Joy is within Reach

Summary:

Jonathan’s sermon emphasizes the importance of hope, peace, joy, and love during Advent, urging a return to the true meaning of the season. He critiques societal pressures for perfection and materialism, highlighting God’s faithfulness amidst human brokenness and evil.

Transcript:

Good morning, everyone. My name is Jonathan. I get to be a pastor here at Journey. And always, we are so grateful for your participation today, for you being here. It means the world to us, and we always want to make sure that we let you know how appreciative we are for you making the time to be here. There are a lot of other places that we could be in this moment. We know that there are several people who are needing to put their attention into other things.

But the fact that you are here, and made an attempt to be here, is something that we don't take for granted, and want to let you know that this morning. So whether you are here in person, or gathered with us online, we are very grateful for it all. You know, the church is the people. It's not a building. It's not the pastor. It is the people. And so, you play the most significant role in what takes place here today.

And so, we are grateful for it. During the season of Advent, it is a little bit of a strange season that we participate in, because we live in this tension of what we celebrate has already happened, but what is not yet fully happened, or is in process of happening. So we live in this space of celebration and anticipation. The celebration of Jesus, born of Mary, many years ago in the town of Bethlehem. The celebration of the return of Christ the King, both in our lives on a daily basis, but ultimately in the world in which we live. And it is in this tension that we celebrate the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love. Hope, peace, joy, and love.

There are many great songs in our culture, and scriptures in the Bible, and songs sung in the church about those themes, hope, peace, joy, and love. We wear them on our t-shirts. We think of them, perhaps often during this time of year. But we come to these themes of Advent, and for some of us, life is going along just the way that we want it to. There are no issues, no problems, at least that we are worth speaking of, or paying attention to. But some of us come in this season, and life is heavy and difficult. My wife, what she does for work is advanced funeral planning, and that is exactly what it is.

She helps people plan for their funerals. And one of the services that her funeral home offers is every year around this time, those who have lost loved ones over the past year are invited to come back for a candlelight vigil to remember their loved ones, to reflect on that, and to grieve during this time and season of Christmas, and preparing for the holidays. And yesterday, we spent all day with people who had experienced a great and difficult loss, and now their task is to face the holiday season without someone they love and care about, which, if you've been there, is a difficult task to say the least. We have people who are mourning events that have happened in their lives. We have people who are mourning events that are happening around the world. We have no shortage of things to concern ourselves with. And yet, we try to cling to these ideas of hope, peace, joy, and love.

And as people who seek to follow Jesus, the cry of our is that God would indeed deliver us. And as we go through our time here on earth, we know that we are certainly not exempt from trouble, from suffering, from difficulties, but we look to the one who promises to lead us through it all and be with us in it all. And with that in mind, I wanted to read from Isaiah chapter 12, beginning in verse 2. I'm just going to read verses 2 and 3, but hear these words of the prophet speaking of God, the deliverer. Surely God is my salvation. I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord himself is my strength and my defense.

He has become my salvation. With joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation. Throughout the scripture, there are these promises that pop up that depict God's faithfulness to people. The trouble is that oftentimes these promises are mentioned and then there, what follows is a time of waiting. God's promises very rarely, if ever, are instant. It takes time for God to do the work in us and in our lives and in the world around us in order for these promises to be fulfilled. And one of the traditions that developed in scripture is that when people received a promise from God or a vision from God of how the future could look different from the past, they would take all of their hopes and dreams and thoughts that had been inspired by God, and they would put them into a prayer or a song.

And these songs are recorded for us in scripture, around 185 of them from Old Testament to New Testament. And these songs were things that people clung to in order to remind themselves of the promise, to reassure themselves that whether they saw it or not, that God was working in their lives and around them. And that no matter what the story that their eyes saw or their ears heard, that they would understand that God was up to something restoring hope, peace, joy, and love around us. And so during this season of Advent, as we have read from the scriptures and read the promises of hope, peace, joy, and love, we have also been utilizing this year a more modern version of these prayers and hopes that is put together by the singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson, who is one of my favorites. The song that Rachel sang, Deliver Us, is one of those songs, and it captures the whole of human experience that I want to talk about today and how that pertains to joy. So hopefully these songs, as we have listened to them and sung them here in our gatherings throughout the season of Advent, and perhaps as you've listened to them throughout the week, hopefully they have helped you to celebrate this Advent season as we wait for God to do the work that God is up to. So just quickly before we get into the sermon for this week, the word Advent is not a word that many of us use regularly.

