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Hi. My name is Michael Kennedy. It's my honor to be here. I've been in Holland Avenue for the last few years. I've had pretty much all my big milestones of faith in this church, and I've got to know a lot of you pretty well. So it's Ah, it's a real honor of mine to be able to stand where I've heard life giving truth on be able to give that to you today. And I'd like toe comfort you all. I'm saying that the wisdom that I'm giving and the words that I'm saying or not my own, but are the lords that they've he's given to me. And so I've prayed for all of you and it's still my prayer that when we're done, you have not heard the words of Michael Kennedy but had a deep in real conversation with Lord himself. Uh, all that being said, let's start with a word of prayer. Please take a moment and pray for yourselves. And this time, ask the Lord to open your eyes and your heart to his word. Now take a moment. Pray for me. So I come to give you the Lord's word. Today, Heavenly father, I thank you so much that you are unchanging. I look at that little video that we hadn't see all these magnificent people of the faith. And, Lord, you are the same God today as you were with them in the same truth as it was then, is the same truth that we have today. I pray, Lord, that you would give me the boldness and the words to speak, to equip your saints with life and Lord, that they would be comforted that these words come directly from you. Lord, I pray that we would all be ableto witness and see your glory in this room. Be aware of your presence, Lord. All that we brought with us today either in this room or as we're watching on the Livestream or that we leave that to the side for a moment. The Lord let us have hope if we haven't had hoped. Lord, let us have faith where there hasn't been before. Okay. All this in Jesus name. Amen. Now most of you that know me know that the gifting is that the Lord has given me among all of them. Navigation is not one of them. Ah, lot of you. I've been in the same car and have been the one driving and added a lot of time to what should have been a short trip the other day. My roommate and I were going to rip out some carpet in a house that we're renovating, and we got a call from my dad and we were meeting there that we needed to pics and stuff up from lows. And now I have been to lows the day before and knew that it took about 30 minutes and, like always, I was running like, right on time. So it was going to be 30 minutes late to get to him and to give just a little bit mawr backstory to that. Um, when I was going, I didn't fill up my car and so I needed to stop and get gas. And so, on top of the lows trip, I know how to stop and add more time to fill up the car. And so as I'm leaving, I see on the GPS lows 15 minutes away, and now I should have thought how in the world if I had just been is there one in half the distance and I didn't know about. Instead, I turned to the roommate with a big smile and said, Bro, we're going to make it. We're going to do this. I thought the Lord had miraculously made a new way to lose. And when? When we got there. Much to my Not my shame, I guess. But just disappointment. I realized that it was not a Lowe's hardware, but it lows Foods. My roommate laughed, too. Um uh and so I'm I was pretty embarrassed and had added another 40 minutes onto our thing. So what I thought was going to be a quick and express pastor where I wanted to go, ended up being faulty. Coordinate. Uh, and if you were wondering, we did not stop and get a snack before we got to the house. In our time here today, we're going to be talking about happiness specifically, what is happiness? Where is it found? And are we on the right path to get to it? Because, like my lows fiasco, many of us have been seeking happiness. But we may have the wrong coordinates. We're going to be using Psalm One to go through this. And if you'd like to turn with us in your Bibles or if you have your phone, go and get Psalm one and we'll see how we can go about our pursuit of happiness. Somis begins like this, he says. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of scoffers. But his delight is in law of the Lord, and then, on his law, he meditates day and night. Now this term, blessed here in the Hebrew, means extremely happy. Whenever I think about it, I think of like if you've ever heard a kid just like screech with joy, it's this this idea of extreme happiness. And it's not the same happiness we feel when we hear a good joke or when we just crush our sibling and heated competition. But it's a long lasting happiness that is not shaken by exterior things. Nothing can take this happiness away. So, in essence, the message we're getting today is God showing us the key to eternal happiness. I imagine that if this was in Hollywood, it would have some good looking Hollywood star, probably Nicolas Cage, risking life and limb solving riddles and mysteries as lines laughing that I said, Nicholas Cage there, um, they're trying to unlock all these puzzles. They have a friend that they lose, they find new love. And then at the end of all of it, they find this truth etched on a rock. And it's this key to happiness. You hear? God is just saying here it ISS do this and you will be happy. I think sometimes we can say that's just too easy. I don't believe it. I ask that you have faith in that today. But instead of saying the one who is happy does this, the psalmist begins with the do nots. He says. Three things for us to not do, he says. Do not walk in the counsel of the wicked, do not stand in the way of centers and do not sit in the seat of scoffers. Notice that there's a progression of actions here. He says that you begin by walking in this counsel of the wicked, and then you just stand in this conduct or this way centers and