A Summer in Proverbs - Wisdom & Happiness - Sermons - Adam Wiggins - 7.7.24

**Adam Wiggins** (0:00)
Thank you, am I on, can you hear me? Okay, wow, words can't quite describe how grateful I am to be with you this morning. We normally attend at 8 a.m., so some of you we see in passing, and oftentimes we don't, and the 11 a.m. is just out of luck. We don't get to see them ever. But man, I'm so grateful to be with you. JT, thank you for inviting me to preach this morning. And I'm excited to continue in this series that Josh began last week with us through the book of Proverbs. And this morning, I think is a fun topic. I wanna look with you at the relationship between wisdom and happiness. Will mentioned that earlier. We sang a great song that talks about how everything we need comes from our Father. And we're gonna talk more about that this morning. But I think this is a fun topic, wisdom and happiness. A few years ago, a psychology professor at Yale University began to notice some serious problems with the student population, especially during COVID. These ambitious students were really struggling with stress and overwhelming anxiety, hopelessness, depression, and unprecedented rates they'd never seen before. And so seeing this in her students, there was a professor there named Laurie Santos decided to make a new course on the subject or psychology of happiness. And she shared that she expected like 20 to 30 students to sign up to be guinea pigs for this course and was surprised to find 1,200 students signed up for this course, which just goes to show like the need for this or the desire for students to be happy. They went on to make this available online and now hundreds of thousands of people have gone through this course and it's simple on how to be happy. It does, it is striking to think of those numbers and it's maybe even more striking to consider how many people don't feel happy on a day-to-day basis. And maybe you're here this morning and you would just say, that's me, like life's busy, there's a lot going on, I don't really feel happy.
In fact, they discovered at Yale that a lot of the things that the students were pursuing that they thought would make them more happy fell flat. And we can relate to this because this is actually true across the board, right? That most of the things in life that we run after and we think is gonna make us more happy fails to deliver. And I'm sure you've experienced that in your life as well. And sometimes it actually has the opposite effect. In fact, I think this morning, if we were to go around the room and just kind of like pull each other with the question like, what makes you happy? Or what are you looking to for happiness?
We're in church, you might give like the church answer and say Jesus, right? But I think if we were like honest, we'd probably have answers all over the board, right? Like we would all have some very different answers. And if you're like me, sometimes you can play the if only game. Like if only my job were better, then I would be happy, right? Or if only I had more money, then I would be happy. Or if only I could afford that car or buy that boat, if you're a boat person. I am not a boat person, I can't really relate to that. If only I had more time for my hobby, or if only my kids would behave better, then, we got an amen, I love it. Then I would be happy. We play this if only game, but studies have actually shown that those if onlys don't actually make us happier for the most part. In 2010, there was a study of like a half million people, and the results showed that once you have a roof over your head and food on the table, a higher salary does not correlate to more happiness. Isn't that amazing?
Another study, 1992, showed that enjoying possessions or living in luxury or luxury items led to higher levels of dissatisfaction in life on a day-to-day basis. There's another study that studied lottery winners and accident victims. So you would think, two opposite ends of the spectrum, guess what they found? The levels of happiness that people experienced on a day-to-day basis wasn't different between the two groups. And so what studies find, right, and what they are teaching in this class, at least, is that for most people, they think if their situation were different, they would be happier, but in reality, it's more how we react to the situation that's in front of us and that God has placed us in. And so this begs the question, right, like what actually makes us feel happy? Like where do we find it? Because everyone's looking for it and most of the things that society says will make you happy fails to deliver. So I want us to look into the Bible this morning. I think Proverbs has something to say about this. Look with me at Proverbs chapter three, and as you're turning there, let me just really quickly define the word happiness for us. I think that might be helpful and I know some of you who have been around Bible studies or the church for a while are sitting there and you're thinking about the word joy, right? Like you're like, what about joy? And we often distinguish between happiness and joy in the church. And so let me just define those really quick. Happiness is an emotion or a feeling, and I want you to think about it, at least this morning, as a range of emotions. So happiness can express itself as contentment or gladness, or all the way to the other extreme of elation or exuberance, right? There's kind of a range there of what it feels like to be happy with contentment kind of as the baseline. Now joy is closely related. There's a lot of overlap here, but oftentimes when we talk about joy in the church, we talk about it as an underlying state of being. It's not so prone to change from day to day. It's a state of being. So another way to think about this is that we have a joy inside as believers and it expresses itself as the emotion of happiness. Are you with me? Does that make sense? Hopefully that's helpful as we keep going. Look with me, Proverbs chapter three, beginning in verse 13