Turning Point

David Michael Jeremiah: If you've searched for happiness and determined that it simply can't be found, maybe you've just been looking in the wrong places. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah shares how God intends for you to find happiness straight from His word. What should you be looking for and not looking for to be happy? From "God, I Need Some Answers," here's David to introduce his message, "How Can I Be Happy?"

Dr. David Jeremiah: How can I be happy? And I thank you for joining us. That is really a question a lot of people have. They point their whole life to the answer to that question: how can I be happy? Everybody has an idea about how to do that, but the Bible has the truth and we're going to find that truth in Psalm 1.

Do you ever wish that you could submit a list of 20 questions to God, questions that would clarify just how you're supposed to live your life? Well, that's just not how God works in the life of the believer. But it does not mean that God is withholding the answers that you seek of Him, because you see God's word is lacking in nothing and holds the answers that we need to face everyday living.

All we need to do is actively and faithfully seek those answers in His word, and there is no better place in all the Bible to find an eternal perspective than in the book of Psalms. That's why during these days, we're spending these broadcasts on this question: "God, I need some answers," and we're studying the Psalms together.

Today we are talking about Psalm 1 and "How Can I Be Happy?" We'll get to that Psalm in just a moment, but first let me remind you that Turning Point is taking its annual Alaska cruise conference in July. The dates are 12th through 19th, and we'll be cruising the inside passage. Icy Strait Point, Hubbard Glacier, Juneau, Ketchikan, Victoria—these are some of the places we'll be.

Along the way, we'll be blessed by the music of Michael Sanchez and Uriel Vega, along with David Michael and David Todd Jeremiah as we study the word of God together every day. Donna and I will be there to host this event and we hope you can come with us. There's still a few rooms left, so get in touch with us at davidjeremiah.org, get all the information so that you can be a part of this event. Now here we go with "How Can I Be Happy?" Let's find out the answer.

Happy is the man. And it's the same word that Jesus used in His great sermon we know as the Sermon on the Mount. He used it over and over again: "Happy are those who mourn," "Happy are the poor in spirit." Everybody today wants to know how to be happy. The songwriter says, "Don't worry, be happy," as if we could in some cavalier way make it happen for us.

It is very evident that people in our culture, and in the American brand of our culture, have an incredible thirst and appetite for happiness and will try almost anything and go to almost any length to try to find it and incorporate it into their lives.

But it should be evident to us that if lasting happiness could be found in having material things and in being able to indulge ourselves in whatever we wanted, then most of us in America should be just delirious with joy and happy beyond description. We should be producing books and poems and art that describe our unparalleled bliss. Our literature should rival that of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Renaissance craftsmen.

But have you taken note recently of what we have been producing? It's morbid and it's sad and it's introspective and it's occultic and it drives us back into our past and back into the hurt and back into the pain. We're giving ourselves away by the plays we write and the movies we produce and the books we author. We're saying to the whole world we've been searching for it, but we just haven't been able to find it. It has become for many a journey on a dead-end street.

Did you know that a lot of folks think that happiness can be found on Easy Street? And I learned that there really is a street called Easy Street. It is in Honolulu, Hawaii. And when I go there, if I ever get to go there again, I'm going to go look for this street. I'll tell you exactly where it is: you take the Pali Highway northbound, travel about a third of the way to Pali Pass, turn right on Park Street, go one block, and there it is: Easy Street.

The problem comes when you turn left and go one block more. There's another sign that says "Dead End." That's really true: Easy Street's a dead end in Honolulu, Hawaii. But Easy Street's a dead end for a lot of people, isn't it? Happiness. How do we find it?

Well, this Psalm is the Psalm about two ways and two destinies. It's about two roads, one that leads toward God and one that leads away from God. The Psalm is divided equally in half. The first three verses talk about the way of the righteous and the last three verses talk about the way of the ungodly. And the way of the righteous is the way toward happiness. That's what the Psalmist says: "Blessed is the man."

And then he goes on his journey to describe the blessedness. Literally, the word "blessed" in the Hebrew language is in the plural. And if I were to translate it with the best nuance I could come up with in the English language, it would go like this: "How awesome are the happinesses of this man."

