Pastor Edgar Mayer;
For more sermons and other writings check out pastors homepage: http://www.geocities.com/mayeredgar
Full-on
Joy
An old Bible hymn makes this declaration
about one of Gods people Psalm
45:7: You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your God,
has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy. Later these words were applied to Jesus (Hebrews
1:9) but this morning as a church
we are coming before God, asking him
to speak the same words over us because we recognize an important principle in
these words: You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God,
your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of
joy.
Our ambition is not to be above anyone
else let our companions rise with
us but we want the joy the oil
of joy according to 1 Thessalonians 1:6: the joy given by the Holy Spirit
and we are prepared to do whatever it
takes to be more joyful. Are we agreed on this? Are we clear about the goal? We
want more joy! We must have more joy! Then all of us pay attention to what the Bible verse is
saying the logic of the words: You love righteousness and hate
wickedness; therefore
joy. In
other words: If you are full-on in your pursuit of righteousness full-on
in your obedience to the will of God and
shun sin, then you are in the right position to receive joy. Invest passion
into the things of God, he then makes you drip with the oil of joy.
Is this a new thought for us? Are you
surprised? We may like our Christianity a little less extreme. What does it
mean to love righteousness? Does it mean that I can no longer go to certain
parties or watch certain TV programs? Does it mean that I have to come to
church? Does it mean that my time is no longer my own or my money? Do
I have to read the Bible and pray? For how long? Some of us may suspect that this
is too much religion. How can there be joy in being so intense holier-than-thou?
Fact is that it is our slackness our failure in asking for any commitment that is dooming people to a faith life
without much joy. [Like it would be dooming couples by telling them on
their wedding day: Be happy in your marriage but dont be too extreme in
loving each other.] Many a time we
promote Christianity by lowering the standard, saying: Just believe (it
doesnt take that much) that Jesus died for you and then you will have eternal
life. We say: Just believe
but fail to mention that Jesus is Lord
of Lords and King of Kings. He wants more than mere intellectual assent. He
wants love and faithfulness. He wants to be our God, our bridegroom not
our Santa Clause.
But we shy away from commitment and then
dont like discipline. Even as Christians we seek joy in the freedom of
self-rule which prompted the president of a Baptist seminary to write:
The decline of church discipline is perhaps the most visible
failure of the contemporary church. No longer concerned with maintaining purity
of confession or lifestyle, the contemporary church sees itself as a voluntary
association of autonomous members, with minimal moral accountability to God,
much less to each other. The absence of church discipline is no longer
remarkableit is generally not even noticed. Regulative and restorative church
discipline is, to many church members, no longer a meaningful category, or even
a memory. The present generation of both ministers and church members is
virtually without experience of biblical church discipline (R. Albert Mohler,
Jr).
This Baptist president is using big
words but is spelling out a simple truth. Christians in the West no longer seem
to grasp the concept of coming under discipline. We no longer understand the
Bible in this matter. Verses like Colossians
How can there be joy in judging sin and
chastising sinners? Yet, one Christian group in history the Moravians bearing
fruit across the world the first congregation to send a missionary overseas
they lived according to the strictest of
discipline but came to be known as Gods happy people.
One historian writes: For pleasure the Brethren had
neither time nor taste. They worked, on the average, sixteen hours a day, allowed
only five hours for sleep, and spent the remaining three at meals and [church] meetings
At five in the morning they met in the hall, and joined in a chorus of praise
Who would have wanted to join the Moravians [at
five in the morning] but and I
remember how much this fact surprised me in my research others at the time recognized abundant joy in them and therefore called
them Gods happy people. The
strict discipline did not diminish joy but seemed to release it. And does this
not bring us back to
Psalm 45:7: You love righteousness and hate wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you
with the oil of joy.
Likewise Basilea
Schlink the founder of the Evangelical Sisters of Mary she wrote a book with the title: Repentance
The Joy-filled Life. She begins
the book by saying that it is really a confession of her own spiritual
experiences. Her Christian life began with a time of remorse and repentance
and (I quote) the greatest
rejoicing [over]
the glorious gift of forgiveness but then not much later she
became burdened with the things of this world. She writes: Our spirits
grew dull and we no longer knew the joy
During this time we accepted
ourselves as we were, bound with all our sins and weaknesses. We knew nothing
of daily repentance
could not, therefore, sing songs of rejoicing about
forgiveness and redemption (Basilea Schlink: Repentance The Joy-filled
Life, London: Zondervan 1968, p7).
However, then God intervened in the form
of a testing relationship. Basilea Schlink could not get on with a difficult
woman with whom she was living. As a result she became frustrated and bitter and
could not see any way out. But then
in her own words the Lord showed
Basilea her sin. The Lord didnt come with comfort shoring up her
feelings of self-pity. He confronted her
and showed her that she was unloving and unmerciful towards her friend. He also
showed her that she should have been able to win her over by overflowing
compassion.
Basilea Schlink writes: Now I recognized that I was at fault. The Lord
granted me a penitent and crying heart. This experience drove me into the arms
of Jesus, for Jesus and the repentant sinner belong together. He began to
reveal himself as Love [and I received so much joy over his grace and
forgiveness]
(Basilea Schlink: My All For Him, London: Lakeland 1971,
p15-16).
Do we understand what Basilea Schlink experienced?
Do we understand what lies at the heart of every joyful Christian life? It took
Basilea years she calls them: lost
years to discover what makes for joy. She
put it in a nutshell: Because my repentance at conversion did not
continue as a daily experience, my love for Jesus grew lukewarm. Only penitent
sinners to whom forgiveness is given are on fire with love for Jesus. So I
can tell you that a life without daily repentance is spiritually poor. It has
no joy or power and is totally lacking fruit
(Basilea Schlink:
Repentance The Joy-filled Life, London: Zondervan 1968, p8).
