Joy in Times Like These

As we get started, I want to pose kind of a question or a thought.

When we look at theology, we might come from a tradition or we might come from a past experience where we would look at something like studying deep, rich theology as something that probably creates tension in our relationship with one another, right?

Or we might see where theology has divided or where it has called uh caused contention, right?

And some of us might stray away from theology uh because of those experiences or what we see as these kind of propensities from it.

But but what I want to help us to see this morning is that the purpose of deep, rich, gospel-centered theology is actually for our joy.

It's that joy might be ignited and fueled within us.

Uh the more clearly and rightly we see God, uh, the more his glory and majesty and splendor are made known to us, uh, the more joy we're gonna have in our life.

And we see this in the text this morning.

And at Sacred Mission, we want to be a place that loves deep theology, uh, that loves trying to discover the riches of God and the glory of his gospel through his son Jesus, that our worship might be made more glorious also.

We believe that healthy theology produces healthy disciples.

It produces healthy mission, but it also produces healthy worship.

And so as we look at this text this morning, we're gonna see how Peter puts that on display for us, which he's not that uncommon as we look throughout the rest of the New Testament in the ways that right understanding about God produces right worship of his name.

Uh, so let's dive into the text together.

If we look at verses 3 through 5, 1 Peter 1, 3 through 5, we'll see joy in heaven now.

Joy in heaven now.

So Peter starts off with this phrase: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Right?

He comes out the gate after he's already kind of introduced himself in the letter, uh, he comes out the gate with this doxology.

A doxology is a worshipful phrase, and what we will tend to see throughout the scriptures is that a doxology, a worshipful phrase, either comes from or comes before a deep theological understanding of who God is and what he's accomplished for us in his son.

Throughout the New Testament, we'll see these kind of blurbs where they'll be talking about God or they'll be talking about his nature and character, or they'll be talking about what Jesus has done for us, and then they just flow so seamlessly into this responsive worship.

And this is what we see here, this doxology.

It establishes God as the center of our affection and our adoration.

You see, great theology produces passionate doxology.

Great theology produces passionate doxology.

We see this in a lot of the scriptures that we read, where a right and clear understanding of God makes us people burst into worshipful expression.

And Peter's no different here at the beginning of his letter.

And what we have to wrestle with is that if our theology does not produce doxology, then it's more than likely that we are studying to puff ourselves up rather than to make God big and glorious in our own life.

And this is a lot of what you see kind of in our camp or camps like us, unfortunately.

If you you would think the way that we love and value and pursue deep, robust theology about who God is, we would be some of the most passionate, expressive, joy-filled worshipers alive.

But typically, when you kind of come into our churches, we're a bunch of like fuddy duddies, right?

We're just like, we know a lot about God, but it doesn't move us.

We're just kind of slunched over, singing lame songs.

Why is it that churches that typically have low theology have the most passionate worship?

And churches that have high theology typically have the less passionate worship.

I think it's because we have a propensity to study deep theology for our own exaltation rather than for the true exaltation of the God that we serve.

R.

C.

Sprohl passed away recently.

He was a pastor, theologian, and founder of Ligonier Ministries.

He said this: he said, When studying theology does not prompt us to adoration, we must question whether we are more concerned to puff ourselves up with knowledge than to glorify God.

And the more the mystery of the gospel is revealed throughout Scripture, the writers tend to respond with deeper and more passionate worship to Him.

And this is how we should center ourselves as the church.

Look at how big God is in this statement.

Every aspect of the opening phrase that Peter writes points directly to the magnifying and boasting of God.

He is the initiator, he is the sustainer, he is the finisher of all the blessing, privilege, and favor that we have in Christ Jesus.

This is what Peter wants us to see.

He wants to make God big and ourselves small.

This is why he's applying glory or weighty worship to his name.

Because he and he alone has caused us to be born again to a living hope.

So let's work to break this long worshipful proclamation down that Peter gives us in this letter.

He says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again.

So, so it's only by the mercy of God Peter shows us that we have been made alive, that we have been born again by the Spirit through the mercy of God.

This identifies God as the agent of our new life.

It is according to his great mercy that he has caused us.

It points to the sovereign action and will of God alone, that his name alone is worthy of praise for what he has done for us.

