"Wisdom's Joy" Proverbs 14-15 Sunday Evening Worship Service

2 Corinthians chapter 1 verse 24 says that one of the pastor's most basic jobs is to work with God's people to make them joyful.

2 Corinthians 1:24

Paul tells the Corinthians, which was a church that bugged the socks right off of his apostolic feet, by the way.

Paul tells the Corinthians that he was laboring with them for their joy.

That's his pastoral obligation to work with a congregation to produce joy in their life.

It's my prayer for you that our time going through God's word together would produce a true and abiding joy in your life.

That it would transform your heart from the inside out and make you joyful.

And you can measure the maturity, in a sense, of a person's spiritual life by their joy.

That's why Paul challenges really himself in 2 Corinthians 1 to be at work in people's hearts for joy.

It's a basic barometer of your spiritual life.

Do you have the joy of the Lord?

It's a very oft-comed repeated command in the scripture to be joyful, to pursue joy, to cultivate joy in your life.

There's, of course, you can get lost in the cause and effect dynamic, but you know how you can measure the health of your marriage by do you have joy in your marriage?

Is there joy in your home?

What's the temperature of your house?

Is it joyful?

You can measure your contentment at work by your joy, so to speak.

Want practical advice as a kid?

Be happy at home.

You want practical advice as a parent?

Be happy.

Have joy.

There's much that can be said about what the word joy means.

You can spin your wheels with all the different words for joy in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

But honestly, there's not a lot of mileage to be gained there.

The word in the Old Testament, the word in the New Testament for joy is basically the English word for joy.

There's no true distinction between joy and happiness.

People often say happiness is temporary and joy is eternal and abiding.

They're the same words.

It's just this idea that you are to have a joy that is in the Lord.

That's the difference between a godly joy and a happy meal.

Joy in the Lord is abiding and eternal, and happy meals are sinful.

There you have it.

1 Thessalonians 5.16 says, Rejoice always.

Philippians 3, verse 1 says, Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord.

Philippians 3:1

Philippians 4, 4, rejoice in the Lord always.

Again I say rejoice.

Those verses there, Philippians 3.1 and 4.4, in the middle of that is Philippians 3.

And that's a similar degree, paying off right there.

And as you look at that passage that's bracketed by the two commands for joy, you have all of Paul's hardships.

You have all of his difficulties culminating in the two women that are arguing in church.

It's interesting to me that in Philippians, which is often noted as the epistle of joy, that all those complaints are bracketed by the command to have joy.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this command to have joy is one of the key distinctions between Christianity and every other religion.

Our religion is a religion of joy.

You don't measure faithfulness to fastidious Judaism, faithfulness to the pillars of Islam, faithfulness to the sacraments of Catholicism.

You don't measure any of those things by joy, but by their actions, by their functions, by their Torah-keeping capacity.

But inside of true evangelical Christianity, evangelical there, just meaning good news, the good news of the gospel is joy.

We have the evangel, we have the gospel, which is good news because it brings us joy.

The fact that it is good makes us joyful.

The fact that we have joyful as a result of it makes it good news.

It's cyclical.

We don't have a religion of work or of effort or of regulations, but of joy.

And that joy in Christ provokes our spiritual growth.

Provokes our spiritual growth.

So many flaws in the church can be attributed to a lack of joy.

So many people foolishly pursuing sin can be attributed to a lack of joy.

Augustine in his confessions, if you've ever read it, you understand the role that joy played in his conversion.

He had experienced the joys of this world and it left him heartbroken.

Then he encountered Christ through the preaching in Milan, and that gave him a gospel outlook in life, but it wasn't ultimately his conversion until he sat down and wrestled through what joy was.

And even after encountering the joy of Christ through the gospel, he recognized, looking back at it retrospectively, the times of spiritual decline or conflict or strife in his life came from a lack of joy in Christ.

He writes this in confessions.

It's kind of small font, so I'll read it for you.

I was astonished that although I now loved you, I did not persist in enjoyment of my God.

So he's speaking post-conversion, when he loved the Lord, he says he was astonished that although he was converted, he did not yet enjoy God or persist in it.

