Sermon Transcript
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
It is written, I believed, therefore I have spoken. Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak. Because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. Therefore, we do not lose heart.
Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. As servants of God, we commend ourselves in every way, in great endurance, in troubles, hardships, and distress, in beatings, imprisonments, and riots, in hard work, sleepless nights, and hunger, in purity, understanding, patience, and kindness, in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love, in truthful speech and in the power of God, with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left, through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report, Genuine, yet regarded as imposters. Known, yet regarded as unknown.
Dying, and yet we live on. Beaten, and yet not killed. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. Pure, but making many rich. Having nothing, and yet possessing everything.
We’re in a series on the fruit of God’s Spirit, and today we are discussing joy, which out of all of what God’s Spirit can bring into our lives, joy might be what we are most desperate for because many of us might feel like we have a weight around our necks. Maybe it’s we’re frustrated at work, we feel stuck, life hasn’t turned out how we thought it would, and we wish we could simply enjoy what we do for 8 or 10 hours a day instead of dreading it. You may relate to the now rather old movie Office Space where part of the plot is the main character really hates his job, really hates his job, but he ends up going to a hypnotist and he asks the hypnotist, Can you put me in some kind of trance so that my mind is tricked into thinking that when I’m at work, I think that I’m fishing? And then when I come home from work, I feel like I’ve been fishing all day? Can you do that?
And of course, the hypnotist says, that’s not really what I do. Maybe you relate to that guy and how you feel at work. Or maybe you feel weighed down somewhere else if it’s not professionally. Maybe it’s relationally, maybe it’s marriage didn’t turn out the way you thought it would, or maybe you’re really stressed over the state of the world. You really hate watching the news, but for some reason you can’t stop watching the news, and the more you consume, the worse you feel.
Or even if we’re not in a particularly tight spot right now, I imagine most of us would want our spirits lifted. We look for escapes, we look for little boosts of sunshine in our lives, we want happiness, joy. If we’re parents, what do we often say that we want for our kids when they start making life decisions, maybe when they’re picking a career, when they’re thinking about getting married, or if they’re dealing with a lot, maybe an opportunity didn’t work out for them and they look like they’re at the end of their rope, what do we say? We say, I just want them to be happy. Oh, so you say it too.
Even if it’s a decision that— they make a decision that we wouldn’t, we might concede, we might put our own desires on the back burner. We’ll say, well, if it makes them happy, okay. You know, maybe through clenched teeth we even say, you know, if they have to move far away from me, okay. You know, whether they get married or not, okay. If they have kids or not, okay.
If I never have grandchildren, okay. If they end up as a CEO or a truck driver or a nurse, you know, teacher, whatever, or if they have some kind of limitation where none of those things will ever be possible, I can be okay with all of that. I just want them to be happy, right? It’s what we want for our kids, it’s what we want for ourselves, but often it seems to elude us even though we put a lot of effort into it. We put a lot of effort into being happy, especially now with mental health awareness, and for the record, our society’s focus on mental health over the last 15 or so years is fantastic, right?
We’re much more educated on the importance of mental health now. It’s rare to hear someone say something like, the best way to deal with stress is just to shove it down deep and pretend you’re fine. Not many people say that anymore. People used to think that was a good idea, the kind of stoic approach, but they don’t now. Praise the Lord, we’ve learned.
We understand we need sunshine and good diet and enough sleep and exercise and socialization and transparency and authenticity All of those help mental health and paying attention to them will improve our lives. And yet it still seems like there’s something about joy that we’re missing.
So what is that? And can God’s Spirit really develop a deep joy within us? If so, how?
To help us, we’re studying 2 passages from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians where he talks about his joy. And Paul, as we will see, claims he has this joy even while he’s in the middle of extremely difficult circumstances. His situation is likely more weighty than what most of us face most of the time, but he still has joy. So if there’s something that can help him, it can certainly help us. As we look at our text today, we will see what joy isn’t, what joy is, and then how we can have it.