It's probably a word that when somebody says, maybe you're like, I think I know what that means, but I'm not quite sure. Simply, the word means arrival. We are anticipating the arrival of Jesus, as I said earlier, both to celebrate what we celebrate on Christmas Day, but also the arrival of Jesus in our lives day by day and in the age that is to come. And so when we talk about celebrating Advent, that is the thing that we are looking towards is Jesus, the celebration and anticipation. But as we do in our culture, if there is money to be made through something, people will figure out how to make that money, right? And so a couple of things that I have seen around people capitalizing on Advent, we've shown some of these every week, and I've got a few more for us today. And just when you think it couldn't get any more egregious, it definitely does.

But here is this one. This one's not so bad. It's a Advent calendar for balsamic vinaigrette and mustards and herbs and different things like that. That's on there. This one, if you can't drink regular water, you saw a lot of people like flavored water. Here's an Advent calendar for you so that you can flavor up your right and even clean your water bottle there. There's a brush for that.

This next one, see if you can see the irony here. I remember we talk about in Advent, we talk about the waiting and anticipation. And here we have an instant coffee Advent calendar. It's like the opposite of the season is there. And then this one, I'm not sure this is necessarily an Advent calendar, but people are just making things up out here. There's a nativity scene, and then you move the star to count down towards the days of Christmas. Like they've taken the idea of Advent and celebrating the anticipation of Jesus and turned it into a countdown for Christmas, completely negating the season of Advent and being present in this moment as it unfolds around us.

Advent at its heart is about the Lord Jesus. And as the song that we sang the first week said, the power of death that is undone by this infant born in glory. This is a story that is ancient. It's not even a story that begins in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It actually begins in the very beginning of the scriptures and has been present throughout all of history. And it is a story so true that it literally changed the world in which we live. And the tension that we all face in Advent is if we know this story, we often want to rush to the end of the story.

But we need to be present in each moment as it unfolds. So a couple of main points that we've talked about in this series. The first week, our main point was that our hope is in Jesus' descent, both Jesus' descent becoming a person, but also not just a person, a servant to all people. And just the image there for God to become the lowest. God's getting to the bottom of things, not to the top as we are so geared to go. Our hope is in Jesus' descent. Last week, we talked about how peace is from God and is fulfilled in loving our neighbor.

Hope, peace, joy, and love. These aren't just passive emotions that we think about or feelings that we feel in our bodies. They actually are an action for us to take. So in order for us to experience peace and be people of peace, we don't just think peaceful thoughts, but we engage in loving our neighbor. And that is where the peace of God comes from. And then today, we're going to look at the theme of joy. So throughout this series, I've posed these three ideas in the form of questions, and I wanted to bring these back up for us.

But first of all, can you imagine a love that is so sincere it can never be exhausted? A patience so long that it never be thwarted. The story of God's people in the scriptures is ultimately a story of God's faithfulness. It is a story of God's faithfulness. Last week, we read from the book 1 Samuel, and in the beginning of 1 Samuel is this interesting exchange of the people with the prophet Samuel, who was leading the nation of Israel at the time. And they decided that they wanted to, as the story goes, be like all the other nations around them, and they wanted a king to sit on the throne. And so they go to the Samuel.

Up until this point in history, Israel, the king of Israel, had been God. The throne was held by God. There were people involved in that always, but they were people who were paying attention to God and who God was and leading the nation according to the kingdom of God, not according to the ways of brokenness, which normally shape the governing bodies of our world. And they came to a point as the leaders of the nation where they decided that they would like to try out what all the other nations do, and that is for a person, a human being, to occupy the throne. So they go to their prophet at the time, Samuel, and they detail this plan to him. They say to him, we want a king so that we can be like everyone else. And I want to read just a few verses of this story, verse seven in chapter eight.

Here is how the story goes. Oh, before I read it, let me remind us of this. Samuel had the place in Israel to be the spokesperson for God. He was the one who would create the vision of what it meant for the people of Israel to fall in line with the kingdom of heaven. He was the one who would spend time in prayer and seeking the wisdom of God. God would give him that wisdom, and then he would make it known to the people. Samuel was a very faithful prophet.

