable. Surely, the old part of us, our old self, still wants us to be miserable if possible. That’s what the sin-nature does to us. It tries to pull us down into its ways, to get us to do things in a way that isn’t beneficial for us.

       So, if pushing a thought out of the way doesn’t work, what does work? The best thing I have found is to face the thought head on, no matter what it is. So, what I have to do is allow the thought to come up in my mind and observe it without judgment. In the case of the person who said something against me, I have to give up the perceived threat that that thought imposes. It may be that I’m afraid that individual will criticize me toward others, as they criticized me to my face. In that case, I have to decide not to care. I have to say to myself, “It’s okay if they do that, and it’s okay if they don’t do that.” Or, I could say, “It’s okay if people like me and respect me, and it’s okay if they don’t.”

       How and why can I say those things? Well, in reality, I don’t want the person to criticize me toward others. And, I also want other people to like me. At the end of the day, however, what really matters to me is what God thinks about me. In that case, holding God in perspective, what another thinks or others think doesn’t matter. What really matters to me is God. So, in surrendering the desire to be liked and approved of, I can free my mind of all the negative thinking that those desires produce. And in surrounding that desire, what I usually find is that people do in fact like me. It allows for them to do so, because I am not blocking the fulfillment of the desire by holding onto it too strongly. God can work to make me look good when I am not too eager to do so myself.

Happiness Point #48: Choosing Happiness is the Way Out

       According to Thomas Jefferson, one of the pillars of life is the “pursuit of happiness.” It’s embedded into our Declaration of Independence, and I believe it to be true. Getting to the root, at the core fundamental level, wasn’t that why God created Adam in the Garden to begin with? God created Adam because God himself wanted to be happier. It is true that God doesn’t need a relationship with any human being in order to be ‘happy.’ That being said, I think it’s also true that be being in relationship with humans, God can himself be ‘happier.’ And, I believe that we as humans can only achieve happiness by being in right relationship with the Creator.

       So, if we accept that we are to pursue happiness, what does that mean? Once we have established our good relationship with God, we know that everything else is secondary. For us, the singular fact that we are in good relationship with God makes us completely happy. If it doesn’t, perhaps we are not totally surrendered in everything, and that is something we will really want to correct. Anyway, at the point we are totally surrendered, we can expand that happiness in our lives. We want our families to be happy. We achieve that by following God’s principles, for they themselves lead to happiness. We want good health. That requires us to take care of ourselves and not do things that give us poor health.

       We also want a happy career, or at least, I think most of us do. I mean, who wants to go into work dreading it everyday? Yet, I think I a lot of people do dread their jobs. If that is the case for us, perhaps we need to make a change. After all, we are pursuing happiness, so why would we want to spend 40 hours a week of our lives doing something that we dread? I don’t think so. If we are doing that, we are truly wasting our lives for the most part. And this will depend on the particular person. For instance, a person may be perfectly happy being a waiter, all the while another person may think that really stinks. We all have different things we like to do, and we do see things differently.

       Also, we should find happiness in our hobbies. This past year, for me personally, I started a new blog about a subject matter that I like a lot. I didn’t start my Amish themed blog because I wanted to get people to like and comment on what I have to say. Sure, that’s good if people want to do that, but that’s not why I started it. I started it because I find the subject matter really interesting, and, at the end of the day, it increases my happiness considering those topics. It’s also true that sharing these topics, these discussion, with others makes me happy. It makes me happy that people who find these things interesting have something new to read. We can all do things like this (and in case you were wondering, it is bloggingamish.com where you will find my new blog).

Happiness Point #49: Getting Up Early Creates Freedom

       Most days I like to get up early. In fact, you will find if you study some of the world’s most successful people, they usually get up early. So, it appears to be one of the keys to great success no matter who we are. Why is getting up early good? I like to get up early because 1) I make sure I get my devotional time in, 2) it gets the day off to a good start, and 3) I get more done that way. These are the three things I have identified in my own life related to getting up early. That has been my experience.

       Truly, when we get up early, it guarantees that we will get our precious devotional time in. We will read something helpful, something that gets our thoughts started off in the right direction. We will be thinking about good things, helpful things, and not rushing out of bed and trying to start our day off on the wrong foot. After we have read whatever good thing we decided (the Bible, a good book, whatever), we will spend some time in prayer with God (or perhaps we pray first). That prayer time allows us to spend essential time with the most important person in our lives, the Person we exist for and the Person who should be first in our lives. We feel happier when we do this.

       The second thing I pointed out is that we get the day started off right. I mean, this naturally produces positive feelings flowing through our heads when we know we did the morning the right way. We weren’t rushing around. We weren’t trying to cut things down to squeeze out lost time. We aren’t skipping anything we shouldn’t be skipping. Everything is flowing just right because we have started things off right. We feel we have plenty of time instead. And that is a good feeling for sure. We feel that we will get accomplished what we need to get accomplished today.

       And that leads me to my third point, and this is that we do in fact get more done when we get up earlier. After all, we spend that solid time in devotions and praying to God. Since we did that, we know have more time afterwards to get things done. If we had gotten up later, we would have had to of done our devotional time later, and then we would have had a late start getting to the day’s work, whatever it is. We may of had to of cut something out that we really should have tackled today. But that didn’t happen because we got up early and did things in their proper order. And not to mention I think God blesses our days when we do this. He likes it when we put him first.

- Daniel Litton