Spiritual Discipline: Celebration
May 30, 2021
There was a farmer who had a neighbor who was a chronic complainer, he could always find something wrong with anything. He was a cold, wet blanket on a cold night. So the farmer decided he would find a way to make this man smile. So the farmer bought the world’s greatest hunting dog, and trained it to do everything a person could imagine; then he invited his joyless neighbor to go hunting with him.
The farmer showed his neighbor how his dog could stand motionless for one hour, how his dog could pick up a scent from one mile away. There was no response by the neighbor. Finally, the farmer shot a duck, which landed in the middle of the lake. The farmer spoke to the dog, commanding the dog in a foreign language, then the dog ran to the edge of the water, stopped, then the dog walked on the water, picked up the duck, and brought the duck back to the farmer. The farmer asked his neighbor, “so, what do you think of that?” To which his neighbor replied, “So, your dog can’t swim?”
We all know people like that, don’t we? People who without even knowing it, or even understanding it, suck the life and joy right out of us. They’re kind of like black holes in outer space, once we enter their atmosphere, they suck us in and take the joy out of us.
This morning we’re going to look at the 3rd of the Spiritual Disciplines. The discipline of Celebration. We would never think of celebration as a spiritual discipline. It escapes our thinking and reasoning that we need to discipline ourselves to celebrate. I mean, shouldn’t that just be a natural part of life?
Yet, we learn it’s not, there are lots of people who don’t enjoy life. So, as we dig into the Spiritual Discipline of celebration the expectation is that we will use celebration as a means to help us draw closer to Christ.
So, what does it mean to celebrate? Is celebration, really something spiritual, which makes it a spiritual discipline?
Richard Foster wrote,
Celebration is central to all the Spiritual Disciplines. Without a joyful spirit of festivity the Disciplines become dull, death-breathing tools in the hands of modern Pharisees. Every Discipline should be characterized by carefree gaiety and a sense of thanksgiving.
Foster then adds, “Without joyous celebration to infuse the other disciplines, we will sooner or later abandon them. Joy produces energy. Joy makes us strong.”
I want to pick up on that theme for a moment. Have you ever tried to do something you really didn’t want to do? You go at it using your willpower, using your strength and energy, and it saps you of everything.
Foster’s point and I agree with him, is that without a spirit of joy, everything we do seems to take on dullness. If you don’t like school, in fact, it’s not fun to wake up in the morning and go. The same is true for work, and how about worship, which we will talk about at a later date, because that’s a spiritual discipline. How about coming to this building as a grump, with no joy, how much of yourself will you give to God.
The Bible is filled with passages in which God calls the people to celebrate. It seems strange that we should be commanded to celebrate, yet, maybe that is one of our issues in life, we forget and need to be reminded to celebrate.
In Nehemiah 8, we hear the vivid call to celebrate, as we read,
9 Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all,
"This day is sacred to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep." For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.
10 Nehemiah said, "Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared.
This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength."
11 The Levites calmed all the people, saying, "Be still, for this is a sacred day. Do not grieve."
12 Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them.
Nehemiah had led the nation of Israel in rebuilding the broken walls of Jerusalem. There was a great deal of opposition from within their own country, but Nehemiah led the people to complete this great building project. The work was finally completed and the people gathered together to worship God.
The priest Ezra began to read the Word of God, which they called the Law. When they heard the Word, the people began to weep and were convicted in their hearts, and they fell to their knees in repentance. They began to worship and praise God.
Yet, Nehemiah didn’t tell the people, “You should be weeping and throwing yourself on the ground, fasting in repentance, you’re a bunch of slugs!”
Instead, Nehemiah told the people to go and have a party. That’s right! Go party!! Go celebrate! They were told ‘don’t weep,’ in its place there was to be joy, food, drink and a huge party. And they were to share their food with those who didn’t have enough. So, the people went off and celebrated, because now they understood the Word of God.
Look at the statement from Nehemiah in verse 10,
10 “for the joy of the LORD is your strength.
Notice whose joy it is? It is the Lord’s joy, and the joy of the Lord becomes our strength. This lets us in on God’s character a little more. God is a God of joy. He loves to see His people having a good party, because the people are worshiping and rejoicing over Him.
