What Does True Happiness Look Like?
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) was a Welsh Protestant minister, preacher, and medical doctor who was influential in the Reformed wing of the British evangelical movement in the 20th century. For almost 30 years, he was the minister of Westminster Chapel in London.
In many ways, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones is responsible for the resurgence of interest in the Puritans we are experiencing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Learn more about Lloyd-Jones’ life in Logic on Fire: The Life and Legacy of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
The following is an excerpt from his Exposition on The Sermon on the Mount.
Happiness is the great question
confronting mankind…
The whole world is longing for happiness, and it is tragic to observe the ways in which people are seeking it. The vast majority, alas, are doing so in a way that is bound to produce misery. Anything which, by evading the difficulties, merely makes people happy for the time being, is ultimately going to add to their misery and problems. That is where the utter deceitfulness of sin comes in; it is always offering happiness, and it always leads to unhappiness and to final misery and wretchedness.
The Sermon on the Mount says, however, that if you really want to be happy, here is the way. This and this alone is the type of person who is truly happy, who is really blessed. This is the sort of person who is to be congratulated.
Let us look at this person…
Read the Beatitudes, and there you have a description of what every Christian is meant to be. It is not merely the description of some exceptional Christians. Our Lord does not say here that He is going to paint a picture of what certain outstanding characters are going to be, and can be, in this world. It is His description of every single Christian.
All Christians are meant to manifest all of these characteristics. The Beatitudes are a complete whole, and you cannot divide them. The relative proportions may vary, but they are all present, and they are all meant to be present at the same time.
None of these descriptions refers to a natural tendency. Each one is wholly a disposition which is produced by grace alone and the operation of the Holy Spirit upon us. Nobody by birth and by nature is like this. Any one of us, every one of us, whatever we may be by birth and nature, is meant as a Christian to be like this. And not only are we meant to be like this; we can be like this. That is the central glory of the gospel. It can take the proudest man by nature and make him a man who is poor in spirit.
These descriptions indicate…
These descriptions indicate clearly the essential, utter difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. This is not just a description of what a man does; the real point is this difference between the Christian and the non-Christian. As I see things at the present time, the first need in the Church is a clear understanding of this essential difference. It has become blurred. The line is not as distinct as it was. There were times when the distinction was clear-cut, and those have always been the greatest eras in the history of the Church.
The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first. That is how revival comes. That must also be true of us as individuals. Our ambition should be to be like Christ, the more like Him the better, and the more like Him we become, the more we shall be unlike everybody who is not a Christian.
The Christian and the non-Christian
are absolutely different in…
what they admire.
Take the newspapers and see the kind of person the world admires. You will never find anything that is further removed from the Beatitudes than that which appeals to the natural man and the man of the world. What calls forth his admiration is the very antithesis of what you find here. The natural man likes an element of boastfulness, but that is the very thing that is condemned in the Beatitudes.
what they seek.
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst.” After what? Wealth, money, status, position, publicity? Not at all. “Righteousness.” And righteousness is being right with God. Take any man who does not claim to be a Christian and who is not interested in Christianity. Find out what he is seeking and what he really wants, and you will see it is always different from this.
what they do.
If they admire and seek different things, they very clearly do different things. The result is that the life which is lived by the Christian must be an essentially different life from that of the man who is not a Christian. The non-Christian is absolutely consistent. As the man of the world is consistent, so the Christian also ought to be consistent. If he is, he will be very different from the other man; he cannot help it.
The truly happy
There is nothing, surely, which exhorts us more than this Sermon on the Mount to be what we are meant to be, and to live as we are meant to live; to be like Christ by being a complete contrast to everyone who does not belong to Christ.
[In this] general account of the Christian which is given in the Beatitudes, do you see how essentially different he is from the non-Christian? The vital questions which we therefore ask ourselves are these:
Do we belong to this kingdom? Are we ruled by Christ? Is He our King and our Lord? Are we manifesting these qualities in our daily lives? Is it our ambition to do so? Do we see that this is what we are meant to be? Are we truly blessed? Are we happy? Have we been filled? Have we got peace?
I ask: what do we find ourselves to be? It is only the man who is like that who is truly happy, the man who is truly blessed. It is a simple question. My immediate reaction to these Beatitudes proclaims exactly what I am. If I feel they are harsh and hard, if I feel that they are against the grain and depict a character and type of life which I dislike, I am afraid it just means I am not a Christian. If I do not want to be like this, I must be “dead in trespasses and sins”; I can never have received new life. But if I feel that I am unworthy and yet I want to be like that, well, however unworthy I may be, if this is my desire and my ambition, there must be new life in me, I must be a child of God, I must be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven and of God's dear Son.