Allen Jackson - Joy and Strength
The third week of Advent is traditionally celebrated with a focus on joy, and I would like to honor that this weekend. We’re starting Luke chapter 2 in verse 10 with a verse that is a part of the Christmas narrative. It says: «The angel said to the shepherds, 'Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.'» It’s the angelic announcement to the shepherds in the shepherds fields that the Christ child has been born in Bethlehem. And I’m always interested by the way it begins. The angels begin by saying, «Don’t be afraid».
Do you have room in your imagination that an announcement, a God announcement in your life, your first reaction to it would be fear? I promise you the angel said, «Don’t be afraid,» it’s because the shepherds are afraid. It’s new to them and it’s frightening. The angel says, «You don’t have to be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy». The Greek word for great is megas, from which we get mega, so in plain, «big joy». It’s bad grammar, but I think you get the picture. The angel said, «I’ve got good news, big joy for everybody». That’s the good news of the Jesus story is it transcends all the things that divide us, all the barriers, all the way we hyphenate our identifications. Jesus transcends all of those. Jesus opened the door for every person, regardless of IQ, ethnicity, height, dexterity, all those things that divide people. Jesus opened the door.
I have a good friend. He’s an orthodox Jewish man and he said to me and to a group of people I was with, he said, «You really have a gift». He said, «The Christian faith is about good news. It’s about God loving you». And I think sometimes, as Christians, we overlook that. The Jesus story is about good news of big joy for everybody. And here’s our challenge. We don’t know much about joy. I think most of us think joy is just a synonym for being happy. And biblically, it really has a very different meaning. And that’s what I wanna take a few minutes with you. The Bible tells us that we are complex beings. We’ve talked about this before. I’m not gonna belabor it this morning, but the Bible talks about us in terms of body, soul, and spirit. You are a spirit. The part of you that is most directly created in God’s image is your spirit.
The scripture says that in Eden God crafted man from the dust of the ground and then he breathed into him and man became a living being. Your spirit is created in God’s image. Your spirit is eternal. When your body stops functioning, you’re not done. Your spirit steps into eternity. You are a spirit, you have a soul. Your soul is your mind, your will, and your emotions. And then you live in a body. You get an earth suit, that’s what one of these things are. You’re born with an expiration date. I know that’s frustrating, but it’s true for all of us. But your body is not you. When your body stops functioning, your spirit continues right on into eternity. For every aspect of your person, there is an expression of contentment or fulfillment. For your body, it’s pleasure, okay? Pleasure’s not evil. God created you with the ability to experience pleasure. Pleasure was God’s idea.
Now if you spend your life committed to nothing but the pursuit of pleasure, you’re a hedonist and it’s highly probable you’ll miss the kingdom of God. But it doesn’t make pleasure wicked or evil or wrong. Now, fulfillment for your soul, for your mind, your will, and your emotions, we call that happiness. And again, God created you with the ability to experience happiness. It’s not evil or wicked or inappropriate. It was God’s idea. God is not opposed to happiness. It’s really good to get that cataloged in your heart 'cause some people think, you know, «God thinks if it makes you happy, it’s wicked».
That’s not true. But fulfillment for your spirit is joy. Now here’s the challenge. Most of us have a plan, an imagination, of how to secure, we even spend time and energy and effort in considering the pursuit of pleasure or the pursuit of happiness. And again, it’s not wrong. But most of us have very little imagination, awareness, understanding, or commitment to the cultivation of joy. And joy is a necessary component for your spiritual health. A life without joy is a life with a tremendous deficit. And so, we’re gonna spend our time today trying to unpack those things and see if we can understand the distinctions and what it would be like to be people of joy.
Again, I’m not trying to diminish your pleasure or do away with your happiness. I’m just saying without the existence of joy, you’re leading a diminished life. And we’ve had such a limited imagination. I think for most of us, we’ve thought joy was just another way of saying happy, and they’re very different things in the same way that pleasure and happiness are different. They may be related. There may be a connection between them, but they are very different things. In the same way, so is joy. So let’s start with this notion that joy is connected to spiritual choices. After all, joy is about your spirit, and so it’s logical that spiritual choices are going to have an influence, an impact, on joy in your life. Deuteronomy 28. It’s a chapter in the law of Moses, and it is a chapter about blessings and curses.
