Easter 2023

April 9th 2023

Philippians 4:4

Rejoice in the lord always

We are called, brothers and sisters, commanded…to “rejoice always”. And just like all of God’s instructions to humanity, just like all of His commandments, they are given for His glory and for our good. For His glory and our good, do we have no other Gods before Him. For His glory and our good, do we not worship images. For His glory and our good, do we care for the sick and needy, the oppressed and innocent. For His glory and our good, do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, stand up for justice and truth, stand outside of abortion clinics, and child grooming story hours. For the glory of God and the good of man, we live out the commands of Scripture. For if we do not, if we assume they are not but a suggestion, then we are denying Him of the glory that is His due, and we are setting ourselves up for sadness, fear, anger and despair. We are setting ourselves up …for hell. 

As a good and gracious King, He laid forth for humanity instructions from heaven for how we ought to live. To keep us safe, to keep us healthy, to keep us upon the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. And when we so choose to step off of that path, and walk in our own strength, our own intellect, our own determination and our definitions of right and wrong, we will be doing nothing but quickening our path into eternal damnation.

And in our verse this morning, we have one of those instructions. One of those commands. For His glory and for our good, He inspired the pen of the Apostle Paul to give to us His words in Philippians 4:4. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice!”

Do you desire to glorify God? Then rejoice always. Do you desire the ultimate good for your life and the life of your family and friends? Then rejoice always.

In good times and bad, in high times and low. In happy times and sad. In times of great grief and depression whereby the Sun itself has been blotted from our vision by the height of that which oppresses us….to the times where our spirits are so high we can feel the heat of the Sun and if we were any higher we would be able to reach out and lay a finger upon it’s golden beams.

Rejoice…always.

But what does it mean, to have joy? To rejoice? To be joyful?

We may think that “Joy” is just happiness, expounded. That it is a level beyond happiness, an emotion that floods our hearts with feelings of elation, ecstasy, happiness and hope. We may think that “Joy” is a level far beyond the normal emotions of happiness and glee. Perhaps…it is happiness so incredibly filled and full, that it levels up into another bracket, another category, and now we are truly feeling “joy” now that our happiness has reached its fullness. But I want to tell you this morning, brothers and sisters, while there are some similarities between “joy” and “happiness”; there does exist a Venn diagram with joy in one circle and happiness in another, and they overlap one another in our life, yes. But, what “Joy” actually is, is something far beyond the feeling of happiness.

“Joy” is not inflated happiness.

It is not a deep sense of well-being.

It is not the sense you get upon waking up after a good night's sleep, when you went to bed at a reasonable hour, woke up on time, and the morning Sun is filling your heart with as much hope and potential as there exists in the day before you. It is not the feeling you get when all is right in the World, where nothing has been going wrong, and you know that you are going to have a good day, a good week, a good month, or a good year.

It is not seeing the first blooming of Spring flowers, bringing with them the memories you have had of Springs gone by, and thereby taking away from you the memories of long dark Winter nights. It is not the absence of snowfall, each flake landing in chilling precision upon your tender skin, and each one threatening to take away what peace you have left, and as you look to the sky and see even more falling in your direction you wonder how you will ever be able to make it through another winter.

It is not the emotion that rises up within you when you have achieved the job you have always wanted, bought the house of your dreams, or have fallen in love with that person whose mere proximity to you fills in all of the cracks in your heart that others have left in their wake as they left your life.

“Joy” is not the feeling you get when you see your child take their first steps. It is not seeing your progeny standing before you, whom everyone in your life says “has your eyes” or “has your laugh”, and the possibilities of their future being bright, are the best chance you have of your own mistakes being wiped clean because of their successes.

It is not the emotion that pulls tears from your eyes in streams that you were unaware you were capable of creating…on the day of your child’s birth.

It is not the emotion that wells within your heart when you look into the eyes of your spouse, or hear a baby laughing. It is not the rush of meeting someone whose beauty in your eyes drowns out the Sun, but you are hoping it does not, because when the Sun brings with it a new day, it brings with it another opportunity to be with the person you have now fallen in love with.

It is not the all encompassing ecstasy between heart, soul, mind, and body that drowns out the rest of reality beyond the closed door of a Husband and wife in their Marital bed.

It is not what happens when all of your Bills are paid, all of your appliances are working, your vehicle needs no repairs, your job is secure, your family is healthy and loves one another, you are healthy, and there's is nothing going wrong in your home or your life. 

“Joy” is none of these things, brothers and sisters, nor is it caused by any of these things.

“Joy” is none of those things…because “Joy” is not an emotion. It is not a feeling.

It is not something that comes and goes, rises and falls, whenever the happenings and circumstances in our life rise and fall.

“Joy” is not an emotion.