When we think of disciplines, we may think we are to eat locusts, celery and all that is gross, or maybe even nothing at all, but here we see Nehemiah telling the people to go and eat your favorite desserts, meats and beverage.
The people of Israel were to celebrate as a means of drawing closer to God. The people were told to go and eat choice foods, this literally translates to eat the FAT!
Jesus commands us to have joy in our lives, and in fact, the joy He calls us to have is the same joy He had. In John 15, Jesus had proclaimed to the disciples that He is the vine and we are the branches. If we, the branches remain / abide in Jesus, who is the true vine, then we will bear much fruit in our lives.
Jesus continued talking and He began to talk about love, stating,
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.”
11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
Do you hear those words from Jesus? He wants us to experience not our joy, but His joy, so that our joy may be complete.
God wants us to experience joy. He wants our joy to be complete, to overflow. God is not grumpy or mean spirited, it’s the opposite, God is filled with joy and love.
You see, we remain connected to the vine out of obedience to Christ’s calling in our lives, and the result is joy. Because we are bearing fruit, being fruitful, we are filled with joy and satisfaction because we are doing and becoming the very people God calls us to be. Jesus’ desire is that our lives should be spontaneous and joy-filled, not burdensome and boring.
One of my favorite oil paintings is one that a good friend painted for me. I told her I never see paintings of Jesus smiling, and lo and behold, she painted a picture of Jesus bending over, smiling as He holds a child’s hand. That’s an image of Jesus I really love. Think about how often we picture Jesus smiling.
Just think to yourself for a moment, if you were to picture Jesus in your mind, is He ever smiling, or is He just instructing people what to do . . . or is He in pain as He is on the cross? Try picture a smiling, playful, loving . . . Jesus. Picture Jesus smiling and laughing as He celebrates you and your faith. Picture Him smiling as He accepts your cries for forgiveness.
To go along with that, I love this quote from G.K. Chesterton,
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again;” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but He has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
That’s a powerful image from Chesterton. Can it be that we’ve become so caught up in our everydayness of life that we’ve lost the ability to celebrate, to respond to life with joy. You see, joy is really another word for celebration.
But we’re so busy. The day starts out way too early, we run behind schedule, we get to work or get the kids to school, we run nonstop during the day. We come home exhausted, but there is homework to do, there is an event to attend, there are phone calls to return, bills to pay, meals to prepare . . . and our list could go on and on. And when the day ends, it ends too late at night, and we are just too exhausted to care about being joyful. Celebrate . . . celebrate what?
Understand if we don’t celebrate, if we don’t have joy in our inmost being, we are going to be like that old curmudgeon neighbor who couldn’t find anything good in life. But that is not the image we want to portray, is it? Is that what the world thinks of Christians? That we are just a bunch of sourpusses who are angry over anything and everything.
We are to be joy bearers, and celebrate the life God has given us. John Piper wrote a book he entitled, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Many don’t like the title, because a hedonist is someone who only wants pleasure for themselves, at the expense of others. However, Piper’s premise is the pleasure we seek is in God Himself. God is the end of our search, not the means to some further end. Our exceeding joy is the Lord our God. Christian hedonism seeks to transform the heart so that Almighty God will be our first and only choice, above all other choices.
The closer we draw to God and abide in him in a love relationship the more joy we are filled with. This happens despite the difficult moments of life. Paul reminds us in Romans 5 that we all suffer, and he makes the amazing statement in verse 3,
3 we rejoice in our sufferings!
Say what!? You heard me, Paul tells us to rejoice in our sufferings. Understand that we aren’t joyful that we are suffering, but in spite of our sufferings, we can rejoice, because we know that we have God on our side, and Paul believes we will grow in the midst of our suffering.
He goes on to tell us
3 ... knowing that suffering produces endurance,
4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
You see, that suffering ultimately can lead us back to joy. But we must be open to the process. We suffer - but suffering produces or leads us to endure - - - and enduring leads us to have a new and growing character - - and that new character leads to a new hope. And when we have hope we aren’t disappointed, because we’ve experienced the power of God’s love, poured into our hearts by the Spirit of God.
