There is greater joy in God!

This blog is taken from a talk I gave recently at a youth event that we run at for the young people at King’s Church. It is about Joy and how there is greater joy to be found in God. This is, in my opinion, the most important idea if you are to live a fruitful life as a Christian.

What is joy?

Some of us may read or hear that word ‘joy’ and think that it is just a good ‘Christian’ word. You might be at a prayer meeting and someone prays, “Lord thank you for Joy.” And some ‘super-spiritual’ people will go, “mmmm. Amen.”

But actually what does it really mean?

The dictionary would tell us that joy is to be happy or excessively pleased. But I think that as Christians, we can know a joy that is deeper routed than a feeling of happiness.

What does the bible say about joy? John 15: 9-11. Jesus is telling his disciples about how they will bear fruit, once he is gone.

⁹ “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. ¹⁰ If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹ I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Read verse 11 again.

This idea of God’s joy is frequently mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments. Some of them are

• Psalm 16:11, “In your presence is fullness of joy, and at your right hand are pleasures forever”
• Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart”
• 1 Peter 1:8, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and are filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory”
•  Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always! And again I say, Rejoice!”

God is Joy! Joy is at the heart of God’s plan for us, and is at the heart of God himself. We will never understand the significance of Joy in human life until we understand its importance to God.

What does joy look like?

I can give you a couple of examples of what Godly joy looks like in people today. Terry Virgo, the founder of New Frontiers, the worldwide group of churches that King’s is apart of, was speaking at a conference in Brighton.

Afterwards, he invited anyone who wanted to make a commitment to Jesus, to come to the front and they were going to pray that they were baptised with the Holy Spirit and be filled with the Spirit for the first time.

A man called Simon Holley came and stood at the front, at this time Simon Holley is the leader of Kings Arms Church in Bedford, which is a fantastic, spirit filled church. Simon speaks all around the country and has seen many signs and wonders.

When asked, why are you going to the front, Simon responds, ‘are you kidding? Terry Virgo is going to pray for people to be filled with the Spirit. I don’t care that I have been filled before; I want to be filled again! That is a man who is filled with the Joy of God, and keeps going back for more.

Another example, are the kind of Christians that are living in the Muslim world, either as missionaries or people who are converted from Islam.

The work of organisations such as Frontiers, OMF and others is that we are seeing people becoming Christians in places that have never heard the gospel before.

In the Muslim world you hear stories of becoming being born again and immediately facing persecution. They face rejection from their families, and in many cases put themselves in mortal danger.

The only way they can maintain their faith, can maintain their life as a Christian is that they understand there is greater joy to be found in God than in the troubled world they are living at that time.

Why is it important?

I said at the beginning that this is, in my opinion, the most important thing, if you are to live a fruitful life as a Christian.

The bible puts Joy in the non-optional category. Joy is a command! Subsequently, joylessness is a serious sin and something that religious people are particularly prone to indulge in. The love and Joy of God has to be at your core, and all action flows from that core.

There are many things in the Christian life that we feel we have to do. But acting out of obligation is not what we are called to do. Not lying because we aren’t supposed to, not getting into that relationship because we are not allowed to, etc. My friends, hatefully submitting to Christian rules achieves nothing. It isn’t glorifying God and it certainly isn’t joyful.

I am getting married next year and my fiancé and I are asking married couples for advice, so that we know can learn from their experience in marriage. If we talk to a couple who have been married for 20 years and it turns out that they actually hate each other. They can’t stand one another, and the only reason they are together is that they don’t believe in divorce. I am not going to turn to Cathie, my fiancé, and say, that is what I want for us when we get married.

In a similar way, if you don’t find Joy in God, if you don’t enjoy your relationship with God, how can you ever expect to encourage someone else to follow your example and become a Christian!

I feel this strongly, because it is something that when I was your age I never truly understood. I became a Christian when I was about 16 and spent two years trying my best to be a good Christian.

Then as I got a bit older I started going to parties that were different. Drinking, smoking and sex are activities that appear very fun and look extremely tempting. The thought that the Christian life was boring, was clear in my mind. At this point in my life, I went to university and went completely off the rails.

All of this was because I didn’t understand that there was a greater joy in God than in the temptations of this world. But there is!

