How God Meets Our Deepest Needs VI, How to Be Joyful No Matter What

Go ahead and take your outline out of your notes, please. We're going to look together at how you can be joyful no matter what the circumstance in your life. While you're getting your outline out, I just want to mention that a number of you have told me about how impactful your small group has been, your Beta group and Lighthouse group. Some of those commitments are nearing the end in March. You said, can we keep going? The answer is absolutely. If your group is gelling together and you want to keep meeting, Pastor Scott and I will make sure you get the materials that you need. So there is certainly a future and a hope for everyone that's in a group. And if you're not in a group, as I'll say many times, that should become a priority if you're part of the life of our church family. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for this opportunity to look at your word and to see what you say about joy in our lives. Thank you that you gave us not just the promise but the power to live a life of joy. In your name we pray. Amen. One of my initial challenges in taking on this subject was to understand what joy is about. It's not really what I would call a compelling word. It's not like breakthrough or victory or, you know, those kinds of things that we often find a lot of emotional attachment to. I don't remember the last time someone came up to me and said, are you having a joyful day? Or, you know, how's your joy level or whatever. But, you know, C.S. Lewis, the great author, wrote this. He said, joy is the serious business of heaven. In other words, God cares about joy. Look at the first verses on your outline. Whatever happens, dear friends, may the Lord give you joy. Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again, rejoice. And clearly joy is a concept that's throughout the Bible. The word is used by Jesus a number of times. And it says in Psalm 16, verse 11, in the presence of the Lord there will be fullness of joy. Heaven is a place where we will live in a constant state of joy. To me it has to do, the root concept, with settled peace. Contentment is the best synonym I can think of. Being satisfied that all of your needs will be fully met. Now this is decidedly not the experience of the average American or even the highly successful American. Even the one that has found the secret of today's new economy. I have in my hand a hot business book. I don't know if you've seen this one. We have it up here on the screen for you. It's called The New New Thing. Author is Michael Lewis. And it's really about some of these incredible dot-com startups in the Silicon Valley and the stories behind them. And particularly one businessman by the name of Jim Clark that he talks about in this book at length. Who on his own initiative started up three companies over the last ten years that sold for over a billion dollars each. Making him a moderately successful person in terms of financial income. And yet as the author gets near the end of the book, he taunts Jim Clark a little bit. And says, you know I remember, and he said this is the benefit of keeping records. When you said if I had ten million dollars, I'd be happy. And you got ten million, you weren't happy. And then he wrote a little bit later, he said, I know if I got a hundred million dollars, then I'd know what true happiness was. And I got that and I wasn't happy. He said, well when I get to a billion dollars after taxes, then I'll be happy. And the author Michael Lewis writes and says, you got to that billion dollars and it didn't happen. And here's how he closes that section of the book. He says, no matter how well Jim Clark does for himself, it's always two o'clock in the morning in his heart and he's lying awake. And I love that description of discontentedness. No matter how well he does, it's always two o'clock in the morning in his heart and he's lying awake. That's discontentment friends. And that's where many people live these days. Billion dollars in the bank for this guy, wasn't enough. Unless you think it's just for the new rich and the new economy, just ask yourself the question, who's lining up to buy the lotto tickets every day of the week? Who's out trying to get into the casinos to gamble? Who's loading up their credit cards? A lot of people thinking that they're going to find contentment through some sort of financial hit. And it just doesn't work that way. People are in search of joy in the wrong places. And it's just as elusive for them as it was for this gentleman who has been so fabulously successful monetarily. And when you begin to get infected with this disease of discontentedness, it changes a lot of things in you and creates some weird behaviors. When that disease of discontentedness finds its way into your life, your perfectly adequate house and your subdivision suddenly becomes sort of substandard for you. And you're on the hunt for some great new contractor who can build the house that no one else has ever thought of before. Your two or three year old smooth running car suddenly becomes a clunker that you've got to get rid of in a hurry. And even though you have a closet full of clothes, you still have nothing to wear. How many of you relate to what I'm saying? You know exactly what I'm saying. It's just never quite enough. Most of us wrestle with what one author describes as the monster of more. That insatiable appetite for one more experience, one more acquisition, one more upgrade, one more decimal point in my salary. And this monster has a whole lot of consequences. It's one of the joybusters. Let's take a look at these. Jot them down. Joybusters. The insatiable desire to have a little bit more. What's enough? Just a little bit more. Another joybuster in our life is disappointment. We think things are going to go a certain way. Doesn't happen. We get disappointed. Our joy goes drifting away. Another