this is just a state of being it's a result of you know circumstances what's going on in your life but on our program today i'm going to share with you that happiness is actually a state of mind it depends on how you think about things this will help you so stay tuned for the gospel truth welcome to gospel truth with andrew wommack a teaching ministry emphasizing god's unconditional love and grace and now here's andrew welcome to our mondays broadcast of the gospel truth today i'm going to begin a brand new series and i'm going to be talking about how to be happy and i know that some people think well that's kind of a strange thing uh to teach on and you know lots of times they don't associate this with christianity as a matter of fact our tape album cd album that we're offering is entitled how to be happy even though you're a christian and the words even though are marked out and it's got especially if written up above it so it's how to be happy especially if you were a christian you know really christians are the only ones that really have a true reason to rejoice and i know that there may be some challenge to that statement but as we go through this i'm going to teach some things and share with you and i believe you'll come to that same agreement and so christians should be rejoicing and we have so many scriptures that tell us that we're supposed to rejoice in the lord always i will bless the lord at all times and on and on jesus said i came to give you an abundant life and there's just so many things talking about how a christian should be rejoicing and praising god for the great things that have happened but did you know that actually there is a large segment of the body of christ that is taught that we should be sad and taught that we're supposed to be burdened and taught that we are supposed to have all of the we're supposed to take the weight of the world upon us and when you couple this with the fact that a lot of preachers as they present things trying to motivate us to you know get involved politically or whatever they will present how bad everything is and talk about how that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and they will give you all of these negative statistics and the purpose is to try and show you how grave the situation is but what one of the side effects of this is that it really does focus christian's attention on how bad everything is and if you watch typical television christian television did you know a large segment of it is just talking about this thing that is wrong and how that the ungodly are trying to push this legislation through and how that this is happening and i tell you there is a lot of negative unbelief type stuff being thrown at christians today and you couple that with the fact that many people think that the sad more you know the more sad you are the hap the holier you are the better off you are they teach that you're supposed to be burdened down there's a lot of reasons for christians not to be happy and i tell you as you look around i travel and minister a lot i find a lot of christians that are so discouraged and hurt and beat down and so i say all of these things to say that to teach on how to be happy it seems like that it shouldn't uh have to be taught on but it does and you know what it's not something that is just automatic there's a lot of misconceptions about what it takes to be happy there's a lot of people that actually believe that happiness is a byproduct of the way their life is going and i tell you that's going to be one of the major things that i attack and show you that happiness is not dependent upon what's going on in your life there are so many examples in the word of god of people that rejoiced when everything around them was going badly and you know the truth is that happiness isn't a state of being it's a state of mind it depends on how you are looking at things it depends on your perspective it depends on where your focus on where your emphasis is and i'm going to be sharing a lot of things that if you can receive this i believe it's going to help you because we are living in a negative world we are a generation that is probably being inundated with negative information more than any group of people that have ever lived on the earth if you just stop and think about it one generation ago people didn't know what was happening on the other side of the world they certainly couldn't watch all of the tragedy in real time you know i've often thought about some of the wars that we're fighting right now back during world war ii if they would have had the ability to broadcast live television and if they would have had the media being intrusive like on d-day the normandy invasion and if they would have shown the carnage and all of the terrible things that happened i guarantee you the american people would have never had the stomach the ability to stand and do what needed to happen to be able to win world war ii we could have all been speaking german or japanese i'm telling you if the news media would have the freedom then that they have now if they would have had the technology so that they could just bombard you and show you all of the terrible things not show you the things that are being accomplished the sacrifices that those lives gave but if they just major it on and emphasize the way that they do today all of the all of the costs not any of the benefit i guarantee you people uh might not have stood behind this and the whole course of history could have been different we are the first generation in the history of the world that has all of the bad news of the entire world pumped into our home and 24-hour a day news broadcast so that we just constantly can turn on the television at any time and hear all of the heartache and the terrible things that is happening all of the statistics all of the abuses we are being inundated with this and you know what i guarantee you they if if you would be honest you would have to admit this that the news broadcast aren't telling you about all of the planes that land safely they aren't telling you about the teens who are doing a wonderful job and sacrificing their life and honoring their parents and being