Your beauty drew me to you, but soon I was dragged away from you by my own weight, and in dismay I plunged again into the things of this world, as though I had sensed the fragrance of the fare, but was not yet able to eat it.

Notice he's using language here connecting to Hebrews 6, where he's talking about those that are around the church but have yet to fully embrace it.

And he connects that to his lack of joy.

It is wise to be joyful.

If the book of Proverbs is kind of your overview of joy, it is wise to have joy.

And when you think just like logically, I want to appeal logically to you before I get into the nitty-gritty of the Proverbs here.

Logically, you understand the way that works.

If wisdom, remember how we defined wisdom at the beginning of our study in Proverbs, wisdom is the capacity to understand how God made the world and how the world functions.

You can have, in a sense, wisdom and not know the Lord.

You can have, you can understand the way the world works.

You can understand how bribes grease the skids, so to speak.

You understand how lies can be a boomerang that come back on your head.

You understand how divisiveness can be poison and contentment can lead to more peace in the world.

You can get those things conceptually.

You can understand the river is flowing this way and swim that way because you see the river is going that way.

You're going to swim in it that way, and life goes easier for you.

That's wisdom, the ability to navigate the way the world works.

Now, to truly embrace wisdom, you have to understand the source of the river is God.

His word is true.

You love the river because you learned that wisdom corresponds to the way the world works, which corresponds to how God is and who God is, and you love the Lord.

So true wisdom, of course, involves a saving relationship with God.

But you can navigate the things in this world by understanding at a superficial level wisdom without being converted.

And here's where joy is so critical to recognizing your relationship to God.

If you recognize the way the world works and you see rightfully your place in it, it has a transforming effect on your heart to make you joyful.

Because your joy is not rooted in circumstances, your joy is not rooted in which way the river is flowing at the moment, how the river ebbs and flows.

Your joy is rooted in the fountain of the river, the one who made the earth and all that is in it.

And that's why Scripture calls us to be joyful.

And if you outline tonight, track along here, repeat the sounding joy.

Repeat the sounding joy.

It is, of course, as you know, this is Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, and C.S.

Lewis.

It is, of course, as you know, a Christian duty for everyone to be as happy as Lewis's word.

Joyful is my word tonight as one can be.

It's your Christian duty to be as joyful as you can be.

And that can be difficult because the world doesn't often cooperate with your pursuit of joy.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes the box under the TV that looks like the Nintendo is, in fact, the Nintendo.

Sometimes that's true.

Sometimes it's a Costco-sized box of socks.

That's also happened.

And so not everything in the world is cooperating for your joy.

Part of maturity and wisdom is recognizing the hand of providence in all things and finding your joy in it.

The main reason God gave us emotions, joy is obviously emotion.

The main reason God gave us emotions is so we could experience happiness.

And so, in that sense, joy is kind of the pinnacle of emotions.

God made us emotional beings.

God himself, in some sense, has emotions.

God, of course, is pure energy, pure light, pure action, pure delight, pure emanation.

He's constantly giving himself, constantly revealing himself, constantly displaying his power and his wonder and his glory in the world.

God is constantly communicating himself.

And the main description of that could be joy, just the overflowing exuberance of joy.

So it is not an exaggeration to say the main reason God gave us emotions is so that we can embrace and experience and reflect and participate in that joy and that happiness.

We're distinguished from the animals because we can have happiness in who God is.

Animals can learn the seasons, they can learn which yards have the good bird feeders, they can learn all those ins and outs.

They don't delight in those things.

Give your cat a scratch on his belly, and he may act like he is delighting in the world and all that God made, but he's just delighting in your claw, your hand.

People are different than that because we delight in the maker of the hands.

We delight not just in the sensations that we feel, but in the motivation behind the sensations that God designed us for happiness.

And our ultimate happiness is found in Him.

It was Calvin who wrote that the principal use of our understanding is to be dedicated towards the pursuit of happiness, the knowledge of God and the happiness and joy that it brings.

Calvin called it the principal use of our understanding.

In other words, to ESV that, the main point of wisdom is for you to understand what it means to delight in God.

The Proverbs, there's 16 Proverbs about joy or contentment.

