Life Song: How To Celebrate To The Glory Of God

This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.

For more information about Grand Parkway, visit Grandparkway.org.

Let's pray together.

Father, we want to say thank you for this day.

We want to be good stewards of the freedom that we have.

We also, God, want to increase in our capacity to celebrate you.

So we pray, God, for civility in the culture.

We pray for consequence in the church, and we pray for celebration in the meantime.

Press upon us the insufficiency of our theology of celebration and invite us into a biblical theology of celebration today.

This is our prayer.

Make it our experience, we ask in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

You can have a seat.

If you've got a Bible, I invite you to take it and open it up if you would to the 147th Psalm.

147th Psalm.

And I want to confess I did not grow up in church, did not become a Christian until I was 18.

And one of the first things that I was told when I walked into a Baptist church at 18, I've been a Christian in about four days, was they gave me the list of all the things you shouldn't do.

You shouldn't do this, you shouldn't drink, dance, chew.

Going to parties was a big one.

You shouldn't go to parties.

I went to a lot of parties before I became a Christian.

And then they said you shouldn't go to parties because that's bad.

I want to just uh uh and I want you to hear, I know I realize you got your kids in here with you, and you're kind of like, uh, easy, easy, easy.

Uh uh your problem, uh I'm just gonna put it right out here.

Your problem is that you're not you go to too many parties.

The problem is you don't know how to party.

It's not that you party too much, you don't party enough.

And your parties are lame.

Yes.

And so when you really learn to celebrate the way the Bible created you to celebrate, it it's like going, uh well, I can't even capture it.

Uh, but but uh here's how I know your parties are lame.

I'm not making light of you.

Some of you, if you're like 17, you're kind of like, no, man, me and my friends get together and we do fill in the blank.

We smoke weed, we do whatever we do, okay, great, big deal.

Here's how I know your parties are lame.

Have you ever been at a party that was so incredibly enjoyable that the people there could not contain it, they couldn't express the joy themselves.

They had to hire a choir to express the joy that they found in the party.

Y'all are like, well, I've been to some parties, but never anything like that.

I mean, when you're in high school, remember the big thing was we're gonna get some beer, we're gonna sneak around, and we're gonna Did you ever go and there was a choir there?

This is awesome.

We're breaking the law.

No.

No, that's how, because and that's where we're that's where the Texas was driving us to.

To this picture of a celebration that is so real that the people couldn't, they couldn't express it enough themselves that they had to get a choir to express their their sense of celebration.

Now, the Bible speaks to the whole range of human emotions.

So last week we talked about how to be sad to the glory of God.

Now, most of us kind of live in the middle.

And by the way, thanks for filling up my email inbox, okay, with your responses.

And that's great.

All it says is you're thinking, one of you men sent me an email and said, Are you just saying we're supposed to be sad all the time?

I never said that, okay?

I said you got to be sad sometimes, or sometimes you just you don't choose sadness, sadness chooses you.

And so the pendulum doesn't just swing over here and stay, uh, but also you you can't just stay over here.

Uh the pendulum also got to swing all the way over here, which is why I want to talk to you today about how to celebrate to the glory of God.

How to celebrate to the glory of God.

Now, boys and girls, you're here.

This is a family worship day.

If you're our guest today, we do family worship days on occasion because we want to model for our kids uh what it looks like to be a mom and dad that worships God.

We want our kids to have questions when they walk out of here.

And so if you're taking notes, boys and girls, the first thing I want you to write down is that God likes to party.

And your parents' parties are lame.

And I'll explain that in just a minute.

Let's read from the Bible, Psalm 147, verse 1.

Psalms 147:1

Praise the Lord, for it is good to sing praises to our God.

It is for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting.

The Lord builds up Jerusalem, he gathers the outcasts of Israel, he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

He determines the number of the stars, and he gives to all of them their names.

Great is our Lord and abundant in power, his understanding is beyond measure.

The Lord lifts up the humble, he casts the wicked to the ground.

Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving, make melody to our God on the lyre.

He covers the heaven with cloud heavens with clouds, he prepares rain for the earth, he makes grass grow on the hills, he gives to the beasts their food, and to the young ravens that cry.

His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man.

But the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, and those who hope in his steadfast love.

Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem.

Praise your God, O Zion, for he strengthens the bars of your gates.

He blesses your children within you.

He makes peace in your borders, he fills you with the finest of wheat.

He sends out his command to the earth, his word runs swiftly.

He gives snow like wool, he scatters frost like ashes, he hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs.

Who can stand before his cold?

He sends out his word and melts them.