a contributing positive influence they're telling you about all of the drugs they're telling you about all of the teenage pregnancy about all of the abortion rate and we are just being inundated with all of the bad news and that tends to war against your joy and your peace and your happiness it's actually propaganda and i'm not even saying that all of the things that are being said are wrong our lives there's a lot of it that is totally mis uh it's half truths they are only emphasizing the negative so there's a lot of it that is lies and i'm going to be talking about some of that and exposing that but you know also if you just take all of the bad things and by virtue of the fact that you only report the negative and you don't report the positive that is going to give you a false impression of what's going on there isn't equal representation there is a lot of wonderful good things happening you know my wife and i watched a movie one of these hallmark movies which somebody outside of the united states may not see these things and you may not know what i'm talking about but they've always got positive uplifting themes and the shows themselves are encouraging instead of discouraging but not just the movies the commercials were wonderful the commercials are advertising their little hallmark greeting cards and they show a person who's discouraged and and uh feeling lonely and uh and a niece comes in and gives this guy a card he starts laughing and it changes the whole mood of the entire place it shows a teacher who's retiring and the guy you could tell is discouraged and a little bit bitter and a student comes back and just says that they want to bless them and the guy says so what did you turn out to be and she said a teacher and you could tell that she was so impacted by him that she wanted to impact other people's lives and they're just positive and they're uplifting i was watching the commercials thinking hallelujah praise god that something good is happening and then they i won't tell you what network it was but they allowed the network to air their commercials and it came on with sex it was people killing each other it was fighting it was stripe it was people yelling it was divorce it was all of this terrible junk and the contrast between these positive commercials versus the mainstream stuff that we get fed all the time it was just like daylight and dark i'm telling you we are being we are being corrupted and many people today are discouraged they're depressed they're they're fighting emotional type of things and they can't understand why and i'm telling you one of the reasons why is because our world is negative negative negative and with the technology now we have the ability to pump all of the ungodliness the bad things that are happening right into people's homes and because of this i guarantee you there's a lot of christians that feel like we should be heartbroken over all of these things that are happening i'm going to be teaching this series and sharing things with you that are going to help you to put things into perspective and i tell you if you understand what i'm talking about you ought to be rejoicing even though the world around you is falling to pieces even though there may be terrible tragedies happening even though there's wars being fought even though there's all of these injustices being done in the world today did you know that we are living in the greatest time in history that there has ever been we are seeing more people born again today than have ever been born again i heard a statistic that in the last 10 years there have been more people born again and turned their lives over to the lord than in the history of christianity in the last 2 000 years we are seeing an exponential growth and you will hear people again take statistics and it just depends whether you want to emphasize the negative or whatever they will talk about how that the muslim may be the fastest growing religion but what they're missing is the muslims are a very small portion of the world population compared to christianity and so it's this same thing that if you only have you know 10 people in your church and if you have five visitors on sunday you had a 50 percent growth but the person that had a thousand people in their church and had a hundred new visitors they actually are reaching more people but it would be a smaller percentage of growth you can manipulate statistics to make it look like that this church over here is growing so much faster than this other one and the truth is it's not true percentage-wise you can manipulate facts and i'm telling you brothers and sisters we have been fed a steady stream of unbelief and lies and things and there is a negativism a pessimism in the body of christ that shouldn't be there so i say all of these things to say you know what i think it's time to hear somebody teach from the word of god on how to be happy and that's what i'm beginning to do and i believe that this is going to bless you andrew's complete teaching titled how to be happy is available in a six-part album on tape or cd it's also available in a dvd album recorded from television request album t-1019 when you make a donation of 19 pounds or more be sure to specify tape cd or dvd album when you write or call the first individual teaching in this album is also available on tape or cd for a donation of three pounds or more but for those unable to send a gift andrew and his partners will provide this first audio teaching free of charge our address is awme that's andrew wommack ministries of europe p o box 4392 walsall w s one nine a r england our telephone number is zero one nine two two four seven three three hundred and website orders can be placed at w www. awme. net we hope to hear from you today and now gospel truth continues so i've started the teaching talking about how to be happy especially if you are a christian and i tell you christians are the only ones that really should be rejoicing the rest of the world it doesn't matter what's going on in their life if everything looks good at the moment the end result of everything if you don't know jesus it's all going to be for naught what's what good is it if you have