What joy isn’t, what joy is, and how we can have it. So first, what joy isn’t. Joy isn’t the absence of sorrow. We don’t actually need to get rid of sorrow in order to have joy. Paul, in fact, explicitly writes that he is sorrowful yet always rejoicing, 2 Corinthians 6:10.
He believes that joy and sorrow can coexist, and considering what was happening to him, it’s a good thing he doesn’t need to get rid of sorrow in order to have joy, because with what he was dealing with, if he weren’t upset, It would be unhealthy. Paul says he’s been in prison even though he never did anything wrong, which means he suffered injustice. On top of that, he’s been physically assaulted, struck down, beaten. Additionally, he says he’s had many sleepless nights, and I don’t know about you, but a couple of nights without sleep for me and I feel like life is overwhelming. He says he’s hungry.
On top of that, he says he’s been misunderstood. He said one thing, people accused him of a different thing. He’s been forgotten even by some of his friends. We know this from some of his— excuse me— his other letters. His friends didn’t show up for him when he needed them the most, and they were people who said they would be there.
So of course, all that going on, of course he’s sorrowful. It’s like everything has gone wrong for him all at once. We might be dealing with one or two of those things, but he’s got 5 or more going on all at the same time. So he says, you know what, guys? This is tough.
It’s hard for me. I’m sorrowful. If he didn’t say that, he would lose all credibility in our eyes, right? If we said, hey, Paul, how’s it going? You know, how you doing with being forgotten, beaten, misunderstood, jailed unjustly, no sleep, hungry?
How’s it going? And he said, I’m on top of the world. I feel as light as air. Can’t get much better in my heart than I am right now. If he said that, we would be concerned.
We’d say, you’re avoidance coping, right? Like, are you on something? This is not healthy how you’re responding to this, Paul. He needs to have sorrow. Which is maybe a weight off for some of us.
Paul says it’s okay, it’s good, it’s necessary to have sorrows and troubles and be sad.
If we have those, we need to say it and express it. Sometimes as Christians we can get a little bit of a complex, especially those of us who are more legalistic. We might read Philippians 4:4, for instance, that says, rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice, right? And we think, oh no, I’m not supposed to act sad, I’m supposed to rejoice, I can’t act upset, you know, I want everyone to think I’m a good Christian so I’m going to put on a happy face even though I’m dying inside.
Paul doesn’t do that. In fact, he even kind of says he feels like he’s dying, he says death is at work in us, he says he’s wasting away. He does not minimize the difficulty. He does not act like everything is fine. So you do not need to act like everything is fine if it isn’t.
Even God doesn’t act like everything is fine. Throughout Scripture, we see Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all grieving and all joyous. Genesis 6:6, people had become so mean and nasty to each other, it really upset God. In Isaiah 63 and Ephesians 4, the Holy Spirit grieves. Jesus is described as a man of sorrows, Isaiah 53:3, and he cries his eyes out when his friend Lazarus dies.
When Jesus was facing the cross, he was so laden with burden that he sweat drops of blood. They grieve. And yet at the same time, Hebrews 12 tells us that for the joy set before Jesus, he endured the cross. And the same Spirit who grieves is the same Spirit who produces joy in us. At God’s side there are eternal pleasures, joy in his presence, Psalm 16:11.
God delights in us so much that he sings over us, Zephaniah 3:17. Hebrews 1 tells us that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and that he has been anointed with the oil of joy. Father, Son, Holy Spirit all have the highest joy and the deepest grief simultaneously.
Joy and sorrow are not mutually exclusive. So, if you have grief, please don’t act like you don’t. Don’t put on some kind of happy Christian mask. It will not help you, and it actually hurts the Christian witness in the world because everyone can see that we’re being fake, and no one wants to be part of something like that. So when we’re talking about joy, we’re not talking about the absence of sorrow.
The type of joy that the Spirit brings into our lives can coexist with sorrow, and it will admit sorrow if it’s there, but it also helps with our sorrows. Which brings us to what is it? If joy isn’t the absence of sorrow, what is it? It’s deeper than sorrow. Paul says a bunch of different ways that he has something bigger and brighter than everything that he’s dealing with.
