Our subject is happy is everyone. Happy is everyone. Our psalm begins with that fact. It says in verse one, blessed,
happy is everyone that feareth the Lord, that walketh in his
ways. Then he gives us three pictures
that we associate with happiness, with blessedness. One is from
one's occupation. Verse two, he says, for thou
shalt eat the labor of thine hands. Happy shalt thou be, and
it shall be well with thee. Next is a picture of a fruitful
wife, bearing many children, and the children being all around
your table. He says, thy wife shall be as
a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house or within thine
house. Thy children like olive plants
round about thy table. And then the third picture is
of one's nation, one's city being so blessed that he gets to see
his great, great grandchildren and peace upon the whole nation. He says, verse four, behold,
that thus shall the man be, for thus shall the man be blessed
that feareth the Lord. The Lord shall bless thee out
of Zion, and thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem all the days
of thy life. Yea, thou shalt see thy children's
children and peace upon Israel. Now, true happiness, True happiness
is to fear the Lord and walk in His ways. That's true happiness. True happiness is to fear the
Lord and walk in His ways and the happiness is spiritual. The blessing is spiritual. The blessing is Christ and being
found in Christ. Now that's the fact that's stated
in verse 1. Verse 1 says, Blessed, happy
is every one that feareth the Lord, that walketh in his ways. Every one. Each one. Each and every one that feareth
the Lord, that walketh in his ways. No exceptions here. He's
blessed. He's happy. You know, no one
is happy that does not fear the Lord or walk in his ways. They're not happy. They have
no spiritual, inward happiness. The fear of the Lord is what
makes us happy. And to walk in His ways, that's
true happiness. Now the fear of the Lord is of
God. It's of God. Look over at Jeremiah
32. No sinner fears God by our first
birth. Not one does. We didn't. None
of us did. They're sitting here now. Paul
quoted the Scripture in Romans 3.18, there is no fear of God
before their eyes. That was so of me, that was so
of you, that's so of every man that comes in this world. And
no sinner can give another sinner a fear of the Lord. Only the
Lord creates fear and reverence in the heart and He does it in
the new birth. Jeremiah 32 and verse 37. The Lord said, Behold, I will
gather them out of all countries, whether I've driven them in mine
anger and in my fury and in great wrath, and I will bring them
again unto this place, and I will cause them to dwell safely, and
they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give
them one heart and one way that they may fear me forever. Look
at that now. This is how He gives this fear
in the heart. I'll give them one heart, And I'll give them
one way, Christ the way, the only way of salvation. I'll give
them one heart and one way that they may fear me forever for
the good of them and of their children after them. And I will
make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn
away from them to do them good. But I will put My fear in their
hearts, that they shall not depart from Me." See, the fear of the
Lord is of God. Now look over at Isaiah chapter
11. God creates a new heart and He
gives us a fear of the Lord by making Christ the one way of
salvation to us. He makes us see Christ as the
one way of salvation. You see, Christ is the perfect
faithful one. He's the one who feared God with
a perfect reverence and walked in His ways in perfection, and
He did it for His people. Look here, Isaiah 11, verse 2. The Lord has to make Christ our
one way of salvation. Now look, He's the one way. Here's
why. Isaiah 11, verse 2. The Spirit
of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and of
the fear of the Lord, and shall make Him of quick understanding
in the fear of the Lord, and he shall not judge after the
sight of the eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of the ears,
but with righteousness shall he judge the poor, with righteousness,
and he'll reprove with equity for the meek of the earth, and
he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with
the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked, and righteousness
shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of
his reins. Now I want you to look one more
place with me, Psalm 111. Psalm 111. So Christ is the perfect
faithful one. He's the one that feared the
Lord and walked in His ways in perfection. Now Psalm 111, our
Lord's going to tell us how He gives this fear. This is how
He's going to make us behold His holy name. And we behold
His holy name in Christ crucified. Psalm 111, and look here in verse
9. He sent redemption unto His people. He sent redemption unto His people. Paul said, God is Christ made
unto us redemption. God is holy. Therefore, God our
Father sent Christ unto His people to redeem us from the curse of
the law. To do it in a way that is perfectly
righteous. He sent redemption. Verse 9 says,
He hath commanded His covenant forever. Before the world was
made, God commanded His everlasting covenant of grace. That's how
He would save His people was through this everlasting covenant
of grace. But He gave that law at Sinai
to show us we sinned. And that law has to be fulfilled.