The book of Philippians is often referred to as Paul’s letter of joy. Over and over he tells us to have joy, and in Philippians 4, he says -
4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.
He repeats himself, even as he was in prison writing this letter, he had joy and he wants us to live life as joyfilled Christ followers. Not as curmudgeons.
Before Covid hit last year, it seemed joy didn’t come easily for lots of people. In some ways, it seems worse now. Firstly, I can’t see your smile behind your mask. That stinks. I can only see if your eyes light up.
But we’ve been through so much individually and as a community. We’ve not only dealt with sickness and death, we’ve moved through a difficult political season, we are navigating a new ethos on justice and what that means, there’s a heightened sense of violence in the world.
There’s so much coming down on us, that the stress and anxiety is palpable. We put on smiling faces, but I have to admit, I hate watching the news. Most of the time, there’s nothing good on the news.
Yet, we’re called to be joyful. It’s hard to fake it. I can give you a fake smile. But my heart may not be filled with joy.
You see, joy comes from within. I can’t manufacture that joy. Joy comes from my relationship with Jesus. That’s why my joy can be complete, because ultimately it is Jesus’ joy that flows within me. But again, I must be connected to the vine. If not, I’m running on empty and faking it.
I’ve said it so many times, happiness is from externals. That’s what chocolate and coffee do for me. But my joy comes from Jesus.
I believe the solution, and it is the premise of all we will ever do in life as Christ followers . . . and I want to let you in on the secret . . .
We must abide in Christ. That’s it. Its is that simple and it is that difficult, all at the same time. We go through our daily lives doing our own thing, we live life as if all of life depended upon our mastery of life; as if life depended upon all of our monumental, momentous and magnificent decisions.
We go through our days, running on our own power, running on empty most of the time, because we are not being charged spiritually. Remember we are the branches and Jesus is the vine. He gives us all of the life giving nutrients we need. In fact, He has the antidote, but to learn it, to discover it, we must be connected to Him. And this leads to our problem.
So, when Sunday comes, we do our very best to reconnect with God. We do our best to plug our proverbial branch back into the vine, but when you do it one time per week, it is difficult to get that perfect connection. So when we leave church after worshiping, we feel good, but that good feeling does not last all too long . . . The reason is we we’re not fully connected to our life source, Jesus, the true vine.
This is why celebration and joy is so vital in our lives. This is why it is a Spiritual Discipline, because it is not something that just happens naturally, we must work at it, we must make it a decision to be connected to Jesus and to allow His joy to be made complete in us.
So, how do we celebrate?
Here are some practical ideas ~
Learn how to laugh! That’s right laugh. Find reasons to laugh. Watch something that is funny. Watch your favorite comedies and just laugh. I love watching kids laugh. It’s contagious.
If you are fighting illness, I would also encourage you to laugh. Norman Cousins wrote a book Anatomy of an Illness about the time he was critically ill, and he began to watch Marx Brothers movies and Candid Camera reruns so that he would laugh. And when we laugh endorphines are released in our body, which brings healing. Laugh at yourself.
Make family events into times of celebrations. Make special occasions special because you plan for them. Don’t let birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, surprise you. Plan for them, and celebrate them.
When you finish a project, receive a raise, get a new job, get accepted into college, get a great report card . . . celebrate. It does not have to be an expensive night out, just rejoice in the goodness and greatness of God.
Give thanks to God! Pray and praise God.
Make holidays special days for your family. Celebrate God’s presence and God’s love. Celebrate the fact that God is with you, and will never fail nor forsake you.
I’m glad we don’t take ourselves too seriously here. We need to laugh, we need to celebrate, we need to rejoice in God’s presence and God’s awesome blessings.
Finally, everyday is a day to celebrate and rejoice. I really try - every morning and every night while I’m in bed to thank God for the day. To remember something good about the day or what’s ahead. Give thanks to God, celebrate His presence and His grace, have that joy before going to sleep and when waking up. Make it part of your daily rhythm of life.
The funny thing with rejoicing is that the more we rejoice the more joy we receive.