He says, we are hard-pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. He says, therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed. Day by day, dying, we live on. He admits, yes, all these terrible things are happening, all these troubles, yes, it is hard.
He says, I am pressed, I have sorrow, I am carrying a huge weight, but that huge weight is not the only thing I have.
He has something deeper than that. He has a joy that’s even weightier. One commentator described Paul’s joy this way, quote, instead of being embittered and frustrated and angry and resentful, By all the afflictions and hardships and calamities and sleepless nights, by God’s grace, God has— Paul has shown patience and kindness and love. His spirit has not been broken by the pain of his ministry. In the Holy Spirit, he has found resources to give and not to grumble, to be patient in God’s timing rather than pity himself, to be kind to people rather than to take it out on others.
End quote. The joy the Spirit develops within us, it’s like an underground stream at the bottom of our souls that never runs dry. Psalm 1 describes followers of God like trees with roots that go down deep. Those roots go down so deep that it’s whatever is happening on the surface, and there could be a lot happening up on the surface, you know, 115 degrees up there, wars, whatever, But nothing happening on the surface can get down far enough to contaminate the waters where our roots are getting their life. There’s this reservoir down there that helps us live on.
Now that doesn’t mean that we always feel lighthearted, we’re not glib all the time or giddy, all of that surface-level joy can come and go but we’re able to deal with the world in a way around us that really looks like the fruit of the Spirit: peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, self-control. Not lashing out, not embittered, because we have something deeper than our sorrows. There’s a scene from the 3rd Lord of the Rings book that describes this kind of joy, which if you’ve been around for less than 5 minutes, you should know that I quote Lord of the Rings a lot. The scene is the battle between good and evil is reaching its peak. The odds of victory seem very slim for our heroes.
They are vastly outnumbered. The good guys have kind of all been separated into different groups and they don’t know what’s going on with the people in other groups and if one of them fails probably the whole thing falls apart. No one knows what’s gonna happen. And one of the little hobbits, these small little creatures, is in a castle. With Gandalf the great wizard, and they’ve just had a disappointing meeting with someone who could have helped them, but he’s not going to be any help at all.
And Gandalf is looking out the window of this castle with the future hanging in the balance. Everything is uncertain. You know, Gandalf knows he’s up against forces that are more powerful than even him, and Gandalf is the one who led them down this path. He came up with this plan, and now his plan may not work out. The fate of the world was kind of in his hands and maybe he didn’t choose wisely.
I mean, you want to talk about pressed, Gandalf is pressed. But Tolkien, the author, writes, Pippin, that’s the hobbit, glanced in some wonder at the face now close beside his own. In the wizard’s face he saw at first only lines of care and sorrow, though as he looked more intently he perceived that under all the sorrow there was a great joy. A fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing were it to gush forth. That’s what we mean.
The joy of the Spirit brings us depth. It doesn’t ignore problems, hardships, tragedies. Sometimes the whole world around us is collapsing. Sometimes victory does look impossible. We could be like Paul— forgotten, poor, beaten, misunderstood, falsely accused, hungry, jailed, knocked over, but there’s something deeper than all of that.
He has a weight that centers him. It’s like one of those kids punching dummies, when you hit it, it just stands back up no matter how hard you hit it. He’s hard-pressed on every side, but he’s not crushed. He’s perplexed, but he’s not in despair. He’s persecuted, but he’s not abandoned.
He’s struck down, but he’s not destroyed. There is a fountain of mirth, to use Tolkien’s language, bigger than his sorrows. That’s what joy is. Now, how do we get it? How do we access this joy?
It’s the resurrection.
Paul tells us why he doesn’t lose heart. He tells us what his fountain of mirth is, what the weight in his soul is that keeps him upright even when he’s knocked over. He says, verse 14, he knows the one who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise him, and therefore, verse 16, he does not lose heart. So how can he be struck down but not destroyed? What underground spring has he found that is deeper than any calamity up on the surface?
