“How to Deal with the Way I Feel” part 5
(Jammin’ with Joy)
Brian A. Moon
A man working in New York City at a very stressful marketing job was asked to take the next 3 days off and spend time amongst the people of the city probing them with questions about some of the products that they were marketing. It had been cold and wet in the city for the past week as a cold winter storm had been blowing through until the man woke up on his first of three days off to bright and sunny skies. As he got ready for the excursion out amongst the people he reached into his pants pocket and found a $100 dollar bill. As he is walking out enjoying the sunshine in central park he stops at a hot dog stand for lunch and the hot dog vendor had run out of change so he gave the man his lottery ticket and told him that if they won he would split ½ of it with him. Later that day as he is talking amongst the people he runs into this beautiful woman who ask him if he wants to escort her to a dinner, and he says sure! When the woman arrives to pick him up she is in a stretch limousine and it turns out that she is the queen of some small European city-state who is heading to a United Nations dinner with the President of the United States. As they are driving to the dinner he flips on the T.V in the car right as the numbers are being given for that nights lottery with an estimated grand prize of 35 million dollars. As he arrives on his first day off, at the nicest hotel in New York, with this beautiful queen on his arm, he now realizes that he just won the lottery.
For the past 4 weeks we have been talking about “How to Deal with the Way I Feel” and all four of those weeks were on how to deal with negative emotions like stress or anger. Sometimes though life is good to us, sometimes we do feel like we are walking on cloud 9, and our emotion could be classified as nothing but pure joy! Life is not always a negative experience…
We have all had those days when everything actually does go right, and we are in a good mood full of happiness and life. We have all experienced that feeling of, “Wow I am just glad to be alive to enjoy this moment!” Even though joy is a good emotion, it doesn’t mean that there is not a right and a wrong way to deal with it.
Back in colonial times here in America there was a common practice of shooting off guns when people wanted to express joy or when they wanted to celebrate something positive. Men would run out into the streets and fire their pistols off into the air, and it was not uncommon to be in a crowd of people celebrating something and have hundreds of gun shots scream into the sky. There is only one problem with this expression of joy, what goes up must come down. What would happen is the shots that were fired high into the sky would eventually come soaring down and right back into the crowd of people. More than one person has been killed all because of stray bullets falling out of the sky and into some early American celebration.
Life can be joyous and we should not feel bad when we do get to celebrate and shout for joy, but we also need to remember that joy is a gift. That’s right, joy is a gift and just like with any other gift we can use it for good things or bad things. To make sure that we stay “Jammin’ with Joy” and using this gift for good we need to:
Give credit where credit is due
Remembering that joy is a gift, don’t you think it would be important to give credit to the person that gave it to you? But where does this gift of joy come from? The Bible says:
“Every good gift and every perfect present comes from heaven; it comes down from God” James 1:17 TEV
Circle the words “good gift” and “from God”
Joy is a gift from God! God wants us to have a good time here on earth! God gave you 5 senses just so that you can feel, smell, and see things that give us joy.
In fact he even gave us the emotional capability to experience joy and happiness! If God wanted you to have a bad time here on earth, then he would have taken away your senses and only given you the ability to experience stress, heartbreak, and fear. But he loves us, he gets excited when he sees us having a good time and it gives him great joy to bless us with joy. When we have joy, when we are given a good and perfect gift from above, our first response should be to give credit where credit is due. Give God the credit he deserves for sending some joyful experience your way.
Psalm 92:4 “You thrill me, LORD, with all you have done for me! I sing for joy because of what you have done.” NLT
Some of you might not have ever considered the fact that God is the one who sent you that joy, or allowed you to have that good time. You might not even know that God is the only reason we can experience joy in the first place. “Well what has God ever done for me? I mean I am the one that gets the credit for that joy, I paid for it, or I worked hard to get to experience that…” That may be true, you might have worked hard for that joy, but who allowed you to be in that position? Who is responsible for the joys in life that no amount of money can buy? And who has given you the opportunity to experience joy beyond your wildest imagination? “Wait a minute, what about this joy beyond my wildest imagination?” You see God has made a way for you to experience a joy that is nothing like any joy you have ever experienced before. God offers us a chance to live with him forever one day in what the Bible calls paradise. A place where there is no pain, no suffering, no sadness, just the constant joy of being with the God of the entire universe forever!
This joy however was made possible through great suffering. God sent his only Son, Jesus Christ into the world as a human being like you and me to live a perfect life, a life that he then traded for death on a cross. When Jesus did this he made a way for us to have a relationship with God and a promise of life with no end no matter who we are, and no matter what we have done!
