"Great Joy"

THE BIBLE STORY AND "JOY."

• About 400 years before the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ, life in ancient Israel was pretty dull. Hopes and expectations which the people had had when they came back from exile in Babylon had been dashed and some of the prophets found that their major task was to stir up the people, to give them a new enthusiasm. Zephaniah was one of those prophets and he knew that if people were to serve God faithfully, then at the depth of their being they needed to know joy. They needed to know a peace, a trust in God, a sense of being loved by God, which led to joy. And Zephaniah wrote these wonderful words to the people of Israel at that time. He said, "The joy of the Lord is your strength." The joy of the Lord is your strength.
  
• The passage of scripture we read from John's Gospel describes an event with Jesus in the Upper Room on the night of His arrest, the night before His death. He is praying for His disciples. He knows He is leaving them; He prays for their protection. He prays for their unity. And if you remember at the end of our passage, He prays for their joy, that His joy would be completed within them.
  
• One of Jesus' followers after His death and His resurrection was a man by the name of Philip. Philip was persecuted for his faith. He really could have been a joyless kind of a person, given what he had gone through. But in being persecuted for his faith and being thrown out of the City of Jerusalem, he took this as an opportunity given to him from God to spread the gospel, the message of Jesus, elsewhere. So he headed north, to Samaria. And there in Samaria, he told people about Jesus, and God gave him power to bring healing to people's lives as well. And we are told in the account in Acts in the Eighth Chapter of Acts, that when he came, when Philip came to Samaria and proclaimed the gospel of Jesus, "there was great joy in that place."
  
• Our second reading was from Acts, Chapter Fourteen. And in that particular passage, we read about Paul and Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas, being mistaken for the Greek gods. Paul immediately tried to change the focus of the attention being paid him, away from himself. He began to speak about God: God the Creator, nothing like Paul and Barnabas. God the Creator, who "gives rain from heaven. Who fills our bodies with food. And who fills our hearts," He says, "with joy." This is who God was to him.
  
• In fact as he writes to the Christians in Galatia, which would be a region not far from where he was when he was accused of being a god, when he writes later to the Christians in Galatia, he says that when the Holy Spirit comes into our lives (and the Holy Spirit is a gift that God would give to everyone who puts their trust in God through Jesus Christ) -- when the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, the Spirit wants to change us. And not just our lives individually, but our communities. The way we relate to one another. And when the Spirit does that, the Spirit bears fruit within our lives, that includes patience and kindness, and generosity and faithfulness, and gentleness and self-control, and love and peace. And joy. And joy.

The work of the Holy Spirit within our lives. Joy!
The desire of God for our lives. Joy!
The prayer of Jesus for our lives. Joy!

And not for our lives only, but for our whole community, for our church as well, which, of course, only begs the question. The question is this: do we know such joy within our lives and within our fellowship?

JOY: WHAT IS IT? Of all things that probably should not be analyzed, joy is one of those things. We want to say, "Well, we just want to feel it. Don't describe it, or talk about it." But it is too late, my friends, I am too much of a mathematician to stop analyzing! Joy! I've just got a few brief things, that's all I can say, -- that this will be brief, this analysis of joy, this morning. And really my purpose is, though, in the end, that we don't know about joy, but that we do experience it. So what is it?

Well I suppose in thinking about joy the first word that comes to my mind is "happiness." But as soon as I think about happiness, happiness seems to be too light a word, too flighty a word, to compare to joy. If we were, in fact, to describe joy in terms of happiness, we would have to say that it is "happiness which has taken root within our lives." That has dug itself deep within our souls so that it is not merely a superficial experience that occurs now and again, because we have been through an event that makes us happy and then it goes away. Joy has to be something deeper than that.

J.R.R. Tolkien in "The Lord of the Rings" describes an incident in which Pippin turns to Gandolph the wizard

"and looks into the wizard's face. And there at first only sees lines of care and sorrow. On the outside there doesn't appear to be happiness at all. Though, as he looked more intently, he perceived that under all there was a great joy, a fountain of mirth. Enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth."

There it is, like a well of happiness within. It may or may not be there on the surface, but it is at the root of life. And it effects all of life and, as Zephaniah would say, it gives strength to our lives in the way we serve God and live for God.