eventually at first and finds that the kind of seat among the scoffers. So he goes from walking to standing to sitting, which may not seem like a big deal, since all of us did that when we came in here today, right? We walked through the doors, stood to find a seat, panic for a minute, and then we finally sat down, right? But when it's connected to these terms, wicked center and scoff for the change of actions is this accepting or mimicking of who you're copying? Right? You're becoming, like the wicked or like the center or the school for So the one who begins this path for happiness and heeds this advice, and when they follow, they become more like the wicked themselves. Jay Witherspoon he like, since this process to a person who steps out of a clear air into a closed room. And he says, You step from fresh air into this closed room, the door shut and you have this kind of dusty, dingy area that your air is just recycling. So the longer you're in it, um, or impure the air gets, but the also the longer you're in it, the less you know that the air is back. You become acclimated to it. Then you say you have to step further, he says. And then you go from that room to a smaller room where there's even more dust and it's even Maurin pure air. And he says that when you're in this furthest room and that process can keep going and going, you don't even realize that you don't have fresh air anymore. And this happens to us all the time and we miss it. A good question to ask is, Does the man know that the way he's walking in is the counsel of the wicked? Does he know that it's wicked advice, and if he did what he keep doing it a good question. But the Psalmist never reveals the answer. He makes it clear that those who do this are on the wrong path. The Shamas the Psalmist shows us the path that many embark on seeking happiness where they've been misled from the beginning. However, this isn't very new. We see it happen all the time or commonly in the lives of others than in ourselves. I just recently heard a story from a mother, the sun. It was a Ian James pecorino and I felt like it demonstrated this path pretty clearly this is what she says and to be going through a tough time in middle school when he found that using tobacco and marijuana numbed his pain, if not in his mind, removed it all through high school in excelled in academics and athletics, it was an all star athlete on both the basketball and lacrosse teams in this high school. Yet no matter his successes, he couldn't rid himself of his pain. In his freshman year of college, Ian and two of his close friends tried heroin for the first time. Both friends got sick and left it, but Ian loved it. He had finally found the being they could take away his pain, eventually came to his mom after about four months and told that his problem was getting out of hand. She checked him into addiction therapy, and he was also for about three months. And then Ian started using again and how to relapse that he never returned from. Ian lost his life nine months after trying heroin for the first time, and he did all of it in a pursuit of joy. The psalmist weren't that many go about life seeking joy, only to find themselves on a path that brings them further and further from it. He says that on the journey to find joy, they become less and less joyful and more and more cynical of those that seek it. And don't miss that. He's saying that you may be on the wrong path, thinking that you're finding joy, but really, what you're doing is getting further and further from it, becoming more cynical of those that believe that they can have it. Joy becomes the thing that you will never reach. Those that walk on this path do not intend to become one of the wicked themselves, but it happens all the same. Have you ever had something like this happened? Something that you thought would bring you joy and it fell short. How many of us when that happens, do we keep going? Say, if I go a little further, the joy will come or if I do a little more, the joy will come. I'll go ahead and ruin some of the ending here. It never does. Those that are on this path are promised everything and given nothing. We're not left to the salmon's continues on. He as the contrast, but and he's taking us back to the beginning, where it says happy or long lasting happiness comes to the one who does this. And he says it's the one that delights in the law of the Lord. And on that law he meditates day and night. He's saying that the key to your joy is delighting and God's law day and night. Now that may come across as a little lot, since we don't normally think about laws in our day to day life, right? And if we do, they're not really happy. When I think of the speed limit, it's more stressful than it is joy bringing right? I don't sit there and contemplate the jail time for grand larceny, right? That's kind of a weird thing. Why is that? The key to our happiness? A law? The term here is Tora. It means teaching or instruction. And so the psalmist is saying you can walk by the teaching or the instruction of the world, or you can walk and delight in the teaching of God. And so he's laying out these two paths that we will always find ourselves on one or the other. Further unpacking this, Osama says the one who delights and meditates in the Lord of Lords instruction. He says he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither and all that he does. He prospers. The psalmist compares the one who delights in God's instruction and meditates on it in their day to a tree, which was planted in fertile land overflowing with life. Notice that the Salma says Planted says he is like a tree planted by streams of water. One of my favorite things about the Bible is that we can read it over and over and over again, and we will always find something new, right? And I didn't really