He detailed the kingdom of God in great and in true ways. And so when the people of God come to Samuel asking for a king, this, for Samuel, is a very difficult experience. He's heartbroken by it. He is devastated by it. He feels the rejection of the people. I think we have all probably been there in some form or fashion where we have seen something or known something to be true, and we've done our best to make it happen or achieve it or accomplish it. And we felt like we did our best job, and our best wasn't good enough.

It still ended up going in a wrong direction in the end. So Samuel is feeling that type of way, and he has this interaction with God that I wanted to highlight for us today. Verse 7, the people of the Lord told him, listen to, I'm sorry, the Lord told him, listen to all that the people are saying to you. It is not you they have rejected. They have rejected me as their king. And then verse 8, as they have done from the day I brought them out of Egypt until this day.

Now think about that. The Bible, of course, begins before Israel is enslaved in Egypt, but the story of Israel as the people living in the kingdom of God really begins with their freedom from Egypt. And God is saying, since the moment that I set them free from captivity, they have rejected me, forsaken me, and served other gods. So they are doing to you. Why? Since God led the people. People out of Egypt, the people have abandoned God.

The people abandoned God, but God would not abandon them. So I bring this back to us today. Can you imagine a love so sincere that it can never be exhausted? A patience so long that it never grows thin. A direction so true that it can never be thwarted. I don't know, I have a lot of conversations with different people about life and about the state of the world. And I think generally speaking, maybe it's just that we like to talk about negative things, the saying misery loves company, but there's an overall feeling that the world and society is headed in the wrong direction.

It doesn't really matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on. Right now, just in two general buckets, we have one side who thinks that the world is already broken and in desperate need of someone to come in and repair it. And then the other side thinks that this person who has been chosen to repair it is going to undo everything that is right and just in the world. If you sit and talk to people, oftentimes we'll talk about the difficult things that are going on around the world, or the struggles that maybe are in our own lives, or the negative things that have been done, or we have been witnesses to. Overall, it is common for people to feel as if the world is headed in the wrong direction. I think though that the reality is that the amount of brokenness and evil that is in the world today is the same amount of brokenness and evil that has always been around in the world. We see it may be manifested in different ways.

We have more access to it, whatever is the cause, but even though it might seem like the world is getting more and more evil, I don't know that as Christians that that is the proper worldview for us to subscribe to. And where I find hope, peace, joy, and love in a world that feels like it is, in some instances, spiraling downward is that even though the story of human chaos and frustration and destruction is an old and ancient story, there is one story that precedes the destruction that human beings are capable of, and that is the story of God's faithfulness, the story that God has been since the beginning working in the destruction of human chaos and offering deliverance as God sees fit for us. The faithfulness of the creator is a more true story than the chaos of the created. You know, in our present day, both culture and the church are guilty of putting the burden of perfection on us. We have to earn our keep. We have to prove our worth. So much of our lives are spent trying to prove ourselves, prove ourselves to others, but our reality is often much different than that.

We live often with a lot of, why did I do that? Or I should have done this, or I wish I would have done it this way. And we spend a lot of our time comparing ourselves to others, either rendering ourselves better than someone else or worse than someone else. That really just depends on our initial view of who it is that we are comparing ourselves to. And so we find ourselves in this place of settling for, well, at least I didn't do that as they did, or I would never go that far, or at least I'm not as bad as they are. But ultimately there is no satisfaction in that, right? We are just, we are chasing down something that will never satisfy.

We're kept in this perpetual state of up and down, of worry and stress. That sounds a lot like captivity, right? And the song Deliver Us that Rachel sang, we were having our pre-service meeting today, and there's another song that's probably more popular than this one, it comes from the Prince of Egypt, that's called Deliver Us. And all of the songs on Prince of Egypt are great, but that song in particular is a good one. This one is of a different artist, but it's depicting the same story. But here is what the verse, the opening verse of this song says. And I want you to really think about these words as I read them.

Our enemy, our captor, is no Pharaoh on the Nile. Our toil is neither mud, nor brick, nor sand. Our ankles bear no calluses from chains. Yet Lord, we are bound, imprisoned here. We dwell in our own land. We often live our lives under the illusion of freedom, but are held captive by a futile pursuit. And as a result of the volatility of this pursuit that we often find ourselves on, we turn towards patterns and devices that instead of fulfilling the kingdom of God in our lives, it ends up leading us astray.

