Advent: God Brings Us Joy
Notes
Transcript
Scripture: Eisens
There is nothing I looked forward to more as a kid than Xmas morning
from the looking through the JC Penny’s catalog to the anticipation the night before
There was nothing like coming out and seeing all of the presents under the tree
It took 15 minutes for me and my brother to tear through our gifts and then it was a blissful day of playing with all of our new toys
That was pur unadulterated joy
I thought it could never be topped until I became a father
Now sitting and watch my children open their gifts one by one easily surpasses
Joy is what we are celebrating on this third Sunday of Advent.
Joy is a resilient cheerfulness anchored in the goodness of God
If you’ve been journeying with us the past two weeks toward Christmas, you know that we have been celebrating Advent.
As a quick recap, the word advent means “coming” or “arrival,” and the season is marked by expectation, waiting, anticipation, and longing.
Advent is not just an extension of Christmas—it is a season that links the past, present, and future.
Advent offers us the opportunity to share in the ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah, to celebrate His birth, and to be alert for His second coming.
Advent looks back in celebration at the hope fulfilled in Jesus Christ’s coming, while at the same time looking forward in hopeful and eager anticipation to the coming of Christ’s kingdom when He returns for His people.
During Advent we wait for both—it’s an active, assured, and hopeful waiting.
And each week, we focus on a different attribute of God represented in the coming of Jesus: hope, love, joy, and peace.
Because Jesus is Immanuel, “God with Us,” He is the embodiment of these traits, who has entered our world and who fills us with them all.
Joy Overcomes Shame
Joy Overcomes Shame
God bring us joy by overcoming our shame
If you were here with us on the first Sunday of Advent, you remember we talked about Zechariah.
Luke 1 tells the story of Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth.
They were the parents of John the Baptist, who was sent to prepare the way for Jesus, the Messiah.
Zechariah was a priest who received a visit from an angel that told him
Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John.
He will be a joy and delight to you
And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth,
The catch was that Zechariah and Elizabeth were old.
Elizabeth was beyond childbearing years, and the couple had never been able to have kids.
So besides the shock from talking to an angel, Zechariah couldn’t get over the fact that it was possible for his wife to have a baby.
And as a result, his voice was taken away until the baby was born.
Let’s take a closer
To understand Elizabeth’s joy, however, we have to understand a little bit about her pain.
You see, for the ancient Jews, children were a tremendous blessing.
Psalm 127 tells us, “Children are a heritage from the Lord,
Children allowed a family to pass on its name and heritage.
Children were viewed as a gift from God and a sign of God’s favor.
To be childless, then, was a source of great frustration, sorrow, and shame.
And Elizabeth would have known this despair for years.
She most likely would have married Zechariah when she was a young teenager, and the couple would have hoped right away to have children.
She would have dreamed of holding her own babies.
At first, Elizabeth might have dismissed the lack of a pregnancy.
Maybe the timing just wasn’t right to conceive.
Or maybe, like many of you in this room have probably experienced, there was a pregnancy.
Joy and hope would have leaped in Elizabeth’s heart when she realized that a new embryo had sprung to life in her womb.
Maybe she even told people she was pregnant. But then—something happened, and there was a miscarriage.
While physically hard and emotionally painful, Elizabeth might have dismissed the first one or two as a fluke.
But as many times as a pregnancy began, it came to an end prematurely.
Friends and family probably offered encouragement and shared her sorrow.
They might have offered advice that while well intentioned was just plain hurtful: “Maybe there is some sin in your life you need to confess,”
Who knows how long it took, but gradually, year after year, Elizabeth’s hope would have slowly died as she came to terms with the fact that something was wrong, that she could not have a child.
At some point, the social stigma would have stuck.
“Barren,” they called her. It became a shameful and permanent mark.
Elizabeth would have grieved over the loss of ever being a mother.
She would have accepted the loss of the status that came in her culture from bearing children. She would never be considered as worthy or esteemed as other women. She accepted her fate as a failure in the eyes of her society.
Still, Elizabeth must have known some happiness as well and would have been deeply involved in community life, especially since Zechariah was a priest.
And though she carried her emotional burden beneath the surface, she and Zechariah remained faithful to God.
Luke described them like this: “Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly” (Luke 1:6).