believe that whenever I started. I was like, No, no, no, I'm probably going to study it. Then get all of it. I've gone through this song a lot over the last few years. The Lord's really used it in my life, and it wasn't until I prepared this sermon that that term planted stuck out. The imagery here is of a CBM planted either by the teaching of God or by God himself. This taking a seat in planting in this fertile ground where he knows it'll grow. That's right by the stream, and it's in good soil, and he knows that it will take root and then it will not fail. A tree that was planted had to grow. I'll be the first to admit that there are times in my life where I have heartache or I have troubles and I come to God and I say, God, let thy will be done. But a few weeks go by and or months and nothing has changed. And so I have to come back to God and I say, Lord, let thy will be done a little quicker, right? Right. You get impatient, we can look out and we don't see the crop. We don't see the tree taking root. We can easily forget that God is not in a hurry and that he grows things. The tree is planted by streams of water, and it's clear that the tree reaches its maturity because it's bearing fruit. God promises that the work he starts in his people, he will finish. Jeremiah unpacks this tree imagery if you want to turn to Jeremiah 17 verse seven, Jeremiah says blessed is the one, so he's keeping this happy is the one who trust in the Lord and whose trust is in the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by a stream. It will not fear when the heat comes, but it's sleeves will be green, and it will not be anxious in the year of drought nor cease to yield fruit. Those that trust in the Lord and find their delight in him will not fail. They do not lose the joy in life, even in the hardest of times, No matter the condition of the land or the surrounding plants, the tree of the Lord will always bear fruit and be teeming with glorious life. In the same way, those who meditate on God's word and delight in it do not lack enjoy, for God is the source of joy. The imagery here when Jesus says that he is the living water, you can imagine that the one who is rooted in him, the one that delights in his law, is that tree right by the stream of living water and the roots that go down into the ground are in God himself. And so your joy is as unshakable as its foundation, and the foundation is God, who we all know is unshakable. The songs is telling us that no amount of world pandemic, no matter how high the count, gets no amount of political strife, no amount of emotional or physical torment can keep that joy from taking root. No matter the condition of our land or those around us. If we remain in him, he will sustain us. The psalmist continues, he says. The wicked are not so, but our like chap that the wind drives away those who find themselves aligned with the world and walking in worldly things that are the Salma says, is not like this tree. He compares him to something called staff, which is like when you harvest wheat, you would beat it and the husk around the grain falls in the straw, and then you would throw that in the air and the wind drives it away. The psalmist compares them to Chapman stands in stark contrast to this tree, he says. Unlike the tree, chaffing is dead, it has no roots. It has no dwelling. Please, that has no life in it. and he goes even further to say they have no benefit to those around them. Chop is not the crop. It's just what you want to go away. Those that walk in this way and in the way of the wicked. And then the teachings outside of Scripture mislead people and the way that they've been misled. Understand that if you walk in this path when you get down here and someone ask you where is Joy found and you are being misled, you will mislead them and put them on the same joyless dead path that you began. Now you have the same opportunity to be the tree. It says that it bears good fruit, and it has. It has a benefit to those around them. It's a delight toe others. And so we have two choices here. The psalmist gives us two paths. One is grounded in the foundation of God's word, and the other is in anything else. There is no middle path, there is no neutral. You were either walking with God into life and you are bringing others with you or you were walking into death and away from God and you were bringing others alongside your destruction, C. S. Lewis puts it like this. He says Every time you make a choice, you returning the central part of you the part that chooses into something a little different from what it was before, he says, You were either turning that central part of you either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature. And every choice we have to ask him, I living for God and my blessed, or if I'm a my living for myself and being destroyed. The psalmist doesn't give us a middle, he says. You're always moving toe one or the other. I know that this is kind of Ah, heavy message, but look at the lives of those around you. Look at those that say that they have joy when fear and anxiety and hard times come. We've had plenty of it in the last year. We know we've had enough time to look at ourselves and look at others who say No, I have a joy, it's unshakable or the hit where it hurts a little bit. I have a faith that is unshakable and they said, Oh no, I love God, but when this wind comes, are they a tree that is firmly planted or they like shaft completely ruined when the hard time comes. So I must continue saying, Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor centers in the Congregation of the Righteous, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous. But the way of the wicked will perish to those who have walked outside of God's word. It might be listening to me saying, Man, give it up. I have