He makes his wind blow and the waters flow.

He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and rules to Israel.

He has not dealt thus with any other nation.

They do not know his rules.

Praise the Lord.

The psalm begins and ends with this one three-word exclamatory statement.

Praise the Lord, lots of historicity and reasons why, and ends the parentheses with Praise the Lord.

And so I want to call us to a theology of celebration today, and I want to talk to you about how to celebrate to the glory of God.

And the Psalms, 150 of them, and they end the last five Psalms, Psalm 146 through 50, are what's called celebratory Psalms because it kind of, this crescendo is that beginning to recount and remember all the things that God has done.

They cannot contain themselves, all right?

And so let me tell you three things about this.

Number one, celebration involves response.

Celebration involves response.

I'll show you what I mean for the text in a minute, but most of our celebrations involve labor, not response.

And by that I mean this.

We have to work at them, we have to create excitement for them.

We have to invite people to them.

We have to make sure everything's just right.

And you send out and you say RSVP and you invite 50 people and you get 12 people that say you can't come, and you kind of start thinking, what do you mean you can't come?

I know you're in town that weekend.

I've been stalking you on Facebook.

I know all your whereabouts.

And you begin to take it personally.

And at some point in the process, this question goes through your mind Is this worth all the hard work I'm putting into this?

Do these people even appreciate how how hard this is to throw a party?

No, they don't.

They don't.

And and if like next year at Christmas, when you say to your husband, hey, we got invited to seven Christmas parties, and he's like, What?

And you're like, Yeah, we're going to every one of them.

No.

Why?

Because it's hard to fake it.

Ask yourself, don't answer out loud, but how many times have you gone to a party and you felt like it was worth the effort it took for you to get there?

And you're just like, oh man.

So when I say celebration involves response, it's not labor, it's response.

The psalm begins by telling us what to do.

Praise the Lord.

Then he describes what doing this is like.

It's good and pleasant and fitting.

And then he gives us some reasons to praise the Lord.

Let me list two big categories.

Number one, God's dealings with various peoples.

God's dealings with various peoples.

He says this in verse 2 the Lord builds up Jerusalem.

The Lord builds up Jerusalem.

Now that sounds kind of innocuous and kind of like no big deal, but that is one of the acts of God.

God has acted in the lives of his people.

He carved his name and left this indelible imprint upon the hearts and minds of his people.

He builds up Jerusalem and it kind of weaves its way all through this Psalm, all through the New Testament.

And you say, well, I mean the Old Testament.

You say, what do you mean?

Jerusalem was overrun.

It was ramsacked.

It was seized.

It was burned.

It was just this pile of smoking ruins and rubble.

And it was that way for almost 90 years.

And God said all along, I'm going to rebuild and I'm going to restore.

I know you're in captivity, but this and one day I'm going to do this.

And the people were like, How long, O Lord?

How long?

And the psalmist comes along here and says, by the way, the Lord builds up Jerusalem.

And this is after the fact.

This is, hey, hey, hey, hey, God has kept his word, as we'll get to in a little bit.

But they're saying the Lord builds up Jerusalem.

Here's what I'm saying.

You ought to have some things in your life, in the life of your family, that are kind of marker points where you look back and kind of say, Remember when God did this?

So if you're one of my little friends in the room right now, I want you to just write down this question to ask your mom and dad.

Mom and dad, what is the biggest thing you've ever seen God do?

What is the biggest thing you've ever seen God do?

It ought to be conversation around the dinner table.

Hey, remember that time God healed grandma?

Or remember that time God did this?

And you as a family recount and retell things.

Like this is what they're doing here.

He says, hey, here's why you ought to praise God.

He says he builds up Jerusalem.

He gathers the outcast.

This is uh back in the book of Nehemiah when God did what God said he was going to do.

By the way, so many people flooded into the city that there was no place to stay.

There's two times in the Bible that tell the Bible, two times the Bible tells us, hey, people came to a city and there was no room at the end at the birth of Jesus and then at the celebration of the dedication of Jerusalem when the balls had been rebuilt by Nehemiah.

And he invited the outcast.

He said to all these people, hey, he gathers the outcast.

He says, Hey, this is not God saying, I told you so.

It's God saying, I can be trusted.

So when he says, hey, celebration involves a response, it's because of the way God deals with different people.

And secondly, it's God's connection to creation.

It's God's connection to creation.

Look at verse 4.

He determines the numbers of the stars.

He gives to all of them their names.

He determines the numbers of the stars.

He gives to all of them their names.

This picture back here is taken in Wyoming.

It's not a very good quality picture.