This is how they planned to live out the rest of their old age, serving God and the people around them.
And then God came.
On an ordinary day with Zechariah at work in the temple, the angel Gabriel showed up out of the blue with that miraculous message.
Zechariah couldn’t even tell his wife what the angel had said.
Elizabeth must have thought she was getting the wrong message at first. It seemed too good to be true!
Hope must have kicked in her heart like the thump of a baby in the womb.
Could she even allow herself to go there? Could she open her heart to the possibility after hoping and waiting and praying for so long, only to be let down again and again and again?
From what we can tell from Luke’s account, it seems Elizabeth had an easier time of accepting the miraculous news than her husband.
And soon she was pregnant, saying,
“Thus the Lord has done for me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among people.”
What’s curious is that Luke also told us that Elizabeth spent the first five months of her pregnancy in seclusion.
There’s no way for us to know exactly why.
What we do know is that in her sixth month of pregnancy, Elizabeth experienced a deep encounter with joy brought by the coming Messiah, whose human life had just sprung into being in Mary’s womb.
As we discussed last week, young Mary left her home shortly after her own angelic visit and came to stay with her cousin Elizabeth for three months.
Luke 1:41–45 (ESV)
And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!
And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
Joy was flowing. And true to its nature, joy was contagious.
Mary burst into her own song of praise and thanksgiving as she gave words to the miracle happening through her.
And finally, she was understood and believed and affirmed. Without Mary even having to explain, Elizabeth knew and gave voice to exactly what was going on.
Maybe God had revealed this to her earlier. Maybe God opened her eyes on the spot as her own miracle son, John, recognized the miracle Son of God, Jesus, within Mary.
But more than anyone else in the world was able to, these two women understood each other and shared a joy that could no longer be contained, no matter how difficult the circumstances they were coming out of and still facing ahead.
Already Immanuel, God with Us, was unleashing joy on earth.
And already His joy began rippling outward. When Elizabeth gave birth to John three months later, the joy of her miracle spread through her village and family. “Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy” (Luke 1:57).
Perhaps there is no joy greater than that of a mother holding her newborn child.
For Elizabeth, the joy must have been especially overwhelming.
She was experiencing a miracle, and it was a miracle that healed a lifetime of hurt, pain, disrespect, and shame.
And it was only the beginning of the miracles she would witness in her lifetime.
Our Source of Joy
Our Source of Joy
God brings us joy by being our source of joy
What would you and I give to know such joy
To see the scars and shame of our life washed away so dramatically?
Most likely we won’t see it happen through such an obvious miracle, but the joy Elizabeth experienced is available to us.
This is the joy brought into our world by Jesus, God with Us. And though we are living long past His time on earth, His life and His joy are available to us now.
Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
An inexpressible and glorious joy. That’s deep stuff.
This is stuff that runs much deeper than happiness.
We love to be happy. We love to feel good. But happiness comes and goes as the circumstances around us change by the hour and the minute.
Happiness can come from many things:
Birthday parties and balloons.
Your favorite song on a perfect summer day.
An encouraging message from a friend.
Winning the big game.
A delicious meal.
These are good and enjoyable things to be savored and enjoyed for sure—but all are fleeting.
And pursuing happiness for the sake of happiness can be a shallow, self-centered pursuit.
“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness,” wrote Viktor Frankl, the famous Jewish survivor of World War II Nazi concentration camps who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning.
Joy includes happiness, but it runs much deeper. Joy permeates our souls.
In our lives, the stuff of joy looks like
the birth of your child.
Your wedding day.
Being declared free of cancer for good.
Your loved one coming out of a coma with no brain damage.
Joy is rooted in gratitude, meaning, and hope fulfilled, especially when it is based in relationship with our Creator.
Joy comes from God with Us—Jesus is the source of our joy.
Peter called it “an inexpressible and glorious joy” that is part of the inheritance we are receiving in Christ.
With His life and the promise of eternal life beyond this world, we find the deep kind of joy that fills us no matter the pain that we still face on this earth.
As Jesus explained to His disciples about His coming death and resurrection,
So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.
As we turn our eyes expectantly to Jesus in this Advent season, and as we walk with Him beyond toward the day when He will come again and fulfill His healing work, we can experience His joy in the process.
