Phil 3:1, 8; 4:4; Luke 2:10-12
By Pastor Brian
Fort Bend Community Church
Christmas Joint Service
12.21.2014
Introduction
1. You are accepted to the med school! You made the team! You've been awarded a scholarship! We'd like to hire you! She said yes! We are going to get marry! A child is born! It is a boy! It is a girl! Great job on closing that deal! You've just won an all-expense-paid vacation! There's no sign of cancer! These are some of life's sweetest moments--when all is right, all your fondest hopes and wildest dreams come true, and your heart explodes with happiness. Life does not get any better than this.
Most of us would say these happy moments create joy, don't they?
2. But there are also other moments when nothing seems to go your way, everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and your fondest hopes and wildest dreams lie in shattered pieces at your feet. Those are the moments when your heart aches with the bitterness of unfulfilled longings, broken promises, or grief so powerful it threatens to take you down.
Most of us would say these unhappy moments rob the joy from us, don't they?
During this Christmas seasons, many of us are experiencing these unhappy moments. A very sick child or a very sick spouse. The boss said that "there will be lay-off after the new year. Have a great Christmas!" This may be the first Christmas after a divorce or the passing of your loved one. It could be a very lonely Christmas. These are unhappy moments. It is hard to rejoice even when we sing "Joy to the World."
3. When the angel said to the shepherds on the first Christmas Day, the angel proclaimed a good news of great joy, saying, "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." (Luke 2:10-11)
The good news of great joy (mega chara in Greek)! Mega joy! We have mega-church, mega-mall... The good news of Christmas is the good news of mega joy! The noun, chara appears 59 times in the NT. The verb, chairo, rejoice, is used 74 times. It is often used in imperative mood. We Christians are commanded to rejoice. Joy is a major theme in the Christmas story.
4. This morning, I would like to talk to you about joy. I want to tell you that happiness in the happy moments of life is not enough, you need joy. I am going to tell you HOW we can have joy. Joy is the godly emotion that we must cultivate. I have three points and at the end of the sermon, I want to tell you again to see if you can remember these three points.
1) Joy is our inheritance because we are in Christ;
2) Joy is the result of a relationship with Christ. When we know Christ, we have joy; and
3) Joy is a choice we make, a conviction, a belief to praise Christ no matter what.
I. Joy is our inheritance in Christ
1. In Phil. 3:1, Paul commands us, "Rejoice in the Lord."And Paul ends the passage with the same command twice in Phil 4:4, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!" Three times Paul urges us to rejoice in the Lord, to be glad in the Lord.
Joy is an important theme, both in Philippians (1:4, 18, 25; 2:2, 17-18, 28-29; 4:1, 4, 10) and in the NT. Paul connects joy to a relationship. Rejoice IN THE LORD. The sphere in which your joy exits is in your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
2. To rejoice in the Lord does not mean you rejoice during only the happy moments. Rejoice in the Lord always. Rejoice always is a command even when life is messed up and mixed up.
When Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians, he was under house arrest in Rome. Not exactly a happy moment in life. And Paul was under the attack and criticism by the Jewish false teachers in Philippi, saying that Paul was preaching a false Gospel. Now I have been in the church for over 50 years. And I know first hand how deeply these criticisms hurt. These are not happy thoughts. They make you angry, upset and sad. These people were not friends. Paul called them dogs and evil workers (Phil 3:2).
How about the Philippians? They were persecuted (1:30; cf. 2:17-18; 3:17). Many were killed because of their faith. They were not exactly in happy moments.
Yet Paul commanded them to rejoice in the Lord.
Two things that joy is NOT:
First, the joy of which Paul writes is not the same as happiness (a word related to the term “happenstance”), the feeling of happiness and high associated with favorable events. In fact, joy persists in the face of weakness, pain, suffering, even death (cf. James 1:2). Biblical joy produces a deep confidence in the future that is based on trust in God’s purpose and power. It results in the absence of any ultimate fear, since the relationship with Christ is eternal and unshakable (cf. Ps. 16:11; John 16:22). Nor is it a humanly produced emotion by other people. People love us. We are happy. People appreciate us. We are happy. But the biblical joy is more than happiness. It is an act of the will in choosing to obey God. The result is a supernaturally produced emotion, the fruit of walking in the Spirit (Rom. 14:17; Gal. 5:22). Rejoicing marks true believers. (MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (2001). Philippians (p. 216). Chicago: Moody Press.)