It's the best I can find.

That's but I in my mind I think that's where Eugene Peterson lives.

He lives somewhere up there, Montana, somewhere like that.

But but you my point is you have to get out of the city and away from artificial light in order to see stars, as many as there really are.

And I I've confessed to you before that I'm a very simple person.

And so I just take a sentence of the Bible or a section of the Bible and just kind of ruminate on it.

And this has been my thought, okay, for the past few days, is just verse 4.

He determines the number of the stars, and then he gives to all of them their names.

Now, when I say God's connection to creation, I want us just to take that in for a minute.

And when he says he determines the number of the stars, hey, do you have any idea how many stars there are in our galaxy?

You can't research it and get the same answer from everybody.

Like one person said there's 200 billion, best we can tell, that's an estimate, in the Milky Way galaxy.

And then at the end of the article, the guy goes, however, we must factor in what we cannot measure, and that is there are other galaxies that are as big or bigger than ours, and they have stars too.

One person said, when I asked the question, how many stars?

He said, There's 100,000 million in the Milky Way alone.

Now, why do I make a big deal out of this?

Because the Bible says he determines the number of stars.

Translation, the only person that can answer that question is God.

And it gets more personal in the next part of the sentence, he gives to all of them their names.

How many of you in this room have kids?

Okay?

Put your hand down.

I have two.

You ever call your kids the wrong name?

I mean, I got two.

And now you start with the same letter.

It's Madison and Sophie.

And sometimes it comes out Mofi.

I mean, I mean, I mean, so I just get it screwed up all the time.

And another thing I realize studying for today, scientists give lame names to stars.

They name stars things like SC-117 N2QT.

And they're going to stand before God on judgment day, and God's going to go, no, that's Ralph.

That's not his name.

That's not his name at all.

His name's Ralph.

How do you know?

Because I named him.

I determined the exact number and I named every one of them.

And here's the deal: I got two kids, and I get their names mixed up, he never calls them by the wrong name.

Now you're probably thinking by now, hey, why are you telling us this?

Here's why I'm telling you this.

Here's where it brings down to where you and I live.

Here's the connection to us.

If God is that intimately acquainted with inanimate objects that were not created in his image, that do not bear his likeness, that do not have a soul, that he did not breathe the rua, the breath of God into their nostrils and give life to them.

He just created them, but they're not, they do not bear his image.

If God is that intimately acquainted with them that he determines their numbers and he gives all of them names, then ask yourself this question.

Then how familiar with our lives is he?

Just how familiar, how intricately involved in the details of your life is he.

So I say to you, if you're in the room today and you're 12 and you're like, hey, I got a lot going on, and by the way, 12-year-olds do.

You may be in the room and be seven and be like, you know what?

I think about getting a job and I watch TV and the president's tweeting this and people are fighting about that.

Here's the thing you can't get your eyes off the prize and get it on that.

You got to come back to what the Bible says, that we are called into a relationship with a God that is intimately acquainted with anything and with everything having anything to do with you.

And the pressure is not on you.

Matter of fact, the pressure is off of you.

The more you grow in your knowledge and your understanding of who God is and how familiar He is with you.

And so when I say that celebration involves a response, you are responding to a God that is very familiar with every every thought you have.

Secondly, celebration involves thanksgiving.

It involves thanksgiving.

Verse 7, he says this.

He says, Sing to the Lord with thanksgiving, make melody to our God on the lyre, which is like kind of like a harp-like guitar instrument.

Then he says this, by the way, when he commands us to sing to the Lord with thanksgiving, he then he gives reasons.

He says in verse 8, he covers the heavens with clouds.

He prepares rain for the earth, he makes grass grow on the hills.

He gives to the beasts their food and to the young ravens that cry.

His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man, but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him and those who hope in his steadfast love.

Now, the psalmist does what the Bible does a lot, because a lot of times, even in biblical times, people could lose sight of how intimately concerned and connected God was with them and everything about them.

And so the Bible would point to animals when he says, Hey, you should you you should sing to the Lord with thanksgiving.

Notice that all that then all the reasons he gives that we should sing with thanksgiving to God have nothing to do with us.

Look at it.

He says he covers the heavens, uh uh he covers the heavens with clouds, he prepares rain for the earth.

Just take it up the last two weeks.

How much is it rained here?

He makes grass grow on the hills.

Nobody puts it up there.

He makes grass grow on the hills.

He gives to the beasts their food and to the young ravens that cry.

That's not referring to your kids in Chick-fil-A drive-thru.

No.

I came down here the other night to get something, and there's a coyote standing right out there.

