We are thinking about Stumbing Into Happiness, a theme taken from Daniel Gilbert, author of a new book about happiness. What makes you happy? And Gilbert’s idea is that you often don’t know.
For the Christian, we know that pleasing God makes God happy. It would seem logical that making God happy will make us happy. So I
have invited you this morning to write down the 10 commandments from memory just to see if you can 
remember how to make God happy. How many people here could not remember any commandment? I’ll give hint – they start with ‘Thou
shalt not’! OK, let’s hear from the group that could only remember 5 or less. Which ones did you remember?
Catholics and Methodists do not agree on the list of commandments. Which commandment do Methodists omit? (Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house) Which commandment do Catholics ignore? (Thou shalt not make a graven image)
So, how many people remembered at least 8 commandments? ¾? Some of you may be happy or sad, but you are going to have to work harder if you expect to make God happy. Some of you parents should be more forgiving now. What do you mean that you forgot what I told you to do? And how many people remembered all 10? Please stand.
We are going to look at the third Biblically supported way to get happier in life in worship today. Many people treat happiness as an experience. I hope I will be happy today. Have you ever heard a friend say – that person wasn't nice and my whole day is ruined now? Maybe you have said that. I don’t want to give another person that much control over my happiness. We are talking about truths from the scripture that help you be happier regardless of other experiences. You can’t control what other people do in your building, you can’t control what your boss ate last night and how they feel today, you can’t control what your teacher puts on your exam. But I do want to help you with some wonderful ways that you can work on your happiness, even if somebody else is trying to ruin your day. So, expect great things from God – the Lord has a blessing for coming for you.
A key to happiness is in your giving. Its astonishing how these essential Biblical ways to grow your own happiness are not mysterious Harry Potter secrets – they are simple disciplines that sound obvious after you hear them. God wants you to give because God is a giver. God created you to give because God created you in the image of God. We have been talking about the 10 commandments, but they are summed up in the New Testament, love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself. You love by giving.
Most of us don’t stumble into happiness because we have some reason which seems to make the application impossible. Some of you heard the sermon on eating right and you immediately knew why it wouldn’t work for you. I can’t eat right because I get a headache if I don’t eat a pound of red meat every day. I can’t eat right because I work across from McDonald’s and I can’t resist stopping. I can’t exercise because I think I strained something in my elbow.
Friends, as soon we hear about a discipline, our body is right there to tell us why it won’t work for us. If I listened to what my body was saying, I’d eat potatoes, chocolate, pecan pie and steak every day. If I really listened to what my body was saying, I’d bring them all into the pulpit and eat while I'm preaching.
The Lord has just delivered the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt. They are now crossing the desert, camped at the base of Mount Sinai. They have keen memories of the torture and the miraculous deliverance. They had to exercise faith because the Egyptians were so mad that it seemed like they would kill all the foreigners. The Egyptian army did chase them and then was turned back at the Red Sea. And now they are safe, but the land is dry and their numbers are great. They couldn’t find food in the desert and God provided Manna.
Now God is asking for a difficult act of giving. God wants a grain offering. While grain was not unfamiliar to the Israelite, it was not a common commodity, either. They were in the desert, where grain could not be grown, and where it could not be purchased, either. Offering manna, on the other hand, would have been easy, but this is not what God commanded.
The purpose of the Grain Offering is not atonement, but worship, acknowledgment of God’s divine provision of the needs of the Israelite for life itself. The Grain Offering praised God for His abundant supply of the “daily bread” of the Israelite, according to one commentator. (Bob Definbaugh)
If God has blessed you, then God requires a response. That seems evident to everyone. We expect that from our children. Play nicely Bobby, Suzy was nice to you so you be nice to her. There is a principle of response.
But our giving is usually from our surplus where God wants our gift to be a sacrifice. For the Israelites to give the grain offering, they had to struggle. They had to cut back that week in other ways so that they could make the gift. The grain offering was mixed with frankincense which was a treasure of ancient times. Frankincense was valued like gold. If you have come to the altar for prayer, there is the essence of frankincense in the oil that we use. It has a wonderful odor that was the base for some perfumes.
Over the years, people have given me more excuses for why they do not give than any other comment on discipleship. People don’t come to me to explain why they don’t pray more, why they don’t read the Bible more. People come to explain that the children are buying a new house and need their help, that they had to take their 10th anniversary cruise this year, that they are about to retire and needed to remodel the house. I’d like to tell you that its weak Christians who rarely come to church who bring these reasons, but it has often been Christians for whom I have a lot of respect. And I marvel that they can come so far in their faith in some ways and completely lose it when it comes to being grateful for what God has done for them.
This offering reminds me of the prostitute Mary in the New Testament, breaking an expensive container of perfume for Jesus’ feet. Her gift was so expensive that the disciples criticized her for it.
The first day of July, 1995 was the first day that I came to work at Community Church. That day the church received a gift of $10,000. Compared to the church that I just came from, I had only seen one other person make a gift of that amount. A saint in my former church left a gift of $140,000 for the church when she died. I assumed that this gift was from a wealthy person. They were now living in Taiwan and wanted to thank God for how the Lord had used our church in their life.
In 1996, I was able to go to Taiwan and I wanted to look up the person making the gift. I wanted to thank them on behalf of all the ministries happening through their gift. To my shock, I found someone much less capable than me of making a gift of that size. A person of limited means felt that God had really provided for him through Community Church. He had come to the United States without friends and scared of the culture and we were a place that took him in and offered friendship. He wanted to let the Lord know that he was forever grateful.
That is a way to bring more happiness into your life. For some of us, the tithe or 10% of our income each year is a sacrificial act of giving. It becomes our grain offering to God.
There is a formal act of giving each week. I make a commitment in church giving because I would not tithe if I didn’t set the amount as a goal. One year, I decided to just give from my heart, thinking that I would give more that way. I found out in October that my rate of giving was actually about half of what I wanted to do. It is my hope that you will start to bring the grain offering – the offering of sacrificial thanks to God for all that God has done. Some of you already offer these wonderful gifts. They provide blessing for all of us and ministry to our community. People in Jackson Heights have such a good image of our church. Its because they smell the frankincense, they see our fruit. And if this is new to you, then its time to add to your happiness. Don’t interrupt the flow of giving because God created you to give. Look at this opportunity with joy. Reorder your priorities and fulfill the law of love. Amen.
