|
The Joy of the Lord
1 Thessalonians 5:16; Is 42:5-9 17th June 2007
Andrew Lim
God wants to fill our hearts with “the joy of the Lord”
God wants us to live freely / liberated
Joy is a gift from God / Ps. 126:3
It is our possession, our birthright as children of God
It is a sign of the Spirit of God / Gal. 5:22
When you are joyful / you are not only greatly blessed
but you will have significant spiritual power
And yet most Christians do not seem to have the joy of God
Many of us are often gloomy and filled with dread
Isn’t it true that generally / we don’t see free people living freely
I don’t see Christians living zestfully / exuberantly
throwing caution to the wind / living joyfully / having fun
and getting the kick out of life
I don’t feel the punch / don’t sense the enthusiasm
In fact / Christians can be
the most despondent / melancholic and dull people you could meet
we mope / moan / sulk / and we pout / we can be so guarded
we seem to be afraid to relate transparently / to love openly
And for many Christians / their life is just one big frozen asset
For many reasons / their gifts lie dormant and unwrapped
When you should be running on all 6 cylinders / you're running on 2
spluttering along on wet plugs / with fits and starts
not really hitting it
What seems to be happening?
Where’s our joy? Where’s the joy of the Lord in our lives
The Word of God teaches us that the greatest thief is Satan
Jesus said “The thief comes to steal / and to kill”
He steals your joy / he kills it
There might be other joy-killers
But Satan is supremely the mother of all joy-killers
The sooner we throw the caricature of Satan the better for our spiritual health
Let’s forget the horns / the hoofs / the pitch-fork
red underwear and the arrow-head tail
Get rid of that medieval impression of him
and you’re left with a biblical portrait of a spiritual being
John Stott describes him as
“highly intelligent/immensely powerful /and utterly unscrupulous”
We are at war / and its a war that’s being waged
between you and the forces of hell / on a day to day basis
all your waking hours / without a lull
The Bible says we do not war against flesh and blood
but against Satan / the devil / and a whole host of demons
The Bible talks about Satan in a matter-of-fact way
even gives him names like Lucifer / Beelzebab / Beliel
and describes him / as a murderer / “a deceitful liar” I John
- a slanderer / an accuser / Rev 12:9
- an adversary / a destroyer - I Pet 5:8 / - a tempter - Matt 4:3
The devil is head of a kingdom which is hostile / to the kingdom of God
When Satan offered kingdom to Jesus
our Lord did not say / it was not his to give
- the world we live in is ruled by Satan
- he is the prince of this world (Jn 14:30)
- he is the head of an organised force (Eph 6:11,12)
- he has under him an array of malignant spirits
who are described as "principalities and powers"
And he / is the one who is robbing us of the joy that could be ours
How does he do that / in at lease three deceptive ways
First / Satan talks to us more often than we imagine
And one reason why we often lack joy
is that we’ve allowed the devil to speak to us
more than we allow God to speak to us
And the Enemy often gets you to look inwardly into your own heart
He gets you to into a state of perpetual self-introspection
to get you to admit to your own failures
He comes to you and says / “You’re such a phoney everyone knows
You’re no good / You’re such a failure where you are
Everyone your age has got it going / and you’re stuck where you are
You haven’t got a job / you amount to nothing
And God’s not pleased with you and He never will be
He can’t keep on having to forgive you
You might as well give-up because you’ll never make it
Many people hear voices like that all the time
But what is astonishing is that when we hear that voice long enough
we actually come to believe it
Moses was like that wasn’t he!
He’d been wallowing in self-pity - for 40 years
In fact after 40 yrs he was still nursing the thought that he was a failure
Just look at his response:
“Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh / I’m a nobody”
Who am I that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?