all of this money all this fame all the recognition all of the things that you need and if you're empty on the inside and then eventually you die and you go to hell and you spend eternity in hell i guarantee you what good is all of these things as jesus said what good is it if a man shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul you know when you look at things in the light of eternity really christians are the only ones that have a reason to be rejoicing and yet in some ways christians can be more discouraged more depressed than believers there's a lot of reasons for this i'm going to go through a lot of these things real quickly let me just mention proverbs chapter 13 verse 12 says hope deferred makes the heart sick but when the desire comes it's a tree of life and that is basically saying that you know what if your hopes are up here and if you don't see these hopes obtained if you don't realize those hopes then it makes your heart sick and so here's one reason i believe that christians sometimes don't operate in joy and peace as much sometimes as unbelievers do and it's because when you get born again when you find out that god is real especially if you receive the baptism of the holy spirit and all of a sudden you recognize that god is real that he heals today that he can prosper you and deliver you and set you free what happens is your hope rises your expectation level rises for instance if you take christians who don't believe that it's god's will for god to heal well then they don't have any hope for healing they don't expect to be healed they may pray out of desperation but the truth is they aren't really disappointed when they don't get healed because they didn't expect it and so they just learn how to suffer they learn how to die gracefully and they don't have any great expectations so in that sense sometimes the fundamentalists the christians that don't believe god for anything all of their hope is all about heaven well then they have less reason to be disappointed and discouraged as they go through life because they think that god is one that puts all of the problems in their life they think that god is the one that gave them sickness and god is one that caused their business to fail and their divorce uh to come because that's god's way of dealing with us and god is sovereign god controls everything did you know a person like that they basically aren't believing for anything not in this life everything is all about in the future and so they don't experience what proverbs 13 12 talks about they don't get discouraged they don't get depressed because they aren't believing for anything but you know what you have somebody that all of a sudden realizes it's god's will to heal they start raising their expectation a person who is trusting god and trying to walk in divine health and appropriate everything that god has for them they'll get discouraged when they get a cold because they were believing not to have a cold during this flu season whereas the person who doesn't believe that they'll just accept it they'll take it well is this the way it comes so i'm saying all these things to say that you know what the greater expectations in some ways the greater danger of being depressed and discouraged and being disappointed because hope deferred makes the heart sick and so there is a need for people to understand how to deal with this and how to cope with this and how to walk in joy and peace and happiness let me share this passage with you out of nehemiah chapter eight if you aren't familiar with the background of this this was a terrible terrible time in the history of the jews they had totally rebelled at god they had totally broken the covenant and after hundreds of years of god being merciful and sending prophets and doing everything that he could to turn his people back to him eventually he brought judgment on them and took them out of the land of promise the land that they had occupied israel put them into captivity they had been in the syrian in the babylonian captivity and now he had returned them back to jerusalem and the people were now back but they were just a shell of what the nation used to be they were still being ruled over by a foreign power some of the people had started trying to build the temple and yet the temple had not been finished and completed because of all of the nations round about saw this as a threat they didn't want to see israel once again rise to prominence and so they did a lot of things that stopped the building and so nehemiah had come back and he was trying to motivate the jews once again to get on with what god had called them to do and to rebuild the temple and to do these things and the people were just in this terrible state for hundreds of years they had been in captivity they had these negative things happening and so because of this the people have been discouraged now the remnant that had come back to israel were being oppressed it looked like that the nation the you know just the little beginnings of this nation the rebirth of the nation of israel was about to be snuffed out they could have lost and have been conquered again so it was a bad time anyway in this period of time nehemiah came along and nehemiah gathered all the people together from the adults even down to children and he had this pulpit built and he stood up on this pulpit and he began to start reading the word of god the five books of the law that moses wrote and let me just read a portion of this to you out of nehemiah chapter 8 and in verse 5 it says and ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people for he was above all the people and when he opened it all the people stood up and ezra bless the lord the great god and all the people answered amen amen with lifting up their hands and they bowed their heads and worshiped the lord with their faces to the ground and then it mentions all of these people i can't pronounce their names but it says in the latter part of the seventh verse that these levites caused the people to understand the law and the people stood in their place so they read in the book of the law of god distinctly and gave the sense and caused them to understand