Summary 

Most people spend their lives chasing happiness through family, friendships, and work, only to find those things still leave them feeling empty. Harvard researcher Arthur Brooks identifies four pillars of human happiness: faith, family, friendship, and work. Psalm 80, written during the destruction of the northern tribes of Israel, shows what happens when each of those pillars is pursued apart from God. Family bonds crumbled, friendships became toxic, and meaningful work turned fruitless, all because faith had been removed from the foundation. Jesus directly addresses each of these broken pillars in the Gospel of John, offering a new family, true friendship, and fruitful work to all who abide in Him. The lesson is not that family, friendship, and work are bad. The problem is treating them as the source of meaning rather than the fruit of a life rooted in God. When faith comes first, the other pillars can stand. When it is removed, they eventually collapse under a weight they were never designed to carry.

Transcript

I'm going to pray for us as we turn to Psalm 80, but I. I just want to say I love the sound of the kids in our church. I felt like they were saying Amen earlier when we were singing, and Psalm 8 came to my mind. Verse 2. Out of the mouths of babies and infants, you've established strength because of your foes. So there's something lovely in the sound of the little ones among us.
Praise the Lord for them. Let me pray. Lord, Lord, God, we're thankful for your word, even these passages that are lesser known and these stories that may be lesser known. And, God, I pray that we would receive it as your Word and your gift to us. Lord, you give us your word because you desire to reveal yourself to us and that we might find life and life in you, the life that we long for, the life that we desire.
And so, Lord, I pray that our ears would be open not just to my words, but to your words. Their hearts would be softened to you, and that we would be desirous, having spent this time with you, to live our life with you in faith and belief and trust and love. We pray all this for our good Lord, but mostly for your glory. For the glory of your Holy name, Jesus name, we pray. Amen.
All right, many of you, my guests, are familiar with the name Arthur Brooks. Maybe you've listened to his podcast Office Hours. Maybe you've heard him as a guest on other podcasts. He seems familiar to many. Maybe you've read one of his books.
He's written a lot of books. One of the books is titled Love youe How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. I mean, isn't that just kind of an interesting idea, that just loving each other and fighting against contempt. What an important sort of subject in our time. Maybe you found him by just googling, how can I be happier?
And there's a reason why maybe you'd find him. He's a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. But a lot of what his work has been focused on is happiness. Maybe you've heard about some of the studies that Harvard has done over the last decades about human happiness. But he studies it like, what is it?
How do we get it? How is it acquired? So what can we do that we might live in happier lives? And he has come up with what he calls his sort of four pillars of happiness. Here's what they are.
Faith. And he doesn't necessarily mean the Christian faith, though he's a devout Catholic. But he is sort of Talking about this guiding faith, this guiding understanding of where we are, where we're going, whose are we, what gives us meaning and perspective. Second one is family, sort of foundational bonds from which we have a sense of our belonging, sort of relational security. The third is friendship, by which he means sort of non contractual social relationships outside of family.
It's not kind of like, I'll just scratch your back, you scratch mine, you go to work, and that's a contractual relationship. I put in these hours, I get paid this much. But relationships that exist beyond family and these contracts. The third one is work. And this has to do with actions that sort of exercise your talents, that provide an opportunity maybe for a degree of success.
And often, actually, he says, most time it is tied to the idea that what you're doing serves something, serves others. And so he says work in this kind of way doesn't have to be work that you're gaining money from, though it often is. It can be volunteer work. It can be joining the English language classes this fall, pastoral plug that others might learn English. Right.
Or visiting and volunteering over at Paxton Ministries, or, I don't know, all kinds of number of things, serving at a food bank. But it's creating value in the world that you kind of move into the world, you exercise your gifts for the blessing of others and for the good of the world. And he's saying that these four things, the happiest people in the world seem to have these four pillars in their life, these four pillars.
And I think it's just kind of good just to sit there for a moment because we tend to, of course in our world that primarily work brings happiness because work brings money. Work, work, work. So you can buy, buy, buy. You know, maybe you know Chris Jansen's famous country song from 2015, Buy Me a Boat. I know this crew doesn't listen to country music much, but here's how part of it goes.
