Calm Delight: Understanding Biblical Joy

Welcome to the Southwest Apostolic Church podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by the Southwest Apostolic Church,

located at 3161 South Rowena Street in Indianapolis, Indiana, 46241.

The podcast will feature preaching,

from our pastor and from other ministers, so we hope you enjoy it.

Without further ado, let's get right into it. God bless.

A seal, they call it, door seal. And new, like original Cadillac,

original General Motors, was $160-something for that little thing.

And I looked all over, and you couldn't get a new one for under $100.

And Ruthie said, she said, why don't we try the junkyard?

I thought, that's a good idea. So I called, I got online and checked with the

pull apart over on Michigan Street.

And they had a 2013 ATS over there.

And I said, all right, let's OTS. Today we went over there and you got to pay

$2 to get in there. And then you go look for your part. Well, I had my knife on me.

So I walked over there and they had this black Cadillac in there and opened

the door. And there's what I wanted right there.

I took my knife and scraped it up off of there. Didn't bend it.

I went to walk in there and laid it on the counter, and she said, you can have it.

I said, praise the Lord. She said, you can have it. I thought,

she don't know what she's giving away right there.

But I'm thankful. God's good to us. Isn't he good to us? Amen.

So that saved me $100 anyway, almost.

So I was glad about that.

Praise the Lord. It's cost me $2.

Can't out give God, can you?

All right, tonight. Who wants something to pray about? Or who's got something

to pray about? Just by the uplifted hand tonight, we're running a little behind.

Remember Sister Matthews? Remember the kids that start school?

Daniel's boy started last week.

I'm not sure when Danny's kids start, but all the kids are going back to school.

So we want to pray for them. Pray for our revival. Let's stand tonight.

We'll pray one more time.

Hallelujah. Amen. Thank you for being here. Let's pray. Lord,

we love you tonight. One more time, we come to you with our needs, Jesus.

We take our prayer request every service, God.

And you know what the needs are, Lord. You hear the family members that we get,

prayed for. You hear the situations, Lord.

You know the unspoken request. And there's not a thing you don't know altogether.

So, Lord, we bring it to you tonight. We ask you to help us with your word, oh, God.

We give you all the glory tonight. We love you, Jesus. Hallelujah,

hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy.

Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise God, praise God, praise God.

Amen, amen, amen. You may be seated.

Praise God. Tonight we're going to go to our next lesson. I didn't think I was

going to talk about this. I looked at a couple of different things,

but just kept coming back to this. So the Lord knows all things.

So we'll give it to God and ask the Lord to help us tonight.

Oh yeah thank you appreciate that give it to the lord is his blessed isn't i yeah there you go,

All right. Thank you. Joy in all things.

This is really good lesson, though, really. This is good. This is,

I mean, it really good. It's good. Amen.

This material I told you before is put together by a man named Ron Wilford. He was a teacher.

He was an instructor at the Texas Bible College.

And there's a forum you could go on. It's been years, a few years back now.

And all the preachers get on there and talk about stuff. And he had his CDs,

and he gave me a special deal. He's got all of his teaching stuff for like $10

or something, and it was a good deal.

So this stuff, and you got the manuals and the PowerPoints, and it was nice stuff. It's good stuff.

But this is really, really a

good lesson. Of course, our scripture text is Galatians 5, 22 through 23.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering,

gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, and against such there is no law.

Hebrews 12.2 looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith,

who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross,

despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God. Amen.

Amen. You may be seated. Thank you.

Most misunderstood aspects of the fruit of the Spirit is joy.

Joy is misunderstood in its true meaning.

A proper definition of biblical joy will help us to understand the importance,

of manifesting it in our lives.

A certain extent, each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit, now when we talked

about this, it's not, we say fruits of the Spirit, but it's the fruit of the

Spirit, and it's actually, there's one Spirit,

and so it's like the apple or an orange that has all the different aspects of

the fruit, like a peeling, and apple has a core, it has a seed,

it has, you know, all the different parts.

So these, what we're looking at is the Spirit of God, and we're looking at the

aspects that make up this,

fruit that we're talking about, and one of the aspects in the Spirit of God,

or in the fruit of the Spirit, is joy.

And we can see that these all hinge on each other.

When you look at this, the fruit of the Spirit is love. First one to mention,

well, we know that God is love.

And if you don't have love, you can't have joy. Okay?

And if you don't have joy, it's hard to have love. So all these hinge together.

They all depend on each other. The Spirit, if we don't have a foundation,

if we don't have a foundation of love, we'll never experience real joy.

The word joy in Galatians 5.22 comes from the Greek word C-H-A-R-A,

which means cheerfulness or a calm delight.

Now, notice it doesn't mean a spastic, bouncing off the wall type of euphoria.

That's what people think about joy. Joy.

Most of the time. Actually, the definition of a calm delight is probably at

the opposite end of the spectrum of how we perceive joy.

When you think of the idea of joy, what do you usually think of?

You think of laughter, a stress-free life, an emotional high, or good times.

But the fact of the matter is, those do not define joy at all.

They probably define happiness better than they do joy.

We make the mistake of thinking that if we're happy, then we have joy, but that's not the case.

The person who has joy is always happy, but the person who is happy does not

necessarily always have joy.

William Lynn Phelps wrote, if happiness truly consisted in physical ease, now this is comical,

if happiness truly consisted in physical ease, freedom from care,

then the happiest individual would not be man or woman.

He said, I think it'd be an American cow.

They don't have a worry in the world, does they? But what is joy?

Okay. What is joy? Joy is an attitude.

Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field.

When a man found it, he hid it again.

And then in his joy, went and sold all that he had and bought that field.

When this man discovered the treasure in the field, he sold all that he had,

and what he did was just as important as how he did it.

In his joy, or...

Thank you for listening to our podcast. Southwest Apostolic Church is a place of refuge.

If we can help you, we'd be glad to do it. Pastor's cell number, 317-469-3100.

If we can help you, we'd be glad to do it. God bless.