You see, we are born again because God, in his love for us and in his good pleasure, he chose to express and display his mercy to us rather than to display his justice to us.

You see, what did God owe us as those who rebelled against him, as those who sought to make ourselves God and establish ourselves on the throne of creation?

We deserved his justice.

We deserved punishment against our sin.

We deserved to be crushed under the weight of his justice and judgment against us.

That's what we deserve.

But God showed us, who are his in Christ Jesus, mercy.

The very word dictates that we did not get what we deserved to get.

God did not choose to display his justice, which he would rightly be able to do because of our sin state.

But he showed and displayed his mercy to us, which caused us to be born again.

So our worshipful adoration is because his mercy has been made known to us, and that mercy has caused us to be born again, but it hasn't just caused us to be born again alone, it's caused us to be born again to something.

He goes on to say that we have been born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

This is what we have been born again to.

And what makes this hope living is the qualifier of Jesus Christ raised from the dead.

This is what makes our hope living because we have a living Savior.

We were ones who were dead in our sin and who had a dead hope.

We had despair in our lives because without Christ raised from the dead, our hope would be in our performance.

How good can you actually live your life?

How much of good deeds can you do compared to the wicked ones that are in your life?

Can you tip the scales of justice in your favor that you might have relationship and fellowship with your Maker?

That would be our only hope.

And how despairing would that be?

Because you and I know we're not going to be able to do good enough.

We know all the ways that we fall short.

We know the things that go through our mind, of the ways that we failed and didn't live up to as we lay our head down at night.

We know those things.

But we don't have a dead Savior, and in that we don't have a dead hope.

We have a risen Savior, and our hope is alive with him.

The means of our new birth, the life-giving agent to our hope is the reality of the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus is the only begotten Son.

He is the conqueror of death.

He is the firstborn among many brothers.

He is our living hope.

If he had stayed in the grave, then our hope would have remained dead in the tomb with him.

But that's not our case.

Our hope is in Christ.

And our hope is anchored in the past because Jesus rose.

Our hope sustains us now in the present because Jesus lives, and our hope is completed in the future because Jesus is coming again for his church.

He goes on to say that we are born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus, but it's to something also, to an inheritance, he says, that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading in heaven for you.

You see, we who are his, we are who uh uh belong to Christ Jesus, are heirs to God's eternal blessing.

And this blessing, he says, is imperishable, meaning it's without death.

It's undefiled, meaning that it's without sin.

And it's unfading, meaning that it's without decay.

Why is it this case?

Because it's God who is keeping this inheritance, he says.

It's the power of the same sovereign God who caused you to be born again by his mercy, is keeping this inheritance in heaven for you.

And so what has been promised to us is being kept for us by God.

And we long to obtain this fully.

There's a reality where we do truly and rightly have tastes of it even now.

We can have joy in heaven now because of the ways that we have received his mercy, because of the ways we have been born again, because of the blessing we experience now.

But there's also a part of us that longs for the fullness of it to be obtained.

The author C.S.

Lewis, in his last book in the series, The Chronicles of Narnia, uh, the last book being titled The Last Battle, writes this at the at the end of the book.

He says, And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most surely say that they all lived happily ever after.

But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.

All their life in this world and all their adventure in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page.

No way less they were beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.

This is what we long for.

The story that's yet to be told.

We don't have our best life now, no matter what these false preachers and puppets in the pulpit want to declare to us.

We wait for our best life to come.

And gloriously, and by his grace and goodness, we get tastes of that now.

But truly, anything we can have now, anything we can know now, anything we can experience or touch is yet a fragment.

It's a morsel of all that will be obtained on the day of our salvation.

Peter goes on to say, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

The hope is guaranteed by us by the keeping power of God the Father.

And we see this in the first part that we that we just went through.

He said that the inheritance was being kept by God for us, and then he transitions and says, we are being kept, or we are being guarded, he says, by God for it.

And so there's this reality of the inheritance is being kept by God for us, but we are being guarded and kept by God for it also.

It gives us such confidence of its guarantee that it rests and resides with inside the power of the God of which we serve.

You see, he guards us, and through this faith of which he guards, we are going to receive and obtain the fullness of all his promises.

It's for something that is yet to be fully revealed, the fullness of salvation that will be ours in Jesus.