The first verses of Deuteronomy are about the blessings of God in your life. The last two-thirds of that chapter are about the curses of God in your life. The blessings are so all-encompassing, it’s really remarkable. It says you’ll be blessed in the city and in the field, when you sit and when you stand, when you come in and when you go out. The curses are pretty overwhelming as well. But in that chapter, in verses 47 and 48, we’re given kind of a key to understanding it. Says: «You didn’t serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things; therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in the lack of all things».
There’s a contrast. It says you chose not to serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart, even though he gave you abundance. It’s a choice. He said you didn’t choose to serve the Lord joyfully, gratefully. You were God’s people, the covenant people. You were the recipients of blessings and abundance and supernatural interventions and deliverances, many tangible expressions. You have the form of worship. You have daily sacrifices. You engaged in religious behavior but if you don’t serve the Lord with joy and gratitude, he said you can serve your enemies. So it isn’t simply that we go through the motions of being religious, it isn’t that we just do the right thing out of a sense of obligation or duty or commitment or tradition. But the attitude of our heart is important.
Joy is a necessary component to spiritual wellbeing. And in the same way that in nutrition, to be healthy physically there are certain things, elements, that you need to make a part of your diet. Maybe it’s very minute amounts, but without them you are not going to physically maintain your strength and health. And joy is necessary for your spiritual wellbeing. I wanna elevate its significance in your imagination. I want you to begin to think about it in a purposeful, intentional way. I’m gonna suggest you think about joy as a force, in the same way that gravity is a force. You don’t have to be conscious of it, but your awareness of it will work to your benefit. And joy is a force in your life. It can add momentum to you or it can diminish you in its absence. It’s an important thing.
Look at Isaiah 35 and verse 10. Says: «The ransomed of the Lord will return And come with joyful shouting to Zion, With everlasting joy upon their heads. And they will find gladness and joy, And sorrow and sighing will flee away». Before you turn the page, look at that last sentence. There’s a set of opposites that are included there. It talks about gladness and joy being found and it talks about something else fleeing away. What is it that flees away? Sorrow and sighing. Now, this is a season of the year that often brings with it some real expressions of sorrow, 'cause we’re reflecting a bit on the year and things that have happened or didn’t happen or loved ones that we’ve lost or circumstances that didn’t materialize or unwanted things that have intruded, and it’s not unusual to get to this season of the year with people trying to celebrate and in you there’s a sense of sighing and sadness.
Doesn’t make you weak or wrong or inadequate. It’s just a reality. But there is a prescription that enables those things to move away from us. It says that if we find gladness and joy, sorrow and sighing will flee away. So the question that begins to grow in me is how would I cultivate joy? How would I let joy in my heart emerge? If it will cause sighing and sadness to move away from me, that’s a good thing, 'cause I don’t wanna spend my life with unnecessary sadness or sighing. So let’s take a minute with this idea of the development of joy or cultivating joy in Acts 13 and verse 52. You can turn the page now. Says: «The disciples were continually filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit».
Now, words have a meaning and in this sentence it’s particularly significant. Says they were continually filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. That’s an intentional use of language. It’s very possible in the Greek language to have said that they were filled with joy one time, as a statement of occurrence at one point in time, it happened in the past, it was complete and entire. But that’s not the verb tense that’s used here. Here it says they’re continually filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit. May I ask you a question? Why do you have to be continually filled? Do you leak? Was your original filling inadequate? What happened? «Continually filled». After all, the book of Acts, from which this verse comes, is really a book that is about the person of the Holy Spirit and his involvement in our lives.
In Acts chapter 1, it’s about Jesus’s ascension back to heaven, and before he leaves for heaven, he says to his closest friends and followers, «Don’t leave Jerusalem until you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit». And in Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit is poured out on the Day of Pentecost and the people are speaking in these unknown languages and a crowd gathers and Peter stands up and tells the Jesus story. And in the same city where a few days earlier they had screamed, «Crucify him,» thousands of people accepted Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah and are baptized. So the book of Acts begins with this outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’s closest friends and followers, and the whole city is engaged in what’s happening. And we get to Acts 13 and it says they were «continually filled with the Holy Spirit and joy».
Now I think we have a challenge in the way we imagine spiritual things. Typically, our goal is to be accomplished spiritual persons, so the language we use tends to suggest that we accomplish something and leave it behind. I was saved or born again or converted. I was baptized. I was filled with the Spirit. I repented. And we tend to have a list. When we tell our stories of experiences in our journey and the way we describe them as if they were something that we encountered one time, we brought them to full completion, and we have left them behind.