Secondly, joy does not mean living in denial of all the pain in the world. It is not even about how I feel. It is definitely not about living in denial and ignoring sorrow or pain. "I am joyful! I am joyful!" in blindfold.
Joy is something much deeper, richer, more stable, and definitely more accessible than you might have thought no matter what life brings.
That is the beauty of the joy God offers. God's joy will always be available to you in Christ. You have to choose joy. You no longer need to live in fear or worry, because God's joy will always be available to you.
In this world you will have trouble, Jesus says. But you can still take heart. You can still receive joy. You are not dependent on anyone or anything other than God to know joy.
3. Each of us approaches the idea of joy differently. Think of a bell curve. At one end of the bell curve are people who don't struggle much to have joy. Their natural temperament is optimistic and upbeat. Sometimes they really annoy me because they never stop smiling and they seem to float through life with a cheerful, carefree, lighthearted attitude. Some have not been slapped around a whole lot yet. Some have done some seriously spiritual work and learned how to access joy every day. Regardless, some are on the positive end of the bell curve.
The vast majority of us are in the middle of the bell curve. Life isn't awful; we're moderately happy, not too high and not too low. We don't normally yet overly discouraged or depressed. We admit to feeling tired a lot, perhaps a bit bored by the routine, and sometimes even flat. Daily joy? I am not so sure. But, nothing is really wrong.
As the bell curve moves downward, there is a smaller group of people at the other end. They are hiding a deep depression. Getting out of bed every morning is a chore, and the pleasures of life are gone; smiling and laughing are hard to do. Joy has simply evaporated. That might be because of stress in a relationship, a job change, physical illness, or even deep grief or loss. The depression leave them feeling guilty because they know they're supposed to be joyful and they're not.
As this curve continues, there's an even smaller group of people at the far end who are contemplating suicide. For some of you, you've given life your best shot, and it's just not enough anymore. You're worn out from the struggle to survive another day, and escaping your painful circumstances has begun to dominate your thoughts. You may even wonder if your family would be better off without you. Joy is as alien to you as a foreign country.
Satan does not want you to leave the place of despair, but the lover of your wounded heart, Jesus Christ, has a better plan for you.
Wherever you are on the bell curve, God has a tender word of encouragement for you: you can experience joy. Joy is not out of reach to you. Happiness is not enough; it's too flimsy, too unreliable, too unpredictable, too few and far between. Your were meant for something more. You were meant to have joy in Christ Jesus.
Last week in the Mandarin service, we have talked about the blessings we have in Christ. By faith in Jesus Christ, we enter into the kingdom of light--in Christ.
4. "In Christ, God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Eph 1:3) In Christ, there is abundant joy.
Lewis Smedes wrote, "You and I were created for joy (in Christ Jesus), and if we miss it, we miss the reason of our existence! The reason Jesus Christ lived and died on earth was to restore us to the joy we have lost.... His Spirit comes to us with the power to believe that joy is our birthright because the Lord has made this day for us." (How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? Shaw Books, Revised Edition 2000)
Jesus died to restore the joy that is our inheritance, the joy we lost when Adam and Eve rebelled against God. The good news is that through faith in Jesus Christ, we are now in Christ. Joy is our inheritance in Christ. We can all have joy in Christ.
II. Joy is the result of knowing Christ
1. What is joy? How does it feel to be joyful? What is joy? Does it feel differently than happiness? Many think that having happy feelings must mean we are joyful. Or that the lack of happy feelings must mean we don't have joy.
Joy is certainly more than feeling happy. You can have tears and joy at the same time, tough time and joy at the same time, sad feeling and joy at the same time. The biblical joy has the feeling and security of a deep and abiding relationship with Christ, not just a happy emotion.
2. Joy is knowing Christ,
Between three commands to rejoice in the Lord in the beginning and at the end of the passage, Paul talks about the importance of knowing Christ. 3:8 "I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.... so that I may gain Christ."