And I rolled down my window and said, What are you doing?

And he just kind of looked at me like, You got anything to eat?

And I drove back to the warehouse and he just kind of ran along, just loped along, and then he hopped into the ditch.

Now, if one of my kids would have been with me, they would have gone, Oh, Dad, we should feed him.

And I would have been, don't be stupid your whole life.

So I had to prepare a response for my kids.

If I told them, hey, I saw a coyote, and they're like, Well, what does he eat?

Hey, God feeds him.

God takes care of him.

Now, all through the Bible, don't miss this, look at me.

All through the Bible, they're they're kind of pointing at creation and nature and animals and God's way of saying, hey, if I take care of these people, these things that were not created in my image, do not have a soul in them, do not have my divine imprint on them like you do.

If I take care of them to this degree, how do you think, how much more do you think I'm going to take care of you?

Probably the biggest and best example of that is Jesus in Matthew chapter 6, starting in verse 25.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Hear these words.

How Jesus Himself points at creation and then brings it back to us.

Matthew 6, 25, therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life.

Anybody in this room anxious?

We've all been there.

We all get jammed up to we're just kind of like, oh, the anxiety is overwhelming.

Are you kidding me?

Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you'll put on.

Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air.

They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.

Are you not of more value than they?

And beloved, that's really the question this morning.

Are you not of more value than they?

And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life?

Why are you anxious about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin.

And yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you?

Oh, you have little faith.

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear?

For the Gentiles seek after these things.

And your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

What Jesus is doing here is very subtle, but it's it needs to be seen, is that he's contending for a bigger definition of life.

When he says this, is life not more than food and the body more than clothes?

Ask yourself, boys and girls, what's worth worrying about?

I want you to ask your mom and dad tonight before you go to bed, hey, what's worth me worrying about?

I don't care if you're six or sixteen.

Ask your parents, hey, what's worth worrying about?

Because Jesus says, hey, don't worry about what you're gonna eat, don't worry about your body, and don't worry about your clothes.

I'm gonna take care of all of that.

So you are freed up to take all the emotional energy you connect to those things and kind of point that towards the kingdom.

Here's what allows us to do that.

You have to embrace the simple, fundamental, form, formative truth, hot out of the mouth of Jesus, and it's this are you not of more value than they?

Are you not of more value than they?

Young ladies, listen to me.

Unless you embrace this good theology from the Bible, you don't realize I'm of much more value than them, you will sell yourself to the first guy that comes along and pays you attention.

And it's not a moral statement, it's a value statement.

You do not embrace the fact that I am much more valuable than they.

That's what Jesus says.

And so I don't have to worry about that.

And so when I say celebration involves Thanksgiving, this is what I mean.

He points to all these different animals sometimes in nature and creation, birds and sparrows and lilies, and kind of says, Hey, look at all these things.

Matter of fact, my little friends are in the room, I want you to do something right now.

I want you to draw me a picture of your most favorite animal in the world.

And let it be a reminder that God says, Hey, as much as you enjoy that, I enjoy you that much more.

Thirdly, the Bible tells us that celebration involves perspective.

It involves perspective.

Verse 12, he says, Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem.

Three times he's kind of given this command in verse 1, and then again in verse 7, he says, Sing to the Lord of thanksgiving.

Now in verse 12 he says, Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem.

And then it gets personal.

He says, Praise your God, O Zion.

In other words, God has done something for you, people, that he hasn't done elsewhere.

And he's referring to the rebuilding of Jerusalem in verse 13.

He says, For he strengthens the bars of your gates, he blesses your children within you, he makes peace in your borders, he fills you with the finest of wheat, he sends out his command to the earth, and his word runs swiftly.

Now, it's hard for us to fathom this because we're kind of after the fact.

But but Jerusalem was pretty much decimated for 90 years.

Anyone in this room?

90 years old?

Anybody?

Anybody?

So, here's my point.

Longer than all of us have been alive, this thing, it's like your house burning down tomorrow, and then for your entire life, your house burning down a long time ago, and for your entire life, you go over and look at it, and your parents say, Hey, I'll tell you what, we're gonna rebuild this, and it's gonna be so much better than what it used to be.

It's gonna be bigger, your bedroom's gonna be twice as big as it used to be.

Who wouldn't want that?

I mean, if your parents said to you, hey, you want to twice you want a bedroom twice as big as what you got now?

You'd be like, Uh-huh.

Yes.

Well, for 90 years, it's laying there in ruins, and God keeps saying, I'm gonna rebuild, I'm gonna rebuild, I'm gonna rebuild.

And people didn't believe God.

