Untitled Sermon (5)

Sermon: Cultivating Joy in the Midst of Manufactured Desire

INTRODUCTION

A. [Look at research on depression/anxiety in our culture from Alex.]

B. Outside these stats, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that there are a lot of people around us who are deeply unhappy and discontented people that aren’t picked up in the stats.

a. We live in a very broken world with pressures all around us.

C. If you remember back to before this series on, you might recall that we had been looking at the what Tim called the Journey of Faith

a. We were investigating the key influences that brought people to be interested in Christianity and eventually make a commitment.

b. We saw a common thread through the stories of people coming to faith is that non-Christian people saw the attraction of the fruit of the spirit at work in the lives of Christians around them, which is why we’ve started this series now.

c. Our culture seems to becoming more and more discontent, anxious and depressed.

(1) We have incredible opportunities to be lights and examples of joy in the midst of this.

(2) If we truly are able see this fruit of joy blossom in our lives, it will create such a stark contrast to so much of our culture here in the Sutherland Shire.

D. …

a. But the benefit is not only for non-Christians.

(1) We as Christians also get caught up in the stress and busyness of life and often miss the joy that’s promised to us in the Bible.

(2) ….

b. Rough notes to flesh out intro

(1) [The have the opportunity to show the non-Christians around this joy...

(2) Dad's point that joy is supposed to overflow out of us. When we have joy that defies our circumstances, joy where none should exist, that is evidence of the Holy Spirit being at work in our hearts. People notice these things.

(3) Seeking to live out these fruit of the spirit, specifically joy, is actually how we can be missional in our everyday, ordinary life. That's we're striving for as a church, doing mission in the mundane]

c.

d. Remember Paul talks about the war between the flesh, or our sinful nature, and the Spirit.

E.

1. Biblical Explanation and Definition

1.1. What is Biblical Joy

A. What is Paul talking about when he’s talking about joy here in the context of the fruit of the Spirit?

B. We all know what joy is.

a. Most of us will hopefully have experienced joy at some point in our lives. Maybe it’s enjoying a great meal with good friends, the birth of a child, a wedding

C. What is the joy that we are called to express?

a. A book that the preaching team has been using as we go through this series is called ‘Life on the Vine’ and I found that it gave a helpful definition of joy.

(1) Paraphrasing, it says we normally use joy to communicate an intense satisfaction, a sense of well-being and underlying contentment at having experienced something for which we longed for or deeply desired.

(2) The object of this longing and desire can of course vary, as can the depth and intensity of the subsequent joy.

b. One distinction that may be helpful to make is the difference between pleasure and joy.

(1) Eg Coffee is something pleasure (or so I’ve heard) or good music, but catching up over coffee with a close friend that you haven’t seen in long time might make you experience joy

c. [Insert definition of joy based on Jesus and future hope]

D. The joy that’s spoken about in the Bible I think is often very different to the type of joy or happiness that is spoken about more widely in our culture,

E. I thought it would be useful to spend a bit of time looking at the key differences that distinguish between worldly happiness and the Biblical joy that Paul is talking about as a fruit of the Spirit.

F. The first distinction is that biblical joy is possible in suffering.

a. In fact, joy in the midst of suffering is one of the hallmarks of Christian joy. It’s one of the greatest differences between the Christian idea of joy and worldly happiness.

b.

2. How our Culture Inhibits Joy

2.1. Happiness defined by circumstances

A. L

a. Secular society generally believes that our level of happiness is dependent on our circumstances.

(1) If the circumstances of our life are bad how could we possibly be happy? But this often turns into, if the circumstances of my life aren’t as good as the next person’s, how can I really happy?

(A) We have to ‘keep up’ in so many areas of life – in order to be truly happy, we need the latest devices and technology, we need the latest car, we need to the nice house with plenty of room in the backyard, we need a great family with happy kids, we need to find our soul mate, we need that the latest fashion to keep up, the newest beauty treatment, in our area we really need a boat, we need the beautiful holiday, we need to travel and see the world.

(2) Even if it’s something that’s explicitly stated, these are the sorts of things our society sees as requirements for happiness.

(A) You might have some different tastes, but you need to do what makes you happy, right?

(3) Even if you’re not there yet right now, you at least to be working towards some these happiness goals, because if you’re not moving forward in these areas of your life, then you’ll be falling behind.

(4) Most of would have heard of the book ‘Eat Pray Love’.