And all sixteen of them have to be tethered to that point.

How you repeat the sounding joy, how you delight in the joy that God gives you.

Here's my four points.

First, wisdom is joyful.

Wisdom is joyful.

Wisdom is supposed to make you happy.

It's supposed to be delightful.

It's how God made us.

God made us to delight in Him.

Now, initially, God made us to be sinless.

Recall?

He made Adam and Eve in the garden.

Sin was not an essential part of Adam and Eve's experience.

Their bodies were complete, they were perfect, they were good as they were absent sin.

But they had the capacity to change, just like animals didn't eat themselves in the garden, but you know, the tigers had the teeth to do just that when the time arose.

People were made to be sinless.

And yet we have the capacity to receive the emotions and the joy and the delight that comes in God, even in a fallen world.

And so Adam and Eve sin, they hide, God searches, God finds them, God calls them.

At first they recoil, but then God covers them and embraces them, and they have joy in the Lord.

This is the man of Psalm 1 who delights in God's law.

This culminates, of course, in the joy of the gospel, to being found in serving Christ, God who desires to seek and to save and to find his creatures.

Think of Romans 14, verse 17, and we'll get to Proverbs after this.

Romans 14:17

Romans 14, verse 17.

Romans 14:17

The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

That's one of those verses that gives you just the category distinction between all the do's and don'ts, all the communication principles that can make your marriage better, all the Torah keeping and fastidious law-keeping Judaism and all the, you know, all the do's and don'ts of all the man-made religions, the just the interpersonal stuff to figure out how to function the world better.

That's, you know, whatever.

The heart of the matter is that's not why God made you.

God didn't make you to focus on eating and drinking, and that's standing in for just the normal affairs of life.

It's not just talking about when Paul uses the phrase eating and drinking, he means just the normal things people do, the way they communicate, how they work, the normal way they spend their money, just life.

The kingdom of God's not about that, Paul says.

It is about peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, actually delighting in Christ.

And so that's true wisdom.

With Romans 14 in the background, you can look at Proverbs 13, verse 19.

Proverbs 13:19

Your Bible might even be open to it right now.

Proverbs, that's not the right Proverb at all.

Well, you'll need to know that Proverbs 13, verse 19, which is somewhere, but not on your screen right now.

Proverbs 13:19

What?

That jumped all over the place.

Well, I'm going, wisdom is joyful.

In fact, you have your Bible open to it.

Let's just look at it.

I just forgot how these things work.

Proverbs 13, 19.

Says, a desire fulfilled is sweet to the soul, but to turn away from evil is an abomination to fools.

A desire fulfilled is sweet to the soul.

The kind of things, you understand Romans 14, 17 in the background, that you are made to have joy in the Holy Spirit, a desire fulfilled for you is sweet to your soul.

It brings you true joy.

The fool searches for desires fulfilled in this world and pursues evil and it leads to corruption.

But we recognize that there is true joy found in the world in the Word of God, in the world that God made.

Jeremiah Burroughs writes in his book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, which is the best of the Puritan paperbacks, according to my wife, writes this.

Do you understand what Jeremiah Burst is saying?

If your desire fulfilled brings you joy, is things that a materialistic sense you wanted, that is tat amount to self-love.

Yes, you're joyful because you got what you wanted.

That's not the kind of joy that's in view in Proverbs 13.

Proverbs 13 has a desire to see the Lord and to be like him.

When it is meant, it is sweet to the soul.

Psalm 17, verse 15 says, As from me I will behold your face in righteousness, and when I awake I'll be satisfied with your likeness.

Psalms 17:15

As upside-down world for the wicked.

We desire to see the Lord and be like him.

Our desire is to grow in our love for the Lord.

That leads to Proverbs 17, verse 1.

Proverbs 17:1

Better is a dry morsel with quiet than a house full of feasting with strife.

Better is a dry morsel with quiet than a house full of street feasting with strife.

Now, this is kind of a humorous verse for people who are married.

It's like it better to have just your stale bread.

You think of the other Proverbs about living on the corner of a roof than with a wife who's nagging them, which we'll save for a marriage.

Look at Proverbs later.

