Joy – Fruit of the Spirit and Advent
John 15:9-17; Gal 5:16-26 December 12, 2004
Intro:
In The Applause of Heaven, (Word Publishing, 1996, p. 6-8) Max Lucado writes of a certain King:
No man had more reason to be miserable than this one-yet no man was more joyful.His first home was a palace. Servants were at his fingertips. The snap of his fingers changed the course of history. His name was known and loved. He had everything wealth, power, respect.
And then he had nothing. Students of the event still ponder it. Historians stumble as they attempt to explain it. How could a king lose everything in one instant? One moment he was royalty; the next he was in poverty. His bed became, at best, a borrowed pallet-and usually the hard earth. He never owned even the most basic mode of transportation and was dependent upon handouts for his income. He was sometimes so hungry he would eat raw grain or pick fruit off a tree. He knew what it was like to be rained on, to be cold. He knew what it meant to have no home. His palace grounds had been spotless; now he was exposed to filth. He had never known disease, but was now surrounded by illness. In his kingdom he had been revered; now he was ridiculed. His neighbors tried to lynch him. Some called him a lunatic. His family tried to confine him to their house.
Those who didn’t ridicule him tried to use him. They wanted favors. They wanted tricks. He was a novelty. They wanted to be seen with him-that is, until being with him was out of fashion. Then they wanted to kill him. He was accused of a crime he never committed. Witnesses were hired to lie. The jury was rigged. No lawyer was assigned to his defense. A judge swayed by politics handed down the death penalty. They killed him.
He left as he came-penniless. He was buried in a borrowed grave, his funeral financed by compassionate friends. Though he once had everything, he died with nothing.
He should have been miserable. He should have been bitter. He had every right to be a pot of boiling anger. But he wasn’t. He was joyful. Sourpusses don’t attract a following. People followed him wherever he went. Children avoid soreheads. Children scampered after this man. Crowds don’t gather to listen to the woeful. Crowds clamored to hear him. Why? He was joyful. He was joyful when he was poor. He was joyful when he was abandoned. He was joyful when he was betrayed. He was even joyful as he hung on a tool of torture, his hands pierced with six-inch Roman spikes.
Jesus embodied a stubborn joy. A joy that refused to bend in the wind of hard times. A joy that held its ground against pain. A joy whose roots extended deep into the bedrock of eternity.
Joy
This morning, on the third Sunday of Advent, let’s talk about joy. Just to get you thinking, let me ask: are you a joyful person?
Note that I didn’t ask, “are you happy?” That is different. Most of us instinctively recognize that there is a difference between joy and happiness, yet it is a challenge to put an exact definition on that difference. Lucky for all of us, I got a little help in the mail this week…
So there! Joy is buying discount jewelry! “Guaranteed!”
I can’t be too hard on Winners, even though they didn’t even spell “jewelry” correctly. Perhaps they looked up joy in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: “Joy: the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires”.
My goodness! Is that all joy is?? An “emotion” that comes when everything is going well, we are rich and successful and have all the stuff we “desire”???
I beg to differ!!
A Little Boy and Some Chocolate Cake:
Last Friday I had the immense pleasure of accompanying an incredible group of young people from our church as we took food for about 500 people to Edmonton’s inner city and served a meal at the Mustard Seed Street Church. Our contact, Trish, wisely challenged each of us to pick a face to pray for as we served and in the weeks to come.
Let me tell you about joy. It was in the heart of each of our young people as they served and as we later talked about their experience. This wasn’t fleeting happiness, this was work-your-rear-off, be-emotionally-challenged, spend-time-giving, go-home-exhausted-but-knowing-that-what-you-did-that-night-somehow-was-the-Kingdom-of-God-in-action. It was joy. There is an important key there, which I’ll come back to in a moment.
Let me tell you something else about joy. Now, I have been down to the Mustard Seed numerous times, have spent a week in Vancouver inner city, and have lived in Old Strathcona, so I thought I was prepared. Then, as I was hustling about bringing hot chili out to the serving line, I paused for just a moment, and as I looked across the serving table I saw a boy about 5 or 6 yrs old, and his dad. The boy had a long, dirty coat – about 4 sizes too big, but warm, and his dad was standing right behind, hands gently on his shoulders, and they were stopped in front of the dessert tray. The boy reached out, and one of our young people placed this beautiful piece of chocolate cake in his open hands. I saw his eyes light up, I saw this huge smile explode onto his face, and he looked up at his dad and said, “dad, look, I got dessert!!”
One of you made that dessert, one of you probably purchased it last week at the bake sale and donated it back, one of our teens prepped and then served it, and a 5yr old inner city boy was filled with joy because of it.
As I looked at this boy’s face, God grabbed my heart. In that instant, I didn’t see a boy in poverty, I saw my son. I saw Thomas, in the sparkle in that other boy’s eyes and in his smile, I knew instantly that they were the same, and I knew that it was only by the grace of God that it was that father on that side of the serving line instead of me. I thought of my son, who has everything, and this other boy, who had – dessert, and I saw the exact same joy.