As a third-century man was anticipating death, he penned these last words to a friend: "It’s a bad world, an incredibly bad world. But I have discovered in the midst of it a quiet and holy people who have learned a great secret. They have found a joy which is a thousand times better than any pleasure of our sinful life. They are despised and persecuted, but they care not. They are masters of their souls. They have overcome the world. These people are the Christians--and I am one of them."
All of this joy is open to you if you accept God’s gift of salvation. We will talk more about this later, but all of us in this room tonight, whether we are a Christian, or just checking this God thing out, need to realize that we have no joy without God. We have no joy unless God smiles down on us and says, “I love you so much, here have fun with this”
Psalm 9:2 “I will be filled with joy because of you. I will sing praises to your name” NLT
Underline the words “filled with joy because of you”
We can live life having a joyful moment here or there, but to be filled with joy, to be “Jammin’ with Joy” we must give the credit for all our joy to God. There is a verse in the Bible that I love, and it fits in perfect with the next thing we must do to be “Jammin with Joy.”
Ecclesiastes 3:12 – 13 “So I concluded that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they can.” NLT
Circle “as long as they can” in that verse, because we must learn to:
Enjoy the good times
Picture with me one of my best days ever… I was wearing my favorite shirt to school and it was a Friday with a three-day weekend ahead. It was kind of cool out but the sun was beating down brightly warming me as I stood on the playground. I was on the top of the monkey bars and feeling on top of the world when all of the girls were amazed by my Spiderman climbing ability when all of sudden this punk kid comes up and pushes me off. I fell some 20 feet and landed on the very last bar with all my weight on my right thigh.
Now instead of spending the weekend playing and having fun I was flat on my back getting a CAT scan done on my femur. The point is that we need to enjoy the good times while we can.
Life is not always going to leave us feeling on top of the world, there are seasons to life, some good and some not so good, the Bible says:
“Enjoy prosperity while you can. But when hard times strike, realize that both come from God. That way you will realize that nothing is certain in this life.” Ecclesiastes 7:14 NLT
When God gives you a gift like a joyful time in life, enjoy it! He has given you a gift and it would be wrong not to enjoy it to its fullest, too many times we walk around thinking, “Well this is just too nice a thing for me, someone else deserves this more than me…”
Let God worry about what gift he will give to people, you just enjoy the gifts he has given you, when a joyful gift is given to you go for it!
Deuteronomy 27:7 “Rejoice before the LORD your God.” NKJV
When you do this, when you enjoy the good times, and when you give God credit for all the joy in your life it will motivate you to do the final key to be “Jammin’ with Joy” and that is:
Share your joy with others
Karl Barth once said this, “It must be said that we can have joy, and therefore will have it, only as we give it to others… there may be cases where a man can be really merry in isolation. But these are exceptional and dangerous.”
When we have joy, when we are in the middle of God’s gift of joy, we need to also pass that on to others.
Proverbs 15:30 “Smiling faces make you happy, and good news makes you feel better.” TEV
Our world is full of hurting people, sad people and people who could use some joy. When God blesses you with joy let that experience spill over into your friend’s lives. Use your good circumstance to spread joy to someone you know is in some bad circumstances.
Write a letter to friend, call a friend on the phone, invite someone over to hang out, buy something for someone for no reason, give compliments to people, smile at the people you meet, and encourage your friends and family. Do things to pass your joy on so that it keeps on going… don’t let it end with you.
God has given you a gift and now he wants you to give that gift to someone else that might be in need of it.
When we share our joy with others we are obeying God which is ultimately the key to being “Jammin’ with Joy”
John 15:10 – 11 “When you obey me, you remain in my love… I have told you this so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!” NLT
Joy is the by-product of obedience and that means giving credit where credit is due, enjoying the good times as a gift from God, and then sharing that joy with others. Before I mentioned that the key to true joy is a relationship with God through his Son Jesus.
If you need this joy in your life, the joy that only God can bring to your life through his gift of salvation then you are in the right place tonight because I am here to tell you that you can have it!
God has done it all for us to be “Jammin’ with Joy” if you will only accept his gift.
Prayer time ---------
God, thank you for the gift of Joy! Thank you that you want our lives to be filled with joy and happiness if we will obey you.
If you are here this evening and God is tugging at your heart, you honestly can’t say that you have a real relationship with him, but you want to start one then just between you and God cry out him and tell him you need for him to come and save you. Tell him that you are sorry for your sins and you need him to come and give you a new life, a life that is filled with his joy. Believe that because of Jesus God can save you and that because he loves you he will.
If that was you then in the Bible it says that God will give you the power to be saved and that one day you will spend forever with him in heaven.
Help us to walk with joy this week Father, and may we be forever grateful for all that you do to help us live victorious lives. Amen.