They heard God, but they didn't believe God, and so they begin to take matters into their own hands.

You say, What what what do you mean?

They take matters into their own hands.

In the book of Zechariah, it records Zechariah chapter 2, verses 1 to 5.

Zechariah 2:1–5

It tells a story.

Jerusalem was in ruins.

God's saying, I will, I will, I will.

Now this is free, okay?

Don't miss this.

God speaks in the future, and we have to live in the present.

God says, I will, I will, I will.

That's in the future.

And we live in the present, and you've got to ask yourself, do I have enough faith in this God to trust him to do what he says he will do, but has yet to do?

Because for the people in Jerusalem, they were like, hey, God, we got it, but we we also got a plan.

We're a bunch of engineers.

We graduate from AM.

We can rebuild this bad boy.

Whoop! I hear you out there, sister kissers.

Anyway.

Zechariah, you're everywhere.

Hear this.

Zechariah chapter 2, verse 1.

Zechariah 2:1

He says, I lifted my eyes and I saw and behold a man with a measuring line in his hand.

And then I said, Where are you going?

And he said to me, To measure Jerusalem, to see what is its width, what is its length.

And behold, the angel who talked with me came forward.

And another angel came forward to meet him and said to him, Run, say to that young man, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls, because of the multitude of people and livestock in it.

And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the Lord.

And I will be the glory in her midst.

See, God is still speaking future tense, and they're stuck in this moment.

They belong to eternity and they're stranded in time, and they are weary of struggling with sin.

And they're like, you know what, God, I can't hear no more future tense.

I'm going to take matters in my own hands.

And so he takes a tape measure and he goes out there to measure what was so he can rebuild what was.

But what God is saying is, hey, I want to do something bigger than what was.

And so he says, hey, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as his villages without walls because the multitude of people and livestock in it.

Now keep in mind, it is just a big pile of rubble.

It is nothing.

And God's talking about what He will.

I will, I will, I will.

Again, we've got to hear the future and live in the present and still and hold on to a belief in God.

Otherwise, look at me, beloved, you take matters into your own hands.

You get you a measuring line and you go out there and you determine the kind of man you'll settle for or the kind of woman you'll settle for.

You kind of measure things and kind of go, you know what?

My first marriage was like this, and I'd kind of like to have something like that.

What if God wants to do something bigger and better?

Do you have the faith to wait on what only for God to do, what only God can do?

Back to the 147th Psalm.

He says, for he strengthens the bar, uh the bars of your gates, he blesses your children within you.

Now, what's happening?

This is after the fact.

God is done.

God basically has kept his word.

And so the last part of this psalm is about God keeping his word and God giving his word to his people.

Earlier they said, you know, praise the Lord with thanksgiving.

And the reality behind this word is so big that they need some help kind of expressing it.

And if you ever kind of wane uh in your heart for worship, or you're just kind of like, you know what?

I'm just not feeling it.

You need to read Nehemiah chapter 12, verses 27 to about verse 43.

Nehemiah 12:27

I won't read the whole thing.

I'll just read the last part of the last verse in just a minute.

But but here's the picture.

For almost 90 years, God's been saying, I will, I will, and then he taps a man named Nehemiah to go back and rebuild the wall around Jerusalem.

And Nehemiah goes out by himself he rides a donkey out in the middle of the night, gets off the donkey, walks around, surveys the wall.

He comes back in chapter two and says, I had not yet told anyone what God had put in my heart to do for Jerusalem.

Because God is a God who puts things in people's hearts to do.

And so he rallies the people, they rebuild the wall in 52 days, and in Nehemiah chapter 12, they dedicate the wall.

Nehemiah 12 · chapter mention

Now, this is remember when I said to begin with, boys and girls, that God is a God who likes the party?

And that our party's pale in comparison to God's party.

And so this party is so incredible the people can't say it themselves, and so they get two choirs.

And they send one choir up on the wall around this way, and they send another choir up on the wall to go around this way, and they encircle the city.

It's enough choir people.

Can you imagine a choir this big to encircle the whole city of Jerusalem?

And all of a sudden, because here's why, because somebody's fixing to get their praise on.

It's fixing to get loud up in here, and not for the sake of being loud, it's it's it's it's combustible.

It's like drop, it's like dropping a mento into a diet coke.

If you're looking for something to do on July 4th, try that on.

I mean, combustion is going to take place and the choir is marching in.

Can you imagine you're sitting there in the city and all of a sudden, are we being invaded?

No, no, no, no.

We're fixing to declare to God, we're fixing to open up our hearts and let our thanksgiving come out.