joined. I don't do anything you're talking about. I don't walk or delight in God's word, but I have joy and yeah, hard times have come, but I'm still okay. Let me show you the end of the road. Osama's writes that those continue down the path of worldly lifestyles and worldly desires will end in death. Paul affirms this and Romans 6 23 he says, for the wages of sin that term, their wages is and you've been serving sin. And when payday comes, he says, all you get is death. At the end of our lives, way will reap what we have sown either for our ruin or for our restoration. At the end of our lives, we get out what we've put in either for our ruin or our restoration. The Lord knows the path of the righteous for its his path. It's almost silly when we think about it, because, of course, he knows those were walking in it because it's his Word is the path that he showed you, and he's the one that laid the foundation. The imagery here is that you're walking across the Bible and that you are loving the way right you might stumble and fall as you're on it. But the path is still good toe live apart from God, and his instruction is toe live without joy. I hope that you don't misunderstand me to say that God wants you to be happy and he will come alongside you in the happiness God is the happiness that he wants you to have. There is no joy outside of God because he is joy. When you are rooted, enjoy your rooted in God or better said, when you're rooted in God, you are rooted in joy. You may be able to coast for a while on that high of symbol when it falls and when the facade ends the path ends in death. There is no joy at the end. There is no life. It only ends in one way. So what does your life look like today? How does it look as this adversity has hit us? Do you see your life marked by joy in life, when others look atyou? Do they see a person who is in love with Jesus and stays rooted in him when hard times come? Or do you find yourself feeling more like this chap blown away from God blown away from that thing you thought was faith in times of adversity, the roots that you thought you had didn't go as deep? If so, let me encourage all of us by saying, We're not at the end of the road yet. We're still on the past as long as you're breathing to those that find themselves more like the chap to those that feel like their life is meaningless and empty and purposeless. I'd like to invite you to come to Jesus today. He loves you and has prepared the way for you to come to him and trade your dry and weary life for abundant life and joy. Jesus says Come unto me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest. For I am gentle and lowly and heart and you will find rest for your souls, My brothers and sisters who were in this room and who have walked with God, examine your life and see is your delight in God. Are you delighting in God and thinking about his word day and night? I'll admit that it's a lot easier said than done. When we leave here, it will be easy to forget this. To say that was good. That's a good word. Say amen on these walls and then walked out and life gets difficult. It gets hard to remind yourself about Gods were day and night. We have to be intentional. I'll also admit that I'm not perfect and then I fail at this. One of the hardest things is to write a sermon first time. But one of the things I'm finding was the hard thing and writing the sermon. What is that? When I go to give it to you, I don't wanna be a hypocrite. And so all week is this Am I delighting in the law of the Lord M I meditating on his instruction. What path do I find myself on? And I'll be I'll be honest. It's hard to say that you're always on this one. They're always on the one that delights and gods were attempted to the light in the world. And to those that say that they are rooted and got into light in him, let me challenge you in saying this. One of the worst things you can do is cling to God so fervently with your words, but be rooted in this worldly path. You tell people I have the key to joy and you're leading them to death. One of the hardest things that I have seen and down talked about this the other week. One of the worst things I have seen throughout this entire pandemic is people that so fervently proclaimed God and say, Oh, yeah, he is our joy. But when adversity really comes, when you really talk to them, it's just misery. There's no joy in them. They're completely undone by times of adversity, they say their treatment, they proved to be a calf, so we have to be rooted in God. We have to be fervently devoting ourselves to him, reminding ourselves that God's word is the one that leads to joy. Everything that promises that it brings you to joy. It is not of God is alive. Pray that God would give you a delight in his law. If you have not been with God, ask that he would bring you to him. I know that he will let us pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to come and share what you have been teaching me for a long time. God, I pray that we would know that there are two paths. God, that there is nothing else that leads to joy other than you. Because God, you are our joy. Lord, you are love and you are our happiness. And I pray that we would root ourselves in you. And we know that you are unshakable. Therefore our joy is unshakable. I pray for all those that have not known you, Lord, that they would have the faith and the boldness that come to you today. Heavenly Father, I'm thankful for your love and the sacrifice that you made or to prepare the way for centers like me. Jesus. Thank you for your word. And I pray that as we go about our day today, tomorrow and the rest of our lives that we would delight in it and walked by it as well as we can and turn to your grace when we fall that we not stop striving or we love you. We ask this in Jesus name and then