I can't go / I'm not qualified / I am not eloquent
What if they will not listen to me
How about sending my brother Aaron instead / on and on he went
One person who listened to that voice was a man named Robert Owens
Owens made a living baking bread in a little bakery he own
He taught Sunday School and loves the Lord
His wife Gina had been a loving wife
but going through menopause / she became irritable and hard
And she would snap at Bob at the slightest inconvenience
and he found the going very rough
One evening at closing time he felt a sudden urge
to reach out for Sue / a lady who works as his assistant
Looking back he couldn’t tell / whether he was looking for comfort
Neither could anyone tell / whether she’d been waiting for him all this time
But she responded / she responded to his advance
And for 10 minutes / they became locked in a passionate embrace
But that was all / nothing else happened
And nothing else happened after that
- it stopped as abruptly as it erupted
But a year after that day
Bob was still trying to come to terms with what happened
The memories of that 10 minutes would come back to haunt him
even though Sue had left / two months after the incident
Bob couldn’t live with what he’d done
He stopped reading his Bible / he quit teaching Sunday School
he finally stopped attending church / and today he is so far from God
Now / that / is a familiar story
Satan had been capitalizing
on Bob’s one moment of failure to condemn him
And that is the first way Satan steals our joy / he speaks to us / big time
Secondly / Satan sometimes uses other people to rob you of your joy
And there is no shortage of people in your life
whom Satan uses / to rob you of your joy
Amos had Amaziah rob him of his joy
Job had his three friends / rob him of his joy
Our Lord Jesus Himself / had people in his life / who tried that
they accused him of being a glutton
addicted to wine / demon- possessed / and breaking the Sabbath
Let me share with you something I have learned
If you are not careful / you’ll be opening the door of your life
to certain people / who go on to become your / “Permission Givers”
There are people in our lives / who have appointed themselves
to be permission givers over us
By their disapproving look / by their scowl / frown / and long faces
they will let you know / what they approve of / and what they don’t
Whatever you do / don’t let them in!
In one season of my life / I let a couple of permission-givers into my life
By their look / they would signal to me
what I could say / what I couldn’t
Strange as it may sound / it was I / who in the first place
given them permission / to give me permission
Whatever it was / I became the most miserable person around
I lost my joy
Dr Phil is right when he says / “We teach people to treat us”
And the Lord came to me / and He spoke to me
through verses I never knew was here in the Bible
God was helping me deal with those faces / He gave me:
Deut 1:17 / “You shall not be afraid of the faces of man”
Jer 1:8 / “Be not afraid of their faces”
Is there a “permission-giver” in your life right now
- you will know if you did
- you’ll see that person’s face / etched in your mind’s eyes
- you’ll see it / when you’re trying to get some sleep
- you’ll see it / in the text-messages they send you
and you don’t even know that you’ve being quietly petrified
But one thing is sure / You are joyless
because / one of the first thing to fly out the widow
when there is a permission-giver in your life / is your joy
Are there not people in your life / whose faces take the joy out of your heart
I want to make one point on the aside / and that is this
If there is no shortage of people in your life
whom Satan uses / to rob you of your joy
might you be someone / Satan uses to rob another person of her joy?
- think about that!
If God reveals that to you / repent of it
Choose to let people breath freely / rather than smother them
Choose to speak live into people / rather than death
Thirdly / Satan uses circumstances to rob you of your joy
He makes you believe that the reason you're having such a bad deal
is because you're such great sinners
He makes you believe that you suffer hardship
because God is punishing you for your sins
How many times you hear people say / “If only I were right with God
I wouldn't be going through this difficulty”
Satan used the circumstances surrounding Job’s life to take away his joy
Satan capitalises on the difficult circumstances of your life
- loneliness / an ill-health / constant squabble with your spouse
- pressure at work / a loss of job / a relational problem
Satan uses these circumstances to make you believe
that God has removed His favour from you / but that’s a lie !