I'm not going to sing it. Yeah, I know what they say, money can't buy everything. Well, maybe so, but it can buy me a boat. Somebody knows it out there, right? Buy me a boat.
And of course, the idea maybe says the boat will make you happy, or maybe the boat will get you the girlfriend, or maybe the boat will be facilitate time with friends. So maybe that there's some degree of truth that it can facilitate some of those things. But interestingly, another huge part of his sort of theory of happiness is that it has this bedrock idea of contentment too. And that contentment is on that first pillar of faith, having a sense that there's meaning beyond us and there's actually something that you can put your trust in and have meaning in a deep sense of belief and trust. So anyway, we're in Psalm 80, and if you were listening when I read it, you probably noticed that there was a chorus, a refrain.
Not all the psalms do this. Actually, not a lot of psalms do this. A lot of psalms are maybe more like the old hymns, where they go from stanza to stanza to stanza. Kind of like the first song that we sang today. But then some have choruses like the last song that we sang, where he goes back, the same idea to repeat it.
And this is the refrain that we find in 3 and 7 and 19. Restore us, O God, let your face shine that we may be saved. Restore us, O God, let your face shine that we may be saved. And that word restore us in Hebrew actually can also be translated turn us back, Turn us back and turn to us, which is to say we've been going some other direction for life, for meaning, for happiness. Turn us back, restore us.
Turn us back to yourself.
The author, Asaph, or at least in sort of the lineage of Asaph, is asking for the people to be turned back because the people have sought happiness, their well being, their life outside of God. So this cry for restoration, what I want you to see today, this cry for God's face to shine upon them is because they've sought this happiness outside of God. And oddly, I was sitting with this passage and I thought, you know, this passage actually kind of can have these happiness pillars laid on it. So I kind of want to see, want you to see how this passage fits in with these happiness pillars. So I'm not going to start with the first pillar.
I'm actually going to come back to that. But the first thing I want you to see is that what we have in this psalm is a destroyed family. If the second pillar is familial relations, what we actually find in this psalm first is a destroyed family. So here's the first couple verses. Give ear, O shepherd of Israel, you who lead, Joseph like a flock, you who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh, stir up your might and come and save us.
How does that have to do with the family? That's what you're asking? Let me tell you. So this psalm was almost certainly written in the context of the Assyrian empire coming in from the north, the northeast, into destroy and take away the best and brightest of the Ten northern tribes of Israel. Last week, if you were here, you may remember that we looked at Psalm 79.
We talked about the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple under the Babylonian exile. That happened. That destruction happened in. Well, the event of this Psalm was about 140 years earlier, 722, when the Assyrians came in and they destroyed the 10 northern tribes. Well, two of the 10 northern tribes.
In fact, two of the 10 largest of the northern tribes are the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh. In fact, sometimes the ten northern tribes together can be referred to as Ephraim because it was the main, kind of the main one. It was sort of just north of Judah and Benjamin. So it was sort of the neighboring tribe to the two southern tribes. But if you notice, it's not just mentioning these two dominant tribes of the ten northern tribes of Israel.
Right between those two tribes. Kind of sandwiched between them is the tribe of Benjamin, which was not destroyed by the Assyrians. And it's actually Judah and Benjamin are the two southern tribes of Israel. The ten northern ones are the ones that were taken over by the Assyrians. So why would Benjamin be mentioned in the context of this Assyrian conflict sandwiched right between Ephraim and Manasseh?
What it's saying is that our familial relations are destroyed. We're being torn apart. They're crying out to God, give ear, O shepherd of Israel, you who lead us, keep your family together.
And the family was destroyed because they did not look to the shepherd. They didn't look to the leader. They didn't look to their Father in heaven.
If you've been around the Bible a little while, you might know that shepherding is a. Is a metaphor that's kind of common in the Scriptures. And that's no surprise. Of course, they led these pastoral lives tending to sheep and all that. And they knew the dynamic of a sheep needing to live under the care of another.
