Let There Be Joy
Sermon Notes
What is joy?
An emotion, contrary to what you may have been told.
But, a complex emotion, meaning that it, unlike happiness, is not dependent on circumstance.
Instead, joy adapts to circumstances.
Much heartier than happiness
It is the emotion that accompanies shalom
In wholeness, it is a spontaneous response to goodness.
In brokenness it becomes a faith-filled, deliberately chosen response to the One who is able to bring goodness out of badness, who is able to redeem all of our pain, who is able to make something beautiful out of the broken pieces.
The feeling is different in brokenness than in wholeness, but it is the same emotion.
Since joy is a response to shalom, we don’t talk about it directly but rather talk about the gifts of shalom that God gives that overflow into joy. In other words, if joy comes with shalom, where does shalom come from?
The gift of miraculous provision
In this case, a baby born to a man and woman in old age.
This was a couple for whom the pain of childlessness was a constant wound.
Painful in our culture
Doubly so in theirs
Elizabeth describes it as a disgrace (which is a strong word in an honor/shame culture; it means that the culture around her had labeled her and Zechariah disgraced, damaged goods – not just an internal feeling)
Elizabeth and (eventually) Zechariah saw this event as God intervening suddenly and unexpectedly in their story in an act of grace.
The gift of enduring nearness
The God who sees me
Isn’t this one of the greatest miracles of all
What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands [Isa. 49:16]. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.
This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.
The gift of His story
What’s even more remarkable about Elizabeth and Zechariah is that the joy of having a child after decades of disappointment seems to have been dwarfed by their joy at Mary’s visit to their house and the promise of the baby she carried with her. What remarkable people! They were more excited about Jesus than they were about themselves, more interested in what He was doing and the fact that He invited them into His story than they were in living their own story. And, it’s clear that they passed this onto their son John who famously said of his cousin, Jesus.
“The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.” (John 3:29-30)