one that's related to that is unrealistic expectations. I can't tell you how many couples I ended up counseling over the years that thought that marriage was a certain thing. And when it wasn't, their unrealistic expectations were met. Their joy dissipated and they were soon headed in the direction of divorce unless something happened in their lives. Another joybuster is fear. Fear that you're going to lose what you acquired or the position that you attained to or whatever it might be. And on and on. I left one blank there. What's a joybuster for you? Go ahead. What robs your joy? Don't put your spouse's name in there. That would not be a good thing. What robs your joy? Weariness. There's a lot of them. Just put in what robs your joy. I want to look today at the way that we can meet the deep need for contentment. And you say, well, you know, how deep really is the need is this? I mean, is this really deep? Well, my thought is this, friends. I believe in America today, the cause of much of the heartbreak in marriage, of broken homes, the root of a lot of the child care crises that we hear about all the time is discontentedness in the lives of people. And I think it's something we need to address. It keeps a lot of people awake at night at 2 a.m. wondering how they can get more. God knows there's an answer to this mystery. And I want to share this with you. I want you to know that you can slay the monster of more in your life if you really want to. Joy is not about happiness. Now, I want to make this really clear. Happiness is about external things. Happiness is about what happens to you on the outside. Philip Keller, who wrote the book about Psalm 23, a shepherd, looks at Psalm 23, says this. Many things outside of ourselves can make us happy. Joy, however, is an inside thing that doesn't depend on circumstance. That's very important. It's above and beyond the good and bad that meet us in our path. It is within us. Joy is within us. Would you say it with me? Joy is within us. Happiness depends on circumstance. Joy depends on relationship. Our relationship with God. And so I want to talk about this inner quality of joy. And I kind of struggled with how far in depth to go, so I came up with two acronyms. And you can just tell me which one you'd like to hear. I can talk about, really, in essence, joy is contentment. Would you like to hear that message? Or I can talk about joy. Thank you for your rousing vote of confidence. You don't want the 11-point version. You prefer the 3-point version. Well, ask and you shall receive. Let me give you three stories that illustrate how I believe we maintain this essential quality of joy and contentment in our life. Number one, I want to talk about the fact that the secret of contentment is to have Jesus as the center of life. And I know this is going to be so simple that you may say, well, of course. But if there's one observation that I've made about the church at large in America, is that we've managed to believe in Jesus. And we do a pretty good job of talking about Jesus, but for the most part, we have pushed him to the margins of our experience. Jesus is part of an attachment of things that we have acquired as a people. And so he is our insurance policy for this life and especially eternity. But he is rarely the center of our lives. He's rarely the reason why we live. I remember sitting at a table in West India about two years ago. About 150 pastors had walked, some of them for a couple of days, to come together for our pastors' conference at Abraham Poffin's compound outside Alway, India. And on that particular evening, nine or ten of the pastors sat at a table with us for dinner. These were men who had very little in the way of worldly goods, very little. Most of them didn't have churches as we know them. None of them had shuttle buses. None of them had sound systems like we do, or coffee hours like we do. But as the evening went on, the simple joy in the hearts of these men just began to radiate through. And you know what we talked about most of the evening? It wasn't about America and the opportunity to do it. It was about Jesus. It was about how glorious he is. About how completely adequate he is to meet all of our needs. And as the evening wore on, even though I was somewhat afraid to eat the food that was put out in front of me, I was overwhelmed with the sense of his presence. As this handful of men talked about the majesty of the one that we together had joined to serve. The Bible says that Jesus wants us to share his joy. Look at John 15, 11. I have told you this so that my joy... Now look at this. Jesus is not just doling out some... He says, my joy. I want you to circle that. Circle the word, my joy, maybe in you. And then circle the word, your joy. Friends, I read that Jesus said, the same joy I have, you can have. How many of you picture Jesus as a joyful individual? See, now listen. Don't put your hand up without thinking about it. A lot of you have a picture of Jesus from your childhood. Simply, your only real mental image of him is hanging on the cross. Because that's what you grew up seeing. But that was just one brief nine-hour period in his life, actually. He was a joyful man. Children wanted to be around him. He goes on to say, I say these things while I'm still in the world so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. Jesus wants us to have joy. He wants us to know the fullness of contentedness that he knew. And it doesn't come by our achievements or accomplishments, even in ministry. Look at the next verse. The disciples said, well, Lord, we said this, and we saw demons cast out of people, and we saw great healings. And look what Jesus said in the next verse. However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. One of the great sources of joy of my life is the fact that I know. And I don't say this with pride. I say it with great thanksgiving. I know my name is written in