(A) It has been an exceptionally popular book for an extended period of time – it spent about 4 years on the New York Times Best Seller List.

(B) It was written in 2006 by Elizabeth Gilbert who after finding herself unhappy in a marriage, got divorced and left to travel around the world.

(a) The book details what she learnt from this time away.

(b) There were 3 main sections to what she learnt; eating and enjoying life (Eat), finding spirituality in India (Pray) and then fell in love with a guy in Bali (Love)

(C) Here’s a quote from the book:

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”

(D) [insert more here]

(E) This is so opposite to the Biblical idea of joy that Paul talks about.

B. Transition to talk about suffering

a. Paul himself is a great demonstration of rejoicing suffering.

b. The extent of what Paul is going to suffer is alluded to in Acts 9 after Paul has his miraculous conversion. God says that Paul will be his chosen instrument to carry his name, but then also says “I will show him he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

c. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul lists for us some his suffering. It includes “great labours,… imprisonments with countless beatings often near death.

d. He says

(1) “24 Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. 28 And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.”

e. And yet this is the same man writing about joy in our passage today.

C. …

D. Biblical joy isn’t based on circumstance.

2.2. Entitlement

A. The entitlement of our culture:

B. For us in our culture, we expect everything and everyone to work for us with nothing ever going wrong. It's our right to never be inconvenienced and for things to run as they should.

C. If, for some terrible reason, things do go wrong, like a train being delayed, our child getting a crazed knee at school, the internet running slowing, a person cutting us off at the lights or the world cup stream not working, we think it some grievous wrong that has been committed against us.

D. We say, 'I would drive like that, or I would never be so negligent.' Well strap onto our high horse and write a complaint, most likely on social media so that everyone can join the collective outrage, and who knows, it may even go viral. Together we'll tear down whoever committed this heinous crime. I mean, come it's the 2018 - how is this still a problem. Perhaps we'll also consider suing then pants off that teacher who negligently let our child scrape their knee to cover the mental trauma caused. [google most ridiculous lawsuits]

E.

F. Now while I expect most of us here wouldn't get that extreme, there is a pervasive sense of entitlement that seeps into us through our culture.

G. We do expect in general that things will go right.

H. While there's not inherently wrong with wanted things to go smoothly, we easily fall into the trap of focussing 95% of our time pouring over the 5% of our day that didn't go right.

I. I know I am guilty of this. Sometimes it just feels good to hang on the wrongs committed against us. For some reason, the outrage, anger and bitterness feels good. We like feeling superior to the other people around. We forget all the mistakes that we make and drill on the flaws of others.

J. And what's the effect of this? I think it actually breeds a deep discontentment in us. And if we let this attitude of discontentment deep into our thinking, I think it will inevitably start to squeeze the joy out of our lives.

K.

L.

M.

3. How to Cultivate Joy

3.1. Thankfulness

A. Transition into thankfulness from entitlement section

3.2. Worship and Prayer

A. Another joy way the Bible says we can cultivate joy in our lives is through prayer.

a. And when I say prayer, I don’t just mean a list that we run through of things that we need from God.

b. I know for me, my prayer life can turn into this kind of praying.

(1) Just praying to God to essentially fix the different circumstances of my life

(2) I think that’s a trap we can easily slip into.

c. And one of main problems with this kind of prayer is that we are inherently focusing on ourselves.

(1) The focus is just on me and my problems.

d. This kind of prayer will not lead to us to more joy

e. I tried really hard to not use a Tim Keller quote for this talk since I have used quotes from him in almost every other sermon I’ve done previously.

f. But I couldn’t help myself.

g. In his book called ‘Prayer’, he addresses our motivation behind prayer.

(1) “In our natural state we pray to God to get things. We may believe in God, but our deepest hopes and happiness reside in things as in how successful we are or in our social relationships. We therefore pray mainly when our career or finances are in trouble, or when some relationship or social status is in jeopardy. When life is going smoothly, and our truest heart treasures seem safe, it does not occur to us to pray. Also, ordinarily our prayers are not varied—they consist usually of petitions, occasionally some confession (if we have just done something wrong). Seldom or never do we spend sustained time adoring and praising God. In short, we have no positive, inner desire to pray. We do it only when circumstances force us. Why? We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness. We therefore pray to procure things, not to know him better.

