Fruit of the Spirit: Joy

Good morning. Good morning. It's good to be with you. If we've never met, my name is Josh, and I would love to meet you. So please come say hello after the service.

Whether I'm down front or out in the foyer, just come up and interrupt whatever's going on. Not whatever, but, you know, gauge the situation appropriately. Okay. And then say hello. All right.

But I'd love to meet you, get to know you a little bit if you have, if you're new here or if you've never really connected with Whitewater beyond just being here on a Sunday morning, sitting in a seat. I'd really encourage you to take a step into community and family here. The best way you can do that is to go to the information desk in the foyer right after the service. We got a great team there. They'd love to get you connected to people, get you connected to the family here, answer any questions that you have or help you figure out the best place for you to share the gifts that God's given you with the body.

And speaking of all of that, every week it takes a massive team of people, of volunteers to do everything that we do, from the greeters at the door to the kids in the other room, rocking babies, handing out communion, a thousand other ways that so many of you serve throughout the week. And I just want to say thank you, thank you to all of you who serve here. We are blessed by the gifts that you're pouring out, and so thank you so much. And I also want to take a minute to say that if you're not serving here, we need you. We need you.

We don't need you to push buttons and check boxes and fill slots. We need you. Because the greater truth, the deeper truth in here is that God has given us all individual talents, resources and perspectives and gifts that he intends for us to be using for his kingdom. And actually serving is what it looks like to be the church and not just come to church. And so we'd invite you to join one of the teams.

One of the key areas that we have need in right now is in NextGen with our kids and students. And so Megan and the Next Gen team do an incredible job of teaching kids and students and introducing them to the love of Jesus and bringing them together in community. And if you have a heart for that, we would love for you to stop by the information desk. If you got a heart for anything else, too, we would love for you to stop by the information desk and let them know that you're interested in serving. Well, today is week three of our Fruit of the Spirit series.

And as we get into this series, we see more and more and more how all of this is all intertwined. It's just a giant ball of things that are interconnected with each other. And so if you've missed any of the other messages, I really want to encourage you to go back and listen to them, to see all these parts and pieces working together. And when we talk about fruit, we're talking about this outward growth, behaviors and attitudes that are the indicators of what is nourishing and forming our lives internally. Jesus said in John 15 that when we abide in him, there is a kind of fruit that is produced by the Holy Spirit that serves as the evidence or the proof that we are his disciples.

And let's remind ourselves of our definition here of disciples. A disciple is an everyday person. That's you and me, everyday people, everyday person growing to be more like Jesus by studying and practicing his ways and helping others do the same. That is a disciple. And all of that is on the way to becoming more and more like Jesus.

In week one, we said that this fruit of the Spirit grows in our lives as we abide in Jesus, the true vine. And as we allow the Father, the vine, dresser, the gardener, to do his primary work of pruning out the parts of us that are robbing energy and resources and power from the production of fruit and pruning off all the parts of us that are not yet like Jesus. Now, last week, we talked about the spiritual fruit of love. And we said that love, the kind of love we read about in the Bible, is selfless. It's sacrificial and unconditional.

And we closed with this challenge to ask this question as we go. God, what does it look like right now for me to love this one in front of me? Now, how did that go? Did anyone take part in that? It's okay.

Some of you said I forgot the question. I'm sorry. I want to tell you that I practiced this on Sunday afternoon on my way home from somewhere after we went out running errands after church. And I want to tell you with transparency and remind you just how human I am. Let me tell you how it went for me.

So just a few hours after I was done preaching, my family and I are in the car. My kids, I know it sounds impossible. My kids are bickering in the backseat instead of memorizing scripture and praying like they normally do in the car. And I asked myself the question, what does it, God, what does it look like for me to love this one in front of behind me in the seat right now. And I almost did it.

And the bickering got louder. And so I proceeded to throw the spiritual fruit of love along with just about all the other spiritual fruit out the window. And I took a giant bite of the fruit of the flesh. And instead, I lost my mind. I lost my mind.

I barked at my kids with impatience. And then I proceeded to feel like a loser and a hypocrite for the rest of the day.

And as I laid in bed Sunday night, I knew the answer to the question, God, what does it look like to love this? And I knew the question was answered with the answer that I needed to apologize to my family. So Monday morning I sat down with them and I confessed to my family that I had done the exact opposite of everything that I had just preached to all of you. And I apologized for my harshness and my impatience. And thankfully, I had some better moments throughout the week of practicing this love too.