This one's less about that, and notice it's more about the joy that is had in contrast with feasting.

Is it better to have a full house and a thanksgiving spread in your house?

But strife, or is it better to have contentment with what the Lord has given you and quiet?

This shows what you value.

Like on a superficial level, it's just like, oh, I don't arguing's not fun.

But this is not nothing superficial is about this proverb.

This proverb is getting under the hood to ask yourself, what really is going to fill your home with the joy?

Is it food?

Is it presence?

Is it the festive atmosphere?

Or is it contentment with what the Lord has given you?

This word, by the way, feasting, in Proverbs 17, verse 1, that word feasting often stands in throughout the Old Testament for the feasts themselves.

Proverbs 17:1

We call in English we call them holidays.

In the Old Testament, they're often just called feasts or um rejoicing.

They're days of rejoicing, days of festivity.

Solomon is saying it's better to have none of those days of rejoicing if they come with strife, because contentment in little is better.

Contentment is little, in little is better.

Less things in your house make it easier to be content.

Honestly.

You have less things to lose, less things to break, less things to worry about.

With much riches comes much worry.

Abundance tempts us to forget about God.

God didn't make us to be rich in things, but to be rich in Him.

When you have many things, you complain about them, you grumble about them.

You complain about others, you grumble about others.

Jeremiah Burroughs went on to say, after the quote I shared earlier, oh, that we could but convince men and women that murmuring spirit is a greater evil than any affliction, whatever it may be.

I like that quote.

If only you could teach people that complaining is a worse sin than whatever they're complaining about.

Then you find contentment.

You you zip your mouth, you stop complaining, and you find contentment where you're at.

Proverbs 17, verse 22.

Proverbs 17:22

A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.

When you have a heart that is filled with joy, it fixes other things in your life.

That's what medicine does.

A heart that's filled with joy fixes whatever is ailing you in life.

We confuse those all the time.

We think I could have joy if I wasn't sick.

Now, Paul says joy is what helps you cope with the sickness.

Think of Paul and Silas in prison.

Acts 16, verse 25.

Acts 16:25

What were they doing in prison?

They were singing in prison.

Why is Paul singing in prison?

Doesn't he know he's in prison?

Yeah.

But he's right where the Lord wants him.

So he sings, he and Silas sing with joy.

When our things like money, time, and our relationships are dedicated to the Lord, they bring joy.

And when those things bring joy, that fixes what ails us.

But when our things, our money, time, and our resources are viewed as the sources of joy, they bring sorrow.

That's why I like the analogy of a river.

The river flowing by, wisdom is knowing which way the river is flowing, and embracing that and recognizing it is from the Lord and points back to his glory.

It is foolish to look at the things God has in the river, to look at the things God made in this world and try to find your joy in those things.

You are definitely swimming upstream them.

When you start looking at the same river, but you think, oh, joy comes in fighting the river and holding on to the things going by, it's a transitory life.

It's lost so fast.

It crushes you.

You start looking in the horizontal level for joy and you feel crushed.

This is an overflow of what we talked about this morning in Matthew 7, or Matthew 11, where Jesus talks about those who are heavy laden, external burdens put on them.

They're weak from the inside, they're weak from trying to find contentment in their homes and contentment with their kids or with their marriage.

It just makes them weak.

And they put these expectations on them that burden them down.

Jesus invites those people to come to him for rest and find their joy in Christ.

This is the same principle here.

When you have those burdens placed on you, it crushes your bones.

Burdens are bone-crushing burdens.

You can't endure those.

That's where you give way to a brooding spirit.

When you're finding your joy and things in this world, it makes you become melancholy.

It makes you brooding.

It makes you just bitter and despondent and apathetic.

Your prayer life is dried out.

Reading the Bible is bleh.

You're weakened, your mind is clothed in rags when you're looking for joy in this world.

Your spirit is crushed.

This is why emotions are a good barometer of spiritual health.

Listen, emotions aren't given to you to make decisions by them.

So you shouldn't do something because you feel like it.

That's bad decision making.

Oh, I made this choice because it felt like a good idea.

Emotions are given to you, though, to display what's going on in your heart.

So head, heart, actions, head, heart, body, so to speak.

