What gives you your greatest joy? A vacation on a tropical island? A problem free life? Playing with your kids? Achieving some goal that you set? A promotion at work? Purchasing a new car, or a new computer? Being highly regarded by others? Helping someone in need? A win by your favorite team? Being physically healthy? The reason I ask this question is not just because I think every person cares about them, but also because this questions is one of the rock bottom concerns of the Bible.
The Psalmist spoke of his highest joy when he says, “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy,” Can you say that? A Christian’s thinking, feeling, and living will not be God centered unless God is the center of your joy not His gifts. The Psalmist in the midst of trouble and sorrow was God centered when he says, “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, (ESV); to God, my joy and my delight (NIV); or very literally from the Hebrew, “God, the gladness of my rejoicing. That is, God, who in all my rejoicing over all the good things that he had made, is himself, in all my rejoicing, the heart of my joy, the gladness of my joy.
Every joy that does not have God as the central gladness of the joy is a hollow joy. Isn’t this amazing! Here King David is threatened by enemies and feeling danger from his adversaries, and yet he knows that the ultimate battle of his life is not the defeat of his enemies, it is not escaping natural catastrophe; it is not surviving the trials and difficulties of life. The ultimate battle is: Will God be his exceeding joy? Will God be the gladness at the heart of all his joys?
Oh like the Psalmist, permeating all of your joy, would be joy in God. God cannot be the center of your life, heart, and mind if He is not the center of your joy. This means that a primary purpose of your life is the cultivation of that joy. Joy cannot be the icing of the cake on your life. Maybe it comes, maybe it doesn’t. It’s nice when it’s there, it’s sad when it’s not. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is duty and doing what is required of you. If that is the Christian life for you, you will not have a God centered heart, mind, and life.
I have been challenging my church and others to declare war on any kind of Christianity that is not God centered and joy producing. We must declare war against a kind of Christianity that promises health, wealth, ease, safety, security, problem free living, and heaven on earth. We must fight tenaciously against a culture of religion and church that tells you to embrace God for all the wrong reasons and as a result produces the wrong joy by promising God is going to bring you happiness in anything less than Him. I am fighting against a shallow mile wide inch deep kind of Christianity that succeeds and appeals in times of safety, ease health, wealth, comfort, and security but is empty and worthless in times of trials, difficulty, and adversity. I am challenging us is to pursue our joy in God like never before so that you can say like the Psalmist that God is “The gladness of your joy.”
This challenge could cost you your life. If you want to be happy it will cost you your life! So happy in Jesus that you can say like Paul, “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:20). A joy in Christ that believes that you do not need to be alive to be happy. You don’t need your house, car, success, popularity, fame, marriage, family, fruitful ministry, or a growing church to be happy. A deep abiding joy in your soul so that you will be able to say like Habakkuk in Habakkuk 3:17-18, “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.”
John Paton, great missionary to the cannibals in the South Pacific in the late 19th century wrote, “Oh that the pleasure-seeking men and women of the world could only taste and feel the real joy of those who know and love the true God – a heritage which the world . . . cannot give to them, but which the poorest and humblest followers of Jesus inherit and enjoy.” Have you tasted and felt that real joy or are we in bondage to the pleasures of this world so that, for all our talk about the glory of God, we love television and food and sleep and sex and money and human praise just like everybody else? If so, let us repent and fix our faces like flint toward the Word of God in prayer: O Lord, open my eyes to see the sovereign sight that in your presence is fullness of joy and at your right hand are pleasures for evermore (Psalm 16:11).
The great Westminster Catechism says “Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever” or as John Piper says “by enjoying him forever.” Jonathan Edwards reminds us “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean.”
Going hard after supreme joy,
Pastor Bill
No comments:
Post a Comment