When the Psalmist describes the way toward God, he does so by telling us what it is not and then telling us what it is. You see, because of the readers of this hymn and obviously because of all of us, in order for us to really get into what it means to be happy, the Psalmist has to take his checklist and check off all the things that men try and say it's not any of these things.

And as he describes the happy man in verses 1 through 3, he talks about him in two ways. First of all, he talks about the fact that he avoids the downward pull of evil. Listen to his words in the first verse: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful."

"Not" is in the verse once, "nor" is in the verse twice. Three times, in essence, the Psalmist negates conduct and he says happiness is not going to be here, don't get involved here. Now, this is an incredible verse because it is a trilogy of threes. Let me say that again: it is a trilogy of threes. There are three threes in verse 1.

And if you read the verse that way, you will understand that what the Psalmist is trying to do for us is to paint a picture of the gravitational pull of evil. It is like a vortex that catches us in it and it always pulls us down. It is the progressive, declining pressure of evil in the life of a person. And what the Psalmist wants us to understand clearly is this: he is saying to us, "Blessed is the man who doesn't get caught up in the downward gravitational pull of evil in his life."

Now if you read the verse carefully, you will notice that the three sets of three are like this: first of all, walk, stand, sit. Do you see that? The second trilogy, counsel, path, seat. And the third, ungodly, sinners, scornful. All of these progressively move away from God. And I want to remind you of something that I think we all know, but maybe no one's ever verbalized before.

We always talk about momentum and how important momentum is. It's sure as important in football and in basketball. It's important in life. We like to have a sense of momentum. It's wonderful to be in a church that's got a sense of momentum. But did you know that evil has momentum too? That you can get caught up in evil momentum? That you can get so caught up in evil that it carries you along like you were borne along with the wind? And that's what the Psalmist is talking about here.

He is telling us that you can get involved in evil in such a way that the momentum of influence begins to capture you. That's the first category. And here he talks about these three words: counsel, path, and seat. The counsel of the ungodly. He said blessed is the man that doesn't get caught up in the counsel of the ungodly.

The counsel of the ungodly is nothing less than the philosophy of the natural man who seeks to understand his existence and his control without regard to God. You see, to be ungodly isn't what some of you think. It's not to be a murderer or a rapist or a bank robber or a child molester or whatever you may think of when you think of ungodly.

The word doesn't mean anything like that although it may include those things. To be ungodly, listen to this, you can be a good person and be ungodly. To be ungodly means to live your life minus God. When you get up on Sunday morning and you go to get your cup of coffee at the local convenience store, you see people packing all their stuff up to get out of town for the weekend.

And these are not just the Christian people who take a weekend once in a while, which is permissible. These are people who take off every week. They haven't had a thought about God in all of their lives. God is non-existent in their thinking process. They go to work all week, they spend Saturday working around the house, and Sunday is their day, and the thought that God might have some claim upon them has not entered their thinking process in years. Every day of their life they live as if there is no God. That's what it means to be ungodly.

It's not as bad as you might think, but in essence it's the root problem of everything. It's to live life without God. Now, the Bible says the counsel of the ungodly is the beginning place in the downward spiral. The philosophy of the ungodly is the idea that after looking at all the pros and cons and seeking out the key answers to life, you've decided that the best way to deal with this is to deal with it outside of faith, outside of God, outside of any meaningful spiritual relationship.

You can do it with your self-help courses, you can do it with all the things you get involved with which help to lift you to the next level. It's to live your life minus God. Now, the influence of that comes from listening to people who counsel you that way. It's one of the things that strikes fear into the hearts of parents when their children begin to get to the level of sending them off to college.

Maybe they've chosen a discipline for their life that is not available at a Christian college where they feel confident they want to send their children, so they send them off to State U. And they sit in the classroom and all of the dynamics of this process are very focused, because this person who stands up in front has got enough degrees to just choke you. You realize this guy's got so many degrees he's got no temperature, you know what I mean? He's just one of those kind of people.

And the kids sit in class and they look at this man or this woman and they're so enamored because obviously this person is so smart and has gone so far in their life. And then they begin to listen. And innuendos and subtleties of the counsel is counsel minus God. And little by little that counsel begins to have its impact. And then the Scripture says he walks not in the counsel of the ungodly and he doesn't take the pathway.