You know what's true about God, your heart believes it, and you act it out.

And so when you are got something wrong in your heart, sickness in your heart, bacteria in your heart, it affects just the way that you live.

Your bones are crushed up.

But when you have joy, it is medicine to your body.

Emotions let you know how you're doing spiritually.

And this transitions to Proverbs 18 verse 14 pretty nicely here.

Proverbs 18:14

A man's spirit will endure sickness.

But a crushed spirit, who can bear it?

You got a cold for a day?

No problem.

Unless it's a man cold.

Those are terrible.

You got the sniffles, you can shake that thing off, man.

But a crushed spirit, you can't bear that.

There's no virus in your body.

Thing is going well, but then something happens to you that crushes your spirit, drives you to apathy.

You're looking for something in the horizontal level.

It wasn't provided, it crushes you.

No one can bear that.

You can't endure it.

So, first, joy, of course, is important.

God gives us joy.

It is wise to be joyful.

He commands us to be joyful, second.

Not only is wisdom joyful, but second.

Joy is personal.

Joy is personal.

This is a battle in each individual's heart.

Person by person.

It's trench warfare in your heart for joy.

You fight for your joy.

You work for even in 2 Corinthians 1, Paul says, we're laboring for your joy.

That's a battle in a heart-by-heart situation here.

It's personal.

And here's where it's helpful to remember the word for feasts that are sometimes called in the Old Testament joyful occasions, festivals for joy.

That's 2 Chronicles 30, verses 21 through 27, if you care about that kind of thing.

2 Chronicles 30:21–27

That's a description of all those feasts where they're called occasions for joy, they're called feasts for joy.

So you can recognize that a corporate event for joy doesn't mean each individual has joy.

You can be sad at Thanksgiving.

You can be despondent on Christmas morning, even before you know what's in the present.

In other words, that's certainly underscored in Solomon's Israel, where those festivals or those feasts are called joyful occasions.

Now the cure for melancholy, of course, is worship.

The cure for the despondent soul is to go back to the Lord and find your joy and identity in Christ as opposed to the things of this world.

Psalm 9, verse 2, I will be glad and exalt in you, I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.

Psalms 9:2

And the context there, the psalmist is despondent, and he says, I'm going to take my despondency and worship the Lord.

When I worship the Lord, my heart is lifted up.

Because if you're worshiping Jesus, your eyes are a little bit off of the mirror.

Your eyes are a little bit off of what's going on around you.

On the woe is me circumstance, the Eor Christianity, the Eor Christian has a hard time singing praise songs.

The Eore Christian has a hard time reading the word.

And so, Psalm 9 verse 2, the cure for this is to get your eyes into the word.

Psalms 9:2

And sometimes the word can convict you of sin.

You have to respond with worship.

A great example of this is Nehemiah 8.

I was reading this recently in my devotional.

Somehow I just got I think I missed this contrast when I preached through Nehemiah.

But Nehemiah 8, Ezra reads the law and people are sad about it, remember?

Sad, crying.

Then Nehemiah gets up and tells them, Stop mourning, because the joy of the Lord is your strength.

So Nehemiah, Ezra, I wonder, I always wonder what the dynamic between Ezra and Nehemiah was like, if they even liked each other.

But Ezra's reading the word and you know preaching the fire and brimstone message, and everybody cries, and Nehemiah comes along afterwards and is like, does the altar call?

You know, dry your tears, be happy in the Lord.

Proverbs 14, verse 10 says it this way the heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares his joy.

Proverbs 14:10

That pairs of Proverbs 14, 13.

Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.

So, in other words, each person has their own emotions and their own affections that are displayed differently.

You cannot tell if somebody is happy or sad in a true sense by looking at them.

People can be laughing at your dinner party and yet not have the joy of the Lord, is the point.

The heart knows its own bitterness.

No stranger knows what's going on under the hood.

You can't know what is truly going on in another person, which means you can't judge their happiness.

A few weeks ago, talking about money, I said you can't judge how much money somebody has by how big of a house they have or how many cars they have or whatever.

That can just, in many ways, be a picture of debt.

The same thing is true with joy.

