One Foot in Eternity - Audio
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This is the final installment in our series on happiness that we began the beginning of the summer. This is the final installment of me running this church and as I've said to a number of people me running this church really means Jeannie and Colleen running this church and me sort of watching as they do it our first entrance into this series was on the three types of happiness you'll recall that there are three different ways in which Psychologists have identified human happiness. The first is hedonic. That's the happiness of pleasure the happiness of a nice piece of art a nice steak a great day hanging out with your friends another type of Happiness is you demonic happiness from the Greek word for flourishing. It's the life of success of of a life That's embedded in a community where you practice the virtues and you find out that your life goes exactly the way that you'd want it to go You're respected in the community. You have very much. You have enough to give you're generous You practice faith hope and love as a Christian And then third type of happiness which we've been more or less spending some time on is eschatological happiness From the Greek word eschaton, which means the end or it refers to the end of time the end of history It's a type of happiness that's possible no matter what your circumstances are because this type of happiness holds in mind the final end of our destiny the final end of the world when the Lord returns his kingdom has brought in its fullness and John John really can I have one of those? I forgot to Take one and it has my scripture passages on it. Thank you That's eschatological happiness then in our second message we talked about God's happiness and we saw that God's happiness is something like God's ability to look down on the works of his hands and Be and we we tread carefully with our language here But almost be in awe of what he has done as he observes The way that the nature of the creation interacts it's both general generative and creative And it's also orderly Also the way that he's able to look at the perfection the beauty of his plan even in the midst of the incarnation of the Sun even in the midst of the Sun's suffering and Death God the Father and somehow in the Trinity God is is in awe and and pleased and happy even in this this very strange experience and again we have to be careful with our talk about God because even to use a present tense verb experience even to Talk about happiness when you're talking about the Lord of the universe our words aren't quite good enough to capture What God is like God is bigger and more? Amazing than our small human minds can possibly wrapped in themselves around and so when we use this language We use it provisionally and we use it understanding that we're not quite getting there Now what we didn't say when we talked about God's happiness and God having this odd this this this pleasure this joy And what he has done with the earth what we did not talk about is how inaccessible God's joy is to us And there's a couple reasons for this. I think the most important of which Is that if you're God and you're looking down on the creation the world time You have a much buried you have a much different perspective than the creation does This was first brought out in the Christian tradition by a theologian philosopher named Boethius And I want to say the third or fourth century on the AD Boethius was thinking about time and he said you know time is sort of like a Path through the forest and we as human beings where we're sitting there in the middle of the forest and the path We can see just a little bit ahead, but then it turns and and what's beyond that turn is is a mystery to us It's it's beyond what we can see right? But for God God's sort of like the bird flying above the forest and when God looks down God sees that the path in its entirety God sees every turn he sees where it ends up where it began and even though we're in the middle And we can't see very far ahead or very far behind God has a different perspective This actually has led to a number of philosophical debates about the nature of time nature of God as a philosophy major I'd like to submit to you that anyone who's figured that out is lying to you
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In the final message of his series, Pastor Tom concludes that the secret to lasting happiness is to set our minds on the truth of God and to create our worlds out of the beauty of His truth.