But I tell you this because I want you to know that if this resonates with you, you're not alone. My grand face plant proves that you're not alone. And this is a reminder that we are still at war with our flesh. This is the whole point of why we're studying this. We are at war with our flesh.

The fruit of the spirit and the fruit of the flesh are constantly int tension against each other and they don't want what the other wants. And before we jump into our fruit for today, let me just pray.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for your gracious love for us, even in our floundering. Thank you for the victories and the failures in practicing the fruit of love this week. And I know that we learn and grow from both sides of the equation, but sometimes that's not very fun. So please prune from us what needs pruned so that we can produce more and more of your fruit in our lives. And help us now to grasp and understand and grow joy.

Teach us, challenge us, and encourage us with your word today. In Jesus name, Amen. Well, let's remind ourselves of the fruit of the spirit found in Galatians 5, 22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. Today we look at the fruit of joy.

So what is the biblical definition of joy? Well, most of the time I love to dig in, grab the original word, find the literal definition, and say this. This is what it is. But this time I think it falls a little short The Greek word used here in Galatians 5 and throughout the Bible. The word for joy is chara, C, H, A R, A.

And chara, by definition is a feeling of inner gladness, delight, or rejoicing. Joy strictly is a feeling. And that sounds about right, doesn't it? So why do I think this is not a good definition for joy? It's because feelings can easily deceive us.

They can be fleeting, they can change as we experience new things, and they're almost entirely conditional circumstances. The biblical description of how joy actually works suggests that it is deeper than that. It's more than a feeling. So let's dig a little deeper and let's see how the Bible tells us joy works, how it functions. Philippians 4.

4. Rejoice in the Lord Always. Always. And again I say rejoice. This word rejoice is just the verb form of the word joy.

It literally means take joy. So first we see that joy is not only something that we just experience, something that is done to us, but it's something that we can practice, we can take part in, we can do. And it says that we are to do joy in a particular frequency. Always. That's a lot.

That's a lot. In fact, 1 Thessalonians says it again. It says, rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

So not only can we practice or do joy, not only are we supposed to do it all, always. Now we're told that we're supposed to do joy and have joy in all circumstances. What about the really difficult ones? And our brother James is shouting from the back of the Bible, pick me, pick me. I'll tell you all about that, James.

One, two, count it. All joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds of. But if joy is just a feeling, I can guarantee you I will not feel it as I'm experienced trials of many. As I experience trials of many kinds that seems impossible. Or maybe it makes me think that this kind of joy is for, like, super Christians.

Like, you gotta have a black belt in Christianity or something. I clearly do not have one. Okay, so there must be more to this. Let's keep digging. We might remember when we were in our study through the book of Habakkuk, this terrible situation that was going on with Habakkuk.

There was this terrible nation, violent nation, and people that were coming across, and they were about to come and capture God's people into captivity. And Habakkuk is crying out to God and. And God not only says, hey, yeah, I'm gonna let this happen, he says, I'm causing this to happen. And somehow the kind of joy we're talking about shows up in Habakkuk's response in chapter three. He says, 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 herds in the stalls. Yet I will rejoice the Lord. I will take joy in the God of my salvation. If this is how true biblical joy works in real life, it's got to be more than a regular kind of feeling or emotion. And I have to conclude that what most of us presume is joy in our lives must be something else, because our kind of joy doesn't work like that.

So before we get to how we experience true biblical joy, let's talk about false joy so we can identify what we're not talking about. Each week. We said that we would be looking at this false fruit, this fake plastic fruit that kind of looks like good activity, the fruit with the little wire hangers that we hang on ourselves like a Christmas tree, but it doesn't grow from us. It's not real, true fruit. And that we would look at what we're calling the evil twin of this fruit.

This is the fruit of the flesh that Satan offers to us in place of the real thing. So what is this plastic fruit joy? I think it most often comes in the form of four optimism, positivity, happiness, and excitement. Which, by the way, those are fantastic things, but they're all cheap substitutes for true biblical joy. If you've seen the movie Inside out, think of the character Joy.

If you haven't seen it, it's about the emotions inside a young girl named Riley. And all these emotions are all played out by little characters that are living inside of her head. There's joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. And Joy is the main character among the feelings. And she's determined to keep Riley happy at all times, at all costs.

She's bubbly and energetic and sees the positive in every situation. She's fun to be around and exhausting to be around at the same time, but she manipulates just about everything and everyone to make sure that Riley's joy stays intact. She thinks her job is to keep Riley from all hardship and pain and difficulty. And then if she does this, then Riley will stay happy. She's constantly toiling and working, and eventually she crashes because she realizes she can't control everything.