You see, the problem with all of the worldly pleasures is that they leave you feeling rough. They provide a brief, temporary thrill and then when that goes you feel worse than when you started. Drinking gives you a hangover, smoking has all sorts of health risks and indulging in sexual sin and one night stands leaves you feeling empty like nothing else can.

I want you to picture that you are in a desert, dying of thirst and looking for water. You come across a big lake of toilet water. What is going to happen? You are going to drink it!

This lake of toilet water is like worldly pleasures, because you will be sustained initially, but then you will get sick. However, if you didn’t have any other option, despite being sick you would have to go back to this stinking disgusting lake.

Similarly with me, even though my hangovers were getting worse, I kept getting drunk. It came to a point where one night I was so drunk that I slipped on a bathroom floor and landed neck first on a sheet of metal and almost died.

It was soon after this that I discovered that worldly pleasures are no match for God’s plan for us. The joy that you can find in God is like a stream of fresh water next to that foul smelly lake. This water is refreshing, healthy and life giving and will sustain you.

Now next to the fresh water, how does the lake full of toilet water look? It no longer looks appealing! Similarly if you live in the Joy of God and focus on the fact that have eternal life with him, then worldly pleasures, ones that make you sick, no longer seem appealing.

If you focus on enjoying God, then you want to experience more of it. You want to grow in it, and that is when good works and leading a good lifestyle happen. If you find that there is greater joy in God. Then you no longer have to lead a life of hateful, religious submitting and obedience, but a life where joy in God is at your centre and all you do is a response to that.

How can we be more joyful?

Now I want to finish with a few things that I have found crucial in increasing the joy in my life.

1.      Pursue joy now

Growing up we all think that joy will come someday when conditions change.

We go to school and we think life will get better, once we have finished this term. Anyone think that?

Or we will be able to find joy once we have finished are exams and we get to the summer holidays. Or when we go up a year at school?When you get older you think, life will get better once you have left home, then you think you will be happy when you get a girlfriend or boyfriend and get married. When you are married you think life will be more joyful once you have children, and then once you are tired all the time with kids you think you will be happy when they leave, then you realise that you were happier whilst they still lived at home.

Before you realise it you are old and you have had a joyless life!

Stop! Pursue joy now! This is God’s day. It is the day that God made, a day that Christ’s death on the cross has redeemed.

2.      Find a joy mentor

You should identify those people around you who give you joy and bring out the best in you. A joy mentor you could call them. We all have people around us who don’t, and it is not that we should abandon these friendships, but if you are spending time with them, look to spend at least that amount of time with your joy mentors.

All of my friends at university are non-Christian, and although I genuinely love them and now that I have left university I miss them a lot, I cannot say that they brought out the joy in me, certainly not Godly joy. In my final year, once God had got me back on the right track, I found friends who did bring the best out of me.

I am still close with my non-Christian friends, but I like to think that I have found a balance.

3.      Worship/Prayer

When we tell other people about being a Christian we can say we believe in a relational God and that we can have a relationship with him today. If that is the case then we should live it!

Good relationships are built on communication. Cathie, my fiancé, lives 30 miles away and we don’t get to see each much more than once every two weeks, but we talk every day on the phone.

When life gets tough, we need to know that we can fall back on God in prayer. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas are imprisoned because they were living as Christians. When in prison, the lowest of lows, it tells us that they were praying and singing hymns of praise to God. As a result there was an earthquake and the prison doors flew open.

Your prayers should build your joy in God. So often you hear people praying in a tone that screams boredom, just as if they are going through the motions.

How do you imagine Paul and Silas were praying that night in prison?

To be Christian, means to be in Christ, in his perfection. In this perfection we can have a relationship with the living God who is perfect love and Joy. Be happy about it!

Why Christianity and not other religions?

This blog is taken from a talk I did at the youth club that we run at King’s Church High Wycombe. We have a small God spot in the middle of the evening, and this term we have been trying to answer some of the questions that the young people have raised. This time I tried to answer the question, ‘Why Christianity and not other religions?’