To know Christ in good time; to know him in bad time. To know him in happy moments. To know Christ in the storm of battle; to know Him in the valley of shadow; to know Him when the light shines on our faces, or when they are darkened with disappointment; to know the sweetness of His dealing with bruised reeds and smoking flax; to know the tenderness of His sympathy and the strength of His right hand—all this involves many varieties of experience on our part, but each of them like the facets of a diamond will reflect the prismatic beauty of Christ from a new angle. (The Epistle to the Philippians [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1952], 162–63)
Paul said to know Christ so that I may gain Christ. Gain Christ is to make Christ my own. Today we have 50 kids in the choir. But the one kid in the red shirt is mine. A lover said, "of all the girls in the world, this girl is mine." Paul said, "Christ is mine and I don't care for anything else in the world."
Therefore to rejoice in the Lord means the conviction that if you have Christ, that is enough. Joy is a conviction, a confidence, and a knowledge that He cares and He loves you and He died for you.
3. Do you know anyone who is a person full of joy? Who has this confidence and this knowledge of a personal relationship with Christ?
Who has joy in the NT?
1). The man who sold everything to buy the treasure hidden in a field (Matt 13:44). He has this knowledge that Christ's kingdom is worth more than everything he has. He has joy.
2). The women were with great joy (mega chara) when they were realized that Jesus resurrected (Matt 28:5). They know that Christ is alive. Everything is going to be alright. Mega Joy.
3). In John 16, Jesus told his disciples to have joy because he is going to return. No one can take that joy away (John 16:24). It is a conviction, a personal knowledge that He is going to come back for me. That joy no one can take that away.
4). In the early church in Acts, those who shared the gospel seeing people coming to the Lord had joy (Acts 8:8; 12:14; 13:52; 15:3) The more hardship they have, the more joyful they were. The spread of the Gospel even in hard time is the evidence that Christ is with them. They rejoiced again and again.
5). Paul is a person of joy even in the midst of suffering (Phil 1:4, 25; 4:1; 2 Cor 7:4, 13). Knowing Christ is his all consuming passion.
4. Joy is not a feeling; it is the result of knowing Christ. It is the deep-down confidence that God is in control of everything for our good and His own glory, and all is well no matter what the circumstances.
Knowledge of God is the key to rejoicing. Those who know God find it easy to rejoice; those with little knowledge of Him find it difficult to rejoice.
5. How do we know Christ? Paul has a wonderful suggestion: To Know Christ in suffering!
Knowledge of God is the key to rejoicing. Those who know God find it easy to rejoice; those with little knowledge of Him find it difficult to rejoice.
5. How do we know Christ? Paul has a wonderful suggestion: To Know Christ in suffering!
III. Joy is a determined choice to praise Christ
1. Lastly, joy is a choice that we can choose. Choose joy because happiness is not enough. Choose to give Christ your praise in obedience no matter what.
Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice!
It is a command. That is a choice you can make. You can choose to rejoice no matter what or you can choose not to rejoice. Joy is something you can do about it. I can choose joy.
We can hug our hurts and make a shrine out of our sorrows or we can offer them to God as a sacrifice of praise. The choice is ours.
2. John Ortberg, the author of The Life You’ve Always Wanted, suggests we find joy mentors: people who are a little farther down this joy road than we are. Find people who seems to be joyful persons and get as close to them as you can. Observe them. Ask them questions; find out how they got to the place of choosing to face life with joy. I’m not talking about someone who just has a great personality. I’m talking about joy mentors who through life’s ups and downs have developed a deep with Christ with a settled assurance about God and his goodness, believes that ultimately everything will be all right, and repeatedly demonstrates a willingness to praise God in all things.
When I was a college student, I visited Christina Tsai (1890-1984), the Queen of the Dark Chamber, in Paradise, PE. She was sick from a rare form of malaria. She could not see any light. For 54 years she lived in her bedroom in total darkness. But she was such a joyful person, sharing her knowledge of Christ with us. She was my first joy mentor. She passed away 30 years ago but still speaks today of the joy of knowing Christ.
The most recent joy mentor I have is Dr. Philemon Choi. He and his wife, Ellen, were here 2.5 years ago. Ellen passed away last year from cancer six months after the trip to Houston. Houston was their last trip together. Dr. Choi shared about his grief. Losing Ellen was hard to him. He cried often and has terrible time adjusting. But Dr. Choi also shared about his joy in the midst tears. The joy of knowing Christ and the hope in Christ.