The reason why we’ve allowed Satan to steal our joy
is because we are often caught off-guard
because the real enemy is often unseen
Maybe you’re going through one emotional upheaval after another
maybe you’re infected by a fierce spirit of lust
maybe there’s someone in your home who is repeatedly sick and weak
maybe you’re plagued by depression / or a sense of low self-worth
But these problems might well be the symptom
of something more dark and sinister
We need ask God to help us sniff out the source of our problems
Our Lord Jesus / had a way of getting past the surface issue
to the real power-source behind the problem
You remember how that one occasion
Jesus told his disciple he was going to die
Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him:
saying / “Never Lord / this shall never happen to you”
Jesus immediately turned to Peter and said: “Get behind me / Satan”
Now / Jesus wasn’t talking to Peter / Neither was he talking to God
He talked to Satan / He spoke directly to Satan / He rebuked Satan
When He heard Peter spoke / He heard Satan's voice
He discerned Satan voice in Peter’s voice
and he commanded Satan to get behind
But the awesome thing is this
Jesus not only exercised authority over the demonic forces
He delegated that same authority to the disciples / and now to us
Jesus not only prayed authoritatively
He wants to empower us / today / with the same authority
He says to us / “I tell you / if you say to this mountain
‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea’
and if you do not doubt in your heart
but believe that what you say will come to pass
it will be done for you” / Mk.11:23
He is not asking us / to speak to God about the mountain
He is telling us / to speak directly to the mountain
This is not prayer as we normally think of it
But it is prayer / it is authoritative prayer / prayer of command
Ordinarily when we pray our prayers proceed from earth to heaven
- it is prayer moving upward
- we reaching up to God / asking for things / for forgiveness
But in praying authoritatively we are taking hold of heaven’s power
and bringing it down to earth to bear upon the situations
we find ourselves in / We are praying from heaven to earth
We are not speaking to God / We are speaking for God
We’re not asking God to do something
Rather / standing by the authority of God
we command something to come to pass
Jesus talked to the demons all the time
To the raging winds and waves / He said: “Quiet / Be still”
To the lepers / he said: “Be clean”
To the blind eyes and the deaf ears / He said: “Be opened”
To the paralytic / He said: “Get up”
At the grave of Lazarus he said: “Come forth”
To demonic spirits / He said: “Come out”
To the demons behind Peter’s words / He said “Get behind me”
You want to regain the joy in your life
learn to discern what's behind the problems that's plaguing you
In ancient days / soldiers fought with arrows soaked in pitch
which were then lighted and shot
And as the arrows land on target
they would splatter the burning pitch all over the place
starting fires / here / there / everywhere
In the same way Satan repeatedly hurls his fiery darts at us
splattering trouble all over the place
in your home / in your work-place / in school / in church
and in our families / among our flatmates
What might be some fires / burning in your lives right now?
- the fires of doubt / fear / unbelief / loneliness / guilt and condemnation
- lies against the character of God / deception about who you are
- temper tantrums from the kids / financial problems
- fear of rejection / persistent physical infirmities
- fights breaking up in the home / a rebellious son or daughter
- animosities hurled at each other /discord & disunity within the church
Satan hurls these fires at us all the time
He is eroding the ground / upon which you stand
and ,argely / you’ve lost your joy
But the incredible thing is this:
There are many of us will patiently endure the fires burning all around us
We’ve been repeatedly knocked about by the enemy
- and sometimes knocked down for long spells of time
But we will not stand up / and do something to put out the fire
We will sit there / and suffer silently / we will swallow the frustration
If there’s going to be healing and victory
you’ve got to understand what the Word says / when it says:
“Be vigilant / let your head be clear on how he works
submit to God / resist the devil / and he will flee” / Jas 4:7
Paul says: “We are not ignorant of his devises”
But many of us are ignorant of Satan's devises
You’ve got to talk back to Satan / rebuke him
Ephesians 6 tells us / when you’re going through spiritual trials