That law has to be honored and magnified in perfection. Now
we all sinned, so we had to die. And so our Lord Jesus came. This
is the holy name of God. This is where we see His holiness.
God will by no means clear the guilty. And for Him to save us
and be gracious to us, He sent redemption to us. He sent Christ
Jesus. And Christ didn't come to destroy
the law. He came to fulfill it. He's the only one that could.
He's the only one that did. And He fulfilled the law for
His people. Every job entitled of the law
on behalf of His people. God commanded His covenant forever. And so Christ fulfilled that
covenant. And He took that covenant away and brought His people under
the everlasting covenant of grace because He honored that law.
He magnified that law so that God's merciful to make the everlasting
covenant with our heart to give us a new heart and to make us
have one way of salvation, that's Christ. This is how He does it. Verse 9, holy and reverent is
His name. That's why He did this. His name's
holy. His name's reverent. This is
why he sent Christ, and he purged our conscience through the preaching
of this gospel, and the Spirit of God made us behold Christ,
that he is redemption. God's so holy that He sent His
own Son to take the place of His people to bear our sin and
bear that curse that all of His people earned. And Christ bore
it. And He redeemed us from the curse
of the law by being made a curse for us. And Christ crucified. On that cross, we see Christ
crucified. That's where we see God's holy
and reverent name. He wouldn't clear us guilty sinners. But He chose them, and He'd have
mercy on them, but He's going to do it in a way that's righteous,
because He's holy. He's holy. Verse 10, Psalm 111. The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom. This is why He sent us the Gospel.
This is why the Spirit of God, how He purged our conscience,
so that we could see and behold. And that's when of God Christ
was made wisdom to us. And we started seeing Christ
as the wisdom of God. He's the only way God could be
just and justifies people. He's the only way of salvation.
And Christ was made wisdom to us. And this fear of the Lord
is given in our heart. And that's the beginning of wisdom.
Now, children are not full grown at birth. Our children are not
full grown at birth. And they're born at different
times. So they're growing at different stages. and at different
rates. Well, that's so with God's children.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. When it gives you
a reverence for the Lord, that's the first time we sat down and
shut up and start listening to God and hearing God speak and
bowing to what He said and trusting what He said. But He grows us,
giving us faith and He keeps growing us in faith and He keeps
growing us in this fear of the Lord. He's growing us up into
Him. He's showing us more of Christ.
He's making us see more and more of His holy and reverent name. And that's how He's growing this
fear. Verse 10 says, A good understanding have all they that do His commandments. Christ came and gave us an understanding. That's what John said. And we
may know Him that's true, and we're in Him that's true. And
He gives us a good understanding, and He makes us willing now to
do as He commands. He doesn't bring you back under
the law of Sinai. He brings you under the everlasting
covenant of grace. He gave us two commandments.
God says, Believe on My Son. Trust My Son. Because He fulfilled
the law. He is the righteousness of the
law. And through faith in Him, God imputes the righteousness
of His Son to His people. You know what that means? You
know what the righteousness of Christ is? When He imputes the
righteousness of Christ to us, and God declares we're righteous,
that means we're as holy, just, and good as the law given at
Sinai. We're as holy, just, and good
as God is righteous. That's in Christ, by Christ alone. And it's ours freely when He
brings you to simply trust Him and believe Him, that He is your
righteousness. And the second commandment He
gave us is to love one another as Christ loved us and gave Himself
for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor.
That's the only way that we learn how to love is when that love
of God is shed abroad in our heart and we see Christ loved
us. He laid down His life for us.
He was willing to become guilty for us. Willing to suffer the
wrath of God for us. He stood between us and the grave,
between us and death, between us and the law and the curse.