All this changes when we discover that we have been mired all our lives in forms of self-salvation, and we turn to Christ. When we grasp his astonishing, costly sacrifice for us, transfer our trust and hopes from other things to Christ, and ask for God’s acceptance and grace for Christ’s sake, we begin to realize with the Spirit’s help the magnitude of our benefits and blessings in Christ. Then we begin to want almost desperately to know and love God for himself. His love and regard make popularity and worldly status look pale and thin. Being delighted in him and delighting him become inherently fulfilling and beautiful.”

(2) If we can learn to pray like this, it completely changes our focus.

(A) It stops being about us and our problems and much more about knowing God and his providences and greatness.

(B) And see that is where were we can find joy because he himself is our source of joy.

h. Learning to pray is a whole sermon series in itself, so I obviously can’t address it one little sub-point, but I think a really practical way that we can improve our prayer life is through the example of the War Room we started this week.

(1) For me personally, I found it was an amazing to have just one hour purely dedicated to speaking with God. I thought I’d just share a bit of my experience of it.

(A) When I first got into my hour, I’d been rushing from another event just before and I didn’t feel settled at all.

(B) The first thing I did was try read though a Psalm, but I read through it really quickly and it didn’t have much impact on me

(C) When I started to try and pray, the prayer felt hard and unnatural. It felt really forced

(a) Often when I try to pray, my heart is a bit like this. I try to just rush through it because I’m busy and don’t have much time. Or if I’m honest, I often want to get it over and done with for the day – another box to tick off.

(2) But the beauty of the War Room is that you’re not rushed. You have plenty of time to read the Bible, listen to some music and be quiet before God.

(A) A little further into my time, I read the same Psalm I started with again.

(a) It was like something brand new, like I’d never heard the words before.

(b) It was the spark that shifted the focus of my prayer onto what I’d reading about God.

(3) I actually came away from my hour just joyful about God’s goodness.

(4) I don’t know whether I should confess this or not, but I drove home just singing songs off my phone. It was like I couldn’t help it. I just felt like it had to come out somehow. (Psalm about singing for joy?)

(A) The irony of it is that the purpose of that War Room time was to pray for others, but I think a lot of us, including me, found that actually God ministered to them in the process.

(5) When we have prayer time like that, that is when it can become a source of joy.

B. Now I’m sure it wanted always be as joyful as that, but I do think that scheduling in regular, dedicated prayer is a really practical way we can cultivated joy is our lives.

a. I know we are all really busy and lives just gets in the way sometime, I know for me I want to challenge myself to make time for this. Even if it’s just starting at 1 hour a week.

b. If we can make this a habit, I really do believe it can build up the joyfulness in our lives.

3.3.Future hope

A. I might be wrong here, but it seems like most people, regardless of whether they are Christians or not have a sense there something is not quite right in the world.

a. It might not seem obvious all the time, but there are times where the broken of the world is almost palpable; we can feel the wrongness.

(1) You feel it when you hear the stories in the news of children being abused, the vulnerable being taken advantage of by people in power. You feel it when a life is taken far too early and you lose a loved one. You feel it when relationships break down. You feel it when you hear of chemical weapon attacks overseas; when there’s no justice for the refugee. There’s injustice, conflict, famine, stress, volcanos, poverty, orphans, floods, disease, starvation, tragedy.

(2) We are surrounded by brokenness

b. It’s all well and good for me to sit here and preach joy from the pulpit, but it’s completely different when that brokenness hits close to home.

(1) I was don’t to trivialise suffering but saying “Don’t w

(2) As we said earlier, Christian joy shouldn’t ignore the suffering around us, but it

(3)

(4)

(5) Potential ways to finish…

(6) From Keller:

4. What amazes me is even Ivan Karamazov knew that, and Ivan Karamazov, which you know if you read The Brothers Karamazov, was an unbeliever. Yet he understood something. He understood it very well, and he wrote this.

5. He says this in the novel. Of course he is a fictional character, but Dostoyevsky says this through him. He says, “I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over … and that ultimately, at the world’s finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with men …”

(1)

(2) Romans 8 (at least 18-25, maybe some extra parts of that chapter)

(3) Hebrews 12:2 and John 17:13 – Joy great enough to endure the cross and this is the joy that Christ gives to us through the Spirit. That is what enables us to have joy

(4) He’s a God that didn’t ignore our brokenness – no instead he came from heaven to walk with us in our brokenness and ultimately save us from it

(5) Jesus doesn’t trivialise our pain and suffering – story of Lazarus – maybe include this earlier somewhere

(6) Could also mention Isaiah 65:17-25 or Rev 21:4