“Joy” and “Happiness” have some similarities, remember, but “Joy” is not an emotion. It is not a feeling. It is not inflated happiness. Happiness is based on happen-ings. Times are good, and we experience the emotion of happiness…because of our happenings. Times are bad, and we experience the emotion of sadness and sorrow. Happiness and sorrow, are fleeting. They leave. They arrive. They show up when we least expect them to, and they stay longer or shorter than we want.

But “Joy” is not based on “happenings” like “happiness” is.

“Joy” is a state of being.

And what that “state of being” entails, we will get to in a moment.

I am sure all of you are already thinking of what that “state of being” is, but there is more to be said.

“Joy” is a foundational, essential aspect of our identity as Christians that does not wean, that does not waver. It does fade, it does not dispel. It whispers not away with a strong morning breeze. Nor does it need to be tended to, for fear of its coals flickering and fading into the cold dark night.

It does not go away when the times are tough.

It does not lessen when we are going through trauma or suffering.

“Joy” hides not its face from us when the storms of this life show us theirs.

When the winds and waves beat against our shores, and erode our hearts, fracturing them into smaller and smaller pieces of exponential hurt to such a degree that we fear we may never find all of the pieces of our heart, let alone be able to place them back in the correct places….”Joy” still remains. 

When those same storms, that fractured our heart…sweep those pieces further and further away from us, leaving them in areas of our life that we are afraid of confronting “Joy” still remains.

And when those waves, breach the dams and banks we have built in our life, for the exact purpose of protecting us from them, and pull us down into the icy depths of despair… “Joy” still remains.

As the sun will always rise, no matter the events of the night before, so will “Joy”. 

It will never go away, because it is not a feeling. It is not created or manipulated or dependent upon our circumstances. There are no, brothers and sisters, no events in this life that can rob or steal us of our Joy. There is no storm so strong, no event so dark, no sin so wicked, no behavior so evil and abhorrent that its crooked and thin fingers can’t grip our hearts with more strength that we can peel its pale skin from our chest.

There is no trauma so deep that its blackened rivers of tar can carry the hurt through our lives and the lives of our Children’s children to such a degree that our joy will be unable to stand against its current. 

Let me speak plainly, fellow Saints, there is nothing in all of Creation that is capable of stealing our joy.

It is as such, because our joy does not come from anything or anyone in Creation.

“Joy” is a state of being which has its source in the character and nature of God.

Who God is, is where our joy comes from.

It is birthed, it is created, it comes from and flows out of, the nail marked hands of Jesus Christ. And this is its only, singular, solitary, exclusive source. There is no other source of joy in all of reality, apart from the character and nature of God.

Yes…there are numerous sources of “happiness”. Without number, the sources of “happiness” press against our hearts and minds at every turn. They confront us, stand in our way, and do everything they can to make us chase our feelings, chase experiences, and long for “happenings” so we can experience “happiness”.

This world and the demons that prowl its streets, offer us, with crooked and curled fingers, every source of happiness that we can ever desire. Some of them good, and some of them bad. Regardless of if these experiences are moral or immoral, if we are dependent upon them for our “joy”...we will be left wanting.

Our culture offers up to us on a silver platter of moral relativity, the offer of any manner of sexual relations that our dark hearts could ever fathom, and the sweet sweet rotten happiness that it births in us. We are offered drugs to numb or enhance our circumstances, as if the manner in which reality exists is unfair to us, therefore we must alter our perception of it it to truly experience it. We are offered leisure and pleasure in amounts that humans have never experienced. We are offered every sort of entertainment that we could ever imagine, pounding our imaginations into their prescribed molds. We are offered unfettered access to the darkest filth humanity has ever filmed, and all we have to do is click a few times…but remember, if what you're taking in is free…then you're paying with your soul.

We are offered our children and our families as sources of happiness. We are told, even by Christians, to place our families at the center of our very being, and worship at their altar. Families are a good thing, yes, but if we expect them to be the source of our joy, then we will be setting ourselves up for failure, and setting them up for hurt.

We can find happiness everywhere we turn. In times of trouble, we can turn to those things in this life that make us feel good, enjoy the rush of dopamine that fills our brain, then go about our day hoping the bad doesn't happen, but prepared to push whatever we have in this world into the opening that our heart is bleeding out of, like a cork that we hope never fails. 

“Happiness” can come from anywhere…but “joy” can only come from God.

Which means, of course, that those outside of God will never experience “Joy”. They will live a happy, hopeful, nice, powerful, fleeting life of emotionalism and experience-based feelings, be they sadness or happiness…but they will never have “joy”.

The atheist will never have joy. -- The Muslim will never have joy.

The homosexual, the adulterer, the racist, the Mormon, the Jew, the Hindu, the liar who calls himself a Christian with his mouth, but hates God with his heart…will never have joy.