The author of Hebrews said that Jesus is a joyful person even enduring all the pains on the cross (Heb 12:2). Jesus throughout history Jesus has been portrayed as sad, serious, somber. That is the picture of all the paintings of Jesus. The first one of a laughing Jesus I found is probably the most famous. It’s called The Laughing Christ. You won’t believe where it was first seen: the January 1970 issue of Playboy. (I do not expect you to go find that issue to verify that I’m telling you the truth. Just believe me.) Jesus was a vibrant, compassionate man, a man of both sorrow and joy who could enter fully into life with all its brokenness. That sounds like someone I’d like to get to know. If he was a man of sorrows and could experience joy, maybe I can too.
My wife, Lily, is a joy mentor. She laughs easily even though she takes things very seriously.
From these mentors, I know the joy of knowing Christ is real. They model the joy of the Lord is their strength.
3. Let me also tell you about the sweetest joy mentors: children! Nobody has a better sense of humor than small children. Nobody. They will laugh at anything! You hit yourself on the head, they laugh. You make funny sounds, they laugh. You make strange faces, they laugh. And they will beg you to do it again and again and again until you are exhausted.
And if you ever laugh at something they do, forget about your to-do list because they will gleefully, repeatedly perform their action and expect you to laugh just as hard as they did for you— each time. Small children are a joy factory! Because most have yet to experience the painful, harsher realities of this world, they laugh for no apparent reason; they crack themselves up! They’re not embarrassed to have their food spurt out of their mouths while laughing. They don’t care if they fall off their chairs laughing. They will roll around on the floor laughing. Even some of the most vulnerable children on the planet know how to laugh about something. Children provide the purest model for unabashed, uninhibited joy you can find.
Jesus said, "unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 18:3)
Maybe you don’t have kids in your life. Perhaps you can volunteer in the children’s ministry. Be like children in trusting.
4. Joy is a choice you make everyday. Let me suggest two action items you can choose to do today.
1) Give Thanks. Joy is rooted in gratitude. In fact, give thanks (eucharistéō) has the same root with joy in Greek. They come from the same family. You cannot have a joyful heart without having a grateful heart. And you cannot be a grateful person and not experience joy. Those who can praise God will experience joy. And those who are joyful will thank God. Joy and gratitude always go together.
Most of us walk around with a gigantic spiritual blindfold over our eyes, focusing on what we don’t have instead of being thankful for what we do have. Why can she eat chocolate all day long and it never shows up on her hips? Why is she married and I’m not? Why does he get those kids and I got these kids? Why did he get a raise and I didn’t? Why do they get to live there and I have to live here? Why did I pray for my loved one to be healed and he wasn’t but his loved one was? As C. S. Lewis warns, we have a tendency to “reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.”
Instead of being filled with gratitude for God’s unbelievable goodness, kindness, and generosity to us, we are blinded by our unmet needs and accuse him of not caring for us. Joy simply cannot grow in the presence of ingratitude.
You can give thanks today and joy will come with thanksgiving. Determine to give your praise to God no matter what! It is a choice.
2) Learn to Live in the moment. Not live FOR the moment, but IN the moment. This is something I learn recently.
Living in the moment helps us recognize that God can be found in this moment, whether it contains joy or sorrow. God is in this moment.
As a perfectionist, I’m always waiting for a perfect moment before I enjoy it. But nothing is ever perfect! That’s why the Bible encourages us to “make the most of every opportunity” for doing good (Eph. 5: 16 NLT). Make the most of this moment. Make the most of this opportunity to do good. Make the most of this opportunity to choose joy.
The problem is, we’re greedy. We don’t want just moments. We want weeks and days and months and years. We want a lifetime. And if we can’t have huge blocks of time that are wonderful and stress-free, we decide we can’t be joyful. Yet sometimes moments are all we have. You and I can decide that we have this moment, and we will choose to love it.
We’re not denying that we have problems. We’re not saying our lives are wrapped neatly with a bow on top and we have everything figured out. It just means that this moment is a gift from God, and we will cherish it. We will love it. Mike Mason says, “A decision to rejoice in the present changes not only the present, it also changes my view of the past and ignites my future with hope.”