You see, while our souls hunger for heaven to come, we do not get tastes, we do, though, get tastes of heaven now.

As I said, we've experienced his mercy, we've been made alive, we have obtained true and living hope.

We have been given confidence in the promises by the Spirit.

And it is from this reality that we proclaim the glory he is worthy of.

Because of this, we truly have joy in heaven now.

We are not just a people filled with sorrow, waiting for a future joy to come.

But we can have joy in heaven now.

Verses six through nine, we see, though, that we also have joy in heaven to come.

We have not yet received the fullness of this inheritance, and so we have joy in heaven to come when we do obtain it through Christ Jesus.

He says, In this you rejoice.

Verse 6, in this you rejoice.

Well, what is the this Peter's referring to?

What is the source and substance of our joy as believers?

It is in the mercy of God, in his making us alive, in the inheritance being kept for us, in the resurrection of Christ, in the promises being fulfilled for us.

This is what our joy is rooted in.

The reality of the living hope that we have because we have a risen Savior.

He goes on to say, though now, so in contrast to or in light of, for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials.

I love what Peter does here right in the text, is he helps us to understand our joy is not based on the circumstances we face in this life.

He's not a fool.

He's not someone that tries to get us to dismiss or disregard trials and sufferings that we face in this life.

He isn't this kind of hyper-optimistic that has no foundation of purpose, right?

He's saying, of course, you're going to face trials.

Of course, they're going to even cause us to grieve.

But we do not rejoice in those things.

We rejoice in what has been given to us by Christ.

Our trials will be various in modes and degrees, but our rejoicing is not rooted in what we experience in this life.

It's rooted in what we have experienced in Jesus and what we will surely experience in the life to come through him.

You see, we often walk around with weary eyes and with our heads lowered in the midst of the trials that we face, but he's encouraging us to raise our eyes and gaze upon the glory that awaits us.

Because it's this that will cause us to have real joy no matter what we face in this life.

You see, the trials and times that we face, they might actually cause us, in a sense, to be grieved.

He says that in the text that though we have been grieved by various trials, but I love that there is no assumption that grief equals the absence of joy.

Peter doesn't walk around with that assumption.

He doesn't just allow that to be the status quo of existence.

It is that these two things might even be experienced in those in our lives simultaneously, that we could experience grief, but we could also be a people of true joy, because our joy is not threatened by the circumstances and trials we face in this life.

If it's rooted in something beyond this life, we aren't being invited to express joy because of life's temporal circumstances, but we're being invited to express joy because of the eternal circumstances of glory secured for us by God.

He goes on in verse 7.

So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Peter goes on to give us purpose in our trials.

And there's comfort to that.

What he wants us to understand is that God has purpose in the trials that we go through in our life.

You see, often when we face trials, we think that it's because of the reality of being in a fallen world.

It's simply this kind of happenstance of being inside of a sin sick culture.

And we hope that God is near enough to us that he might deliver us.

We hope that God is strong enough to pull us out from our position.

We hope that God will actually intervene in this situation.

But that's not what the scriptures show us about the relationship between our trials and the God of whom we serve, that He has purpose in the trials.

And it's for the purification and refining of our faith.

You see, often when we encounter suffering or when we talk about God having purpose in our suffering, we might have an initial response of, well, what kind of cruel God would cause his people to suffer in such ways?

That might be our initial response.

That God would be cruel to do such a thing.

But let us think maybe more rightly and biblically about the situation.

What tragedy that it takes such lengths for God to get our attention.

For us to truly have joy in what we are supposed to have joy in, Him, in Him alone.

We see the tragedy of what lengths it takes to get that joy for us in the cross itself.

Look at what lengths God had to go to to get our attention.

We endure trials, we go through sufferings because God loves us and He wants to draw our attention to Himself so that our joy.

Might be rooted in something that can never be taken from us.

Him.

He says it's like gold tested in fire.

If you've seen the process of uh of purifying gold, you've seen that it gets this extreme heat, right?

And it melts down, and all of a sudden there's these impurities at the top.

And what happens is that the person scoops those impurities off, right?

Discards them so that the gold is purified in its very essence.

But what we have to look at in this process is that the person doing the work isn't making the gold more gold, right?

It's not making the gold more gold.