And we find ourselves joining in with the forsaking and serving other gods crowd. And it really doesn't matter necessarily what it looks like on the outside. Sometimes the circumstances of our life unfold and it's visible to everyone else, whether we understand it or not. They can see it manifest itself on the outside of us. But sometimes on the surface, everything looks great, but on the inside, we are held captive. For the people of Israel in the story of the Old Testament, sometimes their brokenness was manifested by other nations coming in and conquering them and removing them from their land. But if you study the story, you know too that sometimes in the plenty, in those times of security, they were living in just as much brokenness.

I think most of us, if not all of us, can identify with this. So the question then becomes, is this just the story that we are doomed to live in? Is this just the story that's on repeat over and over and over again throughout history? This is where this song, this cry, deliver us really comes in to play. And the ending of that song says this, deliver us, deliver us, oh Yahweh hear our cry and gather us beneath your wings tonight. Now, those words in particular are referencing an Old Testament passage. But what I love here is the last stanza of this song.

And Rachel sang these words because it is a foreshadowing to something that Jesus said and we'll read it here in just a minute as we wrap up. But here's how this song ends. It says these words, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed to gather you beneath my gentle wings. In Matthew chapter 23 in the New Testament, it is a hard chapter to read. Jesus is speaking plainly and truthfully offering a critique on the religious leaders of his day. He details to them this cycle that we have been speaking about of comparing themselves to one another and deciding their righteousness based on the fact that there are other people who don't keep the same standards, who don't do the same things, who don't give the amount of money that they give. And they were spending their time in self-righteousness rather than trusting in God to be their Lord.

To them, everything looked on the outside like it was great. They had these elaborate temples that they had spent a lot of time and effort and money and energy building. They had elaborate clothes. They would gather together in elaborate ways to offer their offerings in front of everyone. They would hold themselves up as the pursuit. They would have people look around at them and tell them that if they can't be as good as them, then they are not being faithful to what God has called them to. They had set themselves up on a pedestal and they had done a great job doing so.

But as we talked about earlier, the outside, what we see on the surface doesn't always tell you what's going on on the inside. While their outside appearance was success and that they were doing things well and perhaps even being blessed by God, internally, their internal direction was leading them to chains and shackles. When I was in college in Oklahoma, I was an intern at a church in Piedmont, Oklahoma, small town near Oklahoma City. The pastor who is there is actually still there today.

His name is Derek Aker. I had the privilege of seeing him and spending some time with him a couple of weeks ago or months ago. I remember a lot of what he said, but one thing in particular is a line in a sermon that he preached and it's stuck with me perhaps more than any other line of any other sermon I've ever heard since. He said, sometimes what people view as blessing is God giving them over to their selfish desires. Sometimes what people view as blessing is God giving them over to their selfish desires. That depicts the story that we read in 1 Samuel. It depicts the state of the religious leaders of Jesus's day.

It oftentimes depicts the state of the church and the leaders of our day. And it's in a similar situation as this, that Jesus speaks plainly to them and he lays out their pursuits before them. He details for them the truth about the captivity that they are in. And in light of all of this, we come to verse 37, where Jesus says, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings and you were not willing. Despite the unfaithfulness of the Pharisees, what Jesus wanted was to gather them in, to hold them close.

Can you imagine this? Not only have the Pharisees confused hypocrisy with righteousness, they are actually in a scheme to kill Jesus. And by the way, Jesus is fully aware of their plans. His response to them is not to out scheme them, not to put them in their place or destroy them, but to gather them in as a mother hen would gather her chicks. In our pursuits in life, the things that we convince ourselves are so important that we devote so many times and resources to, those pursuits, whatever it is that we are pursuing, it's often just out of reach, close enough to keep us interested, but far enough to escape our grasp. And here Jesus comes inviting us in to the shelter of his wings. No longer having to keep pursuing something that we can never attain.

It's simply to find rest in the midst of the chaos and struggle and difficulty. Now we know and understand that following Jesus won't prevent us from suffering and experiencing loss. Jesus will, however, capture us with joy. And what we know to be true is that while the pursuits of our lives may often elude us, joy in the kingdom of heaven is within reach.

Would you pray with me today? God, we all come from different places today, different places in life. For some of us, on our minds, on our tongues, our songs of joy. For others, we have a struggle in our lives or a frustration or a difficulty. And together we live in this tension of celebration and of pain. This is a tension, God, that you know well. And it is a tension that you long not to solve or make go away, but to draw us in and provide us shelter.

To draw us in and provide us life. So as we wrap up our time together, Lord, we pray, deliver us from whatever chains might hold us captive. We ask it in your name and for your sake, amen.