Untitled Sermon (3)

Intro: What is the thing in this world we seek most? Would it be happiness? Or satisfaction? Maybe a means to not ever have to worry about financial struggles ever again. Maybe we just would like to have a break from all our worries, obligations, stresses… and so on. We know that these things we seek may not be naturally bad, but with all of these trials and struggles we face in our everyday life, we often become tired, discouraged, frustrated. Can you think of a time where you were in a place where everything around you just wasn’t going well? Maybe that’s happened recently, maybe it’s happening now.

But how about this, have you ever just been going through life and nothing devastatingly bad is happening, life is maybe in an easier spot, but we just have a blandness to everything that's going on. We’ve become numb to something that is meant to be life-altering. I feel like Christians have been missing a huge aspect of what initially drives us when we come to find salvation in Christ. What am I getting at? Well, when was the last time you spent your own time, just rejoicing and praising God? Just out of nowhere, because we have the freedom to. What attitude did you have the last time something terrible happened in your life, or another trial came along? I don’t want to keep rambling on, but my point is, have we lost the sensitivity to the biggest event known to mankind? We’ve been going through a series for the Christmas season leading up to Christmas day and the first week, Nathan preached on hope. Last week Samuel preached on peace. Today, I’m preaching about joy. It’s ironic because lately the past month or so, I’ve gone through many different situations where I have to admit, I haven’t been very joyful in. But going through Scripture, I’ve been convicted on my attitude in many of those situations. Before knowing this was my topic, the subject of joy has been sitting on my mind a lot lately. Specifically, the joy of the Lord. Through reading, I’ve come to find out that God has given us great joy! But what do we know of this joy? The joy of the Lord that God has given us? Well, today we’re going to look at three different factors of this joy.

Transition: When we correlate joy back to Scripture, our main passage we’ll be focusing around is Luke 2:8-20. In the context of this Scripture, Jesus had just been born to Mary and Joseph, so we pick up verse 8 saying:

That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them.

“Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.” Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying, “Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.”

When the angels had returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

They hurried to the village and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the manger. After seeing him, the shepherds told everyone what had happened and what the angel had said to them about this child. All who heard the shepherds’ story were astonished, but Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often. The shepherds went back to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. It was just as the angel had told them.

This passage of Scripture has such a profound message about joy, but before we dive into it, I want to first talk about the first factor of joy…

What is joy?

We first must recognize that joy is so much more than just happiness. We have made it such a tendency to link both joy and happiness together that when we’re not happy, we reflect that. If we’re not feeling a good mood, we choose to act otherwise. But this is why it’s vital to understand the two realities to joy, and the first being what joy is not…

Joy is not a feeling

We need to separate the difference between joy and happiness because as long as we link the two, we act upon the idea that if we’re not happy, then we can’t be joyful. When a negative circumstance happens in our life, we typically react to it with a negative reaction, but this can result in causing others to become affected by our attitudes that resulted from those circumstances.

For example, say that you’re stuck in traffic for an hour or so with little progress.. Our first reaction is typically frustration, maybe anger and annoyance. In the car, your brother, sister, friend, kid, whoever maybe asks you if you have an idea how long it’ll take to get out of the traffic. How many of us would react in annoyance to them and thus take out anger upon them, even though they initially didn’t have any cause to the problem? This is just a small, hypothetical scenario whereas something worse can happen which has the same process of events. Point being, our reaction towards these situations isn’t happiness. We’re not happy that we haven’t been able to move, we certainly didn’t plan for it, but we don’t have to carry such a negative attitude towards it. Believe it or not, we can actually find joy in that case. This is where we come to our second reality.

Joy is a choice/attitude.

Yes, joy does have correlation with happiness, but when we’re not happy, that doesn’t mean we can’t be joyful. When I was reading through James, one of the first sections of His writing was so confusing to me. James 1:2-4 says:

Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

What does James mean by considering a trial as an opportunity for joy? This is where we can take into account the apostles in Acts 5 who rejoiced and praised God after being flogged for His name’s sake for preaching the Gospel, because they suffered for the name of Jesus. We also see in Acts 16 how when Paul and Silas were in prison for preaching the Gospel and casting out a demon from a woman, they weren’t moping and complaining about their situation, but rather they were singing songs and praise to God and praying. They, in this instance, were experiencing joy. This draws us to the conclusion that joy was a matter of choice for them. No one in places of suffering is ever feeling happy about going through those trials, but they had reason to choose to be joyful, because of the Good News they were preaching on, they were sharing the Good News that our main text revolves around, and they knew that the suffering they were going through is because the Good News had affected them, and thus they had the opportunity to preach it to others.

When James says to consider trials as joyful, he means to look at the positives of life. When these trials come our way, it’s a tendency to dwell on these moments and lose sight of all the blessings and things to be thankful for that are happening simultaneously, or that have happened in the past. When we shift our attitudes to think of the goodness of God despite our troubling circumstances, we can become joyful, which stems from our faith that God is in control, and thus it builds the endurance of our faith because we find strength from our joy in the Lord. As Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:6-9, he says:

So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.

