“The Pursuit of Happyness” is closely based on a true story about a man named Christopher Gardner. He invests heavily in a business selling medical machines, but it doesn’t go that well. As he struggles to sell them, his wife leaves him, he loses his house, his bank account, and credit cards. He is forced to live out in the streets with his son. He is now desperate to find a steady job. This film resonates with many people’s hearts, not just because they can sympathise with Christopher Gardner, but because they can easily envisage themselves in his circumstances. Many people are one or two months income away from not being able to pay their bills. Some are already in the situation where they have lost a house, had their marriage break up, or lost their job. The pursuit of happiness is universal. We all want to be happy. But what makes Christianity different from other approaches, religions or philosophies, is that we can have more than just happiness, we can have joy. Happiness is a temporary feeling. It doesn’t last. Retail therapy makes us happy, but the effect soon wears off (sometimes before we get home from shopping!). Eating our favourite food can make us happy for a while, e.g. chocolate, sweets, cream buns, etc. But the happiness doesn’t last long, so we eat more and more to try to keep up the happiness… Some people want money to be rich, in the hope that that will make them happy – sometimes the promise of riches, or the things that riches can buy, can make people happy. But money doesn’t satisfy – When John D. Rockefeller was asked how much money was enough, he replied: “A little bit more.” He said “It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.” Happiness is a temporary feeling. It doesn’t last. C.S. Lewis found that happiness or pleasure was different from joy In his autobiographical search for joy in his book “Surprised by Joy”, C.S. Lewis noted “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.” He searched for joy, and in the end was surprised with what he found. In his search for joy, he came to faith in Christ instead. As writer David M. Howard, Jr. commented on Lewis’ search for joy: [Lewis] had been focusing on a feeling, an experience, a process that had no Object. What he had been focusing on was “not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand.” He realized that he had made “Joy” itself into an idol. He‘d known that “Joy” was a desire, but he’d never realized that “a desire is turned not to itself but to its object.” Lewis discovered that his quest for “Joy”—and even his fleeting experiences of it over the years—was not, in the end, what he was really after. Lewis concludes on the last page of his book; “But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.” C.S. Lewis was surprised by joy, that he did not find joy when he sought it, but he did find joy when he sought God instead. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit In the Bible, lasting and deep joy is one of the blessings of trusting in Jesus and having the Holy Spirit come into our lives and change us. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy… (Galatians 5:22). It is the result of knowing God personally, and living closely to him, in obedience and faith. Joy is never as free and complete as when we are expressing it. Rejoicing is the expression of joy. Praise is an essential part of Christian worship, as it allows us to express our joy to God. Singing God’s praises is a blessed experience, and we not only send our praises to God, but we experience the fullness of joy as we do so. Yet, we can turn singing into an idol, seeking the fulfilment of joy that we get though praising God, instead of focusing on God himself. We can do that through many other things too, focusing on the gift rather than the giver. But praise God that he alone gives us lasting joy, as we look forward to the fulfilment of salvation in eternity with him. We can therefore have joy despite our circumstances. we can by joyful even when we are sad. Joy is therefore much better than happiness. It is no wonder that the old summary of the main purpose in life is “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

It was great to have Barry Rogers from Derry Donegal Christian Fellowship preach God’s Word to us yesterday (19 February 2012). Barry’s message was about Elijah on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. The situation there was where people were wavering between two opinions, not whole-heartedly for the Lord God. Also, Elijah was an ordinary person who could do great things through a great God. But being used by God like that involves learning to trust God and be faithful in small things first. If we want to see people turn to Jesus, we need to be faithful to God, and faithful in small things, and trust that God can bring many people to him.

Good parenting is not that common In an article on parenting recently by the Christian Institute, parents were said to sometimes be reluctant to discipline their children, not because it wasn’t in their best interests, but because they were more concerned about how they as parents would be viewed. They were more concerned with self-image than good parenting. Call in supernanny Today, lack of biblical parenting, or good parenting in general, has led to many parents not really knowing the basics of how to love and bring up their children properly. They don’t know the basics of discipline and care that are love in practice. So much so, that supernanny is called in to some homes to try to re-establish some sort of order amid chaos. The programme is not popular because there are a few isolated cases of poor parenting, but because these situations strike a chord in so many homes. Her solutions are therefore practical to many viewers. Have a look at this short summary of one family to see how quickly some proper loving discipline is effective and makes home life so much better and enjoyable. Let’s make supernanny redundant In this week’s Bible passage, Paul briefly reminds both children and parents (fathers, mainly) how they ought to relate to each other. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise—“so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:1–4, NIV) When parents put into practice the basics of ‘loving’ discipline, not just discipline, or worst of all harsh, unloving discipline, children generally respond well quite quickly. Sometimes it takes longer. Discipline can take many different forms, and doesn’t need to be smacking, although with younger toddlers it is sometimes the only thing that will protect them from danger (e.g. from putting their hand onto dangerous objects such as a heater or fire because they don’t respond to ‘reason’ like older children or adults) or make them learn quickly (removal of privileges later on doesn’t always have the desired effect on younger children). Children ought to obey their parents (in the Lord = when being told to do what is right), and parents, especially fathers, ought to love their children and not be harsh on them. There is much more to parenting than that, but Paul reminds both of their mutual responsibilities in some key areas. These are in the context of submitting to each other that he introduced in Ephesians 5:21. If Christian parents put this into practice, there would be no need to call in supernanny!