I’m sorry Winners, you don’t know about joy. I’m sorry Webster, but you missed the boat on this one also. Let’s turn to a better source.
John 15:9-17
Just before going to the cross, Jesus took the opportunity to instruct His disciples one last time. They have left the upper room, and are on the way to (or perhaps arrived at) Gethsemane. In that context, Jesus said this: “9As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit–fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. 17This is my command: Love each other.”
Key Verse: verse 11
The key verse in that passage for us today is 11: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” Told them what? Two things – obey, and remain. Those are the two commands Jesus gave in vs 10 – “obey my commands” and “remain in my love.” Why did Jesus give those commands? So that we might have complete joy.
The first command is obedience. Obedience results in joy. We sometimes believe the opposite – that God has given us this list of “things not to do” to limit our freedom and make us miserable – but the opposite is true. Obedience to God is the path to joy, not only because obeying the things we are not supposed to do saves us pain and hurt, but also because in the doing of all the things we are supposed to do we find significance and purpose and life.
The second command is “remain in my love.” Henri Nouwen has said, “Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved.” You and I have known that unconditional love of Jesus at moments in the past; Jesus command to us is to remain in that love. To never get sidetracked, to never get persuaded otherwise, to never lose sight of the eternal truth of Christmas: Immanuel, God with Us. “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son…” Jesus is welcoming us to remain under His wing, to remain wrapped in His arms, to remain always in the midst of the fact that we are loved perfectly, unconditionally, truly, not by virtue of anything that we have done or failed to do, but solely by the grace of God.
As we do, we will know joy. Joy that is not about feeling, circumstance, or economics. Rather, joy that is about being a part of something incredible – the Kingdom of God. About being part of something eternal – the Kingdom of God. About being part of a people, who meet here week after week together in worship and in seeking God. About being part of a mission to share the incredible good news of salvation with a world on a highway to hell.
Two Lessons on Joy From The Mustard Seed:
I told you I would come back to the lessons on joy from the Mustard Seed. The first lesson I learned from that little boy, and it is this: joy has nothing to do with externals. It has nothing to do with your clothes or your smell or the size of your wallet. It has nothing to do with your health or your career or your “position” in life. It has all to do with your heart. It is a gift of God, produced by God, grown by God, as we let Him work in us. That is why Paul lists it second in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” As I recognized the same exact joy in the boy with almost nothing, as I see in my son who has almost everything, I understood: it is not about us, it is a gift of God.
The same is true for you and I. I did a very brief survey of the word “joy” in the New Testament and was started by how many times the idea of joy was side-by-side, hand-in-hand, with the idea of suffering. It was constant, pervasive, and the message was that the externals don’t matter. You might be suffering, you might have everything you ever wanted, it doesn’t matter, joy is about something different.
Joy is about knowing that we are loved by God. We are saved by God. And then knowing that nothing else really matters.
The second lesson I learned from our kids at the Mustard Seed: Joy is only found in giving. In being focused on others rather than ourselves, in meeting their needs instead of our own, in sacrificing our desires so that others might experience theirs. That I didn’t find in Webster, I found it in the lives of our kids, including one young man whom I drove home who said, “It is hard to imagine that those people are wondering where they are going to eat and sleep, and earlier all I was wondering about was how to get a new PlayStation Portable.”
Think even of Christmas – who has more joy, the giver or the receiver? I know for me, I am far more excited about the gifts I give than the gifts I receive (even though I appreciate and enjoy them all!!) You see, I don’t believe that there is joy in any “things” – joy comes in our choice to give. To express love, to help, to encourage, to be there for one another. I like how George Bernard Shaw puts it: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one: the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap, and being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” Leo Tolstoy said, “Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.”
Called to Joy:
I want to call you to joy today. Remember, I said that joy is a gift of God, one of the fruits that the Holy Spirit produces in us. But remember also that I’ve been preaching that you and I, while we cannot create these things in ourselves, can stop God from creating them in us, and so part of my call to you to receive this gift of joy must also be a call to change those areas where we are preventing God from creating joy within us. Chief among those, at least for me, is selfishness. I can see that the times when I am not full of joy are the times when I am most focused on myself. You maybe noticed in the passage I read earlier from John, that the very next thing Jesus says is, “12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
We will never find joy in pursuing ourselves, but only in loving God and loving one another. That much is an act of our will, a choice we make: to live for others first, and for ourselves second. If you aren’t sure what that looks like in real life, watch a mother of a child from birth through to at least Elementary age, many times through to adulthood, and you will see what I mean. And if you look deep into their eyes and hearts, you will see that they take great joy in doing it.
So I call you to receive joy. If you need to confess selfishness or something else first, please do so. And then simply do this: open your hands, place them on your lap, and pray this prayer with me:
Concluding Prayer:
Lord Jesus, we fix our eyes on you, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before you endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. We open our hearts before you. We confess our selfishness and the misery it causes, and ask for forgiveness. We choose with our wills to live for you, and for others. And we ask that Your Spirit would fill us with joy.
