Longing for Joy

INTRO

Welcome back, y’all! It’s officially Christmas season!! Raise your hand if you decorate for Christmas before thanksgiving? Ok, now raise your hand if you are correct and decorate after Thanksgiving?

The Christmas season brings a lot of fun memories to mind and it is very festive. I’m sure we’ve all already watched plenty of our favorite Christmas movies and there will be even more fun to be had! But the other side of the fun festivities is a lot of stress and hurriedness. Christmas can be a really hectic season.

So, this year, we decided to call the series “A Weary World Rejoices”—try saying that five times fast—because we want to talk about the great joy that we receive in Christ that we celebrate at Christmas, but we also want to acknowledge that there may be some people in here who are walking in weary.

The dictionary defines weariness as, “feeling or showing tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion or lack of sleep.”

I’m sure many of you have taken advantage of the different schedule that Christmas break gives you and have stayed up super late on some nights because you can always sleep in the next morning.

There’s even a tradition in my family now of every year, we all get a set of matching PJs and we change into them on Christmas Eve after we get home from service, we stay up late watching Christmas movies and drinking hot cocoa and egg nog and then we crawl out of bed the next morning and groggily and tiredly open presents while the adults drink all the coffee we can find. It’s part of the fun.

Sometimes, experiencing “tiredness…from exertion or lack of sleep” can be okay, but imagine if every day of your life was like that.

In fact, another definition of weary according to Merriam-Webster is “exhausted in strength, patience, tolerance, or pleasure.” And the truth is, you’ve seen people that are “weary” in this sense. They walk with a slight hunch in their shoulders, they don’t usually smile, and you can tell that their world just feels heavy. And this year, we want you to know that if that’s you, there is HOPE and there is JOY available at Christmas even for your story! And you might be thinking, how can he possibly say that? Because I believe that the Bible is true and I believe it still speaks to us today and has relevance for our lives, and I believe that tonight we are going to look at a couple of brief stories of people in the Bible whose lives were weary and the joy that was made available to them is the same joy that is available to us tonight. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, I’d love to pray.

[PRAY]

BODY

You may be surprised by this, given that we’re in a Christmas series, but I’m going to start by camping out in Isaiah 3tonight. So, if you have a Bible flip to basically the middle of it and you’ll be in or near Isaiah. If you’re in Psalms, flip forward a few times and if you’re in something that ends in “-ekiah” you’ve gone too far.

There are some things you need to know in order to understand what we’re about to read:

1. God chose Israel to be his people to bless the nations.

2. Israel was rebellious time and time again and refused God’s guidance and rule.

3. Israel’s kingdom eventually crumbled and civil war broke out in the nation, causing it to split into the Northern Kingdom (still known as Israel at this time) and the Southern Kingdom (known as Judah).

4. Isaiah is prophesying in the Southern Kingdom of Judah. But while he was ministering in the South, the Northern Kingdom was about to be conquered by the nation of Assyria.

5. Isaiah foretold of the coming destruction and urged the Southern Kingdom to humble themselves and learn from the mistakes of their northern brothers and sisters.

With all of that in mind, let’s read Isaiah 3:1-5:

“For behold, the Lord God of Hosts is taking away from Jerusalem and from Judah support and supply, all support of bread, and all support of water; 2 the mighty man and the soldier, the judge and the prophet, the diviner and the elder, 3 the captain of fifty and the man of rank, the counselor and the skillful magician and the expert in charms. 4 And I will make boys their princes, and infants shall rule over them.5 And the people will oppress one another, everyone his fellow and everyone his neighbor; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the despised to the honorable,” (Isaiah 3:1-5).

So, it sounds pretty bad. Let’s keep reading, go on down to verse 8.

“For Jerusalem has stumbled, and Judah has fallen, because their speech and their deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence.9 For the look on their faces bears witness against them; they proclaim their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! For they have brought evil on themselves,” (Isaiah 3:8-9).

Let’s back up. Remember, Isaiah is prophesying to Judah (Jerusalem is the capital city of Judah), the Southern Kingdom. At this time, the Northern Kingdom is about to fall to Assyria and that situation is causing the Southern Kingdom of Judah to kind of flex its muscles a bit. The kings of Judah have ushered in a time of relative “prosperity” and success and wealth to Jerusalem, so most people are just totally cool with whatever’s going on under the surface because it’s mostly working out okay for them in the end.

But if you pay attention carefully to most of the Lord’s rebuke and judgement in verses 1-4, it’s directed against the wicked leaders of the people. God knows that their hearts are prideful and far from him and they are leading the nation astray. Even though the Southern Kingdom looks prosperous and it looks like everyone’s doing fine, they really aren’t. Sin is boiling under the surface of the nation and it’s going to eventually lead to the same kind of destruction that the Northern Kingdom is currently experiencing.

Isaiah is trying to wake them up to this reality by painting this grim picture of the future reality that Judah is about to experience if they don’t repent. Because Isaiah knows something that the people are refusing to see…

Sin causes weariness.