You cannot measure somebody's true joy by the width of their smile.

You cannot measure someone's true joy by how loud they sing.

Joy is known only to them in their heart.

You can't judge those people.

And you know people that are like this.

You know some people that are just more melancholy.

You get to know them and they really are happy people.

They really do have the joy of the Lord in them, but you know, from a distance, you think, geez, that guy's kind of grumpy.

You get to know them, and you're like, oh, they're just normally grumpy.

They do have a love for the Lord inside of them.

You can't really know what's in somebody's heart until you start to spend time with them.

And even then, it can be so deceptive.

It's kind of an earthly joy that is there for a moment and then goes away.

Even in laughter, the heart may ache.

And the end of the joy may be grief.

Just because somebody's laughing now doesn't mean that all is well in their hearts.

That's the warning.

By that I deduce that joy is intensely personal.

Joy is intensely personal.

After all, Jesus was a man of sorrows, wasn't he?

And yet he was joyful.

Jeremiah, an Old Testament example of that.

He had the joy of the Lord.

You know he did.

Remember?

Jeremiah, despite all his tears and all of his pouting and all of his putting his foot down to the Lord, like, that's it, I'm done.

I quit, Lord.

Remember, he says, if I make a covenant to no longer speak your word, it burns in my bones, and I can't keep it in.

I'm gonna just, it's gonna come out of me.

That's Jeremiah.

He's known as the prophet of tears, but he had the true joy of the Lord in him.

Proverbs 15, 13.

A glad heart makes a cheerful face.

By sorrow of heart, the spirit is crushed.

This is another reiteration here.

The joy is personal.

It's person by person, heart by heart.

The body and soul are connected, and worldly sorrow can crush a person.

So emotions are given to you by God.

If you delight in him and rejoice in him, you have to train your emotions.

Your emotions are like your dog.

You have to train your dog.

Your emotions are.

I have pet rats.

I have trained my pet rats.

They can do tricks.

That took work.

I can won't even tell you how many times I got bit, but those things are trained now.

You have to train your emotions.

You have to discipline your emotions.

You have to get them in line.

Your emotions work for you.

You do not work for your emotions.

Do not get bossed around by your emotions.

Your emotions start bossing you around.

Slap those emotions.

Get into gear, self.

Get into gear, man.

Why are you downcast, oh my soul?

Why are you downcast?

Has not the Lord shown himself faithful to you?

You have to talk to yourself.

And you recognize that a glad heart will start to transform you.

Sorrow in the heart will crush your spirit, it will crush your bones, Proverbs said earlier.

So first, joy is given to you by the Lord to pursue.

It is wise to be joyful.

Second, joy is personal.

This is a person-by-person battle here.

Third, joy is contentment.

Joy is often seen simply in your contentment with your circumstances.

Being content with where God placed you in the world.

Better is little, the scripture says, with fear of Yahweh, than great treasure and trouble with it.

Better is a dinner with herbs where love is, than a fattened ox and hatred with it.

We're kind of back to that similar concept we had earlier in Proverbs that better is dry bread and peace and quiet.

But now notice the stakes have even been raised here in Proverbs 15.

Better is little.

But it is worth asking yourself what this proverb is revealing to you.

Because it's so easy to read this, we're familiar.

This is one of those proverbs people are generally familiar with.

So you can lose the effect of it.

Would it really be better for you?

Do you believe this?

That it would be better to you to be in poverty, material poverty, but fear Yahweh.

That your house is a Christian house that fears Yahweh.

Is that really going to be better for you?

Than a house where you've got the fattened ox running around the front yard.

Or, you know, we don't have fattened oxes in our front yards now.

I mean, Fairfax County would not allow it.

Don't go after the oxes at Mount Vernon, you'll go to jail.

What would it now be?

Was it really better to be in poverty but have the fear of the Lord than to have the second freezer in the garage with the four turkeys in it and enough food for nuclear war?

Is it really better to have so little that you don't know what you're gonna eat tomorrow, but to have a household that trusts the Lord?

We so quickly think, oh God, just, you know, I need to have a week's worth of food or whatever in my house.

That's just barely making it.

Kind of language.