And He bore it all. He bore the curse. He bore the
sin and the death and the wrath of God in our place. And that's
what makes you willing. to lay down your life for your
brethren, to try to love them as He loved you. We can never
do it like He did it. But you sure want to love your
brethren. And we have to walk by faith, not by sight. We have
to trust Christ. That's the only way we can love
one another. Trusting one another to Him, praying for one another,
trusting Christ is working in each heart of each one of His
saints. And this fear of the Lord, brethren,
makes us give Him all the praise and all the glory. Look at the
end of verse 10, Psalm 111, 10. His praise endureth forever.
When He gives you a fear and a reverence for Him, first of
all, it makes you fearful of trying to take any glory for
yourself. You see, now that's all we were doing was taking
glory for ourselves. And He brings you to give the
praise to Him and the glory to Him for the work of salvation. And you're happy for the first
time. Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord that walketh
in His ways. The fear of the Lord makes us
depart from evil. Proverbs 16, 6, By the fear of
the Lord, men depart from evil. Now we hate evil. The evil of
will worship. the evil of self-righteousness,
and most of all, we hate the evil we see in our own sinful
flesh. The fear of the Lord is to hate
evil. Pride and arrogance, and the
evil way, and the fraud mouth do I hate. That's what every
one of us are in our sin nature, and that's all we were doing
when we were dead in sin. Walking around in our pride,
walking around in our arrogance, boasting in the evil way that
we saved ourselves by something we did. That was a fraud mouth, a wicked
mouth. God said I hate it. Those things
steal our happiness in Christ. They steal this blessedness we
have in the new man. And it's still in our flesh.
David hated his own vain thoughts. When he said that in Psalm 119,
I hate every vain thought, he's talking about himself. You read
that Psalm, you'll see he was talking about his own vain thought.
Paul hated his sinful ways of his sinful flesh. He said, what
I would that do I not, but what I hate that do I. But I tell
you this, there's no discipline like the discipline of forgiveness.
There is no discipline like the discipline of forgiveness. No
teacher like the teacher of God's forgiveness. While we behold
the sins of our flesh, and they're before us always, God keeps making
us know, like He did the first hour, that for Christ's sake
alone, by His righteousness alone, God forgives us of our sins.
And we'll not remember our sins anymore. And He keeps making
you know that. And He continually teaches you
that. And that's not only how He gave you this fear of the
Lord, that's how He grows you in this fear of the Lord. Reverence
for Him. Look over at Psalm 130 verse
3. If Thou, Lord, shouldst mark
iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness
with Thee that Thou mayest be feared." It's the forgiveness
of God that makes us fear Him. I wait for the Lord. My soul
doth wait, and in His Word do I hope. My soul waits for the
Lord more than they that watch for the morning. More I'll say
than they that watch for the morning. Let Israel hope in the
Lord, for with the Lord there's mercy, and with Him is plenteous
redemption." You see, when He makes you to know, I remember
your sin no more, because my Son really and truly puts your
sin away. And He makes you to know your
sins and your iniquities, I forgive, I remember them no more. That's
what brought fear in our heart in the first hour, and that's
what keeps growing us in the fear of the Lord. He keeps mercy
for thousands for Christ's sake. Because Christ bore our sin and
put it away. And brought in everlasting righteousness
for us. Everlasting righteousness. See,
this fear we're talking about, it's not the fear of hell. It's
not the fear of judgment. It's the fear that God puts in
your heart when He sheds abroad the love of God in your heart.
That love casts that tormenting fear, it casts that fear out.
Now we have the spirit of adoption. God's made you know you're sons
of God. Paul said, you've not been given
a spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received a spirit
of adoption whereby we cry, I have a Father. You know God is our
Father. Don't that just amaze you to
think about that? That holy God in heaven, child
of God, He's your Father. You're His son. You're His daughter. He said, we haven't received
this spirit of bondage. We've been given this spirit
so we can now cry to our Father for help, for mercy and grace
to help in time of need. And so this fear humbles us. It makes us meek to trust the
Lord to do the saving. Paul said, be not high-minded,
but fear. And that's what the fear of the
Lord does. It makes you come down from pride
and arrogancy and put your face in the dust and say, Lord, be
merciful to me, a sinner. It makes you meek. It makes you
ask God, oh, keep us, Lord. Don't leave us to ourselves.
