Joy Sermon
[VIDEO –
Vox pops]
[SLIDE –
Life’s Missing Ingredients – JOY]
We made that
video a while back and the number one answer was ‘happiness’. Last week we interviewed many more
people and again the thing people named as THE thing to live for was
happiness. In all of life’s
missing ingredients it seems that happiness is the most sought
after. Perhaps because it can
also prove the most elusive.
That’s a truth CS
Lewis knew well. Lewis was a
great writer and scholar from last century who became a Christian quite
late in life. He had always been
obsessed by the subject of joy.
And what intrigued him most about joy was how elusive it was. Here’s something he wrote that sums it
up well:
[SLIDE – Lewis
quote on 3 slides]
“All of your life
there’s been an unattainable ecstasy… just beyond the grasp of your
consciousness. Though often on
the verge of breaking through… you’ve never had it. All the things that have ever deeply
possessed you or your soul have
been but hints of it, tantalising glimpses, promises never quite
fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they were caught in your
ear. It’s the secret signature of
each soul. It’s the
incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desire before we met
our wives, or made our friends, or chose our work, and which we shall
still desire on our death beds when the mind is no longer knowing wife,
or friend, or work. The books or
the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we
trust in them. It was not in
them, it only comes through them.
If they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb
idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the
thing itself. They are only the
scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not
heard, news from a country we’ve never visited. It’s a music we’re born
remembering.”
Lewis knew that the promise of joy is incredibly attractive but
it’s also incredibly hard to pin down.
We think that joy lies IN achievements, or IN recreation or IN
music. But the joy is not IN
those things, it only comes through them. The source of that joy stands over and
above those things. And it was
only when Lewis recognized God as the ultimate source of joy that he
understood it. He entitled the
story of his conversion “Surprised by Joy.”
That could
be the description of another man’s conversion – Blaise Pascal. Pascal
was a French mathematician and philosopher who died in 1662. He spent his early life running from
Christ until he was 31 years old. Then on November 23, 1654 at 10:30 pm,
Pascal met Christ in a profound personal encounter. He wrote it down on a
piece of parchment and sowed into his coat where it was found after his
death eight years later. It said,
Year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November, . . .
from about half past ten at night to about half an hour after midnight, FIRE.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and
scholars. Certitude, heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of
Jesus Christ. "My God and your God." . . . Joy, Joy, Joy, tears
of joy. . . Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. May I never be separated from
him.
Pascal met with the Living God and he
described it as Fire.
Certitude. Peace. And Joy.
This is our topic for this
morning. In a series on Life’s
Missing Ingredients we’re looking at joy.
Do you feel like you’re missing joy? Do you often use the word ‘joy’? It’s not so common today. As you saw on the video – people will
talk in terms of happiness but far less in terms of ‘joy’.
Let me give you a working definition
of joy before we get going: Joy
is delight and satisfaction in the face of glory. It’s glorying in glory.
We’re not just talking about happiness
this morning. A Mars Bar can make
you happy. We’re talking about
the kind of joy that endures even when you’ve lost your job, your car,
your house, your kids and your health.
An abiding and unshakeable joy – that’s what we’re looking at this
morning.
Is that a missing ingredient in your
life? Do you have that joy? Do you want it? I want it. So this morning we’re just going to consider four
principles to help us find joy.
We look at four foundations for our understanding of joy. And in each of them we’ll see that the
fullness of joy which our hearts crave is found in relationship with the
Living God.
Foundation 1 – God is
Joyful
[SLIDE – Foundation
1 – God is joyful]
Have you ever
considered that? God is
overflowing with rapturous joy.
Do you think of God in those terms?
I am convinced that
the fundamental problem we have in not finding joy is that we tell
ourselves God is not joyful. We
have a picture in our minds of God as a moody, dismal, frustrated school
headmaster. For the most part we
think of God as cold, indifferent or passionless. Or worse – we think that God’s
eternally stroppy. Do you have
that picture in your mind? It’s
often in mine.
And we have to uproot this thinking at throw it away. That is NOT what God is like. That is not the God in whom Pascal
found such joy. That is not the
God about whom the Psalmist can say “Shout for joy to the LORD all the
earth. Worship the LORD with gladness;
come before Him with joyful songs.”
Unless we are convinced that God is the most joyful Being in the
universe then we won’t make Him the precious object of our
affections. While-ever we think
of God like some angry Jack-in-the-beanstalk Giant in the Sky we will
never trust ourselves to Him. And
if we don’t do that we’ll never discover the true joy to be had in Him.
Just listen to the Living God’s own description of Himself. In Proverbs chapter 8 – Jesus Christ,
the Eternal Wisdom of the Father is speaking of His relationship to His
Father in creation. He says this:
[SLIDE – Proverbs 8:22-31]
“The LORD possessed me at the beginning of His work, before His
deeds of old; I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before
the world began… I was there when
He set the heavens in place, when He marked out the horizon on the face
of the deep… Then I was the craftsman at His side. I was filled with delight day after
day, rejoicing always in His presence, rejoicing in His whole world and
delighting in mankind.”
