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
sometimes 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 Meriden UMC, we will continue our series on “Becoming a
Happier Persons,” and I will be preaching on how serving and helping others can
lead to an authentic happiness. My
message will be based upon the Epistle of James 2: 14-24, 26.
In this passage, 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 works 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. No matter 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. Most
of us believe that we are inadequate failures, when we compare who we are with
who we have always expected ourselves to become. Sometimes we think that we must help and
serve others in order for God to love and restore us. But, this approach puts the proverbial “cart
before the horse.” God doesn’t work this
way.
In his Epistle, James reminds us that God actually works in the
opposite direction. Despite our
fractured brokenness, God is always ready to love and restore us, when we turn
in faith to God. When we are reconciled
and restored, we help and serve others in response to God’s love already
bestowed upon us. But, a parishioner
reminded me this week 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 and flourishing
life is to help and serve others, newer studies have shown that if you only
help and serve others as a means to guarantee your own 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.”[1] So, helping and serving others only makes us
happy when we focus on giving to others, rather than focusing on making
ourselves 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 the Meriden-area 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. Meriden United
Methodist Church is located at the corner of Dawson and Main Streets in
Meriden, Kansas. We have two worship
services each weekend:
Ø Our
contemporary service starts at 6 pm on Saturday evenings.
Ø Our
classic service starts on at 10 am on Sunday mornings.
Everyone is welcome and accepted because God loves us all.
[1]
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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