Joy: More than Enough
Emotions, part 3
Wildwind Community Church
11/26/2006
Psalms 4:6-8
In 1996 there was a news report about an Army veteran named John Crabtree who had been receiving benefits from the government. Evidently he had been wounded in Vietnam and was now on permanent disability. One day, out of the blue, he received an official notification from the government of his own death. Needless to say, this was quite a shock!
Mr. Crabtree wrote the government a letter stating that he was indeed very much alive and would like to continue receiving his benefits. The letter did no good. He then tried calling the government. The phone calls didn’t change the situation either (Have you ever tried to call the government? Not the most efficient process you’ll ever be involved in.) Finally, as a last resort, the veteran contacted a local television station, which ran a human-interest story about his situation.
During the interview, the reporter asked him, "How do you feel about this whole ordeal?" The veteran chuckled and said, "Well, I feel a little frustrated by it. After all, have you ever tried to prove that you’re alive?"
That’s a pretty good question. Could you prove that you are alive? Really, genuinely, deep-down alive? When was the last time you had an alive moment? Not the last time you took a breath or had your heart beat inside your chest, but the last time you felt yourself alive to your living, alive to your loving, deeply present with the gift of life itself?"
I want to conclude our series on Emotions by talking to you today about Joy. Joy is about being alive, about being alive to living. We’re coming off Thanksgiving here today. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, know why? Because it’s a day of joy. I realize Christmas is a day of joy as well, but what I love about Thanksgiving is that it’s not about anything other than joy. No presents. No shopping. No hanging of lights in sub-zero temperatures. Just being with people we love, counting our blessings, and thanking God for every one. A whole day set aside where we can cultivate the spirit we should have on all the other days. Thanksgiving is about celebration. We celebrate all the things we are thankful for. Celebration is a counterpart to joy. We can’t celebrate without joy. If you are not joyful and go to a place where people are celebrating, one of two things is likely to happen. You will either find yourself becoming joyful, or you will find yourself wanting to get out of that place as soon as possible.
Do you know why this is? It is because an unthankful spirit is incompatible with a thankful spirit. Misery and joy do not mix. They are opposites.
1 Peter 2:9 (NIV)
9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
When you move into light, you move out of darkness. Darkness cannot exist in the presence of light, because darkness is nothing more than the absence of light. Light, by its very nature, banishes darkness. In the same way, my friends, I want to suggest this morning that thankfulness, by its very nature, banishes misery. Thankfulness banishes grumbling and complaining. Thankfulness banishes a sense of being ripped off by life. You cannot practice thanks-giving and remain miserable. If your wish is to remain miserable (and as hard as it is to understand, this is the deepest wish of some people), it is essential that you not give much thought to your blessings, to the beauty that surrounds you, to the relative ease of your life compared to that of most others in the world, or to the promised presence of God with you through even the most difficult circumstances. If you spend more than a moment thinking on these things, they will dispel your misery.
So Thanksgiving is about being alive to life. Most of the time we run through life on auto-pilot. In the same way that we’ll sometimes drive for miles and miles and suddenly realize we don’t remember having covered those miles, we often get up and go to work and come home and eat dinner and watch TV and collapse into bed without having really been aware of what we were doing. We have been living, but we have not been alive to life. We have operated like squirrels – just going by instinct without much conscious thought. That is why Thanksgiving is essential – because Thanksgiving brings us alive to life. Why is this important? Because if you believe God created you for a purpose (which we do), and that God loves you (which we do), and that God wants to know you and see you fulfill an incredible plan that He has for your life (which we do), then one of the worst things you can do is to live like a squirrel.
A squirrel’s life is about collecting acorns and building nests in trees. Nothing wrong with that. That is the purpose of its life, and it brings glory to God when it fulfills its purpose. Likewise the only way you can bring glory to God is to fulfill your purpose. And as a human being you not only have a purpose in this world (which all creatures do), but you have the unique capacity to realize you have a purpose, to consciously seek it out, and to choose to live according to it. Those are things no other creature is capable of.