The abortion doctor, the abortion receiver, the Jehovah’s Witness, the person who worships their children and lives their life for them only, the person who worships their job, the person who worships pleasure and power, the person who worship money, the slothful, the coward, the lazy, the murderer, the sodomite, the transsexual….all of them will never have “Joy”.

And all of them, whom Romans 1:20; 2:15, and Ecclesiastes 3:11 teaches were created with an indwelt understanding that God exists, have filled their lives with enough circumstances that mimic “joy” to convince themselves that they have “Joy” and thusly they are experiencing that which only God can give, and thereby they are not guilty before the God they deny is real. “How can I be guilty of my sin…” they will loudly proclaim “...when it produces in me happiness to a degree that my words fail to explain?”

Yes…they can all be redeemed, every Muslim, every Jew, every mother that has murdered her child in her womb can be forgiven. Every transsexual, regardless of the physical damage they have done to their body, the damage they have done to their soul can be healed by the perfect and sinless blood of Jesus Christ when they repent and believe in Him. But until then…as long as they remain in their sin…they will live a joyless existence, and the wrath of God rests upon them, where nothing but wailing and gnashing of teeth await them when they close their eyes for the final time. 

If this is the case, and the source of “Joy” is nowhere but Jesus Christ…then what is it?

If it is not inflated happiness…

If it will never go away…

If you are going to claim, preacher, that for a Christian…no trauma can steal our joy…and I have experienced trauma that seems to have been a leech feeding off of my joy until I was nothing but a shell of a person….then either you're wrong… or i’m wrong in my feelings about that event…or there is more to be said.”

If “joy” is a foundational state of being for the children of God….then what is it?

If 1st Thessalonians 5:16 says to “Rejoice Always”, our verses this morning tell us, twice, to “rejoice always”, if God inspired the pen of the Apostle Paul to talk about “joy” over a dozen times in Philippians…if one of the fruits of the Spirit mentioned in Galatians 5:22…meaning if you have the Holy Spirit living in you, then you will produce the fruit of Joy in your life…if theses are true…then we must dig until our hands are bleeding so as to uncover what it is.

To help us understand what it is, were going to look at a few texts.

Luke 2:8-10: Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid. 10 Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.

Acts 5:33-42

Luke 10:20: Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.

What is joy? It is: Being at peace with God.

Regardless of our sins…

Regardless of how dark or evil they may have been…

No matter the damage we have done to our body…

No matter the damage we have done to our heart…

No matter the damage we have done to our mind…

No matter the damage we have done to our family, our children, our spouse, or our friends…

There is peace and forgiveness in the arms of Jesus Christ.

No longer do we have to live under the ever watchful eye of God, whose wrath fills our nostrils with His perfect hatred of us and our sins…

No longer do we have to live as disappointments to Him…

No longer do we have to fill our lives with circumstances and experiences that mimic joy and cause us to forget…if only for a moment…that hell is awaiting our entrance into its fiery gates.

We can live in unfettered, untouchable, unchanging, unstoppable joy…because all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and we who Ephesians 2:3 says were one time children of wrath like all of humanity, have been bought by the blood of Jesus Christ 2000yrs ago.

We were at one time enemies of God, deserving nothing from heaven but His holy Wrath, and nothing we could ever do would ever earn us his smile. We all like sheep had gone astray, every one of us to our own way, all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, there is none righteous no not one, and God has laid upon Jesus Christ the iniquity, the sin, of us all…and then He punished His own Son on our behalf.

And when we repented of our sins and believed in Him, our punishment was accounted to what He received upon the Cross…and His righteousness was accounted to us.

This is the Easter message.

We, unworthy, unclean, enemies of God - Colossians 1:21 tells us ---- those deserving of nothing but hell…have attained Heaven!

Not because of us

Not because of good works done in righteousness

Not because we prayed every day

Not because we told people who Jesus is and what He has done

Not because we invited people to Church, never did drugs, never had premarital sex, never lied, never cheated, never stole…

Not because we believe that Jesus Christ is God and that salvation is through Him alone ---

because even the demons believe this better than us at times….

There is nothing in this world that we have done that could ever open the gates of Eternity for us

But because God is gracious and merciful, showing steadfast love and kindness to a thousand generations of those that love Him…He saw us in our sins and shame, and though He is the preexisting God of all reality, He condescended to us, stepped into this world, put on human flesh, and lived a perfect sinless life.

-

For it is by grace we have been saved, through faith, and this not of ourselves, it is the gift of God…not by works lest any man should boast. - Ephesians 2:8-9.

When Jesus Christ descended into the grave;

• The punishment that our hate and lies have earned us…

• The punishment that our sexual immorality, in all of its forms, has earned us…

• The anger of God that our murder deserves…

• The punishment that our drug abuse and alcoholism has heaped upon our hearts…

• The verdict that our betrayal, abandonment, selfishness and pride have garnered…

The white hot wrath of God flowing in neon waves of holy anger that our sins deserved, was poured out in complete and full measure upon the body of Jesus Christ.

