The Happiness of the Father’s Love
Greetings and good morning brothers and sisters. This is Dr. James Perry continuing with our series
where we seek to explore the deeper meanings of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Over the years,
the heavenly Father has revealed many revelations of spiritual truth to me, and I want to share them
with you. This morning we seek to understand the happiness of the Father’’s Love.
And now, sit back and listen to today's message.
The Happiness of the Father’’s Love
"Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his god: which made
heaven and earth, the sea, all that therein is: who keepeth truth for ever." Psalms, Chapter 146, Verse
5.
Brothers and sisters, in today’’s broadcast, we shall examine the happiness of the Father’’s love. This
being a spiritual love, we would like to differentiate it from material love. True happiness is the
result of doing the Father’’s will, and Jesus revealed this. The appreciation of spiritual love is
directly related to the maturity of the soul. The hallmark of the spiritual journey is that we experience
more than we know or can appreciate. Now this concept is not strange, for we are all familiar with
the values of experience. Many experiences cannot be fully appreciated until the passing of time has
created a capacity in ourselves to fully appreciate them. As we look back over many of our
experiences, the struggles included, our more mature outlook allows us to extract the true meanings
and values from them, and this extraction fills us with real joy. The times that we have shared with
family and friends take on an entirely different meaning under the sun of the passing of time.
A child’’s concept of happiness is entirely different from the concept of happiness in a mature adult.
A child wants the immediate gratification of his desires and needs; mature adults realize that
acquiring the more worthwhile things of life requires delayed gratification. The things that bring
lasting satisfaction, lasting pleasure require delayed gratification. This understanding becomes
important because how we view our goals in life determine whether we realize happiness. The state
of happiness then becomes appreciation of the worthwhile goals that have been obtained. In the
material sense happiness springs from the satisfaction of achieving worthwhile material goals, and
this is the satisfaction of the three great urges of life, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-
gratification. The satisfactory achievement of these goals requires time and effort. These three great
drives brings family life into existence, and family life brings about supreme satisfaction and joy--
happiness in the material life. Family life satisfies all three of the great drives of our material
existence. When these three great drives are satisfied, then a sense of well-being settles over us.
But there are limitations to purely material happiness. First, material happiness is selfish and is
subject to the vicissitudes of material existence. The loss of the breadwinner or sustained illness or
material death can short-circuit material happiness. In short, there are barriers that may interpose
themselves between the obtainment of material happiness that cannot be overcome. Spiritual
happiness suffers no material handicaps, and it brings lasting satisfaction and joy. Spiritual happiness
is a concomitant of spiritual love. So in order to comprehend the spiritual happiness that is a part of
spiritual love, we must take a detailed look at spiritual love.
There are so many negative factors and experiences associated with the word love. Because of this
it is difficult for us to appreciate divine affection. We have a selfish, sentimental and often unwise
concept of love. To have every selfish and unwise desire gratified is not love, even though the
recipient of this unwise ministry may think so. To remove a loved one from a difficult but necessary
experience is not a bestowal of love; rather, it is actually accelerating a loved one down a failed
course of life. To intervene in the consequences of a rebellious child only obscures their vision from
discerning the relationship between consequences and acts. As Jesus said: "Which of you who is a
father, if his son asks unwisely, would hesitate to give in accordance with parental wisdom rather
than in the terms of the son's faulty petition? If the child needs a loaf, will you give him a stone just
because he unwisely asks for it? If your son needs a fish, will you give him a water snake just
because it may chance to come up in the net with the fish and the child foolishly asks for the
serpent?" Divine love is wise, and does not contribute to the moral undoing of its recipients.
The Father bestows this love upon his children, and when this love becomes active the full impact
is felt. Spiritual love is defined as the desire to do good to others. The desire to do good to others of
itself is unselfish. We see that this love cannot become activated until it is directed outward, and we
can also see that this love is moral. When we allow the desire to do good to become actualized in
our experience by doing good to others, we feel the happiness of it, we feel satisfaction, joy, and a
sense of spiritual well-being. And we are all familiar with this satisfaction when we have unselfishly
and wisely helped another, with no thought of reciprocation. But as long as we continue to expect
some selfish gratification for our acts and fail to realize that we receive love as we bestow it upon
another, we will not appreciate the happiness of love, nor the love itself.
The happiness of love has no competitors. Nothing can begin to approach the appreciation of this
spiritual satisfaction, and we can begin to see that there are no material handicaps to bestowing this
divine affection. Being a spiritual quality, it imbues all moral activities. Thus a cheerful and sincere
good morning, a word of comfort or encouragement, a small act of kindness, a willingness to share
the hardship of others, an empathetic reaction to the troubles of others, all of these activities--when
motivated by the desire to do good--bring forth the happiness of love. This forward impulse of divine
goodness is rewarding in that to flow to another, it must move through oneself first. And whether
the soul is basking in this love through worship or seeking knowledge of the execution of this love
through prayer, the joy of it fills his soul at all times, even during the darkest hours of the material
night.
This divine love has another property as well. It is like a stream of water slowly washing away the
soil to expose the rich mineral vein below. It gradually purifies the soul, stripping away from it all
selfishness, all evil. As this love continues to flow through the soul, bringing with it supreme
happiness, the soul is constrained to sing the beautiful melodies of spiritual freedom:
In my soul I am free
No matter where I be
No chains of selfishness weigh me down,
No evil inertia pulls me to the ground
I have escaped from the dark night
And have emerged into the light
I have won the victorious fight
Love is in me
And I in it
And its spirit
Has set me free
Happiness is the realization that we are divinely loved by the heavenly Father.
This concludes today's message on understanding the happiness of the Father’’s love. We hope you
find something in this message to ponder and pray about as you go about your day.
Until next time, this is Dr. James Perry.
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By Dr. James Perry
Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done!
The Happiness of the Father’s Love