This kind of joy is the fake fruit hanging on our branches with little wire hooks that kind of blow off easily when the wind comes. Another way we can hang this fake fruit on our branches comes in the form of pretending to have joy or wearing a joy costume. This is the person wearing this joy costume who always says positive things that they don't actually mean. Their face is stuck in a perpetual smile, but it doesn't actually represent and match what's happening inside of them. Everyone around them wishes that they were as bubbly and energetic and optimistic as they are.

But they're the only ones that go home and look in the mirror and know for sure it's all a facade. Positivity, optimism, excitement and happiness are good things, but they're cheap substitutes for the real thing. So what about the evil twin of joy, the fruit of the flesh offered to us by Satan? It comes in the form predominantly of three indulgence, materialism and escapism. Indulgence is about excessive gratification of desires.

Indulgence seeks happiness by doing whatever we feel like doing and doing as much of it as we can afford to do. This could be anything from romantic relationships to shopping to eating, vacationing, substances, pornography, a thousand things. The aim of indulgence is to excessively fulfill our desires in an attempt to maintain happiness. So we have to keep a constant supply of things to indulge in so that our feelings of happiness stay intact. And once the supply runs out, we have to aggressively and frantically chase after more.

And then there's materialism. It equates happiness with possessions and status. If only I had this, then I could be happy. If only I had more money or a car or a house or a job or clothing or shoes or jewelry or whatever else. The aim of materialism is to pile up enough stuff so that we can be happy.

Either happy because we have a thing or happy because we have something that somebody else doesn't have. But any of us who've actually ever gotten what we thought we wanted realize very quickly that it all fades fast. And we have to keep acquiring and acquiring and acquiring to keep the high going. And then there's escapism. Escapism seeks temporary relief from reality through distraction.

We Americans are amazing at escapism. We are professional at escapism. Sometimes these are distractions that look really unhealthy, like drug and alcohol abuse, sexual immorality. Sometimes these distractions look pretty normal to our culture and to our home. Like video games, going on vacation, always having the TV or music on so you never have to be in silence and hear your own thoughts scrolling through social media, getting trapped in one of those YouTube rabbit holes that never ends, reading a racy novel, binge watching all five seasons of our favorite show in a long weekend.

Sometimes these distractions look completely healthy and harmless too, like going to work or the gym, or our favorite hobby or sports, or cleaning the house, or putting a birthday party together for our two year old. But escapism is about avoiding reality or relationships or our own internal dialogue. The downside of escapism is you can't run forever and reality always catches up. All of us are giving into indulgence and materialism and escapism at some level every day. But no matter how much we grow or eat this fruit of the flesh, it always leaves us hungry.

It always leaves us longing for more. And even worse, it allows us to distract ourselves just long enough to forget what we're actually after. What we're actually longing for is true biblical joy. Now, I've been using that phrase true biblical joy a lot, and I want to qualify it. I've heard many Christians suggest that anyone who's not a Christian cannot ever experience real joy, but can only ever experience fleeting happiness.

And I think I get the argument. I get the point that's being made there, but I don't agree with that. I think that there is a form of real joy or true joy that isn't true biblical joy. The best term I found for it is moral joy. The definition of moral joy is the feeling of deep and long term pleasure that comes from doing good and making sacrifices for a higher purpose.

Moral joy is only almost true biblical joy, except we don't need Jesus or the Holy Spirit for moral joy. And that's the real difference between the two. It's the source. We are the source of moral joy. We decide that we're a good person, and as a good person, we do good and make sacrifices for the higher purpose of being a good person.

At the end of the day, this does some really good stuff, and it looks almost nearly identical to the real thing. But when you pull the mask off of even the best moral joy, you find out it's actually ego, it's actually self. But the source of true Christian biblical joy is something else. It's salvation that's the true source of biblical joy. It is the source of our joy.

And incredibly, it was also the source of Jesus joy too. Maybe the most poignant scripture that describes how salvation was the source of Jesus joy is found in Hebrews 12:2, it says, for the joy set before him, Jesus. He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. What was the joy set before him? The joy of being beaten?

The joy of having nails run through his hands and feet? The joy of hanging on a cross while his mother wept? The joy of agonizing in painful death? No. It was the joy of knowing that through his sacrifice we would gain salvation.

Jesus beautifully compared the suffering he was facing with a woman at childbirth. We just looked at this at Communion. John 16:21 and 22. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come. But when her baby is born, she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.

So with you, now is your time of grief. But I will see you again, and you will rejoice. You will take joy, and no one will take away your joy. How could it possibly be that no one could take away their joy? How could it possibly be that no one could take away our joy?