And that's exactly what happens.

And why am I telling you that?

Here's why.

Because in Nehemiah chapter 12, verse 43, here's how that little picture ends, because these people have been that I mean, their celebration, it involves the reality that, hey, I've got this perspective.

Nehemiah 12:43

My perspective is that for years I've been heard about what, I've been hearing about what God will do, and now God's done it, and now I got something stirring up in me that I've got to just kind of come before God and get this out of me.

And the Bible says this Nehemiah chapter 12, verse 43.

Nehemiah 12:43

And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

Just just let that in for a minute.

And the joy of Jerusalem.

Boys and girls, let me ask you a question to ask your mom and dad.

How do your mom and dad know when you're happy?

And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

Let me give you big people in the room a question.

What does joy sound like coming out of you?

And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

Not joy because they got a job or they got a new truck or they got a better house.

All good things, you should praise God for them.

You should have build you a big, beautiful home and hire a choir and have a party.

And when people come and there's a big choir, hopefully in the circle drive, rocking to and fro, singing about the battle of Jericho, and your friends are walking in, kind of like, uh, whoa, what's with the choir?

I'm so excited.

God's been so good.

I couldn't tell you with my own words, and my wife and kids couldn't tell you.

So we hired a choir because we want all the neighborhood to know, to be put on alert and notice that God is this awesome.

Well, I brought a bottle of wine as a hostess gift.

Where do I put this?

You've never been to that kind of party.

You've never been to the dedication of a business where they had a choir up on the roof singing down on the people.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine a joy that is so spontaneous?

A long time ago, how many of y'all in this room grew up in church?

Anybody grow up in church?

Any of y'all grew up in a church that sang hymns?

Remember, remember the books on the back of the little rack?

Yes.

Yes.

There's a hymn in that in the Baptist hymnal.

And the name of it is this joy unspeakable and full of glory.

That's what it was for these people.

But they found a way to get it out.

And the Bible says this, and the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

I wonder this morning how far away they can hear our joy.

Because here's my prayer for our church is when we begin to worship God, that our city, not just Sugarland, but Fort Bend County, there's about roughly 80,000 people in Sugarland, but in Fort Bend County, there's over 800,000 people.

It is a big county.

It goes way that way.

Like it's over into Houston.

And I just wonder if they could hear our joy today, beloved.

I wonder if your kids can hear your joy.

If I ask your kids, hey, what are what brings my parents joy?

What brings your parents joy?

What would they say?

Because the Bible says, and the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

God's been speaking in the future tense, and now God's come in the moment, and God's kept his word because God always keeps his word.

Amen.

And the people were like, oh my gosh, we cannot contain this.

We've got to tell you how our mind is blown over this.

And so they have enough choir members to encircle the whole city.

And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away.

Here's what I want you to not miss, and I'll be done this morning.

You still with me?

Joy is not a silent experience.

It's not, well, I'm joyful.

I just, I'm just not that, I'm just not a very, you know, I don't talk a lot.

Okay.

And so what you have to ask yourself is how do you express joy?

What does it look like for you to celebrate?

And what do you celebrate?

Like, for example, I told the first service, I might as well tell you, July is National Ice Cream Month.

Amen.

Yes.

And so to celebrate, I will be dropping in on some of you at random.

I won't come unannounced, okay?

Like yesterday I was driving around through a neighborhood, uh, and I was looked and I was like, I think that's one of my church members.

And I rolled down, he had grills out in his driveway and he had coolers in the grass.

And I said, You get ready for Fourth of July?

Oh, oh, hey, hey, hey, hey.

And that third hey was like, it's the preacher.

Yeah.

And I said, hey, get your party on.

Get going.

Okay.

What are you doing here?

I love when you don't know what to say to me.

And I'm like, by the way, unless you got a choir, your party's gonna be lame.

Happy Fourth of July.

So I'm celebrating National Ice Cream Month because I'm just gonna drop in on different people, different families.

I'll call you and say, hey, I've got some uh drum, a box of drumsticks, or I've got some popsicles, I'm 10 minutes away.

Can I drop in and just celebrate?

And the first people, I told him because he was in the first service, little Andrew Bieber, he's about seven years old.

I've been to his house before.

He's got a balcony on the second floor, and I get up there and play dodgeball with him.

And I knock that kid out.

And his sister's like, hey, I don't want, hey, you want me to hit your brother again?

And she's like, Yes.

And his parents are there, and he's like, Pastor Neil, can you hit me with a ball?

I'm your man.

After a week at my office, I've got pent-up aggression.

I need to get it out.