the reading that means that they explained you know there was a lot of commands in here about the feast and the sacrifices and all the rituals and the way everything was supposed to be done and it needed some interpretation and explanation and that's what they're talking about in verse nine it says in nehemiah which is the ter tur shattha i guess that means governor is what it means and ezra the priest the scribe and the levites that taught the people said unto all the people this day is holy unto the lord your god mourn not nor weep for all the people wept when they heard the words of the law why would they weep when they heard the words of the law well it was because under the old covenant it wasn't near as good as the new covenant that we had and there were all these rituals and laws and with every command there was also a promised curse that came upon you if you didn't keep those commandments and of course the these people that were hearing this they knew firsthand that these curses were true because their ancestors did not keep the law and because of that had been judged and had been taken into captivity and they had suffered their entire lives and they were still suffering because of the judgments of god that came on this nation for disobedience so when they heard this pronounced and saw how guilty they were and how that they had failed and they saw that it had happened before they were afraid it was going to happen again and they began to weep when they heard the words of the law but look at this it says then he said unto them talking about nehemiah go your way eat the fat and drink the sweet and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared for this day is holy unto our lord neither be ye sorry for the joy of the lord is your strength the next verse says so the levites stilled all the people saying hold your peace for this day is holy neither be ye grieved now here's the people mourning when they realized what a bad shape they were in and how they had brought all of this upon themselves and in some ways you could sit there and say well they should have been broken-hearted this would have caused them to repent and hopefully never do it again but you know nehemiah came along and all of these levites and they said go your way eat the fat drink the sweet here's a scriptural precedent for all of you that want to eat at mcdonald's or all this fast food place amen it says to eat the fat and drink the sweet in other words instead of mourning celebrate man this is a feast it's a day to throw aside caution and just rejoice because god had restored them back to the nation yes there had been tragedy happen yes they were still reaping some of the benefits of these tragedies and things like that and yet these people were turning to the lord yet these people were listening to the word of god and you know the scripture says let all of those who seek the lord rejoice and be glad in him if you are seeking the lord it doesn't matter what situation you're in it doesn't matter what situation you're coming from it doesn't matter what your future looks like if you are seeking the lord i guarantee your deliverance is on the way something good is about to happen to you because god it says in many places jeremiah 29 11 is a classic where he says i know the thoughts that i think towards you says the lord thoughts of peace and not of evil to give you an expected end god has a good plan for you not a bad plan god is a good god and if you are beginning to seek him it doesn't matter how bad your situation is right now you should be rejoicing you ought to be praising god because if you are turning to god i can guarantee you god is going to start moving all of his kingdom and all of his power to start prospering you and so this is what they were telling these people even though you're in this bad situation you know what god has restored us to the land god is on our side and of course the story goes on that they did get the temple revealed they did overcome all of the adversaries and you know what the joy of the lord is your strength if satan can get your joy he's got your strength he can overcome you i'm telling you that christians need to be rejoicing we need to be happy and so that's what i'm beginning to teach on is just doing a series about how a christian can be happy and i think that this is really really going to help you now we are going to continue this on our program tomorrow so i encourage you to listen in but also listen as our announcer gives you some information about how you can get this album that i have entitled how to be happy even though you're a christian andrew's complete teaching titled how to be happy is available in a six-part album on tape or cd it's also available in a dvd album recorded from television request album t-1019 when you make a donation of 19 pounds or more be sure to specify tape cd or dvd album when you write or call i'd like to encourage you to call or write and request this teaching that i have on how to be happy even though or especially if you are a christian you know christians need to be rejoicing we need to have joy not only for our benefit but for the world's sake we are the hope of this world what god is doing in our lives is really the hope for mankind and i'm telling you you're doing nobody any good if you are depressed and discouraged there are a lot of scriptures that talk about rejoicing in the lord and this teaching will help you so we've got a number on your screen i encourage you to please call please get these materials and please do it today the first individual teaching in this album is also available on tape or cd for a donation of three pounds or more but for those unable to send a gift andrew and his partners will provide this first audio teaching free of charge our address is awme that's andrew wommack ministries of europe p.
o box 4392 walsall ws1 9ar england our telephone number is 0-1922-473-300 and website orders can be placed at www. awme. net we hope to hear from you today i want to remind you that on july the 2nd through the 6th we're having our summer family bible conference we call it family because we got special ministry for the youth ages 5 through 16.