Because through the suffering, the death, the burial and the resurrection of Jesus, his joy and our joy are unshakably anchored to one thing, to salvation. My favorite section of scripture that describes this is in Ephesians 2. I love this section of Scripture. It says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live, when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the Spirit, who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts.

Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It's by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us, Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith.

And this is not from yourselves. This is a gift from God. This is the greatest news ever. And this is how true biblical joy remains anchored through trial, difficulty, grief, pain and sorrow. Think of it like this.

You're sitting at work and you get a phone call and you find out that a great uncle that you never knew existed has. His name is Elon Musk. And he leaves you. He leaves you his entire estate. It's worth $432 billion.

Now all you have to do is drive downtown to Cincinnati and sign a piece of paper and $432 billion. And this joy, this excitement, this news gets you so excited that you accidentally spill your drink on your favorite shirt and it ruins it forever. But you don't care, because you have $432 billion. And as you start to rush out the door, your boss says, if you leave right now, you don't have a job. But you don't care because you got $432 billion, right?

And you go out to your car and find that while you were at work, someone keyed the entire side of your car, smashed out your back window, and stole your favorite whatever. But you don't care because you got $432 billion. So you hop in the car, and you're driving at a pretty quick pace downtown, and you're in a construction zone, in a school zone, and you get pulled over, and the police officer says, I'm gonna write you a ticket. It's gonna be really expensive. But you don't care.

Cause you got $432 billion. And you get back in your car and you're driving downtown, and you take the exit. You're 100 yards from the building and your engine breaks and your car catches on fire and you gotta walk the rest of the way, but you don't care. Cause you got $432 billion. Now, of course, this is ridiculous, right?

But you get the point. Paul tells us you were dead, but God. And you're like, I got $432 billion.

Those of us who are in Christ are now coheirs with King Jesus. True biblical joy is not something we hang onto with all of our might. It's not something we hang onto ourselves that quickly gets blown off in the wind. True biblical joy is something that hangs onto us so firmly anchored in salvation that no outside force can shake it off of us or cut us off from it. This is how and why we can experience deep, abiding joy no matter what we're facing.

Because whatever we're facing pales in comparison to the hope of eternal salvation. Just like a ruined shirt, an expensive ticket, and a destroyed car pale in comparison to $432 billion. But while no external force can cut us off from this anchor, there is one internal force that can. True biblical joy has one major weakness. It's forgetfulness.

When we forget the joy of our salvation, we untie ourselves from this anchor.

But there are two potent practices that can keep us from forgetting. The first practice is to practice gratitude. Gratitude. It's interesting how scientists and psychologists find clues of God's truth hidden in these secular studies. There are multiple recent studies which show that practicing gratitude reduces depression, stress and anxiety, improves sleep quality, strengthens our immune system, reduces inflammation, and literally rewires our brain by strengthening neural pathways to the parts of our brain associated with emotions and reward.

Gratitude is an antidote to to forgetting. So here's this week's challenge. It's super simple. We can all do this every day. This week, one of the very first things I want you to do when you get up in the morning is write down five things you're thankful for and thank God for them.

That's it. Write down five things every morning and thank God for them. We can all do that. I heard a preacher ask the question once, what if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you thank God for today? Ooh.

For some of us, it wouldn't be very much. For some of us, we would only have things that could not sustain our lives.

Write down five things every morning.

In Colossians, there's a verse that says, so then, just as you receive Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him. Check. That makes sense. Rooted and built up in him. Yeah, that sounds great.

Strengthened in the faith as you were taught. You're like, man, check, check, check. That's all good stuff. And overflowing with thankfulness. That's a pretty solid list.

Overflowing with thankfulness added to the end of that. That's our project this week. And now, the second potent practice that strengthens and nourishes joy in us is worship. Worship is all about reminding ourselves of who God is, what he has done, and expressing that worship in our lives. We can express it through song, through generosity, through evangelism, through prayer, through the way we live in love and the way we live out faith every day in our lives.

And right now, we're going to practice worshiping together through singing. And as the band prepares, I'm going to read a few scriptures that should just fuel our joy, should be rocket fuel for worship. And then I want you to sing your guts out.

Will you stand?

Our joy is anchored in real salvation, and it is unshakable if we would worship and remember God's faithfulness and gratitude. First Peter 1:8:9 says, Though you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are faithful, filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. For you're receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Hebrews 6:19 says, we have this hope as an anchor for our soul, firm and secure. Romans 5:11 not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now revealed.

Receive Reconciliation in Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace, as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Spirit. Let's sing.