They also knew the dynamic, as Jesus picks up on in John chapter 15, that we heard that sometimes the sheep want to listen to another's voice. They hear other shepherd's voice, and they say, maybe I should go over there. They hear other voices of sort of parental figures who are to care for them. And they say, let's go there. And that's exactly what they were doing time and time again.
They were saying, you know, I don't want to hear. I don't want to hear the voice of the good shepherd, our Father, who is led us as his people. I want to Listen to other shepherds, or I just want to be my own shepherd. That's what's going on. And so they reject the father and the family is destroyed.
Which is to say in some ways that they sought their happiness, but they sought it outside this foundational bond, this bond that sort of leads them out into life with others. They found it in a foundational bond which was not God. And so the happiness which they sought actually destroyed one of the things that actually would build their happiness. Their families destroyed. Their family ties are broken up, breaking up the tribes of Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh and all their relationships.
But so, interestingly, I think if you look at the second stanza there, we actually find another one of these pillars of happiness that's taken down. And I want to call this Destitute Friends. Okay, the second. So Destroyed Families and Destitute Friends, verse four. O Lord, God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?
You fed them with the bread of tears and given them tears to drink in full measure. You make us an object of contention for our neighbors and our enemies laugh among themselves. Now this, you might think that's odd that I would title this under friendships because the last thing was enemies. Enemies were mentioned right before that. It's talking about neighbors, not family, right?
Not those foundational bonds, but necessary relationships for our well being that exist outside of our families, like our neighbors. These, you know, these relationships that we have outside of these immediate family ties. And here it's saying that they're torn. They've actually become relationships of contention. And why is that?
One of the reasons is because it says God hasn't heard their prayers. He's angry with their prayers, right? O Lord, God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers? Does that seem strange to you, that God would be angry with the prayers of his people? I think that's kind of maybe an odd passage, odd thing to say.
Well, here's what had happened, right? Again, this is geared towards the northern tribes, the tribes that are sort of said as a whole to be Ephraim and Manasseh. They had set up places of prayer. They set up places of prayer all over throughout their tribes. But most of those places of prayer were not places of prayer that God had told them to set up either to pray to him or they were used actually to pray to other gods.
The exile itself, the Caesarean exile, happens because they've decided to worship other gods, to pray to other idols. They've made other gods and They've offered up these prayers, but not to Yahweh, not to the true God. And also what they've done. The other big reason why the exile happens is because they've made these alliances with these neighboring countries when God told them not to. So here's an interesting thing that's happening.
The very thing that they're going for, which is friendship with their neighbors, is destroyed because they made their friends the main thing, right? So they're setting up these gods that are. Sorry, they're setting up these places of prayer to the gods that are the gods of their neighbors. They're making alliances with their neighbors in such a way that denies their alliance with God, which is to say they're making their friends. The main thing.
Their neighbors are becoming the main thing. And what it ultimately ends in is destroying the friendship that they have with those about them. Think about this.
Have you ever. Have you ever seen this happen where someone doesn't seem to exactly have an identity of their own, but their identity exists almost completely in how they associate with another? And so they almost seem to mimic another's speech. They don't have music that they love. They just love the music of the other.
They don't have jokes that they make up. They just make up the jokes of another. It's almost as though they're just saying, I just want to be, you know, and it actually destroys the relationship because you don't offer yourself. You just sort of mirror the other person completely. And the friendship doesn't bring life.
In fact, the friendship often withers and fades because that kind of relationship that's bending over backwards just to be whatever the other person wants kills the relationship. Those friendships don't work. And this is what's happening. These 10 northern tribes are saying, we just want to be liked by all these people. And so we're going to put up these places of prayer.
We're going to pray to their gods, we're going to make alliances. And what happens is that those friendships where they're in faith and actually those very relationships come in and destroy them.
So in some ways, of course, God wouldn't listen to their prayers. They weren't offered to him. Their prayers were for the sake of them, were for the sake of finding their identity in their friendships.