The Living God is not a lonely miser but a lively relationship of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And
here, as the He creates, the Son describes how much delight He takes as
the craftsman at His Father’s side.
“He is filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in His
presence, rejoicing in His whole world and delighting in mankind.”
God is joyful. The Father,
Son and Holy Spirit form the Happiest Being in the Universe. Everything that is ever good, righteous,
loving, true or beautiful – is because the Living God made it that way as
the overflow of His own joyful Being.
That’s why CS Lewis said we won’t find joy IN things but that Joy
comes FROM God through those things.
In Colossians chapter 1 verse 16, the Bible says all things were
made by Jesus and for Jesus. The
Father made all things by Jesus – the craftsman of creation – and He made
all things for Jesus – the Son who He loves. It’s all for Jesus. Everything and everyone exists as a
love-gift from God the Father to God the Son.
At the heart of the
universe is this eternal love story between the Father and the Son. Before anything else was, this
fountain of love flowed between them in the joyful communion of the Holy
Spirit.
God is the happiest
Being in the universe because He is love. He is the loving communion of Father,
Son and Holy Spirit. (Therefore) THE
Joy to be had in this universe is to be caught up into this Divine love
affair.
BUT, we seek joy in
all the wrong places. And that’s
foundation number two:
[SLIDE – Foundation
2 – We seek joy in all the wrong places]
No-where is this fact
put better in the Bible than in the book of Jeremiah. Here we find such a colourful image to
describe our joy-suppressing tendencies.
The prophet writes
this in chapter 2:
[SLIDE – Jeremiah
2:12, 13]
“Be appalled at this,
O heavens and shudder with great horror” declares the LORD. “My people have committed two
sins: They have forsaken me, the
spring of living water, and have dug their own wells, broken wells that
cannot hold water.”
Can you picture this
scene in your mind? Here is the
LORD Christ standing before a people with outstretched arms – offering
living water. And we have all
walked past Him and instead, to slake our thirst, we have taken a shovel
to dry ground and we have dug our own little wells that can’t even hold
the water we so desperately crave.
All the while the spring of living water stands, arms
outstretched, to provide eternal satisfaction for our thirsty souls. And all the while we toil at making
our broken wells a little less broken.
Now the water here
symbolizes satisfaction. So here
Christ is saying “I provide overflowing satisfaction for your soul. But instead you trudge on past Me and
decide to try to make your own fun.
And it will not work.”
Now I want us to
notice something here. Thirst is
not wring. Wanting satisfaction
is not wrong. Seeking joy is not
wrong. Everyone seeks joy –
everyone tries to get satisfaction from somewhere. That’s not the problem. The problem where you seek that
joy. And the LORD says that the
heavens are appalled that human beings should value their joy so
little. We forego white hot joy
in order to indulge in tawdry fleeting pleasures. The heavens are appalled that we are so
joyless!!
CS Lewis said it well
when he wrote:
[SLIDE – Lewis
quote]
“Our Lord finds our
desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures,
fooling about with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered
to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the
slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at
the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
We think that our own
sources of joy – drink, sex, ambition – will satisfy. But the LORD is amazed and horrified
that we should neglect Him and His eternal satisfaction.
We reject the joy to
be had in Christ and we try to find joy elsewhere. We find it in relationships, in work,
in sport, in academia, in holidays, in anything and everything – but not
in Christ. And when we do this,
it’s like digging a broken well.
And broken wells leak.
Charles Darwin knew
all about this. Towards the end
of his life He noticed that the joy in his life had steadily drained away
over the years. One evening he
wrote this in his diary:
[SLIDE – Darwin
quote]
"Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds …
gave me great pleasure … Formerly pictures gave me considerable
(pleasure) and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot
endure to read a line of poetry … I have also almost lost any taste for
pictures or music … I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not
cause me the exquisite delight it formerly did … My mind seems to have
become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts."
When we try to find satisfaction outside of Christ, we find that
we have dug a broken well. And
more importantly we have rejected Christ, who the Father loves so
much. This is THE problem that
faces us. We are out of
relationship with Jesus. And when
you live in a universe that is made by Jesus and for Jesus and you
yourself are not FOR Jesus you stand in a precarious position. In fact, you stand in need of rescue.
But that’s just why foundation number 3 is so wonderful.
[SLIDE – Foundation 3 –
God rejoices in bringing us back]
Foundation 3 – God
rejoices in bringing us back
The great rescue
mission of God to save us from our rebellion happened when Christ was
born as one of us – to live our life and to die our death.
On the cross, Jesus
pays the penalty for all our foolish and wicked attempts to live life
without Him. It is not right that
we reject Jesus in our lives – but on the cross Jesus says “I know it’s
wrong but I will pay for it myself.”
He bears the terrible guilt for all our sin so that we would never
have to.
But hang on – you
might be thinking. This doesn’t
sound particularly joyful. Isn’t
the cross PROOF that God isn’t actually joyful but that at the heart of
God is this horror and suffering?
Doesn’t the cross prove that God is NOT the Happiest Being in the
Universe.
Well NO. Actually Jesus is working hard for His
joy even as He goes to the cross.