heaven. And that should be your source of joy as well. Not whatever you might accomplish in your ministry or your assignment from the Lord. You know, on a recent trip that I just returned from, I sat in a room with about 20 heads of ministries from around the country. It was one of my privileges to be sitting in that room as a pastor of a church. And I noticed, we went around and took about an hour to introduce ourselves and get to know one another. And after that hour, I made the assessment, just based on what people said, that two-thirds of those individuals in that room were not joyful people. They were not content. They were very unsettled in their lives. And these were people, some of you would even recognize their names, leaders of significant ministries. And I want you to know, it doesn't come by your achievement. It comes because of the presence of the Lord. And so we need to do what Jesus did. Look what it says, I don't want to oversimplify this, friends, but the more we look to Jesus, the more His joy becomes ours. The deeper our contentedness becomes. I just want to ask you today, are you focusing every day on Jesus? Is He the one that you'll awaken to in the morning and say, Lord, I want to know you today more than I did yesterday. Walk with me today. Fill me today. I want to worship Him right now. Would you join with me? Let's just lay your things aside for a second. Let's just lift our voice to the Lord and focus on this one who we call our beautiful Savior. Stand with me where you are, would you please? And we're just going to lift our voices and our hearts together. And we're going to sing of His great love for you. Boy, it sounded good. Worship in the Lord. Let's be seated. You. So it begins by focusing on Jesus. Second thing is, turn your outline over, to see others in the path of your life. Let me tell you another story. Just last May, I celebrated my 30th college reunion with a number of my fraternity brothers. Interestingly enough, three of us had enrolled our children four years earlier in the same university. And so we sat down to really share what had been taking place in our lives. And we just said, well, what were some of the most significant things of the last few years of our lives? And as we went around the table of adults, it was interesting to hear. One talked about their next son who was coming up, and the fact he was an All-State football player, and they were excited about him getting a scholarship and going on to school. Another said that she had been named the chairman of the Make-A-Wish Foundation in Jacksonville, and she was so happy and thrilled to be serving people in that respect. Another one shared how they had lost their parent, a parent, and the impact that that had had in their lives just a year or two earlier. Another one said they were about to move and they were going to miss the friendships they had made in Charlotte and having to relocate and all. It was very interesting to me as we went around the room and shared the most important things in our lives that not one of them mentioned the new home they had bought in the gated country club community, or the exotic trips that they had taken to the South Pacific, or the fact that they had made enough money to retire at age 45 and so on, by the way, all of which had been true. In every case, it had to do with relationships and the people that God had put across their lives. True contentedness comes when you begin to realize, friends, that life is in relationships. It's with people. It's about others. It's connections. That's where it has meaning. It has nothing to do with how well your career is going, where you live, how much of a promotion you're going to get. You can have just as profound a conversation on a little tiny deck in a one-bedroom apartment as you can sitting on a big patio overlooking a three-acre estate. God made us that way. Isn't that cool? That's the way relationships work. You can touch someone's soul over a $5 happy meal just as easily as you can a $50 gourmet dinner at a fine restaurant. Learning to be joyful and content has to do with opening your heart to other people. And you don't need any more stuff or achievement or money or possessions to do that. You just need to be willing. You need to be able to take a step outside of yourself and develop relationships. Realize that you have enough right now to be content if you open your life. You don't need a penny more to do so. And that's why we make every opportunity in this church for you to get connected to a small group. Because some of you don't have a circle of friends. Some of you don't have anybody that you really open up to and share your lives. And I want to say, if you don't have that, then make it a priority of this month. Put your name on a communicator and say, help me find a small group. And I will personally commit to you that we'll do everything possible to help you find some folks to open up to. I mean, look what Paul wrote. Here is a guy that traveled and did great things for God, great miracles. What was his source of joy? He said this. Look at your outline. Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and my crown. It was the people that he ministered to. Next verse. For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? In other words, the second coming is the second coming. The moment when we think we're all going to be raptured up and stand in the presence of God. He says, what's the joy going to be then? He said, is it not you? Indeed, you are our glory and our joy. This last weekend, Carol and I were gone because we were visiting our son David, who is now a self-sustaining adult. Man, parents, that's a great feeling, isn't it? He's a computer consultant down in Northern Virginia. We went down for the first visit, really, on his own, just to visit with him. He was the kind of young man in high school, and parents, this is meant to encourage you, who oftentimes, when you asked him how things were going, he'd grunt. How was school? Just drawing out a conversation. If he was in the mood, fine. But if he wasn't, boy, it was like he just wasn't getting through. Well, it was so wonderful to talk to this person, and to really find out what was going on in his life, and to enjoy together an overpriced fish dinner at a restaurant that we went on. It didn't matter, we just had fun together. Afterwards, it was still kind of early, so we went to one of these, there's all these coffee shops all over Georgetown, and all kinds of opportunities, places to hang out. We looked through the window, and I saw all these young people, and I walked in, and I thought I heard an alarm go off. I said, oh, there's the Gee's alarm, two over 50s entering the building. They let us in, though, and served us coffee and s'mores. That was the menu, and it was great. We loved the relationship. We loved the exchange. It was a joy to share, parents with their kids, one to another. See, it's about focus. Joy and contentment is about focus. It's about what you look at. The third thing it's about is you and your purpose in life. Don't minimize this, because you see, a lot of folks today don't really know why they're there. Let me tell you a third story. I was with a group of leaders not long ago that I meet with periodically from the city here. Some are pastor types, others are parachurch leaders, and some have real jobs. When we sat down to talk, I posed the question to this group of men. I said, what's going to propel you to keep on going into the new millennium? What's going to sustain you in your journey here? Not surprisingly to me, but somewhat to a few of them, it really had very little to do with how much more they could acquire or whatever. It had to do with this. They said, I just want to make sure that my next 20 years really make a difference. I just want to be sure that what I'm investing is going to return something to me that's going to last beyond just life. I want to leave a legacy and things like that. And even though the salaries in this group ranged widely, it didn't have to do with visibility or money. It had to do with meaning. Some of you have read Bob Buford's little book called Half Time. I want to commend that to some of you who might be struggling with, what decisions do I make in the middle of my life? Because it helps you to ask the right questions. You see, in Scripture, Paul says very clearly, for me to live is Christ. That's why I lived and to die is gain. Look at the next verse. My only purpose in life is to please Him. Can you say that? I'm not sure I can say that yet, but I want to. My only purpose in life is to please Him. I run, he says, straight toward the goal with purpose in every step. If you want to see your commitment level rise, then start to pursue God's purpose with passion. Pray this one simple two-word prayer. I dare you to pray it. Write it down at the bottom of your outline. Pray this one simple two-word prayer. Ready? Write it down. Use me. Pray that prayer. Pray it every morning. Use me. Lord, use me. And you will find astonishing things begin to happen in your life. I prayed that prayer. The first recollection I have, I was a teenager. And then at age 22, I graduated from college and 27 from seminary. 33 when I started this church. And I got to tell you, it isn't necessarily cheap to pray that prayer. It sometimes costs you more than you want to pay. But it makes a life worth living. And there's no greater joy. How many of you would attest to this? There's no greater joy than knowing that God has used you to touch another life for eternity. No greater joy. I just want to encourage you on that. Now, you say, well, if I do those three things, Jay, if I focus on Jesus all the time as the center of my life, if I put others before me in the path of my life, and if I look to my purpose in life on a regular basis, will I always live a life full of joy and contentment? Will things always work out the way I hoped they would? Will I be at peace at all times? And the answer is, of course not. It won't happen. But you'll have the resource to respond when life's tragedies come your way. I want you to hear a testimony this morning of someone who was living what they thought to be a life that was pleasing to God. And tragedy struck. And they've discovered how God's joy and contentment can be restored, even in the midst of that. Give a warm welcome this morning, would you, to Bob Mercer, as he comes to share his testimony. Give him a welcome. Thanks for staying, Bob. Good morning. I want to invite you to join with me in imagining for just a moment. Imagine with me for a moment a man and a woman. And they're sitting in an elegant restaurant, and they're both around age 40. The location is Honolulu, Hawaii. The time of year is May of 1996. The evening is tropical, and there's a gentle breeze blowing in through the large windows that are open to the ocean. The lighting is low, and the music is playing quietly in the background, and a candle illuminates the faces of the man and woman. Do you have that picture in your mind? This was to be a romantic evening, but the man has tears rolling down his cheeks. His eyes are red from the tears and from the pain he's feeling in his heart. And in a low voice he speaks, hoping not to be heard by the diners sitting nearby. Please, he said. Please don't go. Please, please, please don't go on that trip with him. It just isn't right. Can't you see how this is hurting me? She looked back at him and replied, You know, he's just a special friend to me. Really, that's all. Nothing more than that. Just a special friend. Throughout what was at that time a marriage of 17 years, she had always been so tender, so kind and so considerate of his feelings. She'd always been so protective of their relationship. But now, on this evening together so far from home, she was strangely being protective