He took the wrath of God that we deserve, and when He gave up His life from His holy body, and was laid to rest in the grave…our sins were laid to rest with Him. 

God punished Jesus to save His children -- this is Easter.

We can have eternal life, because when that stone was rolled in front of the cold and dark cave, it was not His final resting place. He remained not in His Earthen grave, hewn from the stone that He created…

Wrapped in linen spun from plants that He created…

And closed off from the rest of the world that He created…

For on the third day He rose again!

Over death He stood, triumphant!

To the sound of angels singing & demons screaming, our holy King defeated death & rose back to life.

…to fulfill the righteous requirement of His Father’s law

…to satisfy His Father’s holy justice

…to glorify His Father’s holy name

And to save His children from the wrath that they deserve.

Jesus did not come back to life to give you happiness and wealth. 

He did not hang naked upon a Roman cross, suffering the jeers and spit of those who hated Him, so that we could live from experience to experience, chasing happiness.

He suffered and died upon that Cross, descended into the grave, and rose back to life so that one day, when our hearts stop beating and our bodies have given up their strength, and there is nothing in this world that can keep our soul bound to it…we will rise again! Face to face with our King, He will look unto us with eyes of gentle fire and say “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” 

And forever will we dance upon streets of gold, beyond the gates of pearl, as we worship for eternal tomorrows the King of all Creation, Son of God and Son of Man, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Alpha and the Omega, Jesus Christ the lamb of God.

We are at peace with our maker. We are at peace with our God. He is not disappointed in you who have repented and believed.

He is not angry with you, who have repented & believed.

He is not standing at the edge of heaven waiting for you to mess up so He can rain down punishment.

He is tender, and gentle, and lowly, and kind, and soft with His children.

Because His perfect justice was satisfied on the Cross and there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 

This is the Easter Message.

----

This is what “Joy” is.

To be at peace with the God who made you, and who we are all accountable to.

“But…” you may be saying “...I still feel sadness, I still get depressed. How can I have joy and all of these feelings that are not joyful?”

Yes we still feel sadness! -- We still mourn! -- We are still hurt in ways that may never heal this side of Heaven, but “Joy” is not the absence of hurt, it is the presence of it with the understanding that God is still God.

Hear me brothers and sisters, and take this to heart:

The times in your life when you experience the “Joy” of God most clearly…

…most unmixed with other emotions or feelings

…the times in your life when you can see the “Joy” of the Lord unveiled and unhidden and undiluted by emotions and feelings…

Will be the times in your life when there are no feelings…

…will be the times of emptiness

…will be the times when there is nothing to celebrate

…nothing to laugh about

And nothing to look at but Jesus Christ and His perfect life, death, and resurrection.

The times in your life when you will be able to see the joy of the Lord most clearly, will be the times when life has pushed down to the miry depths of sin, sorrow, and shame.

Psalm 30:4-5:

Sing praise to the Lord, you saints of His,

And give thanks at the remembrance of His holy name.

5 For His anger is but for a moment,

His favor is for life;

Weeping may endure for a night,

But joy comes in the morning.

We will bury our children, bury our parents, and bury our loved ones, but the joy of the Lord never goes away. We can lose our jobs, lose our homes, and lose our families….but we can never lose our salvation. The God of all reality is standing upon the edges of Heaven, with holy love in His open arms, awaiting the day that He has written down for you, for when you will leave the bonds of sin, soil, and temptation, and join Him in an eternity of unending joy and worship upon the golden streets of tomorrow. 

Take joy in the Easter Message, brothers and sisters!

Take joy that nothing in this world can ever take your joy. That perverts and pagans can never steal it! That death and sorrow can never touch it. That God haters can rage and seethe and foam at the mouth, vomiting their hate and filth across our schools, homes, and churches, but not a drop of it, will ever land upon our joy.

In the face of the mightiest waves of the mightiest storms, our joy stands as a lighthouse. And when those ships filled with the children of God who have not yet come home, are caught in the currents of wickedness, crashing them into the rocks of selfishness, idolatry and sin… see our joy in the midst of pain…

…when they see our joy in the dead center of our hurt

…when they see our joy ever shining amidst the tempest tossed waves of despair

…when they see our joy standing unmoving before hurricanes, they will get a glimpse of the eternal unchanging God of the cosmos.

We are the means by which our Father uses to call His other children home, brothers and sisters, so take joy. Stand firm sons and daughters, stand strong children of God. Take joy, you descendants of the Almighty. Shine like stars as you cry and mourn, point the people in your life to the only source of joy in all of reality…that the God whom they have sinned against is willing to forgive them and adopt them…if they repent of their sins and believe in Jesus Christ.

Rejoice in the Lord always! And again I say, rejoice!