Again, though, this song to another of these pillars of happiness that was taken away from them. So they lose their familial relationships, they lose their friendships, and they also lose their work. So we have destroyed families, depleted friendships, and then. Sorry, what did I say? Not depleted I have depleted work here.
What did I say? Destitute. Thank you. Destitute friends and depleted work. Which is say they're a fruitless vine.
That's the last sort of main paragraph. And again, this is a metaphor that you find in the Bible a lot. The metaphor of a vine. And this makes sense, right? Just like the shepherd thing makes sense.
You're like, oh, there's sheep, shepherd, and there's like vines. And so they use these metaphors to talk about themselves. Vines were to bear fruit as they were tended to. They were to bear fruit as they were pruned and trained along trellises, they were to bear fruit. And if you didn't bear fruit, what would you do?
You'd say, ah, well, this. This is a defunct vine. We need rid of it and plant something else here so that it will bear fruit. And a lot of times, Israel as a nation was actually talked about as the. As the vine of God.
We find this in a few different places. In Genesis 49, you can read of Joseph being called a fruitful vine near a spring whose branches climb over a wall. It's growing because it's near the stream of God. Isaiah, we can read this. My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside, which is to say Israel was to be planted by the waters of God.
And in a fertile hillside where, by the Lord, near the end of Hosea, we can read, he will blossom like a vine, referring to Israel, the nation and his fame will be like the wine of Lebanon. Which is to say that not just as he's to be planted by the stream and on a fertile soil, but he's to bear. Right? This work is to actually be sort of the work that Arthur Brooks talks about, something that's offered into the world, the blessing of the world. So come to this stanza.
I'm not going to read all of it for us, but starting in verse eight, you brought a vineyard out of Egypt. You drove out the nations and planted it. You cleared the ground for it. It took deep root and filled the land. The mountains were covered with its shade, the mighty cedars with its branches.
It sent out its branches to the sea, and its shoots to the river. Why then have you broken down its walls? So that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit. The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it. Now, again, maybe kind of like prayers.
I think we get to this and we do go, wait, why would God do this? Right? Why would God break down the walls and Allow the boar from the forest to ravage the plants.
Well, this is answered for us In John chapter 15 that we heard, every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you're clean. Because the word that I've spoken to you abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.
So why are the walls broken down? Why are the boars from the forest coming in, ravaging the plants? Because they're not bearing the fruit of abiding in the vine. And Lord says, enough. Lord says, enough.
So here's what's happening. Here's what I'm suggesting in this. What this psalm is doing is it's saying that you have, you've sought to find this happiness in these things, but you've sought to find them outside of me, you know, in your family relations, in your friends and in your work. These are to be actually places that you're to grow and to bear fruit and to have life. But all along they're doing it outside of the Lord.
Destroyed family, destitute friendships, depleted work.
So Arthur Brooks has more to say. Of course, he's written all these books, but he's an economist. And so a lot of times he uses economic language. And he says that oftentimes with these four pillars, we over index, or what we do is we don't diversify. So we put all of our chips in one pillar.
So we're like, oh, happiness can happen if I just work, work, work, work, work, work, or if I just give all of my life to my family, right?
So Israel was putting their happiness basket at this time, a lot of what they were doing is they were putting their happiness basket into their friendship, relationships, into their relationships with their neighbors, Right? Like I said, they put up these high places and they worshiped the gods of their neighbors and they made all these alliances and they said, we're just going to do whatever we can because we need friends.
That, of course, happens to us. We'll give up on a lot of other things if we could just make a friend. We kind of make that the God, the thing that will bring us happiness. But for the most part in our world, we kind of put a lot of our chips, you know, we kind of over index into our work. We find our meaning in what we can accomplish, maybe the amount of money we can make, how many people we can serve man.
That can make us feel good. And of course, we need to hear, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But also think about this. I think actually within Christian settings, a lot of times what we can do is we can sort of overplay the family card. Like, family becomes the main thing, right?
What we want to do is we just want to keep everybody really, really close.