It is drawing out the impurities that are in it so that it can rightly have the glory it deserves.

He is drawing out and separating from it the impurities that might diminish its true glory.

Authentic and sincere faith given to us by God is in its essence pure, strong, and true.

Suffering through trials works to prove that.

That the faith that we declare we have has been given to us by a pure and holy God.

And it in itself is pure and holy.

Authentic and sincere faith given to us by Him is pure.

Any outcome of suffering, any outcome of the trials that we face in this life, that pull us away from God, that remove us from Him, only puts on display the inauthenticity, the falsehood of the faith that we had confessed.

We see the Apostle John writing to this end in his letter, 1 John 2.19, he said, They went out from us, or they have left the fellowship of the church, but they were not of us.

The faith that they had confessed was not genuine, authentic.

Here, they would have continued with us.

For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us.

But they went out.

That it might become plain that they all are not of us.

This is what John's trying to help them understand.

The reason we saw them depart was that we might know that their faith was never genuine and true.

They might have declared that they have faith, but the going through suffering and trials proved a different reality.

God desires for us as his people to have our faith tested for its genuineness in the trials and sufferings that we encounter.

Verse 8, he goes on Though you have not seen him, you love him.

Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with him.

That is joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.

You see, Peter works to ensure us that our chronological proximity to Jesus' incarnation and uh uh earth ministry, right, that isn't some type of default uh disablement to our faith, right?

But that we actually, though we live now in a time where we do not see him or have not seen him, we are able to partake in the fullness of faith through the very essence of what it means to be a Christian.

And he kind of lays out this three-point reality for us.

In the first one, he says that uh first we love Jesus, right?

Though you have not seen him, you love him.

So to be a Christian fundamentally means that we love Jesus.

We have unashamed, extravagant affection for him.

Loving Jesus means prizing him above all that is lovely.

It means valuing him above all that is costly, it means treasuring him above all that is beauty, praising him above all that contends for glory.

Though we have not seen him, we love him.

He goes on to say, second, that we trust Jesus.

Though you do not see him, you believe in him.

This word believe isn't just some kind of inactive, generic acknowledgement about Jesus, right?

Or some doctrine about him.

But it communicates a deep active reliance and trust in him.

And you've probably experienced this in your life, right?

Where you have someone in your life that doesn't have an issue with making some type of positive acknowledgement about Jesus, right?

Oh, yeah, I believe in Jesus, or I believe he was the Son of God, or I believe he died for our sin, right?

But what follows in some conversations you have with people is, but I don't really know if they're a believer.

I don't really know if they've been born again.

I don't really know if they walk with Jesus.

Why do you say that?

Why does that doubt come into play?

Well, because you see no fruit in their lives.

You see no evidence that would give you confidence that they actually have been born again, not just making some generic inactive acknowledgement about who he is, but that their life has been so transformed that they deeply trust Jesus, that they yield to him, rely upon him moment by moment, that they entrust their very life and the outcome of their souls to him.

You see, to trust Jesus, to believe in him, is to live as though you have complete reliance upon him and the outcome of his promises.

And that's a life observed.

That's a life you can witness when someone truly trusts in Jesus.

Thirdly, he says that we enjoy Jesus.

So first we love Jesus, second, we trust Jesus, third, we enjoy Jesus.

Do you think you're a person who enjoys Jesus?

Like some of us are married, we might not enjoy our spouse.

I'm just saying, I kind of speak plainly this morning to y'all.

Uh I'm not talking about my personal situation, uh, just for the record.

Uh do we enjoy Jesus?

Do we love the time that we get to spend with him?

Do we long for spending time with him?

When we don't get that time with him, does it negatively affect our hearts?

You see, the end product of a faith that has been purged and purified, Peter says is joy inexpressible and full of glory.

When we love Jesus, when we trust Jesus, oh, we enjoy Jesus.

I'm learning more and more that it to be a disciple means to be with Jesus.

I've lived too much of my adult Christian life learning about Jesus.

And I've called that being a disciple.

But to be with Jesus is such a more faithful reality of what it means to be a follower of him.

Peter qualifies this type of joy.

He says that it's inexpressible.

What I want us to hear rightly is inexpressible, not unexpressed.

You might walk away from here, well, you still standing there like a lump on a log and be like, Well, I've got joy.

