Practical Joy, Part One

 

As human beings we have a problem.  We want things.  We desire pleasurable experiences.  We enjoy nice things.  These desire in themselves are not bad, in fact they are good.

God wants us to flourish and have a pleasurable, joy-filled life.  He gave us the capacity for pleasure so that we would be drawn to Him, since He is the ultimate source of pleasure and joy.  "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning."  (James 1:17)

The question is, how do find pleasure and satisfaction in the presence of God?  The lights and rush of this world are in our faces constantly, how can we cut through the noise and find the greater pleasure God is offering?  There are four things that I believe should be active in our lives if we want to be filled with the joy of the Lord:  surrender, sanctification, service, and silence.  We will look at surrender and sanctification this time and service and silence in a following post.

In the Gospels one of the first things we find Jesus doing is calling the disciples to follow Him.  He comes upon them while they are about their daily jobs, many of them fishermen.  They are busy at work, cleaning and mending their nets when Jesus approaches them and simply says, "Follow me!"  And they do.  They leave their nets behind and follow Him.

Jesus said that if we are to follow Him, we have to leave some things behind.  "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.  And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me."(Matthew 10:37-38) Family commitments are important and essential, but if they supersede our commitment to Christ, they have become idols.  Christ calls us to be willing to even leave our family behind in our pursuit of Him.  The call to follow Jesus is a call of absolute commitment.  Half measures will not do.

Romans 12:1 says this, "I beseech you, therefore, brethren by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."

"A living sacrifice" - that is what God is calling us to.  To lay our life down at Jesus feet and never ask for it back.

This is hard thing.  There is certainly a cost to following Christ.  A steep cost.  We are asked to let go of our sin and selfish desires and embrace the Savior.  In the end, though, we will find this exchange to be the greatest bargain in cosmic history.  As we abide in Christ and see more and more of His beauty and glory, and our hearts apprehend the eternal riches He is giving us, we realize how foolish we were to lay hold of sin to begin with.  It looked so wonderful at the time, but in the light of Christ, it dims and is revealed to be the rubbish that it always was.

We shake our heads at Adam and Eve as they give up Paradise to eat a piece of fruit, but we are the same way.  We give up the opportunity to know eternal bliss in Christ to hold on to some cheap baubles the devil and this world offers us.

"All to Jesus, I surrender, all to Him I freely give.  I will ever love and trust Him, in His presence daily live."("I Surrender All", Judson Wheeler Vad DeVenter) The old hymn says.  It is a sacrifice, but what we gain is infinite joy.  A reasonable exchange by any measure.

The next step on our journey to joy takes the form of sanctification.  Sanctification is not an everyday word for most of us, I don't think it is ever used outside of church.  Basically, what it means is "to make holy."  It is the process by which we gradually, day by day, dedicate ourselves more and more to God, and we become more and more like Christ.

Paul mentions it in his letter to the young pastor Timothy, "If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work." (2 Timothy 2:21) “Purge" here has the idea of making something clean, like we might clean a vessel.  If we are going to use a bowl to make some tasty ramen, we will not use a bowl that is filled with dirt.  At least I hope not.  We would clean the bowl; we would purge it of every unclean thing.  Once the bowl is clean, it is fit and ready to be used to make tasty soup.

This is what God wants to do with us.  He wants to cleanse us from all uncleanness and make us more and more useful to Him and to His kingdom.  He wants us "prepared for every good work."  We can't do good works when we are continuing in sin.

A while back I wrote about the Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews movie "The Princess Diaries."  As the story goes, Mia is an average girl who discovers that she is really a princess.  And now that she knows this, she must learn what it means to be a princess.  She must learn to dress, speak, and act as a princess.  She now has responsibilities she never imagined before, but new opportunities as well.  It takes some time, it is not an instant process, but by the end of the film, she has learned to carry herself in a majestic, dignified way befitting a princess.

This is what sanctification is like.  When we trust in Christ we enter into His royal family, we become princes and princesses with God.  And now we must learn to live and walk as children of God.  We have the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us to guide us along in this process.  We let go of certain things and we embrace new things.  Our speech, behavior and attitudes change.

When I was teaching children's Sunday school and running a bus ministry, we used to sing this song, "The things I used to do, I don't do them anymore!"  That is sanctification in its simplest form.  We are changed, transformed into the image of Christ.  "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new." (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Sin is a siphon that drains joy from our lives, and sanctification helps us root it out.  This means that when we become aware of sin in our lives, we do our best to refrain from that behavior.  When we learn that there are things we should be doing for the Lord, like serving others, tithing, and witnessing, we put forth effort to those ends.  This is an ongoing process that never ends while we are here on earth.  There is friction here, and sometimes pain.  We resist this change more often than not, but if we surrender to the process, in the end, we will find joy.

Surrender and sanctification are two important, practical steps to joy.  In the next post we will look at service and silence.