Now, I don’t wanna cause you to live in fear or to question your conversion or your entrance into the kingdom of God. But I do wanna call into question the idea that those things are simply something you experience and then you’ve moved beyond them. It seems to me that the counsel, the teaching, the invitation of scripture, is that your spiritual life requires attention, that it requires care, that it requires revisiting. In this particular verse in Acts it says they were continually filled with the Holy Spirit and joy.
Again, did they leak? I think it’s more helpful to think of spiritual things as something that need replenished. «I had a very good meal in July. I ate vegetables, whole grains. I was completely hydrated. It was a good meal». But if that was the last time I ate, I’d be a little wobbly this morning. Agreed? We have a notion that, physically, you have to continually take in nourishment. Pleasure isn’t something you just want to experience one time. Happiness isn’t something that you want to say, «I was happy once. I was nine». And joy in your life is something that requires attention.
When you’re a Christ follower, when you make a profession of faith, the Holy Spirit takes up residence within you. The Bible says you’re a temple of the living God. The fruit of the Spirit, the evidence of the Spirit in your life, that you have cooperated with the Holy Spirit, is a transformation of your person from the inside out. Christianity was never intended to be a set of rules forced from the outside in. It’s about a transformation of our person and our life. We choose to allow the Spirit of God to bring change to us, to change our soulish, selfish, carnal, earthly way of responding to life, to let God responses begin to emerge in us more fully. And it’s called fruit.
Now, fruit reflects something of the character of the tree. You know, we like to talk, the New Testament talks to us about the gifts of the Spirit, the expressions of the power of God, prophecy, gifts of healing, the workings of miracles, those supernatural expressions. The Bible doesn’t call those things fruit, it calls them gifts. When you see a Christmas tree this year with gifts beneath it, none of you imagine that you could cause the gifts to grow in size or value by fertilizing the tree, right? Nobody looks at those gifts and thinks, «Well, you know, if I’d just gotten a bigger tree, I’d get bigger gifts,» right? Everybody is seeing there’s no connection. The gift reflects the grace and the care of the giver, not the tree.
Well, fruit, on the other hand, if you have good fruit, you understand it is the reflection of a healthy, vital, vibrant tree. So it’s not whether or not we believe in the gifts of the Spirit or the fruit of the Spirit. We need both. The fruit of the Spirit is the insulation for the gifts of the Spirit. The power of God expressed through the life of an individual that hasn’t yielded themselves to transformation by the Spirit of God is very difficult to sustain. The fruit of the Spirit enables the power of God to move through our lives more remarkably without doing damage. But the evidence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, one of those, is joy. Joy comes through the presence of the Spirit of God.
Now why would we care? Why does it matter to us? Is it just a talking point for a crafted sermon? I hope not. I wanna suggest to you that, biblically, we learn that joy enables us to endure. And whether we like it or not, life comes with seasons where it’s required of us, endurance. Isn’t that true? Look in 2 Corinthians 7 and verse 4. It says: «Great is my confidence in you; great is my boasting on your behalf. I’m filled with comfort; I am overflowing with joy in all our affliction». That last phrase, I know it’s in the Bible, but it’s odd. It says: «I am overflowing with joy in all our affliction». I don’t know about you, but when I’m in difficult seasons, I haven’t thought about overflowing with joy. I’ve thought about overflowing with complaining, overflowing with criticizing, overflowing with blaming somebody else, but it hasn’t really occurred to me that I could overflow with joy.
So there’s some realignment being discussed here. Look at 2 Corinthians 8 and verse 1. He’s writing to the same group of Christians: it’s the church in the city of Corinth. He said, «Now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given to the Macedonian churches». The churches that started with that visit to Philippi. «Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity». Now, that’s an odd sentence. It has paired things together that I would never pair in my imagination. It says, first of all, «Out of the most severe trial, they have overflowing joy». Huh? How do you do that? «Out of severe difficulties,» I usually has overflowing whining. And then it says something equally odd. It says, «From their extreme poverty, they welled up in rich generosity».