And we can know with confidence that an even greater, unending joy awaits us one day.
One day we will receive it in full.
Yet even now, we find hope and joy in what Jesus has done and what we know He will faithfully do in the future.
And like Nehemiah of the Old Testament, the Jewish leader who faced great odds in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, we can experience the truth that “the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10)
Joy Defies Our Circumstances
Joy Defies Our Circumstances
God brings us joy by defying our circumstances
We compared happiness and joy a little bit ago, but if there’s one defining characteristic of joy that I hope you take away from our time together today, it is this: Joy defies our circumstances.
Happiness comes and goes with positive events or experiences.
Joy flows deep even in the face of challenge, hardship, or suffering.
Joy drawn from Jesus, God with Us, sees the big picture beyond the immediate pain.
James famously said it best right at the beginning of his eponymous book of the Bible:
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
Joy understands that there is more than meets the eye. That God is at work always, even in the tough stuff of life.
And that eventually God will make everything right and healed and whole, including us.
Because of that, we can experience joy in the here and now, no matter how bad the here and now looks and feels.
Sure, there’s a process involved, and that’s part of the point.
As we continue to practice opening our hearts to God’s Spirit, immersing ourselves in His Word, and aligning our thinking and perspectives to His ways, we experience His Spirit working within us, bringing us clarity, understanding, and strength to trust and see and act in the joy He provides.
What are the circumstances you are facing right now as we journey toward Christmas?
What are the situations that are stealing your joy? Or the hurts where pain seems to overrule?
I don’t mean to make light of what you are going through, because I know the pain is real for us all. But can I encourage you to take a look from another angle?
Can I encourage you to ask God to give you another view—to show you His big picture?
You may not experience a miracle as clear as Elizabeth’s, but in Advent and in Christmas there is a miracle for us all: the miracle of God coming to earth to be with us, to heal us, to forgive us, to redeem and restore all our pain, to turn it into good.
This is a cause for joy even in our darkest days.
This was the message of the angel long ago announcing the arrival of Christ to the terrified shepherds outside of Bethlehem:
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. 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.
Jesus, come to be God with Us, has brought us joy—no matter what we are facing.
Joy is a Choice
Joy is a Choice
God brings us joy but its our choice
Before we close today, I’d like to look at one more aspect of joy that we can apply as we continue our Advent observance. That is the fact that joy can be a choice, and joy can be an action.
We’ve talked about Mary in previous weeks, and we talked about her today as she spent time with Elizabeth.
Remember when Mary showed up at Elizabeth’s house?
Elizabeth was overcome with joy, which spread to Mary.
When it did, the beginning of Mary’s expression went like this:
Luke 1:46–48 (ESV)
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
These are important words—with the key word being rejoices.
It’s the active form of joy, the verb. And this is Mary choosing and embracing joy in the role she had been given by God.
She didn’t have to.
Remember those cartoons and old movies where an army sergeant or leader asks for a volunteer?
The mission is dangerous, sometimes ridiculously so.
It will require a brave and true individual willing to put his or her life on the line. Will the bold volunteer please step forward?
You know what happens. At the same second, in perfect coordination, the entire line steps backward, leaving the main character standing in front when the leader turns around.
Forget volunteering—he is volunteered, whether he likes it or not.
Mary could have looked at her situation a little bit like that.
She didn’t ask to be the mother of God’s Son. If she had been asked, she might have stepped backward.
But in Mary’s words we see her response: She rejoices. She chooses joy. She focuses on the big picture and embraces her difficult role.
In a similar way, in our own situations and seasons, we can do the same.
We can choose joy. We can rejoice. We can embrace the miracle of God with Us and align our vision with the work He is doing in and through us.
The Bible is filled with verses exhorting and encouraging us to rejoice. Probably because we all need lots of reminders. `
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
These are only the beginning, but the message and the takeaway is the same: We have reason for joy because God is with us, and we can choose to embrace it.
Friends, let’s choose to make this a season of joy.
Let’s rejoice as we figuratively await the arrival of Christ, and let’s celebrate His birth with joy. God is with us.
And so joy is with us—a joy that flows deep within our spirits and outward because our King, our Savior, is with us, always loving, always working, even in the midst of any hardship we will face
Benediction
Psalm 5:11 (ESV)
But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you.