It’s the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And the confidence that because Jesus was resurrected, Paul will be resurrected as well. That’s why he has so much joy. Now, I realize to our modern ears, to some of our modern ears, Jesus coming back to life may not initially sound like it relates to all the problems that we face. We might say, if we’re honest, I mean, okay, Jesus is alive, great, But my marriage is still falling apart.
I still hate work. My kids won’t speak to me. So, I hate to say it, but who cares if someone is alive again? How is that relevant to my difficulties? It’s a great question.
It’s why Easter is such a big deal to us. We need an understanding of the first-century Jewish view of the resurrection First century Israelites, not all of them but many of them, believed in this future resurrection from places like Daniel 12, for instance, and Isaiah, new heavens and new earth, where it says— Daniel 12 says all in those— all in their graves will rise from the dust of the earth and live forever. Some of the people who rise will live with God, some away from God, but everyone rises. But their belief in the future resurrection was much more than simply thinking that they could live forever. Their belief in the resurrection was more than simply life after death for them.
It was more significant than that, which is needed because simple life after death may or may not comfort you in the moment of struggle. You can think about it. If you believe that you’re going to have a pleasant eternity waiting for you as some kind of respite from the struggles of this life, And now you’re in a painful spot like Paul or Gandalf where life is collapsing on you. You know, your friends have forgotten you, someone falsely accused you and now everyone is condemning you, you’re an outcast, you’ve lost everything, everything you’ve worked for for years has been taken away from you unfairly and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll be bankrupt forever, right?
You’re in a very painful spot. And then someone comes along and says, don’t worry, you can live forever.
Maybe that provides some hope, but think about what you’re really saying. Essentially, you’re saying, yes, this is hard, but if you just wait for the sweet release of death, your pain will be eased. You won’t have to deal with this anymore.
Yay?
That’s not terribly helpful. You wouldn’t want anyone telling you that on some kind of crisis counseling call system, right? You call in and say, my friends forgot me, I’ve been condemned unfairly, someone stole my project, I’m angry, I’m useless. We spill our guts to the counselor and the counselor replies, well, if you just wait to die, then you’ll be somewhere pleasant.
I mean, maybe that’s better than believing the struggle of this life is all there is to existence. I mean, maybe it’s something, but I’m sorry, that’s not a fountain of mirth enough to set a whole kingdom laughing. It’s not enough.
And it’s not the full significance of the resurrection. The biblical understanding of the resurrection is not simply life after death. It’s a remaking of all things. It’s a restoration of all that was ever broken in the world, and it’s restoring it in a way that somehow it is better having been restored than if it were never broken in the first place. You can see that principle with Jesus’ resurrection itself.
There’s a sense in which Jesus coming back to life, having conquered the grave, having gone into death and coming back victorious. Having experienced death, having had the brutality of the crucifixion, there is a sense in which Him coming back from that, having been victorious over it, that coming back and being victorious is better, fuller, brighter, deeper, greater than if He were never crucified in the first place.
The mending of the problem is more wonderful than if there had never been a problem.
And the belief in the resurrection is not just that Jesus and not just that those who belong to him will rise, but the world itself and everything in it that has ever gone wrong will be mended like that. From Isaiah, you know, child playing near the den of the cobra, wolf laying down with the lamb, really everything that has ever gone wrong will be brought back to this fullness. That’s the resurrection, and we have a hint of it, of this belief, in our verses today when Paul says, verse 17, for our light and momentary troubles are achieving— that’s the word he uses— achieving for us an eternal glory that outweighs them all. As a quick aside, it’s rather incredible Paul thinks his troubles are light and momentary, right? Forgotten, beaten, falsely accused, imprisoned, dying, Light and momentary, that’s a different point.
To our immediate point, Paul says those troubles are achieving an eternal glory, meaning those troubles are part of what creates the future that we long for. So, when we are in eternity, the picture is not that we sit down with Jesus and look back on our life and we talk about our troubles and Jesus says, well, at least you’re out of that situation. And you’re in a good place now, you know, the bad times are over, the good times have come, right? That’s not the picture. Instead, we sit down with Jesus, look back on our troubles, and we see how those troubles and the mending of them achieved, contributed to, produced the glory that we will be sitting in.