I’ve stopped demanding that a moment last longer than it can. I don’t require a moment to be anything other than what it is: a brief span of time that has been given by a gracious Father. I will wring every bit of pleasure out of this moment because I don’t know when the next one will come.
We’re rarely satisfied with today; we spend too much time regretting the unrepeatable past and wishing we could get a do-over, or we waste our energy on worry and anxiety about the unknowable future. Either way, TODAY is ignored or minimized. In Psalm 118: 24, we read, “This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” Try this exercise: Repeat this verse out loud, emphasizing a different word each time.
This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.
You’ll be amazed at how this verse comes alive. Something will begin to shift deep in your soul, and you will stop insisting that God give you days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime. You’ll stop looking for the perfect time to start living. You will begin to enjoy the moments of your life, starting now. If you want to increase the level of joy in your heart, you’ve got to decide that whether you are in pain or not, this is the moment you are in. God can be found in this moment.
Conclusion
1. I used to think that life came in waves: There was a wave of good and pleasant circumstances followed by a wave of bad and unpleasant circumstances, with a lot of ebb and flow in between. Or life was a series of hills and valleys; sometimes we’re up, then we’re down. But I heard from Rick Warren that life is much more like a set of parallel train tracks, with joy and sorrow running inseparably throughout our days.
Every day of your life good things happen. Beauty, pleasure, fulfillment, and perhaps even excitement occur. That’s the track of joy. But every day of your life also holds disappointment, challenges, struggles, and perhaps even losses for you or those you love. That’s the track of sorrow.
Most of us try to “outsmart” the sorrow track by concentrating our efforts on the joy track, as if by our positive outlook or outright denial of reality we can make the sorrow track go away. That’s impossible, because joy and sorrow will always be linked.
And in the strange paradox of the universe, at the exact moment you and I are experiencing pain, we are also aware of the sweetness of loving and the beauty still to be found. Likewise, at the exact moment we are full of delirious delight, we have the nagging realization that things still aren’t quite perfect. No matter how “positive” we think or how hard we try to visualize only happiness, the sorrow track remains. One of our toughest challenges in life is to learn how to live on both of those tracks at the same time.
As we stand on the tracks and stare into the distant, bright horizon, those parallel tracks become one, no longer distinguishable as two separate tracks. That’s the way it will be for us too. During our lifetime, we “stand on the tracks” looking for signs of Jesus Christ’s return. We watch for the sights and sounds that will alert us that his appearance is very close. We stare into the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. One day, in the brightness of his coming, we will meet him face to face. And when we do, the tracks of joy and sorrow will merge. The sorrow will disappear forever, and only the joy will remain. And everything will finally make complete sense. But until that day comes, we live with the parallel tracks of joy . . . and sorrow.
2. Illustration: Rick and Kay Warren lost their adult son to mental depression. The son committed suicide in 2013. They mourned and grieved wide and deep. Last Christmas, the first Christmas they were without their beloved son, was extremely hard. Kay wrote about her pain. Every time she opened a Christmas card with all these wonderful family pictures and happy greetings, her heart was broken again mourning for her loss. Yet in her pain, she also wrote about her joy in Christ.
She said, she "learns to keep seeking beauty from these ashes. It may seem counter intuitive, but it is possible to be in deep grief and yet experience the joy of the Lord. In fact, it is the Lord's joy that enables me to keep choosing to engage life and ministry even as I live with a broken heart." She said, "joy is a settled conviction ABOUT God who is in control of all the details of my life. Joy is a quiet confidence IN GOD that ultimately everything is going to be all right. Joy is a determined choice to praise God in all things to give praise TO GOD."
Joy is our inheritance in Christ.
Joy is knowing Christ.
Joy is a choice we make to give praise to Christ.
3. I’m praying for all who mourn today for any cause. May we find in the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ the fulfillment of the words that Zechariah prophesied long ago:
"Through the heartfelt mercies of our God, God's Sunrise will break in upon us, Shining on those in the darkness, those sitting in the shadow of death, Then showing us the way, one foot at a time, down the path of peace." (Luke 1:78-79 quoted from Zech )
4. Father, I want to choose joy in my life. Rekindle hope in my heart. Help me to keep seeking the joy that belongs to me in Jesus Christ. In the name of Jesus, amen.