How can you be generous from a place of extreme poverty? Well, from the way I do accounting, it’s pretty difficult. But the Bible invites us towards a little different perspective on how we evaluate our giving, our gifts. See, we tend to value a gift based on the value of what we give. God tends to value our gifts based on the value of what we retain. I’ll give you an example. Jesus, it says in the Gospels, was on the Temple Mount and people were bringing their gifts. It was a public offering. And there were some making gifts of tremendous value. And a widow came along and put in a few pennies and Jesus gathered his disciples together and he said, «That woman has given more than all the rest of these». And the disciples said, «No, Lord, you didn’t see it. There were people who gave gifts of incredible amounts throughout the day». And Jesus said, «Yes, they gave out of their abundance, but she gave all that she had to live on».
Jesus attached greater value to her gift because it represented an expression of total commitment. Now, I don’t believe it’s a condemnation of giving out of your abundance. When God blesses you, I think that’s appropriate. But clearly, he’s inviting us to this imagination that it isn’t so much about what we give, it’s what we hold on to. So it’s possible for the Macedonian churches to have given with tremendous generosity, even though they were battling great poverty in their own lives. What intrigues me is their response. In the midst of circumstances that were unpleasant, that are described by Paul as severe, it says they still overflowed with joy. Joy enables us to endure, to overcome distasteful, unpleasant, uncomfortable circumstances, to not be dominated by them, to not have them steal from us the meaning and the integrity of our days.
Look at the next passage. It’s James chapter 1 and verse 2. It says: «Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials». Again, it’s plain language but, to be honest, I’d like to white that verse out of my Bible. I’d like to highlight it and hit delete. Consider it all joy when you win the lottery. Consider it all joy when I walk in the house at the end of the day and Kathy says, «You are handsome and brilliant». Woo-hoo, I’m joyful! But that says consider it all joy when you face different kinds of difficulties. Why would I do that? It gives us an explanation. «Knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing».
How do you arrive at the place where you lack nothing? Apparently, it’s not about asset accumulation or emotional strength. So I wanna suggest something for our closing prayer. I wanna take a minute and just offer a few expressions of thanksgiving to God, some things I can be grateful for. And if there’s anything in your life for which you can say thank you, I would encourage you to just quietly say thank you to the Lord. If nothing else, you can be thankful I’m done. Woo-hoo. 'Cause some of you wondered if I would ever hush. I’m going to.
Let’s take just a moment or two and offer an expression of thanks, and then I will close with a prayer for those of us that are facing real challenges. And when I thank the Lord, I like to put my hands up. If that freaks you out, you don’t have to do that. It won’t hurt you, but doesn’t make you a crazy person or a fanatic or a zealot. We’re not gonna film it and post it. That would be an idea. But let’s just take a moment and say thank you to the Lord, 'cause we’ve been guilty of serving the Lord without joy or gratitude. We’ve done it reluctantly, out of a sense of obligation, kind of a compliance, but our heart wasn’t in it. And let’s just take a moment and say, «God, thank you». Fair enough? All right.
Lord, we wanna say thank you today. You’ve been good to us. You have blessed us. You have watched over our lives. Lord, you’ve poured out abundance on us and freedoms and liberties. Lord, through Jesus, you have forgiven our sins and redeemed us. You have given a purpose to our lives and a meaning to our days. We praise you for it today, Lord. We thank you for the food we eat and the clothing and the shelter and transportation and education, the medical that is available to us. Lord, you have blessed us so abundantly, and we just wanna pause to say thank you for the privilege of worshiping in public without fear of reprisal. We praise you for it. For comfortable places and convenient places. We praise you, Lord, we have access to the Word of God. That you’ve given us the strength for a new day. We give you glory and honor today because you are worthy of all praise and majesty and glory and honor. We bless your name today, that in your great mercy you have called us out of darkness into the kingdom of your Son. You’ve opened our eyes and our ears to hear and our hearts to receive. We praise you for it, Father. That you haven’t counted our failures against us, but you have loved us. We bless your name today because you are worthy. We give you glory and honor, and we pray for one another, Lord. You know every need and every circumstance, and I pray that the power of a living God would be expressed on our behalf this day. Lord, bring life to our bodies and peace to our minds, hope to our souls. Open doors of opportunity where there has been no possibility before us. We praise you for it today. Lord, give us the strength to complete this season. Open our hearts to you as never before. We thank you that you’re a God of mercy and love and grace, that you are anxious to be involved with us, that you are willing to deliver and restore. We praise you for it, in Jesus’s name, amen.