take a position / get your feet planted / dig your heels in
Like a football player digging in / get yourself positioned
- take a stance / become entrenched / take a position of warfare
- and come up against the enemy
I have the Almighty God as my loving Father / and I am taking up my position
I resist what is happening around me
I resist what's happening to our little baby
who’s gone from one sickness to another
I resist this discord in my family / all this quarrelling
I resist the voices that tell me God cannot be trusted to provide for my needs
I resist the voices that tells me I have been left behind / that I am a failure
Walk up to the line / Come up against the enemy
Break up all the curses and destructive vows that hang over you
Some of you have come under Satan’s bondage
Some of you condemn yourselves
with vows of sickness / failure / and depression and death
Some of you live under the curse of alcoholism / gambling
drinking / and sexual perversion and abuse
The curse may be physical / emotional or spiritual
All the same / to regain your joy / you need to come up against Satan
and break them in the Name and by the authority of Jesus
You need to bind up the spirit of suspicion and distortions
lies / anger / greed / resentment / and unbelief
In its place / release peace / love / and forgiveness
The way to combat the lies of the enemy is to rebut them with the truth of God
The enemy tells you / “You are a worthless piece crap”
Counter the lie with this truth: “I am a child of God” / Jn 1:12
“I am precious and honoured in His sight and He loves me” / Is 43:4
The enemy tells you / “You’ll never change”
Counter the lie with this truth:
“I am being renewed inwardly day by day” / 2 Cor 4:16
The enemy tells you / “You’ll never amount to anything
Counter the lie with this truth:
“Someday I will be transformed to be like Jesus” / 1ohn 3:1-2
The enemy tells you / “Everyone / including God is disappointed with you”
Counter the lie with this truth: “God loves me so much
He’s engraved me on the palms of His hands / Isaiah 49:16
The enemy tells you / “You’re a pathetic failure as a Christian:
Counter the lie with this truth: “I am a new creature
created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” / Eph. 4:24
The enemy tells you / “Look God is blessing everyone but you”
Counter this lie with the truth:
“God has given me everything I need” / Eph 1:3
There is not one of us here / that does not have a few things
that try to get us down
- something perhaps no one else knows about
- maybe a deep disappointment / a resentment / a failure o some sort
You know something / Short of coming to God / and handing it over to Him
it will not go away / it will not disappear
If you will resolutely not give it to God
there are only two people you can give it to
You can give it to yourself / you can carry this burden / this neurosis yourself
lugging it on your own body / in your mind / emotions
Each November / Hindus all over the world
goes through the ordeal of what is called the Taipusum
Its the season for paying up for your sins
- they would cut / trounce / lash themselves till they bleed
- they would impale their bodies with spikes and fishhooks
We call it self-flagellation
They subject themselves to that so as to atone for their sins
Much like what Martin Luther did
before he stumbled on that glorious verse in Habakkuk
“The just shall live by faith”
So / the first person you can give it to is yourself
But if you will not bear it yourself
you usually put it on someone else’s shoulders / and many people do that
But the painful thing / is that quite often / that someone else
is someone who is nearest and dearest to you
And they will be manipulated to carry it for you
How many spouses there are / who pass guilt feelings to one another
like a game of ping pong
And as so often is the case / the one doing all the accusation
is the one who is hurt / insecure and unforgiving
But he or she / often makes the other spouse bear their guilt
Many husbands and wives spend long years together / durable years
But under that roof / hidden from the world outside
theirs is no longer a nourishing passionate relationship
but a passionless / pragmatic / partnership
Deep inside / each one puts up a layer of insulation
protecting himself/herself against their own pain
And how many parents there are who pass on their pain to our children
Of course they don’t realise they’re doing it
but they’re manipulating them all the same
There’s just no running away / from that unyielding law
There is a cruel / ruthless / inflexible law in the universe
it’s a law that says / rather coldly:
“Someone must pay / who will it be this time round?”