Are all religions the same? The Dalai Lama often refers to the ‘oneness’ of all religions, the idea that all religions preach the same message of love, tolerance and compassion. But are all religions essentially the same? They certainly have a common moral standard, more or less, that we ought to live by. But they differ in how to resolve our failure to live up to this standard. According to author Stephen Prothero, to claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. In his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter he shows that religions vary significantly, because they see humanity’s plight as different problems, with different solutions: Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order Hinduism: the problem is reincarnation / the solution is spiritual liberation Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission to Allah Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation by faith How can we know which one is right? They can’t all be right, because they’re not all addressing the same root problem. Despite some aspects of truth being found in many religions, which one addresses the core issue of mankind’s problem? Is faith always the way of salvation? Christianity says that the problem is rooted in sin, and that salvation is through faith alone. But then, others say that faith is believing the unbelievable! Isn’t faith a leap that is disconnected from reality? Isn’t faith believing without evidence, as some atheists would say? On the contrary, faith is believing the evidence. Faith that is not based in reality is faith in faith, not faith in truth. Faith in faith was very popular after World War II. Mark Pinsky comments in an interview on his book The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust that: Will Herberg’s book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, … was written in 1955. His thesis was that America’s civic religion was faith in faith—that is to say, faith in a nonspecific, non-sectarian faith. Or, as Eisenhower put it, “I don’t care what you believe in as long as you believe in something.” When people say; “Just believe” or “Have faith,” we can’t just believe that faith itself is the solution. It is who or what we are believing in that matters. The faith that produces results But how can we know what to believe in? And how can we know that it is the right belief? This is the question that the Apostle John answers in 1 John 5:1-12. Following on from his teaching in the previous chapter that the evidence of godliness in the lives of believers shows that they are God’s children (see last week’s podcast), John takes a different tack, based on the same evidence. In 1 John 5:1-12, he not only tells us that we ought to accept the testimony of God above that of what people say is true, by pointing to the dual witnesses of Jesus’ baptism and his death to disprove a heresy that was present in his day. He goes further and shows that the faith that overcomes worldliness, the faith that produces evidence of changed lives, the faith that has life from God, is the faith that works in reality. He shows that Jesus is the one we should believe in if we want to see evidence of faith that works, religion that changes lives towards godliness. While John’s argument in 1 John 4:7-21 is that the evidence proves that a believer is a child of God, in 1 John 5:1-12 his argument is that the same evidence validates the message that Jesus Christ is the one we should have faith in. The work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of God’s children is a third testimony to the truth of the gospel. The real and tangible evidence of lives where the life from God can be seen in practice not only validates that believers in Christ are God’s children, but that belief in Christ is what results in life from God: And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5:11–12, NIV84)

What is the cement that holds the Church together? According to Paul, it isn’t just a common belief or salvation – while we have these in common, they are not enough on their own to make God’s people grow into a beautiful Church. Focusing for a while not on our common salvation, Paul focuses on what ought to bind together God’s people – love. Continuing his imagery of the people of God as a temple, Paul considers how wide and long, deep and high the construction is (also alluding to the limitless bounds of God’s love too). While he has discussed suffering in the cause of the gospel in the previous verses, in Ephesians 3:14-21 he considers the people of God as a growing building. Each believer is a stone in the building. The cement between believers ought to be love. Paul prays that the believers will know how glorious the Church is, the temple of God’s Spirit, the body of Christ. In case we might be tempted to think that the Church is incapable of being anything significant, let alone glorious, Paul assures the believers that God can do far more in them that they can imagine or pray about. And he does all this to his own glory – glory in Christ Jesus, and glory in the Church. We might not be much in and of ourselves, but with God doing far more in us that we can conceive of, we can look forward to seeing his masterpiece completed on the grand opening day when all of God’s children will be with him for eternity (Rev. 21:2-4).