And so I told him this morning, I'm coming to your house when he said, Strawberry is my favorite kind of ice cream, and my sister loves chocolate.

And so I will show up with a half gallon of bluebell strawberry and bluebell chocolate, and I'll get up on the second floor and I will play dodgeball.

That little kid, the yard's not that big.

He's it's hard to miss him.

And he's got a ball about that big.

I said, You still got that big ball?

Do I need to get one?

He goes, I've got the ball.

Come on.

I looked at his parents and I was like, Why does your kid have a fond affection for concussions?

Somebody was standing here and they said, You're being serious, right?

And I said, Absolutely.

They said, Why?

I said, Because I want Andrew and his sister Annabelle to grow up and think, you know what?

There's a lot in this world worth celebrating.

And we don't celebrate enough.

And you can't just say, I want to be sad to the glory of God.

Sadness connects you, okay, to life and to what it's like to be authentically engaged in this world.

And that it connects you, but celebration compresses you.

It reminds you that you're not in this world alone, that there's a God in here.

You look around at creation, you look at lilies and sparrows, and you're reminded, oh my gosh, I'm of much more value than they are, and God takes care of them infinitely graciously.

Is he not going to be even better than that to me?

Or, as Paul asks it in Romans chapter 8, about verse 31, he who spared not his own son, but freely offered him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

Romans 8 · chapter mention

Let's pray together.

If you're our guest today, we just relax.

We like to teach the Bible and then give you some space to think about it.

And so what we'd like to ask you to do right now is just to take some moment.

You may want to close your close your eyes, you may want to bow your head, you may want to just sit there.

We're not telling you what to do, but but but kind of block out everybody and everything around you and ask yourself, what's my one takeaway?

Because what I want you to do as an individual and a family is I want you to find something in the next two weeks to celebrate.

And I want you to celebrate it.

Not not as an act of labor, but uh, but but as a response.

Like, oh my gosh, oh, I can't help myself.

Maybe today your takeaway is just that simple question Jesus asked in Matthew 6 are you not of more value than they?

Do you have any idea how much I care about you?

And by the way, Jesus is not saying to us, hey, if you're anxious, you should feel bad for being anxious.

No, he's saying, because I knew you would feel anxious.

I taught about these things.

I looked at people way back then and I said, Hey, see the lilies of the field?

They don't toil or spin.

And yet I take care of them.

Translation, I'm gonna take care of you.

What does your joy sound like today, beloved?

Let's give ourselves to that consideration for just a moment.

I want you to look at me for a moment.

Celebration is not hard, it's not it's not labor, it's it's reflex.

Let me demonstrate.

I have a friend of mine that grew up very poor.

And as a consequence, he slept on the couch or on the floor his whole life growing up.

Got a job as a roughneck in the oil field, worked his way up.

Now he's got this sounds like a hovercraft.

It's a diesel Ford F 250 King Ranch edition, blah, blah, blah.

But that's not his favorite thing.

His favorite thing was he and his wife bought a temperatic adjustable mattress, bed.

You know what I'm talking about?

And his wife texted me and she said, Oh my gosh, I love my husband in a way I've never loved him before.

Because she knew he slept on the floor as a kid growing up, and she goes, We got our bed, and apparently they're expensive, right?

Kind of a big deal, and it has a temperature-controlled cooling mechanism in it, and I'm like getting jealous on the phone, like, shut up.

Uh and she said, Neil, we we we adjusted it.

You know, the head can come up and the feet can come up, and I'm just like, Yeah, that's great.

I'll be sleeping on the floor tonight.

Keep talking.

Uh and she said, we were laying in bed and we were playing with it, and it was all, and then we flattened it out and we turned off the TV.

And about two minutes later, I heard my husband sniffling.

And I said, Babe, are your allergies bothering you?

She said, My husband just laying in bed sobbing, just crying, the tears that go out the side of your eyes, into your hair.

And she turned her lamp on and said, Babe, are you okay?

And he all he could get out was, God's been so good to us.

I don't sleep on the floor anymore.

And he got out of bed and he just got down beside his bed on his knees, and he said, Can we just tell God thank you for being so good?

And she said, Thanks for telling my husband.

Because when I first met him, I was like, hey, God has the infinite capacity to be better to you, then you have to be better.

You try to be good to yourself, and that leads to sin.

God wants to be even better to you than that, it will blow your mind.

And she said, I just fell in love with my husband all over again, kneeling down beside our Seely adjustable bed or whatever it's called, temperatic bed.

And I was like, when I was reading the 147th Psalm last week, get ready for today, I thought about him.

