Friday, February 5, 2016

"Helping Makes Us Happy"

            Remember the last time that you helped someone else?  Was it caring for a sick friend or helping a neighbor with yard work or volunteering for an organization or helping a stranger who was lost.  Almost all of us have helped someone or some deserving organization at some point in our lives.             

   Why do we do that?  Why do we help others?

            There are many reasons why we help others: 
Ø  We may feel obligated to help others out of a sense of debt or duty. 
Ø  We hope to gain recognition and impress our family, friends, peers, or boss. 
Ø  It looks good on our resume for admission to school or to get a new job.  
Ø  We volunteer because all of our friends are volunteering and the event looks like it would be fun to do together.
 
Many times, Christians help others for religious reasons: 

Ø  We want to show others how strong our faith is and how committed we are.
Ø  We feel a need to make up for sins and previous mistakes.
Ø  We want to earn “brownie points with God” in order to receive mercy and grace from God in the future.  (In other words, we want to bribe God by helping others and doing good works.)
Ø  We hope that helping others will convince God to prevent bad things from happening to us in the future.  (This is sort of like trying to buy an insurance policy with God.) 

This weekend at Christ United Methodist Church, I am continuing my sermon series on the question, “Would You Like to Be a Happier Person?”  And, I will be preaching on how helping others can lead to an authentic happiness.  My sermon will be based on the Book of James 2: 14-24, 26.  
 
In this passage, the biblical writer James claims that all of the reasons listed above for helping others are wrong.  For James, we do not help others because of what we hope to gain.  Rather, we help and serve others out of our faith in Jesus Christ.  That is, helping and serving others are the fruits of our Christian faith.  In essence, we can’t help but help because helping is who we are—and, what we do—as disciples of Christ.  Or, as James expresses it:  “For just as a human body without breathing is dead, so faith without words is also dead.” (v. 26~my paraphrase)   

Our help and service grows out of our Christian faith.  They are in response to God’s love already given to us.  Regardless of who we have been or what we have done, we know that God restores us to our true identity through our faith in Christ.  It is easy to forget the order of how God works.  Sometimes we think that we must help others in order for God to love us.  But, this approach puts the proverbial “cart before the horse.”  Instead, as followers of Christ, we help others because God has already loved us.

In this passage, James reminds us that despite our fractured brokenness, God is always ready to love and heal us.  When we are reconciled and restored, we help others in response to God’s love already bestowed upon us.  But, a parishioner once reminded me that it is very tempting to keep trying to put that cart in front of the horse, and try to earn God’s love.  Or, as she put it, “There is such a huge difference between intellectually hearing the Gospel and internalizing it in your heart and actions.” 

So, Christians help and serve others because it is in our faith-DNA—not in order to influence God or others.  Interestingly, researchers studying what creates authentic happiness have discovered something similar.  While we have known for some time that one of the keys to living a happy life is to help and serve others, newer studies have shown that if you only help and serve others in order to guarantee your happiness, then you probably won’t be happy.   

This is actually true of all the components that lead to happiness.  The more you try to be happy, the more elusive happiness becomes.  As the psychologist Todd B. Kashdan observes in an article, “In sum, the more you value happiness, try to be happy, organize your life around trying to become happy, the less happy you end up.”[i]  So, helping and serving others only makes us happy when we focus on giving to others, rather than focusing on whether we are happy.  Our happiness emerges as a by-product from serving others because—just as in Christian discipleship—serving others is in the DNA of the truly happy and flourishing person. 

If you live in Lincoln and do not have a regular church home, I invite you to join us this weekend, as we continue our exploration of becoming happier persons.  Christ United Methodist Church is located at 4530 A Street in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Our classic worship services are at 8:30 and 11:00 on Sunday mornings. 
 

Everyone is welcome and accepted because God loves us all.




[i] Todd B. Kashdan, “The Problem with Happiness,” the Huffington Post, posted online on 30 September 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-kashdan/whats-wrong-with-happines_b_740518.html, accessed 3 October 2013.

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