I don't, you don't, you look so sad.

Um He's not saying it's joy unexpressed.

He's saying that it's joy inexpressible.

What he means is this is that the human tongue fails to be able to exalt and communicate the fullness of the joy of knowing God's salvation through Jesus.

It doesn't have the inherent ability to do it.

It is a joy that is inexpressible.

Maybe perhaps this is why we even have the gift of heavenly tongues, that it might supplement what our human tongue cannot do.

A joy inexpressible and full of glory.

It's not fading, it's not deteriorating joy that the world offers and extends to us.

It's eternal, it's undefiled, it's full of the majesty of God.

You see, in the end, when Jesus is revealed in his glory, we will fully share in glory with him.

Though we have not seen him, though we are awaiting the fullness of our salvation, we can have joy here and now because of the assurance of our hope that has been accomplished and is waiting to be revealed in him that we might have joy in heaven to come.

In part, we live in a future that is already present, not simply in expectation alone, but in realization here and now.

And it's through the fullness of the gospel what Christ has done, what Christ is doing, what Christ shall accomplish that ignites and fuels our joy as believers in Him.

Because of the gospel truly experienced in our lives, we have joy in heaven now, and we have joy in heaven to come.

And that has to be the root, the source and substance of our pursuit of having joy.

Because we're experiencing so much calamity, we're experiencing so much devastation because we're trying to get through the trials and sufferings of our life with earthly joy.

But here's what Peter wants us to help us understand.

Heaven's joy prevails through our trials.

Heaven's joy prevails through our trials.

You see, Peter's putting forth a holy reason for why we can be a people of real joy in the times that we find ourselves in.

Because we're not working to cultivate worldly joy out of temporal circumstances, we're expressing heavenly joy based on our eternal circumstance in Jesus.

And we have to ask ourselves the question: what makes heaven's joy so good?

What makes it so holy rather than the kind of carnal, depraved, and useless joy that's so often evident in this world?

What makes joy ugly or what makes joy beautiful?

What makes joy defiled, or what makes it clean?

The answer is simple.

It's the thing that is being enjoyed.

It's the very thing being enjoyed.

This is what determines the quality of our joy.

Are we enjoying heaven?

Are we enjoying Jesus?

Are we enjoying our good and faithful King?

Are we enjoying the salvation that he brings to his people?

Are we enjoying the presence of his Holy Spirit?

Are we enjoying him in the fullness of his power and majesty and glory?

Are we enjoying his church?

Are we enjoying sitting under the preaching of his word?

Are we enjoying partaking in his sacrament?

Are we enjoying the mission we are sent on by his spirit?

Are we enjoying seeing others come to faith in Christ?

Are we enjoying heaven?

You see, heaven's joy prevails through our trials because its source and substance is not derived from the enjoyment of the world or of this life, but it is wholly and fully derived from the enjoyment of our God.

Yet many of us were frustrated, we're disheartened, and we're filled with sorrow.

We have waited with exhausting expectation to finally be able to obtain real joy now in our life.

And it seems ever so out of reach for us.

But we have to be honest that we're simply just fooling ourselves and believing that we will have it through enjoying this life in this world and the things that it can offer to us.

You see, every trial we face threatens our joy because it's an attack on what we enjoy.

And because the attack on what we enjoy has the possible outcome of us losing it.

And so our joy is ultimately threatened.

Do you see why we need to enjoy heaven?

Heaven can't be taken from you.

The goodness of God, of his adoption of us as his children, of his inheritance that he has kept for us, of us as his people, he's keeping for it, that cannot be taken from us.

It's in our enjoyment of him that we have a joy that goes without threat.

You see, we must strive to understand that the issue with our joy is fundamentally the enjoyment of the wrong things.

And our problem, our story, is that we expect to find joy in the enjoyment of fleeting things.

We expect to find joy in the enjoyment of fleeting things.

Here's the reality.

This is what makes this complicated at times is that we serve a good God who gives his people good things.

And there's a sense of joy that should be known in that.

When we experience the goodness of God, when we experience his blessing poured out in us through our relationships, through our marriage, through our children, through our church, through whatever you want to call it.

If it's a good gift from a good God, then we should enjoy that thing.