The next thing is after you hear the counsel, you translate the information into action. Instead of observing from a distance, you start to walk along behind. You start to ask more questions, you start to investigate. The counsel now becomes something that's captivated you and you want to know more about it. And you move from the counsel in influence to the path in influence.

And finally, the Scripture says you have come to the seat, you sit down. And that is a picture of not only being a practitioner, but settling into the embracing of this philosophy of life. You are seated in the seat, you are settled down into a comfortable lifestyle of ungodliness. And I want to tell you something, men and women, there are thousands of people who started out to have some thoughts for God in their head and in their heart.

But they began to listen to the counsel of their friends who said, "You can't work as hard as you do all week and then give Sunday to God, you need some time to recreate yourself." And so it was a Sunday here and a Sunday there and God pushed to the side here and God pushed to the side there and now they are so settled into this lifestyle, it doesn't even bother them anymore.

So it's a lifestyle, you see, but it starts listening to the counsel, kind of falling into the pattern, and then settling into the lifestyle. That's the downward pull of influence. Notice the second category: the momentum of involvement. Notice the three words: first you walk, then you stand, and then you sit. It's kind of a different way of saying the influence translates into involvement.

Someone has described the walk as a reference to our daily decisions, the things that we decide on a daily basis. The standing is to the making of a commitment. And the sitting is the settled attitude of lifestyle. First we make little decisions that are minus God, then we make commitments that cement those decisions, and then finally we settle into the attitude of a life without God.

It's so easy to do. And there are lots of Christian people who could tell me you've come back to God having gotten into that. But all of a sudden you woke up one day and you said, "My goodness, you know, 20 years ago we used to never miss church, and then this happened, we made this little decision, and then out of that decision we made this little commitment, maybe we bought a place that took us out of the town, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in a lifestyle."

Now remember, what is the Psalmist saying? Blessed is the man who doesn't get caught up in the gravitational pull of evil in his life. Here's the third issue of momentum. First of all, it's influence. Then it's involvement. And thirdly, there's a momentum of intensity. Notice he moves from ungodly—that's sort of a person who's passive about spiritual things.

He doesn't have time for God, but it's okay if you have time for God. You understand what I mean? Then there's the word sinner. I looked this word up, and you know what the Hebrew word here is? The Hebrew word for sinner is a word which means to make a loud noise or to cause a tumult or to make trouble. And it's kind of the word for partying.

It's the party animal. First of all, he's kind of minus God, he's not into God that much. But then he gets kind of caught up into the worldly lifestyle, he gets into the parties. And then the third word is the word scornful. Now watch this: he's not influenced anymore by the people outside, he has himself become an influencer. Do you see what I'm saying? He's moved from being passive about God to being involved in practicing anti-God things to now he is an atheist in a sense and he is scornful of God. He curls his lip at God.

Somebody says something to him about going to church, "You got to be kidding. You do what? You take the only day that you can really call your own and you go to church? And Sunday night too? Oh my word." And so he becomes the critic of the Christian, the scornful. You see what's happened? It's the downward pull of evil. He's gone from ungodly to sinner to scornful.

And what the Psalmist wants us to understand is that man is happy when he stays away from the gravitational pull of sin. You say, "Well, Pastor Jeremiah, how in the world does a person do that?" Well, somewhere in the process between the counsel and the path and the seat, and from walking and standing and sitting, and from ungodly and sinning and scornful, somewhere in that process you'll get a wake-up call, I promise you.

You will get a wake-up call from the Holy Spirit if you're a Christian. "Hey Christian, why do I feel uncomfortable?" When you get that wake-up call, you kind of scooted over to the edge and you're about to get caught in the downdraft. And when that happens, you better move away because you are not headed toward happiness, you are headed toward misery.

Miserable is the man who gets caught up in the gravitational pull of sin. Are there any Christians who ever had a down trip for a little bit who could give a witness today that it's more miserable being out of fellowship with God than it is almost not being a Christian? Because you know what it's like to really joy in your faith and now all of a sudden you got caught in the downdraft and you're getting pulled away from God and you feel lousy.