The sin of the Northern Kingdom of Israel caused the nation to crumble into in-fighting and strife and turmoil and oppression of the poor until eventually the country was consumed by its own sin and corruption and the Lord sent Assyria to judge them and conquer them.

Their sin was perhaps more overt and explicit than the Southern Kingdom’s. They didn’t pretend to be walking with the Lord. The Northern Kingdom pretty quickly abandoned the true worship of God.

This kind of explicit sin would be like people in your life that outwardly deny and reject the things of God and live their lives chasing all kinds of fulfillment and satisfaction apart from him. This is the kind of life that many of us expect to cause weariness.

The sin of the Southern Kingdom was a bit different.

They had subtly begun to walk away from the Lord in their hearts while outwardly demonstrating a version of faith. Their worship still “looked good.” They were going through all the right motions.

The craziest part was that the Southern Kingdom was, at the time of Isaiah writing this, experiencing a ton of wealth and prosperity as a nation. They all figured they were clearly and obviously “blessed by God” because of their outward success.

But God saw something different and so did Isaiah. They had become slaves to their sin and their hearts were far from the Lord. So, the Lord was foretelling of coming destruction unless they repented. Sadly, we know how that story went.

Though the Southern Kingdom did have a couple more kings come in who were faithful to Yahweh and did try to lead the people in true worship, the nation was largely beyond the point of no return and on the whole, they continued to reject God long after the Northern Kingdom was destroyed until eventually Babylon came in and took them over as well. And then they experienced exile for 70 years in Babylon.

Talk about weariness.

But this message isn’t so much about the weary world; it’s about how even the weary world can rejoice!

And Isaiah wrote about that very same hope of rejoicing as well!

Turn with me to Isaiah 9.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone…. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of Hosts will do this,” (Isaiah 9:2, 6-7).

Even in darkness, there is always hope.

Isaiah has spent the majority of his ministry so far telling people about the destruction that’s going to come and trying to wake them up and get them to see their own sin. But in the middle of that message of conviction and judgement, he still gives the people a ray of hope.

While they are weary now because of the failure of their earthly rulers and the corruption of their king and their government, while people are being oppressed and wronged and justice is not as it should be, and the promised Kings from the line of David are failing, there is still hope!

Isaiah prophesied about a coming King from the line of David who would restore God’s reign and rule over his people and whose kingdom would last forever and ever.

And here’s the thing, that promise of hope wasn’t fully realized for nearly 700 years after Isaiah said it. But it did come true and that’s why we’re talking about Isaiah and the divided kingdom of Israel from 722 B.C. on December 6, 2023, in Little Rock, Arkansas, because…

Jesus’s birth brings joy.

That promise that Isaiah gave to the nation of Judah 700 years earlier is finally realized by shepherds living on the outskirts of Bethlehem during Roman occupation of Judea in the early AD’s:

Check this out in Luke 2:

“8 And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. 10 And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord,’” (Luke 2:8-10).

Remember the words of Isaiah, “The people living in darkness have seen a great light.”

Guess what? Those shepherds were living in darkness.

Not necessarily because of their own sin, but certainly because of the sinful world they were living in. They were overlooked and outcast by a society that treated them as sub-class citizens. They were tired when they wandered away from their fields and toward that stable in Bethlehem.

The magi who were there to celebrate Jesus’s were living in darkness.

They were from the East, apart from the revelation of God’s Word to his people, they were some of the first witnesses to Jesus’s birth but they were Gentiles. They were in the dark about who God was and how they could know him personally. Until God graciously invited them to his Son’s birthday party.

Mary and Joseph were living in a dark world and I promise you, they were weary.

Pregnancy is a long and difficult road in the modern era. I can’t even begin to imagine, nor do I want to, the kind of difficulty and hardship that Mary and Joseph experienced the weeks and months leading up to the first Christmas morning.

Not to mention the social strain that the birth of Jesus and the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy would have certainly caused. People didn’t know that Jesus was the Son of God, miraculously conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. They just knew that Mary and Joseph were engaged and Mary was a teenager and all the sudden she was pregnant.

They were all no doubt weary and burdened and longing for joy.

And the birth of Jesus brought joy to each and every one of them! And here’s the best part:

“And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them,” (Luke 2:20).

Joy found in Jesus leads to worship.

And that’s what we’re about to do, so I want to invite the band to come up and I want to leave you all with one thought as we wrap up tonight.

CONCLUSION & APPLICATION

Worship fights weariness.

I’m not telling you that you should all just sing some songs and forget about your problems. I am telling you that when we worship the Lord—when our hearts recognize his glory, his greatness, his majesty, his beauty and when our hearts recognize our status as broken and fallen creatures desperately in need of his grace who he has lavished his love upon, it can’t help but fight back the weariness that we feel.

So, this week, if you are experiencing some weariness or if you know anyone who is, tell them about Jesus. Even if that person is yourself. Tell yourself about Jesus. Tell yourself about all that he has done in your life. Worship him this week and see how that worship fights back against the weariness that this world will throw at you.

We are all longing for joy this Christmas and as cliché as it may sound, I am telling you,

true joy is found only in Jesus!

Let’s worship him tonight.