But here's the reality: the enjoyment of that should rightly push us even more into the enjoyment of the giver of the gift.

But we tend to fail because we tend to take the gift and try to remove it from the giver and find our joy in it.

That's not what was supposed to happen, but that's what our hearts are prone to do.

You see, every good gift given to us by God should cause us to enjoy Him, the giver of the gift, more.

But we fool ourselves, we trick our own brains.

And this is potentially what makes joy so dangerous.

We are, in our nature, joy addicts.

We want it bad.

And we're trying to find the source where we can obtain it most.

This is almost the way that we would understand the pursuit of life to obtain joy.

And so we go from thing to thing, hoping we'll find it in it.

It is actually through the hits of synthetic pleasure, it is through the taste of temporal joy that calls us to search for it again and again in the sources that we first discovered it in.

But let me pose something this morning.

Let me submit this to you.

That if our taste of joy came through that which is defiled and dirty, if our taste of joy came through pornography or lust or greed or power, if we've grown to enjoy the very things God calls dirty and unclean, is it no wonder our joy has become dirty in the process?

And there's many of you sitting in your seats right now, you know what I'm talking about.

You remember that first synthetic hit of joy when you chased after that thing.

And man, it felt good.

And what it caused you to do, it caused you to go back for it over and over and over again.

But you've been bound by it.

Because here's the wicked thing about the sources of synthetic joy is they become cruel masters over us.

And they can't deliver what they promised in the first time.

And you know now, you know that when you go back to that well, that joy feels dirty.

It doesn't do what it once did.

You feel unclean.

You see, some of us, the more that we try to derive our joy from our possessions, when we try to get it out of material things, the more that our heart and our joy shrivel and fade like those possessions.

Some of us we we we spend insane money on stuff, right?

Um I I uh I've said this before, my guilty pleasure is watching hoarders.

Um new seasons roll out.

I just, it's man, I love it.

And and here's what happens is every time, man, this person thought there was joy in that next purchase.

They thought there was satisfaction in that in that next deal.

They thought that there was something at the end of this.

But then look at the way that their house fills up.

Why?

Because it's ultimately unsatisfying.

And some of us we've experienced that.

Man, we we've worked 80-hour weeks, we we've put in hard to uh uh uh effort to earn six-figure incomes plus, we we've labored tirelessly to get that house in that neighborhood.

We we've taken on debt so that we can roll up to places in certain vehicles or whatever it is.

And guess what?

When you step into that, when you walk into that living room, when you enter into that space, does it satisfy the way you thought it would?

Or is the 80 hours a week continuing to fail you in producing the joy it once promised it would?

And now your wife or your husband and your children are looking at you like, when is it gonna click so that you can just sit here and be present with us?

You see, some of us our joy is rooted in things that can be taken from us, what we can lose, what can be stripped out of our hands.

If we have enjoyed that which is perishable, then our joy will perish with them.

This is why we must put our joy in an imperishable God.

That is why our focus of joy must be Jesus.

You see, heaven's joy cannot be threatened because heaven's promises cannot be thwarted.

If our joy is in Him, we don't have to experience the threat of losing it.

There's nothing that can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Nothing.

And so our joy can never truly be threatened when it's rooted in that which cannot be thwarted.

Jesus made sure that we could be a people of great joy.

And he did this by becoming the man of sorrow.

Jesus became the man of sorrow that we would be a people of joy.

Think about the fruit of what we're supposed to see in our life as believers in Jesus.

It's joy.

If you look throughout the Old Testament, you'll see writers, psalm writers, and other uh uh uh uh prophets and so forth, they'll talk about the joy of God's salvation.

And we get to see the fullness of that because that salvation was coming through his son Jesus.

We should be a people above all, with the most Lavish joy because we have known the glory of his salvation in his son.

But it came at a cost.

It came at the cost of Jesus being the man of sorrow.

The prophet Isaiah talked about the nature of Jesus and his sacrifice for us so many years before it ever actually happened.

And he says this in Isaiah 53, 3 through 5.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And as one from whom men hide their face, he was despised.

And we esteemed him not.

But look at verse 4.

Surely, with full, unwavering confidence, what has he bored in his flesh?

Our grief, and he carried our sorrow.

Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

Why can we be a people of joy?

Because Jesus bore the sorrow in his flesh.