And when you put your feet on the floor in the morning and you wake up and you start off the day, you have this feeling of guilt in your heart and you can't even figure out why. Why do I feel so guilty? Because God is giving you the automatic sin alarm system which is starting to go off and make you uncomfortable because you've gotten pulled into the gravitational thrust of sin. Blessed is the man, happy is the man who doesn't get caught up in the gravitational pull of evil. Amen?

Now here's the positive side. The righteous way not only avoids the downward pull of sin, but the righteous way accepts the decisive place of Scripture in life. "But his delight," says the Psalmist, "is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, its leaf also shall not wither, and whatever he does shall prosper."

The first thing the Psalmist says is that the believer who is headed toward happiness on his way toward God, not away from God, this believer delights in the word of God. Now I wasn't sure what that meant, but I want to contrast it for you. Do you know how a lot of Christians read the Bible? They read the Bible to find out how far they can go before they cross the line. Do you understand what I mean?

I've talked to people like this. They don't read the Bible to find out what God wants them to do, they read the Bible to find out what God will let them do or what they can do without getting into a whole lot of trouble. Now, the person who delights in the law of God is totally opposite that. Here's what he does: he comes to the Bible and in his heart there's this incredible desire that he wants to please God.

And so he reads the Bible and he reads it like he was a detective trying to find little clues about how he can please God with his life. Not trying to find ways that he can get by with the things he wants to do, but he opens the book and his prayer in his heart is, "O God, what I really want to do with my life is I want to please You, I want to bless You, Lord, and I'm going to read Your book today and maybe You could just show me one little thing, one little nugget that I could mine that would help me please You."

Did you ever read the Bible like that? Did you ever come to God's word—I want to tell you something, friend, if you come to God with that spirit, you'll find little nuggets everywhere. Because God just loves to show His children how they can please Him. Because God's a parent. Are you with me? The most unheard words from children is, "Is there anything I could do to help you today, Mom?"

What would you do, Mom, if you heard those words? You would go over and examine to see is this an impostor? Did this person get in my house by mistake? And kids, you know, if you're going to go home and do that, maybe you could give your parents a little time to kind of get ready and warm up to this because this could be a little lethal if you drop it straight out.

But if you really knew they meant it, wouldn't it be incredible? Wouldn't it truly be incredible? I mean if every morning at breakfast, "Oh no, let me do it today, he did it yesterday, Mom." Well, I know we can all dream, right? But I want to tell you something, that's what it means when the Scripture says to delight in God's word. It's to come to the word of God with your heart motivation being, "Lord, how can I please You today?"

And the Scripture says that when you delight in the word of God, when your heart delights in the word of God, now watch carefully, that will translate into this wonderful thing and that is that your habits will be dictated by the word of God. Did you know that? When you delight in the word of God, it will automatically determine that your habits are dictated by the word of God. Why? Because if you're coming every day and saying, "Lord, how can I please You?" He'll show you and it'll translate into life.

And the Psalmist gives us a couple of clues here as to what that will mean. First of all, you will discover that your strength comes from the word of God. The Scripture says he's like a tree planted by the streams of water. Just like a tree is nourished by the constant supplies of water, without which under the blistering sun the tree would surely die, so the life that is rooted in the word of God will also be established and it will be strong.

When you get your roots down deep into God's word, it's like the tree sending its roots down deep into the water next to the stream and it grows strong. Amen. Amen. We'll finish up our discussion of Psalm 1 tomorrow as we meet together for the Thursday edition of Turning Point. In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, I encourage you to request your copy of the book *5 Psalms for a Flourishing Life*.

This book will take you deeper into these critical Psalms. It's a 230-page book that will really bless you and help you. It's a hardback cover book that we have just finished. We're so excited about it. We want you to have a copy of it and it's yours for a gift of any size to Turning Point during the month of May. All you have to do is say please send me the book *5 Psalms for a Flourishing Life* and it will be on its way to you.

It is yours again for your gift during the month of May to help us with the outreach of Turning Point and teaching the word of God worldwide. We're so blessed to have you as partners and we thank you for your generosity. We will look forward to seeing you here tomorrow. I'm David Jeremiah.

David Michael Jeremiah: For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series "God, I Need Some Answers," please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine *Turning Points* and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of David's new book *5 Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It'll help you abide with God and it's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the *Jeremiah Study Bible* in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, available in your choice of attractive cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website davidjeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue "God, I Need Some Answers" on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.