Firstly, I will quickly give you a background about myself and the angle that I am coming from. As a young boy I didn’t believe in God, and I didn’t go to church. When I was 14 I decided that all of this religion stuff was important to think about and I set out to prove, to myself at least, that it was rubbish. I initially looked to Islam, as I thought Muslims seemed the most devoted religious group, and I read the Koran (an English translation), but after deciding that it seemed really unlikely I went along with my friend to a local church. It wasn’t until I was nearly 16, so just less than 2 years later that I decided to become a Christian.

Now I want to talk about two things in particular that arise when considering this topic. Firstly, there is a view point that religion is specific to where you are from, and actually that all religions point to the same thing and therefore all religions lead to God.

I want to address this, in particular focussing on the 5 major world religions;-

Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism

I know there are plenty of others, but I would like to look at these five. I think a lot of people look at three of these in particular and point out that they have the same God with different names, be it God, Allah or Jehovah. However, if you look at these religions they all contradict each other in a fundamental way, and there is no way that they can all be true.

Buddhism for example says that there is no creator God, but all of the other major religions say that there is. Focussing for a moment on Islam, Christianity and Judaism; the issue of Jesus’ death on the cross is divisive for all three. The Christian faith is built around the idea of Christ’s death. Followers of the Jewish religion believe that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah, Jews view the coming Messiah as a saviour or warrior and having him die doesn’t make sense. In Islam the cross is still crucial. The point of the Koran is that it is literal, and that Allah dictated the Koran in its entirety to the last Prophet Mohammed. The Koran teaches about Jesus, and that he was the second most important prophet behind Mohammed. However, the Koran also teaches that Allah would never let one of his prophets die in a way as demeaning as crucifixion. In Serah 4 of the Koran there are 6 long arguments directed to a group of Jews in Medina who claimed to have killed Jesus, saying that they were mistaken and in fact Allah had raised Jesus to be with him

Now, Jesus was either crucified or was not crucified; therefore both religions cannot be true.

I would be happy to discuss the validity of the Koran in this instance but that is not the point of what I am saying, I just want to use it as an example to show that not all religions can possibly be true. It could be that one is correct, but either one or none in fact will lead to God.

Secondly I want to discuss what is different about Christianity compared to other religions.

Religions are about man’s attempt to reach God. Every religion has things where if you do this, then you can get to God. In Islam there are 5 things you must do, the 5 Pillars of Islam to get to paradise. In Buddhism there 8 steps to reaching enlightenment and the list goes wrong.

Christianity is in fact the exact opposite. The Bible says that there is nothing that YOU can do, to get to heaven. In the bible it says that we have ALL fallen short of the glory of god. We believe in a God that is perfect, and therefore, anything short of perfection is not good enough for him.

However, the bible tells us that God loves us, so much that he came up with a plan for us. The bible says that if someone who was perfect was willing to take the punishment for our imperfection, then we would be covered by that and would be able to be with God. Now the only person who could be perfect was God himself, so he gave himself in human form, He died on a cross so that we could be covered by Him. Being Christian literally means to be in Christ, and to be in Christ means that you are covered by perfection.

In that way, the Christianity that is written about in the bible is the anti-religion. If religion is Man searching for God, Christianity is God searching for Man.

Jesus said I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. Now, I know that some people reading this will be thinking that this sounds arrogant. To say that the Bible is right and everyone else is wrong, certainly sounds arrogant, but to understand Christianity and to acknowledge that we are flawed and can do nothing to save ourselves is actually the most humble thing.

We have to acknowledge that the only way is if Jesus helps us. Most people don’t like admitting that there is something that they cannot do. I for one am struggling to admit that at the age of 22 and at 17 stone, I am never going to be a professional sportsman. When you become a Christian, you say that I cannot do this on my own, I need Jesus. Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, I cannot get to God, unless Jesus’ helps me. And Jesus offers that help to me, to you and to everyone.

The other thing that comes of God’s rescue plan is that it goes further than getting us to heaven. The bible tells us that the redemption found in Jesus, means that we can have a friendship with God. I remember when I was at infant school we were taught the Lord’s prayer, but it wasn’t until I became a Christian that the line ‘Your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ made sense. God’s love and forgiveness doesn’t start when you die, it starts from the moment you accept Jesus into your life. Unlike Islam or the other major religions you can have a relationship with God today, by acknowledging that we are not perfect, we don’t match up to the perfect standards of the God who created the earth and the heavens, and that we need the help of Jesus.