There is a way There is some way that trouble plus redemption of that trouble equals a glory that is better, far better, Paul says, than if there had never been any trouble in the first place. Trouble plus redemption of trouble equals better glory than no trouble, including all of our loneliness, including our failures, including when we feel useless, including when what we deserve was stolen from us, all of it, all of the troubles, when God remakes the world, not only does all that get fixed, and it will get fixed, not only all the wrongs set right, and they will be set right, but the way in which He fixes it will give us more joy than if it had never been broken in the first place.
That’s the resurrection. It’s a resurrection of the world in a sense. It’s a resurrection of all the wrongs.
And when first-century Jewish people saw Jesus resurrected, the reality of that resurrection must have hit their hearts on a whole new level. Not like they didn’t believe it before, right, because they’d read Old Testament Scriptures, new heavens, new earth. Wolf, lamb, child hanging out with cobras, right? I mean, they thought it was going to happen, but then when they saw the resurrected Christ standing there and they could hug him, their faith became sight, tangible, right? And they knew, right, if Jesus has literally resurrected, and he did because there he is, then they knew the rest of the resurrection will follow.
All the wrongs will arise and be set right. If Jesus really conquered the grave, if death really could not hold him, then this whole thing is true. Everything is going to come back, everything is going to be remade, all the sad things really will come untrue, to quote Lord of the Rings again. So all our current troubles, marriage, kids, job, world affairs, betrayed, forgotten, imprisoned, beaten, robbed, all the troubles, all of them, the way in which God will redeem them, the way in which He will make us new and make the world new, it will be so glorious that when we look back on the trouble and we see how it plus the restoration of it achieved the majesty that we will be sitting in, we will say, thank you, Lord. Thank you for your amazing work.
Now, if you believe that future is coming, or to the extent that you believe that it is, and we have good reason to do so because Jesus really rose from the dead, so we can have confidence the rest of it will happen as well. If we believe that is on its way, we will have a depth of joy that can’t be touched by any circumstances. We’ll have a weight that keeps us balanced no matter what storm is raging. We can be struck down but not destroyed because we know that even getting struck down is part of what is going to achieve the glory to come.
That is the fountain of mirth that can set a whole kingdom laughing no matter what’s happening. And I’ll tell you, even on my hardest days, Even at my lowest points, if I’m in a season where I feel like nothing’s working, if I’m depressed, if I think through the implications of the resurrection, it’s like this little beam of light is able to blast into my heart even though I may still be sad, Right? I might not be chipper, but there is a joy that the resurrection gives that’s unshakable, that is so deep that it can’t be touched by circumstances. I pray all of us put our roots down there.
There is nothing like it. It is the greatest news ever in the history of the world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Let’s pray. Father, we thank you that you are not going to leave us in our troubles. We thank you that you are going to redeem our troubles, Lord. No matter how severe they are, there is a way that you will put this world back together, and when you do, it will be more glorious than it ever was before it was broken. We long for that, Lord, and we have confidence in it because Jesus rose, and we know the rest of creation will as well.
We give thanks for those things in his name. Amen. Well, one of the symbols that Jesus gave the church for the weight that he took off of us on the cross is communion. At Bridges, we do not believe communion is what saves you or forgives you. We believe communion is a symbol of what Jesus did to save us, that on the cross he took the weight of our sin, he took the weight of the brokenness of the world onto himself.
And then, as we just discussed, rose to life and victory over all the problems that are around here. So as we take communion today, our ushers will bring it forward. You can stay right where you are. Trey will come down your row. But if you would, as you, as you take the cups, if you just hang on to them, I’ll come back up here.
We’ll all take it together. When, when Jesus first instituted communion, it was a meal sitting around a table. In the first church, when they celebrated communion, it was a meal sitting around a table. And just like your table at home, you like for everybody to be at the table before you start eating the meal. So in honor of their early tradition of how they took communion, we will just hang on to it.
I’ll come up back up here and we will all take it together. Let’s take communion now.