The challenge is: never to become
satisfied with our sin never to
accept ourselves as we are excusing our sins and weaknesses. The challenge is to face up to our own sin
in difficult relationships and daily irritations. We need to see our need
the need for forgiveness. Otherwise we
grow cold in our love to Jesus (we dont appreciate him) and therefore have no joy.
The good news is that we do not confront
sin on our own. We do not confront repentance on our own. The Bible says Ephesians 1:7: In Jesus we have redemption
through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of
Gods grace
Ephesians 2:8-10:
this is not from yourselves, it is
the gift of God
Redemption deliverance from sin, death and the devil which includes the work of repentance is
not from ourselves not any of our work but a gift from God. Therefore, sinners cry out to God in this way
Psalm 51:10-12: Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast
spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence or take your Holy
Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing
spirit to sustain me.
Sinners cry out to God. Sometimes we may
not feel like repenting. We may not want to turn away from sin and temptations.
We may want to dig in be stubborn
remain offended but it is God who can change our direction. What
we do not have, he can create a pure heart, a steadfast spirit and a
willing spirit and therefore for
that very reason crying out to God in
desperation makes such good sense because it is he who can make us want to
repent. We pray until the breakthrough comes: Create in me a pure
heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. He can make us fall in love with him again bring alive to us
again his goodness on the cross the glory of his holiness the preciousness
of forgiveness to eternal life and
then with new love he will also grant us new joy the joy of his salvation
as we cried out with Psalm 51:10-12:
Restore to me the joy of your
salvation
The truth is easy enough to understand. There
can only be joy in alignment with God
the source of joy. There can only be
joy in alignment with him and we want to be aligned. Am I right? We want more
joy. We must have more joy! Let him do with us what he wants. This morning we
are coming before God, asking him to make the words come true for us
Psalm 45:7: You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your
God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.
Are we firming up on the truth the connection between righteousness and joy pure
hearts and joy repentance and joy? Or
would the following outburst still confuse us: Are you going to preach
to us about sin, are you going to preach about conviction of sin? You say your
object is to make us happy but if you are going to preach to us about
conviction of sins, surely that is going to make us still more unhappy. Are you
deliberately trying to make us miserable and wretched (Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
Spiritual Depression, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company 1965, p28).
Are you deliberately trying to make us feel miserable and wretched.
Precisely thats what we are trying to
do. We must be made miserable before we can know true Christian joy. We must
become aligned with God in repentance and forgiveness (turning away
from sin towards him agree with his outlook and be open to his truth) before we can receive the joy of his
salvation, the joy of his love, the joy of his majesty and honour and power.
We may have a look at a few more Bible
references Psalm 97:11: Light
is shed upon the righteous and joy on the upright in heart. John 15:9-12:
remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love
I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be
complete. My command is this: Love each other
Romans 14:17:
the
These Bible promises are for us today. Joy
is shed on the upright in heart. Jesus puts his joy and makes his joy complete in
us if we remain in his love and thus, obey his commands especially: Love one another. The
I close with another Bible story which
yet again explains the connection between full-on alignment with God and joy.
Lk 15:11-32:
There was a man who had two sons. The younger
one said to his father, Father, give me my share of the estate So he divided
his property between them
[The younger son squandered his wealth, returned in
desperation and the Father welcomed him back with a feast and full reinstatement
as son.]
But the older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his
father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, Look! All
these years Ive been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you
never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when
this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home,
you kill the fattened calf for him! My son, the father said, you are always
with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad,
because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is
found.
This is a story on the one hand brimming with joy: the stunned joy of a delinquent son over the love of
his dad, the unashamed joy of a heart-broken dad over the return of his son.
There was the feast and the fattened calf but there was also someone that had
no joy and that someone was like many a Christian with no joy.
He was half-hearted and uncommitted even
though he never left home. While the younger son had the guts to be extreme in
his sin and then be extreme in his experience of forgiveness (and newfound love for his dad), the older son was not extreme in anything. From the outside he looked
like a decent follow (not given to anything radical in his faith life) but on the inside he was a bundle of
bitterness without any joy. Why? Because as a son he had never aligned himself
with his father and therefore could never appreciate what he had the love
of his dad all of the time and the inheritance of his dad all of the time. There was no joy because he had never
learned to love his dad and therefore he didnt understand him accusing
him with the words: Look! All these years Ive been slaving for you and
never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could
celebrate with my friends. To which
the father replied: My son, you are always with me, and everything I
have is yours. It was always there
for the asking.
The older son chose a path which never
leads to joy. He chose to be of two minds sit on the fence remain at
home but with resentment. From the outside he looked decent enough but on the
inside he seemed to have pined away for the sinful life envious of his
brother letting his heart speak in the words to his father:
[he] has
squandered . property with prostitutes.
It is the same with God. Joy comes from
being a little more extreme in our faith. Joy comes from fully committing the
heart to loving our Father in heaven and fully committing the heart to loving
everything about him. Then we celebrate with him we get it when
the whole household is brimming with joy: the stunned joy of a delinquent son
over the love of his dad, the unashamed joy of a heart-broken dad over the
return of his son and our joy over the kind of dad and family that we have. As
he said: We are always with him and everything he has is ours.
What about it? Do we have faith for it? Joy
is coming to this church. God will say
Psalm 45:7: You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your
God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.
Oh yes God pour it out, rub it in,
smear it on us the oil of joy. Our passion is for you. Let it be abundant
joy. Amen.