Don't let me to my own self or I'll perish. Be a sanctuary for
us. Fear the Lord. Let Him be your
fear. Let Him be your dread. He shall
be a sanctuary. He's our refuge. And we seek
to obey Him. God's people have a heart. In
our heart, because of this fear of the Lord, this reverence of
the Lord, seeing what Christ has done for us, we want to obey
the Lord in everything we do. But this is where our confidence
lies right here, not in our obedience, not in our walking in his ways. We rejoice that Christ Jesus
served the Lord with a perfect fear, that He walked in the ways
of God in perfection, and He's all our righteousness. And when
God sees us, He doesn't see our sins, He doesn't see our failures,
He just sees perfect righteousness, perfect fidelity to Him, perfect
obedience to Him, in Christ Jesus, our righteousness. That's what
He sees. You remember when Job, after
Job's trial, the Lord told his friends, he said, you've not
spoken aright as my servant Job has. Well, you read the book
of Job, and here's some of the things Job said. And you think,
how did the Lord say Job spoke aright? Because God didn't hear
anything but what Job spoke aright. And he was looking at everything
He was in Christ, and the things Job didn't say right, Christ
put those things away, and God wasn't regarding them. That's
how He regards all His people. Now secondly, let's look at these
pictures. These are temporal pictures.
That's what they are. They're temporal pictures that
we associate with happiness. But they picture the spiritual
happiness that God gives us. They picture the happiness that
Christ Himself is to us. The first is God promises we'll
eat the labor of our hands. He said in verse 2, you that
fear the Lord and walk in His ways, He says, this is why you'll
be happy, for thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands. Happy
shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Now, the Lord
provides His people with a job. If we have an occupation, a job,
the Lord gave it. The Lord, by His grace, gives
you every need you have. He provides it. We eat the labor
of our hand. What we work for. And we give
God the glory. He gave it. We know that. He
gave it. Solomon said, Behold, that which
I have seen is good and comely for one to eat and to drink and
to enjoy the good of all his labor that he taketh under the
sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him. And God's
the one that gives it, for it's His portion. But what if God's
saints who fears the Lord, and walks in His ways, and works
the job, but He's not rich in temporal ways? He doesn't have
an abundance of temporal things. Well, God provides our temporal
need. He's going to provide the temporal need of His saint. You
can just mark that down. But the true blessing, the true
happiness that this is picturing, brethren, is spiritual. It's
spiritual. What was the labor of our Lord
Jesus Christ? He said, I must be about my Father's
business. And that's what He was about.
He walked this earth doing what the Father sent Him to accomplish,
to accomplish redemption for His people. And when He, on the
cross, one of the last things He cried out is, it is finished. He finished the work the Father
sent Him to do. He accomplished salvation. Well,
God blesses us in spiritual blessing due to the work of His hands.
the work of His hands. The true blessing is Christ Himself. God our Father, Paul said, blessed
us with all spiritual blessings. In heavenly places, according
as He did what? As He chose us in Him. The blessings
are spiritual and they're in Him. And Christ, He brings you
to labor. He brings you to labor. You labor
in prayer. And what does God give you? He
gives you the fruit of your labor. He gives you to eat the bread
from heaven, Christ Jesus. He gives you the water of life.