This is starting to show that you can have joy if you are content with what the Lord has given you.

Contentment is knowing that this world is not all there is.

That's the flip side of this kind of contentment.

Contentment is knowing that God is good and God reigns, and you'll die, and you'll open your eyes in heaven, and with your eyes you will see your Redeemer who lives, and you will reign with him on the earth.

That's an Old Testament promise, by the way.

That's wisdom.

Knowing that Jesus reigns wherever the Son does his successive journeys run.

And that you can be joyful in light of that.

That Jesus reigns and you will die and resurrect and be on the new heavens and the new earth with the Lord and reign with him in his kingdom.

All that's in your future.

You can be content with what you have now.

Proverbs 16 gives you a window into people that don't believe that.

Better is a little with righteousness than great revenue with injustice.

Of course, there are those that will exploit others and will gain wealth through illegitimate means because they think that they need that wealth in order to be happy.

And of course, they won't be happy, eventually they'll go to jail, or maybe they get away with it.

Who knows?

But then they die and go to hell.

Better to have so little now, but to have the righteousness that comes through faith.

Here's another way of saying that.

This is how Jeremiah Burroughs renders that proverb.

Lack of contentment is practical atheism.

You're not content with what the Lord has in your life right now, you're practically an atheist.

You don't believe that God has given you your current circumstance if you're not happy with it.

If you believed God gave it to you and you loved the Lord, you would be content with it.

Lack of contentment reveals a doubting spirit towards the Lord.

Proverbs 16, 19.

It is better to be of a lowly spirit with the poor than to divide the spoil with the proud.

Notice the sin of arrogance here.

Again, this is getting under the hood of your life.

Would you really say it is better to be impoverished but humble than to be rich but arrogant?

Like that starts to show what you value in this world.

Humility is better than wealth because the eyes of the Lord go to and fro looking for the humble to elevate.

And they won't always be elevated in this life.

Sometimes it's the next.

It is the meek who will inherit the earth, Jesus says.

He's not talking about this life.

You understand that, right?

In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says the meek will inherit the earth, his eyes are going forward to the next life.

You're storing up for yourself treasure in heaven.

Not here.

And so it is better to be of lowly spirit, of humility, and in poverty.

That's contentment.

Another verse that even drives this point even further through the heart.

As in water, face reflects face.

So the heart of the man reflects the man.

Now we talked earlier that sometimes those can be fooling.

No one knows the man's heart except the man himself, of course, but some of the countenance can be a valuable tool.

But look at where Solomon's going with this at the end of Proverbs here 27, verse 20.

Sheol and Abaddon, speaking of Hades, of the grave, where souls die, they go to the grave.

Of course, Christians in the New Testament go up, but even the Old Testament, even David and Job and Solomon go down.

Those graves are never satisfied.

You've never heard a grave say, that's enough.

We don't need more dead people.

Filled up here.

Never satisfied are the eyes of a man.

People always want more.

They always need just a little bit more money.

Just a little bit more money.

You know, you think if you get more money, you can finally get the right kind of car, and then you get that kind of car and you need the right kind of house, and you get the right kind of house, and you need the right kind of soccer team for your kids to be on.

And it just keeps going all the way up.

You're never going to be happy, just like the grave is never satisfied.

The person who looks for wealth in this world is compared, by the way, they're compared to hell.

Because it's death to the grave.

So notice with that verse on the screen, what joy is not mentioned exactly in this verse, but notice that what's required for joy is self-control.

What's required to have joy and contentment is self-control.

The ability to say, yes, I would want more, but I'm in charge of my desires.

They don't rule me.

And I'm telling myself, no, that's enough.

That'll do.

You get this at the buffet.

You know how many trips to the dessert table is really appropriate?

Really?

You get this with the buffet.

This applies to all of life.

How much are you going to pursue?

Joy requires self-control.

And like I said, emotions are coachable.

Emotions can be directed.

The mature person does just that.

Part of directing your emotions is to cultivate contentment.

Fourthly, joy produces joy.

Hence my title, Repeat the Sounding Joy.

Joy produces joy.

Joy is self-replicating.

Joy is contagious.

The song Joy to the world has the refrain in it, repeat the sounding joy.