All the grief and all the sorrow that we should have rightly felt because of our despair and state of sin, Jesus bore in his own flesh so that he could produce a people of joy.

That know him, that enjoy him, that have something inherent within them that he's given to them by his grace that can never be taken from them.

You see, Jesus became the man of sorrows that we might become the people of joy.

And that is a joy that is inexpressible and full of glory.

And so us as the church, knowing what the gospel accomplishes for us, should we not be the people of most joy?

Shouldn't culture around us be dumbfounded in the ways that we have joy in this life?

They should be the ones without joy.

They should be the ones full of sorrow and despair.

They should be the ones grieved by these circumstances.

Because what?

It's the promises of the politician that is failing them over and over again.

It's the collapse of a culture that once brought them joy that can't do it anymore.

Look, the things that we once had just three, four years ago, there's no guarantee that we ever get them again.

And even if we never do get them again, should that have any impact on our joy as his people?

The times have changed.

Praise God.

We're not going back to what used to be.

Praise God.

We've got something better.

That even if America collapses, if our sources of protection and safety are ripped out from our white-knuckled hands, praise God, because there's a joy that can't be taken from me because it's not rooted in that perishable thing.

It's rooted in the imperishable of God Almighty.

That's why we can be a people of joy in times like these.

Because it doesn't matter what happens.

It doesn't matter if they come to take everything we have from us.

Seize my home, seize my possessions, take everything that I've got, bankrupt me.

Take every freedom I think is rightly mine, take every liberty I once enjoyed, take it all.

You can't have my joy.

Because it's not in those things.

It's in Jesus.

And so my hope for us sacred mission is that we would be a people of inexpressible and joy people of joy, inexpressible and filled with glory.

I want us to remember it's not unexpressed joy, right?

It's inexpressible joy.

And it's filled with glory.

It has substance and weight to it because it's being found in Jesus.

When we look at the the next leg of what we call Sacred Mission Church and what God's called us to, man, I hope that there's a testimony of the culture around us that points to how much joy we have.

Man, have you met somebody from Sacred Mission Church?

They like all have joy.

It doesn't make sense.

Do you see what happened during the election?

Do you see what's happening in our school systems?

Do you see where our economy is going?

Do you see all these things?

How do these people have joy?

And that joy is an opportunity to point them to that which we enjoy.

Oh, it's because of Jesus.

Let me tell you about him.

Can you imagine the mission that would ignite in our city if we were actually just a people of joy?

They would find it so contrary and confusing.

How do you have that joy?

They'd want to desire it.

Because again, we are joy addicts in our very nature.

Where are you getting this from?

Man, I'm getting it from Jesus.

Let me tell you about him.

Let me tell you why what I'm going through in this life.

And is it right reason to grieve what I'm experiencing?

Sure.

But can I tell you why I don't have, I haven't lost my joy?

It's because of him.

Man, we'd be a church on fire.

If we grasped hold of heaven's joy, if we grasp hold of enjoying heaven.

And so I want to be a person who enjoys Jesus.

And I want to wake up like longing to see him, like in his word, in prayer, in singing to him.

I want to be a person who throughout the middle of my day thinks about, oh man, I just can't wait until I get a free moment and enjoy Jesus.

I can't wait at night, like when I can just ponder and think about and meditate on all the reasons I enjoy Jesus.

Man, some of us don't have joy in our life because we're allowing these thoughts to take dominion over us of all the reasons we shouldn't have joy.

All the problems we're facing in this life, all the trials that we're uh suffering through, all the things that are negatively impacting us.

And we just allow it to run rampant and have dominion in our mind.

The Bible calls us to actively take every thought captive.

That means to imprison it.

That we might think rightly about God.

We have all the reason for our mind to run wild on the reasons we should enjoy Him.

Can we get that in us for just a moment?

We have every reason in the world to have our minds run wild with the joy, pleasure-filled thoughts of God.

That's why we should be able to take those things captive and say, no, that's not going to dominate my thinking.

God is going to dominate my thinking because He has more reason to do so than the circumstance we're facing now.

Because we'll be done with this.

We'll be done with this world.

We'll be done with these trials.

We'll be done with these sufferings in a blink of an eye.

But he is forever.

Amen?

Amen.

Let's pray.