Peter affirms that the joy we have can develop from the testing of our faith. We can rejoice that because of the trials we face, we know our faith will grow in the sense that we’ve seen God faithful in the past, we know He keeps His promises, and thus, we know He’ll be faithful now and in the future. That promise of salvation for our souls is a reason to be joyful, because of what Jesus did, which we’ll get to here soon.

Transition: So joy isn’t just a feeling, it’s a mindset, a perspective, a choice ultimately. We don’t only choose to be joyful in our rough circumstances, there are plenty of times where joy happens more naturally, and these are great experiences! But as followers of Christ, an aspect that sets us apart from the world is being joyful in our trials too. When we choose to be joyful where the world would naturally be miserable, we stand out amongst them as a living example of hope in what God is going to do, because we have faith in what He has done, and what He promises to do. Through this, others will question where we get this joy, and the opportunity that the apostles rejoiced over suddenly falls into our hands to tell others about the significance of Christ’s coming. With that being said, we can now move onto the second factor of joy. We now have an understanding of what joy is, but our next factor answers the question of…

2. Why is joy so significant?

Now we can look into the context of our passage. The Shepherds weren’t doing anything crazy. They were doing exactly what their work required, living their normal lives, tending to their sheep. Yet, in a moment the heavens opened and an angel accompanied by a choir came to them and told them about the good news he was sharing that would bring great joy to the world. This news was the news of Jesus’ birth. After this extraordinary event, the shepherds stopped what they were doing and went to see Jesus. After seeing Him, they went all over to tell others of the good news with great joy! They rejoiced and praised God for what had come. There are two reasons this joy is so significant!

Because Jesus came to us.

The shepherds, as we mentioned, were living their ordinary lives from what we’re told. And yet, God sent His angels to tell them of the best news known to man. Mary and Joseph were decently ordinary people, yet God chose Mary to be the mother of the Messiah, and Joseph to look after them both and protect Mary. Israel had been waiting for God to move for 400 years with almost no prophecy, and finally; God, in His loving mercy, did exactly what John 3:16 tells us. He sends His only Son, to come and give a way for not just the Jews, but everyone to have relationship with Him, giving the free gift of salvation to all who believe in Jesus, and at the climax of Jesus’ life, has Him sacrifice Himself for our sins that we may have this relationship with God for eternity. That is why this joy is so significant. God came to us! He saw a broken world and had a plan all along to reunite us back to Him even when we weren’t trying to.

We have a great joy for what Jesus came and done for us, but we still have another reason for why this joy is so significant.

Because Jesus is coming again.

As we have read from Peter and James, we can be joyful in our sufferings and trials because our faith can grow, and that’s exactly what the apostles and early Christians did. They suffered through trials and persecution because they let the Holy Spirit transform their lives, and with that, they were filled with joy of what Jesus did, AND… as Peter said, they were joyful for the promise that Jesus was coming again! They were willing to suffer because they had faith in the promise of Christ’s return, and just as Jesus told them, they would suffer for this. They only saw this persecution as a means to that promise, and therefore, it built their faith even more, which fed into their joy!

Transition: So we’ve seen what joy is: the distinction between happiness and joy being the fact that joy is a choice rather than just a feeling. And we’ve seen why it’s so significant, because Jesus came to us when we didn’t deserve it, and He’s coming again! But now we have to move onto our third and final factor…

3. What do we do with this joy?

When God is able to transform our lives with the Holy Spirit through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we should be moved as the apostles and early Christians were, to let that joy that fills our soul from this miraculous news to overflow that we may become bold of the Gospel so that as many people as we can tell may know that what Jesus did for us, He also did for them! Jesus is coming again, and we as followers of Christ can be joyful of this, but we aren’t supposed to sit and wait for His return while living our comfortable lives, but rather go out into the world and do just as the shepherds did, just as the apostles did, just as we were commissioned to by Jesus! Living for Christ means doing as He has called for us to do! If we truly believe in what Jesus did for us, it should impact our lives more than just an emotional experience of salvation and going on with our lives as if nothing happened. The Gospel is supposed to radically change our lives, so much so that we experience this great joy, which moves us to tell others of the Good News. We know that the Gospel is more than just accepting Jesus as our Savior, not that it requires of us to do works, but our drive to tell the world of this joy we have in the Lord through Christ is supposed to be a reflection of how it impacted the disciples and apostles in the upper room when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and what we read of from then on.

Conclusion: We can’t lose the joy of the Lord in our lives. The world isn’t going to satisfy our every need, so there's not much of a point to giving so much that we may find happiness from it. We already have access to the biggest gift of all that we could ever receive, and that’s a relationship with Christ, and the joy that comes with it! We need to be joyful of the gift God has given and express that to the world. Let this joy drive you to tell the world! Let this joy move you to shift your attitudes in your trials and troubles in order to build your faith because God will be faithful just as He was and has been. Let this joy create in you a hunger and desire for more of Christ in your everyday life, that instead of seeing if you can fit time for God into your schedule, you revolve your schedule around your time with God. Instead of trying to finish up your prayer or devotions with God so you can move on with your day, you anticipate the next time you’ll be able to spend uninterrupted time with God, and long for it to be longer. The joy of the Lord is unlike anything the world could ever offer, and how blessed are we that God has given us this great joy!