So you cannot be alive to life if you live like a squirrel. Thanksgiving gets us out of reflexive, reactive, responsive mode (the state all animals besides human beings live in all the time) and into reflective, proactive, initiative mode. Does that make sense? In other words, the act of giving thanks is one of the main things you can do to be truly human – to live on a spiritual level. No matter how good an animal might have it, he never sits back and thinks, “What a beautiful world God has made – I’m so grateful to be part of it. What a huge acorn I just found, dang is God on my side today or what? Life is good.”
Animals are alive, without question. But they are not really alive to life. As a human being, you can be alive to life. When you are thanking God for things, you are engaging that part of you called a spirit. Thanking is a spiritual act, and that’s why it is critical. That’s why God wants us to cultivate spirits that are thankful – to give thanks to Him – to live in a state of gratitude.
And do you know the by-product of a sense of gratitude? Do you know what we experience when we take the time to be thankful? My friends, we experience joy. Joy stems from gratitude. Without gratitude, without thanks-giving, there is no joy. Joy is not something that happens to us. We do not become joyful people on accident. We must take time to be thankful, to count our blessings, to be alive to our lives. Indeed, this could even be considered a spiritual discipline. Thanking God, counting our blessings, and celebrating them is not only important, it is essential. So many people are wandering around in this world looking for joy and they hope one day to stumble upon it. But joy does not happen to us. Joy is something we acquire as we busy ourselves with the habit of being grateful, of celebrating, of giving thanks.
Let’s look at our text for today.
Psalms 4:6-8 (MSG)
6 Why is everyone hungry for more? "More, more," they say. "More, more." I have God’s more-than-enough,
7 More joy in one ordinary day than they get in all their shopping sprees.
8 At day’s end I’m ready for sound sleep, for you, God, have put my life back together.
Our passage begins with an observation. The Psalmist notices that everyone seems to be hungry for more.
He indicates the intensity of this search by repeating it over and over. “More, more, more, more.” Though written long before the birth of Jesus, I’m not sure anything in scripture is more pertinent to us today than this observation. “Why is everyone hungry for more? More, more they say. More, more.” Are you a person who’s always saying, “More, more?” What is your more? More money. More friends. More square footage in my home. More power at the office. More toys. More attention. More glances from the opposite sex. Right now, at this moment, what do you want more of? What have you been frustrated over having too little of? Are you stuck in the “more-more” cycle? Do you have friends and neighbors stuck in it? How do we get out of that?
We see the answer at the end of verse 6. “I have God’s more-than-enough.” I have God’s more-than-enough. The way out of the more-more cycle is to receive and celebrate God’s more-than-enough. A main theme throughout scripture is God’s absolute sufficiency, the fact that if God is with us, that’s all we will ever need. Some of you may remember this from a few weeks ago:
2 Peter 1:3 (NIV)
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
If you have God, you have everything you need for life. Couldn’t be more straightforward than that.
Romans 8:31 (NIV)
31 …If God is for us, who can be against us?
If God is on your side, what difference does it make who’s not? If you have God, you have everything you need.
Joshua 1:5 (NIV)
5 No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you.
Why will no one be able to stand against Joshua in this passage? Because the one person who stands with Him happens to be the only one he needs, and that One has promised to never leave Him.
This, my friends, is God’s “more than enough.” It’s knowing that the presence of God in our lives simply is all we need. Yes, we need the presence of God in our lives as it comes to us through other people – that is a clear teaching of scripture – but nonetheless it is God’s presence. We’re going into Advent and we’ll be talking more about this, but remember one of the names given to Jesus? Emmanuel, which means God With Us.
Now in verse 7 the Psalmist assigns a word to this “more-than-enough” presence of God. He calls it “joy.” I hope from now on you will think of joy as an awareness of God’s more-than-enough presence in your life. And after naming this more-than-enough presence, he goes on to compare his more-than-enough presence of God to those stuck in the more-more cycle. He says, I have God’s more-than-enough,
7 More joy in one ordinary day than they get in all their shopping sprees.
It’s critical that we pause here to look at this. I want you to notice that these people who are always clambering for more, more, more, more are seeking a certain type of more – it’s mostly material stuff. It’s stuff you can buy, or build. But there’s something in the nature of things that can be bought that will assure we never get enough of them. There’s something lacking in them, something that never fills the longing for more, something that continues to leave us hungry, or thirsty. And what do those in this passage today do to satisfy that hunger? They head back to the store. It must be the next big ticket item. It must be whatever I don’t own yet. It must be that thing my buddy just got. It must be that thing I can get if I take the two years same as cash. This more-more cycle is similar to the ignorant man lost at sea who becomes thirsty and begins drinking the ocean water. The need is there for something to satisfy him, but there’s something in the nature of his solution that makes his problem worse. He doesn’t realize as he drinks this water that not only is it not quenching his thirst, it is actually making it worse and, if he doesn’t wise up soon, will eventually kill him. He will die from the thing he thought would solve his problem.