of her relationship with her boss and the business trip she would be taking with him alone, while apparently being so cavalier to the danger that it was posing to her marriage. Well, the fact that I'm standing before you this morning would lead you to perhaps know that I'm the man of this story. I'm the one who, as a teenage boy, was infatuated and enchanted by her as a teenage girl. I'm the one who later built with her a marriage and a life that others looked upon with admiration. And I'm the man who, so many years later, sat across a dinner table on a Hawaiian trip that was part business and part vacation and was tearfully bewildered with the response of the woman that I knew so well, or at least I thought I knew, and I now know only, as my ex-wife. This very brief testimony that I was asked to share this morning is just one example of many in my life, and no doubt of many that could be shared by any one of you in this audience, of how the God who loves us so helped me to find new life when the life I had built was rapidly disintegrating and I was in panic and despair. Now, I'm very confident that the reason God says so simply in the Bible, I hate divorce, is because there are no winners. Absolutely everyone involved loses. The only winner is Satan, as he enjoys the incredible pain and the suffering, the anger, the bitterness, the fear, the sadness, and the sorrow that touches the lives of countless people with every single divorce. In the six months that followed that tearful dinner in Hawaii, I continued to trust and believe my spouse while she fell ever deeper into the sin of adultery. By the seventh month, the guilt of her betrayal became too much for her to hide or to bear any longer, and she left. My then 13-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter and I began a long journey together, now only as a family of three, into a life that none of us had ever expected. I know in some ways you've been there too. Perhaps your situation was not divorce. Perhaps it was not as severe, whatever it was, for you or for your children, or perhaps it was more so. But in some ways you too know what it is to find that life is not what you thought it would be. It's not what you wanted it to be. And like you, I was at a crossroads in my faith, and the test of God's faithfulness to me and mine to him was about to begin. But this morning, the details of all that my children and I walked through and experienced together over these last four years are not so important as the fact that through His Word and His people, the Lord ministered to each of us, sometimes in very simple ways and other times in what only could have been miraculous ways, such that today I can tell you that life is not what I thought it would be. But by the grace and mercy of God, life for me and life for my son and daughter is very, very good. I would not have believed that at the start of this journey. I would not have believed that I could have said that to you at the start of this journey. And I know that you may be sitting here this morning at the early stages of some very difficult journey of your own. The pain, the anger, the despair will cloud your vision and your emotions such that you may see little or no hope. I'm here to tell you that I had to come to the end of myself, to the point where I did absolutely all I could enough to bring myself and the kids back to a place of peace and joy in our lives. It was at that point that I could see the Lord working good for us in what Satan meant as evil. That good came in the form of Scripture that comforted and guided. And you know how that is. It's Scripture that the times by yourself alone or the times in the small group that you've joined together with or the times of worship here at the church when Scripture speaks to you and guides you and comforts you through your days. It came in the form of people who loved us through the difficult days in such incredibly simple and practical ways. And it came in the form of circumstances that had absolutely no better explanation than they were clearly gifts of God to us. By nature and personality, I've always been a very optimistic, upbeat, enthusiastic, energetic person. Ask the people who know me and hang around with me, and they'll tell you that's just who I am. But divorce was a life blow that sent me reeling. And that trauma was shortly followed by my daughter and I being involved in a severe auto accident that left both of us with emotional scars that are such that neither of us yet speaks very often of the incident. And as if that were not enough, these last two years I've walked side by side with my son through an incredibly painful experience in his life. And I count myself blessed to call him my son. And I'm so very, very proud of him and how he's walked through this. Have I figuratively and literally cried and hurt through all of this? You bet. And yet I was asked to stand before you this morning not because I can testify to hurt and pain in my life, but rather I was asked to come before you today because I can testify that placing my faith in God through Christ and experiencing His love through Scripture and relationship with fellow believers has given to me the joy and the peace to endure, no matter what. A number of you that prayed a moment ago, you need someone to agree with you. And our elders and their spouses will be up here to pray with you. Please come if you need further prayer. And then those of you who just said, you know, I want to follow Christ. You looked up at me. If our eyes met, that was sort of a sign of agreement. It's very important that you come and get one of these little packets. We talk about these periodically. These packets have a cassette tape and a booklet and some literature. This is just like a little booster packet for you to start this new journey. So come up and get one of these and let someone agree with you that today you became a follower of Jesus.