[SLIDE – Hebrews
12]
Hebrews chapter 12
declares:
“Let us fix our eyes
on Jesus, the Author and Perfector of our faith, who for the JOY set
before Him, endured the cross, scorning its shame.”
How could Jesus endure
the cross?? How could He go through the agony and the shame? He did it for the joy that the cross
would achieve. Now what is that
joy? What is the joy that Jesus
desired so much that even the cross was worth paying to get it?
Well think about it –
what extra thing did Jesus get because of the cross?? He was already the Eternally Loved Son
of His Father. He was already the
Maker and Owner of the Universe.
He already had everything there was to get. What did Jesus get out of the
cross? He got us!
He already owned
everything else – but we had stolen ourselves away from His loving
grasp. At the cross Jesus won us
back – He said ‘I don’t care how far you’ve run from me, I don’t care how
many broken wells you’ve dug in your life. I have paid for your wrong-doing – I want you back!’ And what a price He paid to win us
back! But He considered it worth
the cost.
Even the cross was
worth it because of the joy it brought Jesus – the JOY of restored
fellowship with us.
Do you ever consider
the joy Jesus has in His people? Have you ever thought with what passion
Christ loves His people?
The prophet Zephaniah
writes about the LORD’s love for His people:
[SLIDE – Zeph 3:17]
“The LORD your God is
with you, He is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His
love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”
What a humbling love
that is. Undeserved and unending.
We had failed to love
Him in spite of His glory and grace and beauty and worth. Yet He determined to love us, at such
a cost, in spite of our loveless, selfish lives. When we look at the cross we see those
two things – Christ’s amazing worth and our unworthiness. Christ’s love and our unloveliness.
But what a relief to
be able to take our eyes off ourselves and fix them on Christ. How refreshing to get our focus off
our own agendas and concerns. To stop
digging our own broken wells and simply return to the source of living
waters.
This is exactly the
opportunity Jesus gives us, as we see in foundation 4
[SLIDE - Foundation
4 – To return to Christ you will find true Joy]
Foundation 4 – To
return to Christ is to find true Joy
In Matthew chapter 13,
Jesus describes the process of returning to Him in joyful terms. He tells two mini-parables:
[SLIDE – Matt
13:44-46]
“The kingdom of heaven
is like treasure hidden in a field.
When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and
sold everything he had and bought that field.
Again the kingdom of
heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he
went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”
To find Christ is to
find a treasure worth more than anything you possess. If you discover in Christ the immense
value of His power and grace and holiness and mercy and faithfulness and
glory and love. If you see in Him
the priceless worth of an unquenchable spring of life giving waters then
nothing will stop you from following Him. You will do what the man in the parable does when he finds
something so valuable. You will
get that Treasure at any cost. To
gain Christ you will sell everything you have, you will relinquish every
possession, you will relegate every human relationship to come under the
priority of Christ. And you will
do it with joy.
To become a Christian
is to joyfully consider everything else as a dead loss compared to the
incomparable greatness of Christ.
And that means two
things as I finish.
First of all it means
that if you are not yet a follower of Jesus, you need to be able to SEE
Jesus for who He is. If you don’t
see Jesus as a treasure chest of holy joy there is no way you are going
to give up anything in order to gain Him. You have to know that Christ is Valuable before you value
Him.
Well if you want an
opportunity to spend some time thinking through the Beauty and Worth of
Jesus, let me recommend to you the course Christianity Explored. It begins on October the 8th
and for seven Wednesday nights we will examine the Person of Jesus. You don’t need to know anything about
the Bible, you won’t be asked any question yourself, but you can ask any
question you like. Fill out a
pink card in the pews and tick the box that says ‘I’d like to explore
Christian faith’ – we’d love to help you out. Take this opportunity to discover the Treasure of Jesus –
the One who made Blaise Pascal cry out “Joy, Joy, Joy, Tears of Joy.”
But secondly, if you
are a Christian – have you forgotten the immeasurable Value of
Jesus? I do – daily. Do you find the joy of your salvation
draining away?
Clearly we need to
refresh our vision daily. We need
to be daily intoxicated by the glory of Jesus. It’s Very difficult to live the Christian life if you
haven’t set before you the wonder and worth of Christ. You won’t give up your broken wells
unless you see the well-spring of living waters that Jesus offers.
Let us then make it a part
of our daily routine – not just to read about Christ or to pray to Him
(though this is essential) but let us be faithful in our adoration of
Him. Let us worship Christ. Let us see Him and savour Him. Let us praise Him. Let us prize Him above everything and
everyone else.
As we do this we will
be remembering these four foundations.
(1) He is joyful – He is
to be rejoiced in. (2) We seek joy in all the wrong places –
we must repent of our broken wells.
(3) He rejoices to win us back – meditate on the glory of the
cross. And (4) our true joy is to be found in returning to Him – in
prizing Him above everything else.
To help us reflect on
these things we’re going to listen to the glory of Christ in song. We will hear about the character of
Jesus, that He carries us in the arms of grace and love divine. Make this into your own joyful
response to the God who rejoices in you…
[SONG – I am
carried]
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