DAY ONE: An Invitation to Happiness

The happiness of God’s kingdom is not about perpetually feeling good; it’s about the happiness expressed in the Beatitudes, which helps us become like Christ.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for blessed is ašerê, which means to be in a state of happiness.(1) In the New Testament, the Greek word for blessed is makários, and it also means to be in a state of happiness.(2) Dallas Willard insightfully wrote that makários “refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings, but it is also the term the Greeks used for the kind of blissful existence characteristic of the gods.”(3) The original readers of the Gospel of Matthew, where we find the Beatitudes, would have been aware of what makários meant. He was inviting people to be happy.

And he is still inviting people to be happy.

According to Jesus, the blessed, or happy, are those whose lives are supernaturally interwoven into Jesus’ life, and who are participating in his kingdom by the Holy Spirit’s power.

The happiness of God’s kingdom is not about perpetually feeling good or good things consistently happening to us. The God-kind-of-happiness expressed in the Beatitudes is about being good and becoming a person who images forth the character of Jesus into the world by the power of the Holy Spirit.(4) If you will, Jesus makes us good by imparting and implanting his good life into us, utterly transforming our being.

How do we become more like Jesus? Like the disciples, we sit at his feet to learn. The New Testament uses the term Christian only three times to describe Jesus’ followers. The term used most to describe Jesus’ followers is disciple. It’s used 269 times. In the first-century, Second Temple Jewish world of Jesus, a disciple was the student of a rabbi. The student’s task was to follow and observe the rabbi, to learn at his feet, and then to pattern their lives after his. Jesus is our rabbi, and we are to observe him through the Scriptures, to learn at his feet and through the life of a local church, and then to allow him to live his life through us by faith. The good life, the happy life, is a life of discipleship.

The good life that we desire and, more importantly, we were created for, is available to us.

Two thousand years ago, on a hill over the Sea of Galilee, our good King invited us to discover the happiness we long to experience. The invitation still stands. You don’t have to chase shadows anymore. Jesus—happiness himself—is chasing you.

Are you ready?

READ Matthew 5:1–12.

What surprises you in this passage?

PRAY

Father, I’m discovering that life is exhilarating, messy, beautiful, and perplexing. I seem to have a longing that no created thing can satisfy. Just when I think I’m going to be happy for longer than just a few fleeting moments, I realize I’m back where I started, chasing something that seems to be uncatchable.

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W. W. Wessel, Blessed in D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, and D. J. Wiseman, eds., New Bible Dictionary 3rd ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 142. R. J. Utley, The First Christian Primer: Matthew Vol. 9 (Marshall, TX: Bible Lessons International, 2000), 36. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 120–21. Scot McKnight, The Story of God Bible Commentary: The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 53.