So weekends are meant almost exclusively for family things. And actually, friendships sometimes can diminish. One of the other pillars can be swallowed up by another.
You can think about dating and about romance, about how we put so many chips into that, we put all of our energy into that, that actually work. And these other things diminish. And then when you get the date, you're like, what do I talk? What do I talk about? Because this is the main thing I've been thinking about all the time, which is just to say we over index, we don't diversify.
And Brook says you've got to have all four of these pillars.
So what's missing for Israel? Well, what's missing for Israel? I wonder. Maybe it's missing for you.
It's worth asking the question. What's missing for Israel's faith, Trust, belief, commitment to the Lord. I mean, think about it. It's not that Israel didn't want family. They did.
They even wanted sort of a father to look down upon them and help give them direction, like a shepherd. But they didn't want the great shepherd. They wanted other voices to care for them and to tend to them. And it's not that they didn't want friendship. Obviously they did.
They just made their friends the determining thing of their life. And so their prayers went up to the gods of their neighbors. And their friendships became contentious relationships because they held more than they were intended to hold. And it's not that they didn't want to produce or to work to bring something into the world. I mean, we are all made for that, but we're made to do that in connection with divine.
And so here's the refrain that we hear, right? Verse three, verse seven. Down in verse 19. Restore us, O God, let your face shine that we may be saved. But just say, turn us back because we're running after these other things to give us our meaning and our happiness.
And they are good things, but they are not good things in and of themselves. If we put all of our chips in these baskets, they cannot hold it. They're good. They're to be sought after, but not in and of themselves. Restore us to yourself.
Let Your face shine on us that we may be saved. And if you're thinking that sounds familiar, well, you should be thinking that. Of course, that phrase comes from the great Aaronic blessing that the priests would speak over the people morning and evening as we so often do in Christian services. At the end of our services, with the great benediction, Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, give you his peace.
What he's saying is, give us faith, renew us again, help us to turn from these other things that we're kind of banking on to give us life and meaning and happiness and joy and all the rest, and turn us to you.
They're asking for faith that the Lord be gracious to them. Faith that they will not find their meaning in what they do or don't do.
Faith that God is the source of their peace, not these other things of family and friends and work.
So one of the stories, one of the stories behind this time period, and maybe actually that was happening right in the. Right at the same time of writing the psalm, we're not totally sure, but one of the stories that happens around the time of the. Of the Assyrian exile and actually sort of just after the Assyrian exile, we read for part of it, we had read for us from 2 Chronicles 30 that Chuck read for us.
And it's Hezekiah. Hezekiah is this good king. He's a righteous king. He's the king of the southern tribes. He actually lived during the time of the Assyrian destruction of the 10 northern tribes in their exile.
And so he has this spiritual renewal. And they are desirous to follow the Lord. And what he does is he says, okay, everybody has got to come and worship the Lord in Jerusalem and we need the priests. I don't know if you caught that. Actually, it says they had to celebrate the Passover in this month because there weren't enough priests yet who had consecrated themselves.
They needed the priests there because they were to lead the people in worship and lead them in the Passover sacrifices and meals. But they were also the ones who were supposed to speak God's blessing, his benediction, that God's face would shine upon them to him. And so what Hezekiah does is he established this and he says, hey, we're going to have this great feast in Jerusalem. We're going to celebrate the Passover, and the priests are going to speak the blessing over God's people. And he says, send out word to everybody.
And if you notice, actually the passage there in Second Chronicles 30, it actually mentions Ephraim and Manasseh, but this is after the Assyrian exile. So he's saying, hey, you've seen. You've seen that this sort of life of looking for your happiness in your family and your friendships and your work won't bring it to you outside of God. And so come. Come and worship him and receive his declaration that his face is shining upon you.
Invites all these people to Jerusalem, all these ten tribes of the north and the two tribes of the south. And he's trying to unite them again around this idea that outside of God, you cannot have the happiness and the joy for which you deeply long.
But what did they do? I don't know if you know, this is like one of those weird passages that are not terribly well known. So I'm sure you probably heard Chuck read it and you're like, whoop, whoop. You know, that kind of thing. Well, let me read verse 10 again for you.