He gives you spiritual communion with the Lord Jesus. We assemble
here and we labor for the meat that endures unto everlasting
life. And God blesses our labor. He
gives you Christ. He gives you Christ. We labor
to enter into His rest. God blesses your labor. He makes
you labor, He makes you seek Christ, He makes you hungry and
thirsty for righteousness, and He blesses the hunger He put
there and makes you rest in the Lord Jesus. Even the temporal
job we have, when God has blessed us now, a temporal job that we
work, it's not like it was before. Before we just did it for our
own self, now we're doing it to further His gospel. We're
doing what we do for the cause of Christ to further His gospel
and to be able to provide for needy brethren. And God always
blesses us, but He's blessing us spiritually, inwardly. Yes,
He provides outwardly, but the blessing is knowing Christ and
being found in Christ. The Hebrew writer said, God's
not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which
you've showed toward His name, and that you've ministered to
the saints, and do minister. God said to Abraham, Surely,
blessing, I will bless thee, and multiplying, I will multiply
thee. Everything we have is from God,
is of Him, and through Him, and to Him, all things. Everything
spiritual and everything temporal. Look at this next picture of
happiness. It's a fruitful wife bearing many children and all
the children being around our table. Verse 3, thy wife shall
be as a fruitful vine. In the inner compartment of thine
house, thy children like olive plants round about thy table.
God does give a faithful spouse. He gives children. And we thank
God and we're happy. They make you happy. But Christ
is the preeminent husband. We're the bride. The church is
the bride. He's the preeminent husband. He's the everlasting
Father. And we're the children. We're
the children. It's Christ who makes His bride,
His church fruitful. He blesses the word that goes
forth and makes us fruitful. And it's Christ who produces
the children through the Holy Spirit, through the Gospel. We're
the travail of His soul. He justified us. He redeemed
us. This is the travail of His soul. His children He redeemed. And He produces them. Paul said,
now we brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.
Children of promise. And He keeps His children full
of the oil of the Spirit so that we're like olive plants and He
keeps us around His table. David said in Psalm 52.8, he
said, I'm like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust
in the mercy of God forever and ever. He makes you, fills you
with the Spirit, makes you like a green olive tree. Even the children Christ produces
through the gospel. As we're laboring together preaching
the gospel, exalting Christ, even the children Christ produces
through this gospel are our children. That's who, when He speaks of
your children, He's talking about spiritual children He produces.
Yes, He gives physical children. We thank Him for those physical
children. But not all our physical children
may be our spiritual children. But these spiritual children
are thine. John said, he said, my little children. That's what
Paul said. Now, indeed, God blesses His
saints with faithful husbands and faithful wives, and He gives
you physical children, biological children. But our true happiness
is spiritual. It's spiritual, brethren. And
therefore, this happiness is lasting. It's of the Lord, and
He keeps this happiness in the heart, this blessedness in the
heart. Things that are seen are temporal. Things that are not
seen are eternal. Things you can see only by the
eye of faith. They're the eternal thing. They're
the lasting things. We can preach in a way, and the
Lord showed me this. You know, remember Paul said,
the things that happen to me have fallen out for the furtherance
of the gospel. I can say that. And the Lord
has shown me something very important. We can preach in a way that not
only discourages God's saints, but also promote self-righteousness.
What about those who fear the Lord and walk in His ways, but
they don't have these things? What about those that have them
taken away? If you fear God and you walk
in His ways and you prosper in your labor, and you have a faithful
spouse and children, Be thankful. You're happy because of that.
Be thankful. But don't one minute think that
you earned that or that's given to you because of your merit.
It's the gift of God's grace. See, we're very apt. You know,
Job's friends came to him and they said, Job, where is it?
You're suffering. You did something wrong. You
wouldn't be suffering like this if you feared the Lord and walked
in His way. And the flip side of that coin is saying, I fear
the Lord walking His way, that's why I have all this. Be careful,
be thankful, be happy the Lord's giving it. But no, it's a gift
of God's grace. There are plenty who are rich,
they eat the fruit of their labor, they're rich, they have faithful
husbands, faithful wives, they have a bunch of children, and
they don't fear God and they do evil. Job said that. He said, wherefore do the wicked
live, and become old? Yea, they're mighty in power.
Temporal thing. They've got an abundance of riches.
Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their
offspring before their eyes. They've got all these children.
Their bull genereth and faileth not all the labor of their hands. Therefore they say to God, depart
from us. We desire not the knowledge of
thy ways. What's the almighty that we should
serve him? What profit should we have if we pray unto him?
You see, there's a lot of people who have these things here, temporally
speaking, that don't fear the Lord and don't walk in his way.
And sometimes, for the child of God who fears the Lord and
walks in his ways, God takes these temporal things from us.
