Unshakeable Joy In A Shaking World - Advent Message

Sermon for Advent 3 - Joy - December 14, 2025 -

What gives you joy? Name one thing.

What are some examples of joy? Of course I’ve had times of great happiness in my life which come close to joy. Marrying my beautiful wife Barbara in 1987 was a great highlight.

And then comes the challenge of marriage, the ups and downs, the financial struggles, health struggles and changes in our lives due to the deaths of our various family members.

Having our children, Jared and Elia were both sources of great joy. But when Jared was born both he and Barbara came very close to losing their lives.

And then there's the struggle of raising children, through illness, through rebellion, through their own struggles as adults. But then there’s joy as Elia gets married, and as Jared is settled very well into a strong relationship.

And of course nothing beats being a grandparent to our two awesome grandkids, Stephen and Matthew.

We pass through many seasons of great happiness, moments that come close to true joy, yet each one follows a natural course that inevitably rises to peaks and sinks into valleys. By far the greatest point of joy for me was coming to faith in Jesus Christ when I was 17 years old on the Ides of March 1980.

That has been a joy that has sustained me for over 45 years. In the midst of all the ups and downs of life, losses of people that I love, all manners of struggle, the joy of knowing Jesus trumps everything by a very wide margin.

I can’t overstate the massive, extraordinary blessing of the change that came into my life permanently when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour.

But of course it's a truism that you cannot avoid suffering in this life. Suffering is the universal constant. Hardship and challenge is completely unavoidable in life.

So it strikes me that for all our advances, for all of our technology, for all of the ways we have developed since the events described today in our scripture reading occurred way back in the day, humanity is still humanity.

People are still people. Much of life was very difficult back then, much of life is very difficult now. We needed God back in the time of Jesus, we need God now in our lives.

Back then many believed in God. Many didn’t, or they followed after idols. Or they believed in God in theory, but it didn’t mean much because they did not follow the ways of God outlined in the Bible.

And those “ways of God”, which some consider so very heavy - the 10 Commandments for example - were only ever calling us back how we were created, to the first book of Genesis. After God had created the world, He then created something unique, in His own image. Genesis 1: 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

A few verses later, God steps back, as it were and takes in all that He has created.

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

One key implication is our inner life—our conscience—and that’s where God’s commands come in. To understand that we can look at the 10 Commandments, the basis of the OT Law.

How do the 10 Commandments fit into that, you might ask? It’s actually really simple on the one hand, and pretty cosmic on the other.

We’re made in God's image. What’s that about? Well, for instance, God doesn’t steal. So we, made in His image, should not steal. Thus the Commandment.

God doesn’t lie. We should not lie, as image bears of God. Thus the Commandment. Etc. Etc.

Those commandments were simply a call to live as we were created, as image bearers of God.

They are about ordering our internal world. Do you ever feel like it’s chaos on the inside? That’s because you’re living out of alignment with the way you were intended by your creator to live.

And not you only. All of humanity got shifted out of alignment. Our internal moral world, which is like a universe in itself, got seriously displaced, messed up, fouled up by the first few humans ever made in God’s image.

Adam and Eve’s decision to want to be like and live like gods was the decision to live in a gross distortion of reality. What reality? God is God. Our Creator is God. The Lord is God. We are not. He is above. We are below.

So because of that proto-sin, or first sin, the internal moral world of every human being has been messed up.