And they repeat the refrain, repeat the sounding joy.

And a third time, repeat the sounding joy.

When the Savior reigns, the hills will break forth in cheerful joy.

That's Isaiah 55, verse 12.

Isaiah 55:12

The whole earth will clap their hands, the trees will clap their hands, the nations and the hills and the trees will all express cheerful joy when the Savior reigns.

This is why Christians are commanded to rejoice, and again I say, rejoice.

Joy produces joy.

Hope deferred, Proverbs 13, 12 says, makes the heart sick.

But a desire fulfilled is the tree of life.

When you don't get what you desire, it makes you long for it, it makes you sick.

So it's worth asking yourself, where are your desires placed?

In this life or the next?

A desire fulfilled, when your eyes are on the Lord and you receive godly things, that is a tree of life.

That's language from Psalm 1, of course, Psalm 1 written by David, Proverbs written by Solomon.

Solomon knew someone.

He's incorporating it here.

You have this tree, and the person trusts in the Lord that is watered.

It's a tree of life.

Life comes from putting your faith in the Lord and hoping in him.

Proverbs 15, 30.

The light of the eyes rejoices the heart, and good news refreshes the bone.

When you receive things that are pleasing to you, it makes you stronger.

Notice the cyclical nature, it's just like the earlier Proverbs that said, Joy is like wisdom.

Good news is joy is like medicine.

Good news is like medicine.

Joy produces joy.

When you hear good news, it makes you stronger.

When you're stronger, you rejoice.

The body and soul are linked here.

Proverbs 29, verse 6.

Proverbs 29:6

An evil man is ensnared in his transgression, but a righteous man sings and rejoices.

Two people thrown in jail.

The evil man is stuck there because of his own wickedness.

Paul is stuck there and worships God.

That contrast can be applied to all of life.

Evil people get caught in pits of their own design.

A righteous man can be caught in the pit and he worships.

That's what righteous people do.

They worship, they delight in their circumstances, even when their circumstances are not delightful.

The righteous man sings and rejoices.

This is just a truism.

It's a wisdom principle.

Again, some of these truths in Proverbs can get lost, so just zone in on the last half of it.

A righteous person sings and rejoices.

If you are righteous, you are rejoicing.

That's the general principle.

Remember the way Proverbs work, this isn't 100% true at the time, but generally speaking, if you are righteous, your life will be marked by rejoicing.

Generally speaking, if you are righteous, your life should be marked by joy.

Regardless of your circumstances.

And in his affliction, he says, You have been my help.

In the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.

My soul clings to you, and my right hand upholds me.

And then the psalmist in his affliction cries out to God and says, I will sing for joy because I know I'm where you want me.

Even in trouble, surrounded by the enemies, the feet in the my reclay, the psalmist says, I know I'm under your wings, I can find joy there with you.

Augustine, when he finally battled through his doubt and his lack of joy, wrote how sweet it was all at once for me to be rid of those fruitless pleasures.

Those fruitless pleasures that I had once so feared to lose.

This is the way it is in life.

You have things that you want to hold on to, and you think, Lord, I'll give you anything, I'll do whatever you want, just don't take this from me.

Don't take that from me.

Once Augustine finally pushed through that, he said, how sweet it was to finally be rid of those joys.

And he used to hold them so tightly, and now they're gone, and your life is better with them gone.

And then he, in fact, he ascribes personal agency to God here.

You drove them from me.

You who are the true and the sovereign joy, you drove them from me and you took their place.

You who are sweeter than all pleasure.

That's true joy.

That's a desire makes the heart glad.

That's good news, strengthens your bones.

When you recognize that God is the ultimate joy and you find your source of contentment in Him, it transforms everything else.

You've never met a godly person rejoicing in the Lord, lamenting the things of this world that he lost.

No.

Things of the world grow strangely dim in the light of his glorious grace.

Lord, we're thankful for you and the way you meet all of our needs in Christ.

We're thankful for how you have given us Christ and more than Christ.

You've given us your spirit who transforms us and makes us joyful people from the inside out.

We know it is a rare jewel to have contentment.

Thankful for the joy of the Lord.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.