Even from those who fear God and walk in His ways." Look over
at Job and look at Job 1. Back to your left there, Job
1. Look at this. Job 1.8. The Lord said unto Satan, Has
thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in
the earth, a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God, and
escheweth evil? Whoa! Now, if we're going to
look at our psalm and say, this is what all God's saints have,
temporally speaking, every one of them have this, what about
Job? He feared the Lord. He walked
in His ways. The Lord permitted the devil
to take his children, to take all the labor of his hands, and
his servants in one day, and then his health. The only one
the devil left was Job's wife. And that's probably because it
sounds like Job's wife was an unbeliever. She told him to curse
God and die. And you know, later when the
Lord blessed Job, it doesn't say she's the one by whom he
bore the children. We don't know what became of
her. But Job's blessedness, brethren, was not merely in temporal things. His happiness was the Lord Himself. Yes, He was soulful. Yes, that
brought great tears to His eyes. It broke His heart. But His happiness
was still the Lord. Look at Job 2 and look at verse
10. Job 2 and verse 10. Job said unto his wife, Thou
speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. You speaketh
like a woman. The fool has said in his heart,
Know God. You're talking like one that
doesn't even fear God. What? Shall we receive good at
the hand of God and shall we not receive evil? And all this
did not Job sin with his lips. Look over at Job 19. You see,
if Christ is our happiness, if He's the blessedness we have,
well then when God takes away temporal things, we still have
that inner joy, though we may be suffering outwardly. That's
what Job had. Listen to Job 19 and look at
verse 25. I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And
though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall
I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eye shall behold,
and not another, though my reins be consumed within me. You see,
my point I'm trying to make to you, brethren, is yes, God provides
temporal gifts. But those are not the real lasting
blessings. The real blessings are spiritual
between you and Christ. In fact, the real blessings are
Christ. They're in Christ, being found
in Christ. Christ Himself. David feared
the Lord and walked in His ways. Somebody might say, yeah, but
David sinned. All God's children knew to break the law in one
point is to be guilty of the whole law. All God's children
have broken it. But David feared the Lord and
walked in His ways. God said, he's a man after my
own heart. God used him to write the Psalms. But David's sons were not olive
trees around his table. They were thorns. They sought
to kill him. What was David's happiness then?
What was his happiness? He said, Although my house be
not so with God, yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant,
ordered in all things ensure, and this is all my salvation
and all my desire, though he make it not to grow. You see,
we could preach this, a man that's got, he's got a, he's got a He's
got some money in the bank, and he's got a faithful wife, and
he's got children. He could preach this and say,
now, if you fear the Lord walking his way, this is what you'll
have. What about the one that never has married? What about
the one who doesn't have a faithful spouse? What about the ones whose
children, his whole house is a mess? There's a lot of saints
that that's been the case. What about those that are barren?
You run into saints that are barren, we see them in the scripture.
But you see, if you preach this as being that Christ is the blessing,
that our happiness is Christ, that it's everlasting, that it's
the covenant He's fulfilled, He's the one that puts this fear
in your heart and gives you this blessing and this happiness,
and it's Him and Him alone, and it'll never be taken from us,
brethren. That's what Paul's learned. He said, all that I've
suffered. He said, it's working for us a far more exceeding eternal
weight of glory. It's making us not look at the
things that are seen, but the things that are unseen. Joseph
was obeying his father. Joseph was, he was his father's
favorite. He had that coat of many colors.
He goes to his brethren because his father sent him there. And
he goes and what amounts to what he did was he preached the gospel
to them. And they hated him for it. And they threw him in a pit.
And they were going to leave him for dead. And then they got
the idea, hey, we can sell him. Let's make some money off of
baby brother. We can sell him to these gypsies.
And so they sold him. And Joseph goes down. Joseph
feared the Lord, and he's suffering all of that. Joseph feared the
Lord, and he's in Potiphar's house, and Potiphar's wife tries
to get her to lay with him, and he goes, I can't do this against
my Lord. He feared the Lord. And the Lord
put him in prison. And the man he interpreted the
dream for forgot all about him. until finally they called for
him. And the Lord ends up putting him on the second-in-command
behind Pharaoh over all the storehouses. And did Joseph say, if his blessings
would have been just in temporal things, Joseph would have been
so bitter, he would have been so cast down and all of that,
and he would have had no worship of God whatsoever, but his blessings
was Christ. So what did he say in the end?