If you want, you can have double! In the ’60s, four-year-old Carolyn Weisz was one of a number of children whose self-control was tested. She was offered a variety of sweets and biscuits, and after making choosing one she was offered another on the condition that she waited until the interviewer left the room and returned a short while later. Carolyn couldn’t remember how she responded. But five-year-old Craig did remember. According to the New Yorker, Craig still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—but instead, he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out.” After that, he says that the teachers stopped him from taking part in the research. We do not have the ‘self-control’ we want or need About seven out of ten children gave in early for the one treat instead of waiting for two. This reflects a problem that many of us have. When we’ve eaten our full and we’re offered another slice of pizza, we find it hard to resist. When we’ve had a good number of buffet snacks on offer, we find it hard to resist just trying the others that we haven’t had yet. When shopping, instead of choosing between two items of clothing, some people buy both. When socialising, many find it hard to resist the pressure to have a drink, even when they’re going to be driving home. The crucial decisions we make on some temptations have serious consequences, such as a recovering alcoholic tempted to have a social drink with friends, or someone in a stable relationship giving in to a seductive one-night-stand or affair, or hoping that the next gamble will pay off big-time, and so on. Whether it is the relatively insignificant matter of having another slice of pizza, to the inability to resist life-changing temptation, everyone has a problem with self-control to some degree or another. In case someone might think that they don’t fit into this description, even if we have (by God’s grace) a sufficient self-control compared to avoid falling for some obvious temptations, we don’t have enough to be able to avoid pride, to love others all the time as much as we ought to, or to love God above all else. Christians need self-control Don Carson, in his book For the Love of God, writes: People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated. Lack of self-control is a real issue that we all need, to some degree or another. Self-help doesn’t help as much as we need? There are many self-help gurus who promise that we can do better. But at the end of the day, all they are offering is that we become more efficient at helping ourselves. They do not offer us strength that we don’t have – they just try to harness our existing ability a bit better. The same goes for many other philosophies or religions. They tell us to try harder, but at the end of the day they don’t give us the ability we are lacking. But we need more than encouragement, being more able to harness the self-control that we already have – we need the missing self-control that we don’t have. Where can we get it from? Why does the Bible not talk more about self-control? The word/phrase for self-control in Galatians 5:22-23 is only found seven times in the whole New Testament. With such great need for self-control, why does the Bible not speak more about it? The answer is that the drive towards self-control is one that is primarily philosophical or from other religions, but it is not biblical. The Bible speaks in numerous places about the need for living in a controlled way. But it rarely refers to the subject as “self-control.” The reason is that when self-control is discussed in other religions or philosophies, what is meant is more often than not “self-mastery.” Spirit-control, not self-control? The Bible does not teach self-mastery. Instead, it tells us about the control that comes from the Holy Spirit. Paul often contrasts our own lack of control in our natural strength with the ability we can have through the Spirit. We are unable to do the good that we want, in our own strength : “So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.” (Romans 7:25, NLT) But, the believer can have the necessary control by the strength of God’s Spirit in order to obey God (keep his law): “because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” (Romans 8:2–4, NIV84) Holiness, which involves self-control, is ultimately only possible through the work of the Spirit in a person’s life. What we cannot do in our natural ability, we can do through the Spirit. How can we have Spirit-control, in practice? Become a believer. The Spirit cannot work in us if we have not first trusted in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour. Set our minds on the things of the Spirit, not the things of the sinful nature. Learn what God’s Word says about how to live a holy life, as a pre-requisite to stepping forward in obedience. Don’t rely on your own strength – this was always the root cause of our inability to have self-control in the first place. Rely on the Spirit’s strength – we can do all things through Christ Jesus who strengthens us. Step forward in faith. We cannot do it naturally, but by faith we can do it. Don’t look on our natural inability, but trust that we can do it in the Spirit’s ability. Paul refers to the “obedience of faith” in Romans 1:5 and 16:26. This is what the gospel brings about – obedience that is on the one hand what follows from believing in Jesus for salvation, and on the other hand is the active result of believing that we can do what God want, if we rely on God’s strength to do it, instead of our own. But we must remember that the motivation for this is love for God, in response to his mercy to us (Romans 12:1). What a glorious gospel! Many of us know people who are struggling to do what they ought to do. Sometimes it has life-changing consequences, sadly. People might not think that looking into the future and considering Heaven and Hell is very relevant for them. But they might more easily accept that the gospel has a direct impact on how they can live their lives here and now too. The gospel not only offers us a glorious future in eternity with God – it offers us new life here and now too. This surely must be good news. Especially since no other religion of philosophy gives us the ability or strength that we need, from outside ourselves, instead of trying to harness what little ability we have. Praise God for the gospel of salvation, not only from the consequences of sin in eternity, but from the power of sin here and now, through faith in Christ and reliance on his Spirit.