Spiritually, millions of people are dying from the thing they think will solve their problem. They sense a need in themselves and seek desperately to fill that need. But their solution only makes the problem worse, leaves them thirstier than when they began. So what happens? Another trip to the store. Another desperate ploy for a promotion. And every time the emptiness is worse because of the disappointment from our last transaction having not filled us. Now into this environment of frustration and pain and emptiness, I want to bring the words of Jesus. Here’s how Jesus described himself. Here’s Jesus at a well with a woman who’s drawing water. And he says,
John 4:13-14 (NIV)
13 Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,
14 but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
In other words, there’s a permanent solution to your emptiness. You can get out of the more-more cycle. And when you do, you know what the result is? Joy. Joy is knowing you have what you need. Joy is resting in God. Joy is getting out of the rat race. Joy is being relieved of the illusion that we’re going to buy, or manufacture, happiness or peace or love or contentment or anything else we most desire in our lives. When we step out of the rat race and commit our way to God, leave our life in His hands, we have found a cure to the fundamental disease of the human race. Call it what you want, but the Psalmist names it best with the words, “More, more, more, more.” The Apostle Paul wrote:
Philippians 4:12 (NIV)
12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
That is joy. Joy is deep contentment that isn’t dependent on circumstances. It has nothing to do with whether or not you are healthy, or rich, or good-looking, or successful at your job. Joy comes from being alive to your life. Joy doesn’t even have a whole lot to do with being happy or sad. You can carry around an awful lot of sadness and still have a sense of joy. Did you know that? You might say, “Well, if you’re sad, where would the joy come from?” I’m glad you asked.
Psalms 4:8 (MSG)
8 At day’s end I’m ready for sound sleep, For you, God, have put my life back together.
No matter what has happened – whether the events of the day have been positive or negative, good or bad, up or down, to your advantage or the advantage of someone who hates you, joy is ending the day ready for sound sleep, knowing that God has put our lives back together. And how has God done that? By pulling us out of the rat race. Satisfying what was turning out to be an unquenchable thirst. Getting us off the treadmill of slavery to material things that don’t satisfy. Taking the saltwater bottle out of our hands that was killing us, and replacing it with cool, fresh, water that quenches spiritual thirst for real, and for good.
This, my friends, is joy. Remember, joy is not magic. Joy does not happen to us. Joy is the by-product of a life that is:
1. Given over to God
2. Lived in gratitude and thanksgiving toward God
3. Learning that God is all we need
Do you want to live a life of joy? Do you want out of the rat-race, a cure for the more-mores? Do you need to give your life over to God this morning, get off the throne of your life and let Jesus take His rightful place there and become living water to you? Do you need to practice intentional gratitude and thanksgiving to get past a sense of misery that clings to you and become alive to your life? Do you need to learn better this week that God is all you need, maybe by surrendering to God a hunger you have had for material things? Will you pray with me?
Father, some of us here today need to give our lives to you. We are caught in the rat race and the more-mores are killing us. God will you hear my prayer on behalf of those folks today? I would pray for them the prayer of King David from Psalm 51 – “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” As they invite you in their own heart, in their own words, will you send your Holy Spirit to them to make a home for Christ to live in? Will you forgive their sins through the death of Jesus and adopt them as your children? Thank you, God, that you do this when we ask.
Some of us need to be more grateful. We confess complaining spirits to you. Father, we thank you for showing this to us and ask that we would have spiritual eyes to see how you are working all around us. We will be intentional about being more grateful.
Finally God, some of us need to learn more this week about how you are all we need. So we take that thing in our lives that has been an issue for us – that thing we just want so much it’s eating us alive – and we place it on an altar in our mind’s eye, and ask that you would burn it up. Help us not to chase after any God in our lives but You. Thank you that you are a God who hears and answers prayer.