He told his brethren, you meant it for evil. God meant it for
good. God was blessing me the whole
way. The whole way. Growing me in a fear of the Lord.
Growing me to see Christ as my blessing that will never be taken
from me. Listen to our Lord's beatitudes. This tells you these
blessings are spiritual. I'm just going to give you a
few. He said, blessed are the poor in spirit. Happy are the
poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of God.
Happy are they that mourn. Blessed are they that mourn.
They shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, the poor,
the meek that don't have anything in this world. They shall inherit
the earth. Blessed are they which are persecuted
for righteousness sake, reviled and reproached. Theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. How is this so? Because our blessings
are in Christ. Our blessings are by Christ.
Our blessings are to the praise and glory of Christ. Our blessings
are Christ. He's our happiness. Look at this
last picture in our text and we'll close. This shows you that
this is a spiritual blessing. These are pictures, temporal
pictures of spiritual blessings. It's a picture of a prosperous
nation. You know, sometimes God's saints live in poverty stricken,
oppressive, third world countries. But still they have this blessing.
Verse 4, Behold, that thus shall thee men be blessed that feareth
the Lord. And thee man is Christ, and He's
the one that gives us these blessings. It's fear of the Lord. Listen,
the Lord shall bless thee out of Zion. The Lord's not blessing
us out of earthly Zion. He's not blessing us out of that
place over there. He's blessing us out of heavenly
Mount Zion with spiritual blessings in the heart. and thou shalt
see the good of Jerusalem all the days of our life." You see
the good of earthly Jerusalem? Do you see that? You fear the
Lord, you walk in His way. Do you see the good of earthly
Jerusalem? He's not talking about that. But you see the good of
heavenly Jerusalem, don't you? The church. We're happy Christ
has made us His holy nation. Our citizenship is in heaven
from which we look for the Savior, our Lord Jesus. We look for a
city whose builder and maker is God. He's blessing us from
heavenly Zion, from heavenly Jerusalem with the gospel in
our hearts. Verse 6, Yea, thou shalt see
thy children's children. Christ prayed not only for those
He called out. when He walked this earth. He
said, I pray for them which shall believe through their word. And
brethren, in glory, we're going to behold our children's children. We're going to behold not only
those God called out through the gospel we preached together,
we're going to behold those that God called out through their
word that they preached. We're going to behold our children's
children in glory. And because Christ is our peace,
you've got to see peace upon Israel. We don't see peace in
that nation over there. Look at it right now. But we
see peace upon the spiritual Israel of God. You see, these
blessings are spiritual. Fear God and walk in His ways. That's happiness. You know, anything... You know this as a child of God.
When you sin, that don't... It just... destroys your happiness
for a little while. Fear the Lord, reverence the
Lord, and walk in His way. That's true happiness. And be
thankful for temporal gifts. Be thankful for the temporal
gifts that God gives. But don't let temporal gifts
be your happiness. God has taken them away. He's
taken them away, and He's going to take them all away eventually.
The blessings, the happiness that makes God's child happy,
or spiritual. It's Christ Himself. Listen now. Whom have I in heaven
but Thee? And there's none upon earth that
I desire besides Thee. Can you say that? Is He your
happiness? Well, I'll tell you this. In
that day when the Lord brings you down to where He's taken
everything else away, And now He's taken your health, and He's
taken your life. There'll be one thing, one thing
that'll never be taken from you, and that's Christ. And He'll
be your rejoicing then, though you may be sorrowful, may be
painful, He'll be the rejoicing of your heart, and when you close
your eyes in death, you're going to open them, and you're going
to behold Him and be like Him. And that is the blessing. He's
the blessing. He's the happiness of His children.
He'll never be taken away. I pray that the Lord will bless
that. All right, Brother Green.