And the most amazing thing / is that this law
has been mercilessly woven / into every fibre of your life
that it infects every part of you
- your mind / body / emotion / your relationships
Doctors now confirm for us / quite consistently
that 75% of us who are bodily ill
often have problems / that are emotionally rooted
We are not denying that these people are sick / and in real pain
but we’re saying that the root cause of the illnesses
of these 75% of people / are fundamentally emotional
Its as if every cell / every fibre of your body / conspire together
to pronounce to you the verdict: “You are guilty”
And doctors are today saying that perhaps the cause of much illnesses
is the crumbling of delicate balance between mind / body / and soul
But Jesus says it so long ago: “If your eye is single
your whole body will be filled with light
but if your eye is evil and wanton
your whole body will be filled with darkness” / Matt 6:22-23
Judas came so close to the light / yet he was so full of darkness
I wonder if Jesus had him in mind when he taught
that if the light that is in you is darkness / how great is that darkness
I know a young man who suffered from just such a problem
He came to me for counselling after we led him to Christ
I had been following him up / discipling him
But I knew nothing of the tremendous turbulence
that was been brewing in his mind / heart / and spirit
Then it exploded / One evening when I was in the church-office
- this young man stormed into church
- ripped the wooden cross from the wall above the pulpit
- and smashed it to smithereens / against the pulpit
Little did I know that He had reached the end of his tether
and hanging only by a thread / he’d camouflaged it so very well
I got help / and we managed to subdue him
and when we thought he was sufficiently sobered down
we sent him home
But later that night I received that dreadful call
He had gone into his room / locked himself up
and taken an overdose of barbiturates
We rushed him to the hospital
and they managed to pump everything out in time
A few weeks later / he recovered from that terrible drama
He was now ready to talk / and he told me this sordid tale
As a young boy of seven / messing about in the neighbourhood backyard
he had fallen into bad company
It was there that he had his first dose of pornography
in the form of some crudely home-taken pictures
One evening / he found himself being lured by an older man
to his first homosexual activity / he was then only ten
This led him to a life of lust and fornication with other men
And as is always the case
with an untimely and improper introduction to sex
he became addicted to an intense need for sexual gratification
And so it came about / that nothing would seem to satisfy his insatiable lust
he started peeping at his own sister bathing
And this led to the abhorrent sin / of peeping at his own mother bathing
But he was plummeting deeper into the abyss
till one day he found himself committing the absolute repulsive sin
the sin of bestiality
And as I spoke to him / he poured out this intense inner turmoil within his soul
the guilt-feelings / the feelings of utter worthlessness
And he told me
- that becoming a Christian / instead of helping him / condemned him
Intellectually he had accepted the love of Christ
But emotionally he never once bask in the warmth of the love of God
- he felt he couldn’t ever be clean enough / worthy enough
- he felt he had no right to be forgiven / he felt he has to pay for it
- he studied the Bible / memorised scriptures / prayed long hours
- he helped out a lot in church
but all that time / he was trying to pay for his salvation
- secretly atoning for his own sins
because he felt he could not be forgiven
without receiving a single lash of the whip
And he reasoned to himself that he if he could destroy God’s church
then / surely that / would provoke God to destroy him
But as it turned out / it was not to be
Instead / through a lengthy process of prayer and counselling
this young man pulled through / and today
by the grace of God / this man is a Baptist minister in Malaysia
Unfortunately / the story of this young man
is the same story that’s being played out
in the lives of far too many people / than we want to believe
The details may be different / But the basic plot is the same
You have some black chapter in the history of your life
And the devil will not let you off easy
And he accuses you / condemns you / slaps you with a guilty verdict
But what will it be?
You / who are listening to me now / may deny that you feel this way
you may push it to one corner / you may try to shrug it off
But the Spirit of God is now convicting you
that you need to come to Him for healing
You have one or two tender areas
to which no one must ever be allowed to come near
- that’s the area you’ve been betrayed / or violated in some fashion
exploited or manipulated before
There a dark spot in your heart / that you haven’t asked God to clean up
Remember God knows your struggles better than you do or Satan does
You can take your memories and feelings to Him
What does the Lord do with them?
He puts them under the blood of Jesus Christ / They are gone
He buries them in the depths of the sea / Micah 7:19
He blots them out like a thick cloud / Isa 44;22
He takes them off the record / I Jn 1:9
You can be made righteous and worthy before His eyes
Shame the devil / Come to God for the healing of your souls
The Word says / “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven
Whose sin is covered”
“Blessed is the man to whom the LORD
does not impute iniquity
And in whose spirit there is no deceit”
Our Lord Jesus had His body hung on the cross
to pay the price and free us from such hurt and pain
You need to come to the Lord for healing
When you choose to accept the forgiveness of God
you will sense the weight of the burden falling off
David committed adultery with Bathsheba
when he prayed for forgiveness he said
“Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow
Let me hear joy and gladness” / Ps. 51:7-8
God’s forgiveness will free you / to once again taste joy
|