Celebration is not labor.

You just have to remember how good God's been to you and not lose sight of that.

And it's just like spontaneous combustion, it just explodes inside of you.

Anybody here got a sleep number bed?

You know what I'm talking about?

Y'all like, I'm not raising my hand, you'll come to my house.

I might.

I was in Costa Rica, sleeping on the ground with some of our men last February.

And in one of the tents down the mountain, I heard some guy say, I miss my sleep number bed.

And then James Serrano over there goes, Me too.

And somebody over there goes, Me too.

I'm like, how many people have these beds?

See how much we take for granted?

My wife and I, for the first seven years of our marriage, slept on just a full-size mattress.

When we got a king-sized bed, my wife cried.

She's laid in it and did snow angels.

She goes, Finally, I can sleep without you touching me.

We're supposed to celebrate that.

You are a hog.

You take a this thing's not that thing.

You take up a lot of room.

You're a big man.

See, celebration is not hard.

You just have to come at it to the lens of Thanksgiving.

Let me pray.

God, thank you for temperatic, adjustable mattresses, for sleep number beds.

I pray that for whatever reason, when people buy themselves nice stuff like that, they feel guilty.

That's not that's not the God of the Bible.

So wash off of us all the religious guilt that culture tries to put on us.

I pray that if anybody in this room has one of those, they'd go home and just play with it, enjoy it, and realize they could be sleeping on the floor.

But you've been so good to them.

They can get things they just want.

They don't necessarily need them, they just want them.

The point is, God, we have so much to celebrate.

We don't want to we don't want to lose sight of it.

So, Holy Spirit, stab our consciousness, awakened to your generosity in our life, and let that lead to celebration.

Lord, for our pleasure and yet for your glory, we play, we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Would everyone say.

Amen.

Amen.

How many of y'all are ready to go home and lay on your bed?

Hey, by the way, let me before we let you out of here, there's a couple things we're celebrating coming up by way of announcement.

I want to make you aware of so you can join in the celebration.

First of all, on July 19th, we're having a woman's gather women's gathering right here in the sanctuary.

Uh, here's all the information on it.

Uh, Marcy, our women's pastor, will be speaking, and Lindsay uh will be leading worship.

Lindsey Frelick.

Uh that is July 19th from 6:30 to 8 30, right here in the sanctuary.

Secondly, tomorrow is a kickoff of Breakfast Club.

Breakfast Club is a book club our student ministry does.

It is for 7th through 12th graders, but also it's for 5th and 6th graders, which is called the Bridge Ministry.

Uh and so they're reading different books, and tomorrow's a kickoff.

We have breakfast and then small group time to process kind of what you're reading.

You okay?

Anyway, uh, yes.

Do what?

Don't just smell like a camel.

Yeah, don't just smell like a camel.

Yes.

Um, but also for the bridge students, fifth and sixth grade, tomorrow after Breakfast Club, you're going to Typhoon, Texas.

Uh, and so tonight is the last, it the deadline to register is tonight, because we need to make sure we got enough fans to get everybody there.

So tomorrow, it's a great opportunity for spiritual formation and then just fun.

And look at me.

Here's why we do things like this.

We want your students to look around and make some forms of friendships with other people and realize they're not on this journey alone.

That, hey, there's people here, not just my peers, but there's adults here that are going to help me in this whole Christianity thing.

And so tomorrow, if you haven't registered, you can register online.

You just go click on the student ministry link and it'll take you right to that.

Uh, we sent you an email this week so you can sign up.

That all kicks off tomorrow.

Lastly, family uh VBS is July 13th and 14th.

It's at night, and we do it family-based because we think, we believe what the Bible teaches uh parents, that you are the spiritual leaders of your home.

Uh that is your privilege and your responsibility.

We do not want to replace you, we want to equip you.

And so that's why we do family VBS.

Uh it's July 13th and 14th, 6 to uh to 8:30, I believe, in the children's building.

There's all the information, but we need you to register so we can plan accordingly, okay?

If you have questions about any of that or anything you heard this morning, we'll be available down front.

We'd love to pray with you.

We'd love to celebrate with you, whatever God's doing in your life, okay?

Stand to your feet.

Let me speak a blessing over you.

Hold your hands out.

Your God is the God of the temperature, the sleep number, the couch, and the floor.

And we've all been there at different times in our lives.

Physically speaking, and spiritually speaking.

So if you're sleeping on the floor today, spiritually speaking, you're not going to be there forever.

Hold on.

There's a temperature coming.

That's how good God is.

Depart now and live in that reality in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you.

You're dismissed.