SOURCE OF JOY: TRUST AND LOVE. If we were to dig just a little bit deeper, and to think about what it is that lies at the root of our lives, and to think about my own life and to think about the presence of joy and in fact, more to the point, to think about the absence of joy, when joy is not there in my life, I would tie it in very closely with trust and with love. That is, when I know joy in my life, it is at those times when I trust God. And at those times when I know, not just know about, but know, the love of God for me. The working of the Holy Spirit in this connection, then is quite simply to restore and to keep on restoring, our trust in God and our sense of the love of God, not as a distant thing, but an immediate thing, close by us. And so to bring us joy.

TRUST. It is when I don't trust God that I am anxious. And usually when I am anxious, it is because I am rushing around too much.

Don't take enough time
to slow down,
to think about all the things that are happening in life,
to raise them up before God in prayer;
to make the list and then to make it a prayer list of what is happening in life;
to bring it before God in prayer.

And that then solidifies this business of trust. It brings our lives back to God and forces us to say, "Lord, where are You in the midst of all this? Can I trust You? Surely I can trust You, at this time, when so many things are happening, so much anxiety seems to be filling my mind."

The Psalms. That really is one of the major lessons that we gain from the Psalms. What the Psalmists do for us, again and again and again is to reflect on life. They simply tell their story. "This is what has been happening, Lord." They tell the story of their nation. "This is what has been happening to us as a nation, Lord" And then they say, "Lord, this is who You are. Now, be a God whom we can trust in all of these things that make up our lives." The Psalms are ways of coming back to God, drawing our lives back to God in a busy, hectic world that pulls us apart. It is not that we don't want to trust God, it is just that there are times when life is so busy that God is out of the picture, and we are consumed by other things.

Trust. Trust in God. I trust that as we gather for worship, this is something that happens. We reflect on our lives, we reflect on our nation. We reflect on our world, and we remember God and draw God down, as it were, just as God would draw us up. Draw God down, into our lives and reaffirm who God is within our lives. And find, through that, the restoration of a sense of joy. Strength for living.

BEING LOVED. More than that, though, when the Spirit is present, the Spirit not only I think restores our trust in God and makes it an immediate reality, but the Spirit's longing is to give to us a deeper sense of the love of God. God is not just trustworthy, God is not just powerful, who controls our future, controls the universe, controls our lives, controls our families, God is not just powerful, but God is loving - power in action. And that love is deeply personal.

I hope we all know that God loves us; that we have heard it from childhood: God loves us. And loves us deeply. But in practice, I am convinced that what happens in many of our lives, is that we forget it. We who want to serve God, forget it. We become so involved in serving God, become so involved in pleasing God, we become so involved in pleasing other people, in being good at what we do, in being good to other people, in providing for others that very subtly God becomes a demander. And not a giver, not a lover first of all. We know it (the love of God), we know it in our heads, but we don't always remember it in our hearts and in the depth of our being that God loves us as we are. Before we do, God loves us as we are. And so we lose our peace and so we lose our joy. And so we lose our energy to serve the Living God.

On the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit came, when the people knew such joy that others accused them of being drunk, the Spirit came not because of anything that they had done, not because they had worked hard, not because they had been good people; some of them had been very faithless and unbelieving. But the Spirit came as an act of sheer grace, as an act of sheer kindness. It was as if, on that day, when they felt the Spirit, as if God, by His Spirit, wrapped His arms around them. Whether they were male or female, whether they were black or white, whatever nation they came from, whether they were slave or free, it was as if God wrapped His arms around them and said, "I love you, and I have come to you, like a mighty wind, I have come to you, and I will not, I will not leave." I have come, and I will not leave.

Is that how you think of the love of God? Not just knowing it, but knowing that God has come and will come and will not leave you, known by name, deeply loved by God.

Knowing the love of God is one of the foundations of joy.
Trusting God is one of the foundations of joy.
And joy is what God wants to give to His people.
Joy is part of the fruit of the Spirit within our lives.

Joy is part of Jesus' prayer for His followers. For you and for me. This is His desire, His passion, for us as individuals and as a congregation, that His joy would be complete in us.

And that joy would be a source of great strength to honor Him with our lives in this world.

May we, this day, know such joy that comes from the Spirit, such a joy as would set us free.

Let us bow before God in prayer.

Almighty God, come, and grant us joy. A joy that is not passing. A joy, which when it does pass is restored, because Your Spirit is at work within us, creating trust and a sense of Your love that nothing can take away. Hear this our prayer. AMEN.