Okay, so the couriers, the guys that are inviting everybody to Jerusalem, the couriers, the people that are bringing these letters, invitations out, went from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh and as far as Zebulun up in the northern part. But they laughed them to scorn and mocked them. They laughed in the scorn and mocked them. They thought, no, no, no, no, no. We actually think that happiness can just be found in our family relationships that we have or in the work that we produce or in the friendships that we have.
I don't have any interest in that whole God thing. And of course, I think part of the question for us is, what would you have done actually? What are you doing?
How are you indexing? Right? How are you diversifying? Where does faith fit for you?
So if we turn to the last section there in this Psalm, Psalm 80, verse 14, down, it says, turn again. O God of hosts, look down from heaven and see. Have regard for this vine, this rock that your right hand planted, and for the Son whom you made strong for yourself. They've burned it with fire. They've cut it down.
May they perish at the rebuke of your face. But let your hand be on the man of your right hand, the Son of man, whom you have made strong for yourself. And we shall turn back from you. Give us life, and we'll call upon your name. And of course, as Christians, we read that and we go, this is talking about our Lord Jesus.
It's looking forward to the fact that God will restore his wayward people. He's going to have grace. He's going to make quite literally his face to shine upon them, the image of the invisible God for the world to see. And think about it. When we look to Jesus, when we look to the Gospels, specifically the Gospel of John, almost every single thing that we have mentioned for us, to us, for mentioned to us here in this text is found in Christ.
So In John chapter 6, Jesus says that he and the Father are one and all, whom the Father has given him, he will not cast out. There's this familial reality. You're in a part of a new family with Jesus. He offers a lasting family, a new foundational relationship from which you can go out into the world. John, chapter 15.
Jesus says, no longer do I call you servants. The servant does not know what his master is doing. But I've called you friends. Which is to say a servant is a contractual kind of thing. In a way.
He's saying, that's not our relationship, we're friends. Jesus is offering that pillar of friendship to us. John, chapter 15. He says, I am the vine, you're the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, offering something out into the world as you abide in Christ.
But all of this, all of this in the Gospels and I think what this text here in Psalm 80:80 is getting at this thing for which we desire right family bonds which unite us in a way that help us to go out into the world and life. Non contractual friendships, work that offers something out into the world that is productive and a blessing.
What I think this psalm is telling us, and I think what we see as we put these things together in these texts in John, is those only will take root, those only will actually give meaning. If you have that first pillar in place, first faith, you cannot bear fruit apart from the Lord. Your family and your friendships will be places of control and of domineering with outside of the Lord.
It's true. Seek first his kingdom, his righteousness, all the other things will be added unto you. Look to Christ, the shining face of God, who offers you a new family, a greater friendship, greater fruit bearing life in the world apart from him. We can do nothing. And yet with him is lasting happiness and joy.
Let me pray for us. Lord, think of these stories and this psalm, the occasion of the writing of this psalm and it's distant from us and there are stories that are not terribly well known, stories of Hezekiah and the Assyrians, and we're talking about stuff that is long ago.
And yet how. How much it really does speak to our dynamics. God, I pray that you would shine your blessing upon us. That we have people, people that know joy, a deep happiness.
And that we would. That we'd be fruitful in our work, that we desire to live productive, meaningful lives, serving others, producing in your world, God, that you'd give us friendships, maybe new friendships would be birthed today at our picnic that would truly increase our happiness, our sense of well being and life in this world. God, that you would be. That you bless our families, God. But I pray that each of these things that we desire, good desires, we would place them upon the foundation of faith, of belief, of trust in you, of looking to you, looking to your face, looking to the work of Christ for us, God.
That we would be those who seek first the kingdom and your righteousness. And then know that the other things would be added. That we wouldn't seek those things as the kingdom, but the fruit of the kingdom. God, please do this. What a passage that seems so old is so applicable to us.
Apply it to our lives. We pray by the work of your Holy Spirit, in Jesus name, amen.

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