Sermon Notes, July 14, 2013
The Fruit of the Spirit—Joy, John 16:16-24
We’re looking at the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, etc. We’re looking at joy this morning. Jesus says, “Now is your time of grief, but I
will see you again and you will rejoice and no one will take away your joy.”
Psalm 30:5 says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”
I thought about that verse for a while and I said to myself, Is this teaching that every
Christian, no matter how unhappy they are at night will always wake up every morning with
a smile on their face?
No. I’ve come to realize what that verse was saying. It was saying that a child of God will
receive a joy of such intensity that no sorrow or trouble, in the end, can overwhelm it.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings we see Gandalf, who is a great wise old wizard and
he is carrying all the world’s problems on his shoulders. He’s trying to save the world from
falling under the dominion of darkness. It’s all on his shoulders.
At one point somebody makes a statement and he begins to laugh. He laughs from the
heart—deep down. And this friend looks at him and he suddenly realized that in spite of all
this incredible pressure and strain and stress on this old man, that underneath it all there was
a fountain of joy that was so deep, a gusher of joy that was so deep, that no matter how big a
boulder that put on the top that gusher of joy could not be held back. And that “there was
enough mirth down there to set a kingdom laughing.”
I read that and I thought that’s what a Christian’s supposed to be. Sorrow is always a
temporary condition for a Christian. And joy is a permanent condition.
Now, to talk about the fruit of joy we’re going to take this one passage that is very
helpful, and do a bit of an exposition of it. Then we’ll summarize what the Bible teaches
about joy.
1) What’s the definition of joy—this quality that is supernaturally supplied?
All of these fruit of the Spirit are the supernatural maturity qualities that you can have
in Christ.
2) What’s the opposite of joy?
3) What’s the counterfeit of joy?
4) How do we cultivate it in our lives?
1. The exposition.
Let’s just see what Jesus says about joy.
1) We see that joy is of the essence of being a Christian. (Verse 22)
“So with you: Now is your time of grief but I will see you again and you will rejoice!”
He doesn’t say to these Christians,
“Some of you will be full of joy, some of you won’t.”
No. It’s a fact. If you’re a Christian and you’ve met Jesus Christ you will rejoice and it will
be a joy that no one will take from you. Now, the reason that Christians must have joy is that
it is a characteristic of God Himself.
What does it means to be a Christian? Essentially what it means to be a Christian is that
you come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, which is so intimate that you
catch His attributes, some of His qualities, which are what theologians call the communicable
attributes of God.
If you have an intimate, close relationship with God you will catch some of His attributes.
They will be applied to your life through the Holy Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, meekness, self-control and so on are simply communicable attributes of God.
Joy is an attribute of God. Now, when you think about God, my guess is this is not the
sort of thing you think about do you?
There’s a remarkable passage in Proverbs 8 where it talks about wisdom, which was with
God in the beginning and through whom all of creation was created. Proverbs 8 speaks of
wisdom through which God created all things and the Gospel of John, chapter 1, tells us that
that wisdom was Jesus.
“In the beginning was the Word (or was wisdom) and the Word was with God.”
Jesus Himself at various places points to that.
Now, go back in Proverbs 8 and realize that Jesus is looking at Himself as the divine
wisdom. When you see what it says about divine wisdom it’s amazing. You’ll see wisdom is
speaking in the first person and wisdom says, “I was with him in the beginning and through
me he created all things.” Then it actually says, “I was delighted in mankind and I was filled
with delight every day.”
There’s a Hebrew word used there: “shasha,” which is a very unusual word to be used of
Jesus or of God. It’s a word that is often translated (as it is here), “delight,” yes, but it’s a
word that more accurately means, “to frolic.” It’s to jump up and down and clap your hands!
And here’s Jesus using this of Himself.
Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The Lord takes delight in you and he will rejoice over you with
singing.” God’s joy is a majestic joy. It’s a holy joy. It’s who God is. And nobody who really
knows God can be dour. Therefore if you are a Christian you have to have received this joy.
Not only is joy essential to God, it’s also essential to the gospel. What does “gospel”
mean? Good tidings. Good news. It is the tidings that bring joy!
Here’s something to consider: if you haven’t got joy you there’s a good chance you
haven’t got the gospel. Joy is at the heart of God’s plan for your life. Part of what we’re
learning in this series is that I can’t make the Fruit of the Spirit happen. It’s something that
grows in me as I abide in God, because that’s the kind of person God is. When you read the
Fruit of the Spirit, you’re reading a description of the Spirit of God.
If you get nothing else, get this today: Joy is at the heart of who God is, and we will never
understand the significance of Joy in human life until we understand its importance to God!
I believe that most people seriously underestimate God’s infinite capacity for Joy. In his
book called Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton writes about how the joy that you see in a little kid
is just a fraction of the joy that exists in the heart of God. At the end of this passage is one of
the great sentences I have ever read in my life:
Because children have a bounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free,
therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again.” And
the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown up people are not
strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says
every morning, “Do it again!” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again!” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes
every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger
than we.
Isn’t that fabulous?
We have sinned and grown old—Jaded, tired, worried and irritated, rushed and blind and
bored. We have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we. That’s our God.
We suffer from a disease and it could be called “Taking It for Granted.” Do you ever
take something for granted? Every moment your heart beats, you take it for granted, because
that’s what a heart is supposed to do. Every moment your lungs fill up with air. And grass
grows, flowers bloom, birds sing, and fish swim, and seasons change, and children grow, and
cuts heal, and we say: “Been there. Done that. Now God, really wow me with something.
Give me get a promotion. Let me get a new house or a new car.”
If we’re not filled with awe and wonder and delight, it’s not because we’re sophisticated or
intelligent. It’s because we’re broken, fallen, sinners.
Dallas Willard writes: “You will not understand God until you understand this about
Him; God is the happiest being in the universe.”
But God also knows sorrow. Jesus was remembered, among other things, as a “man of
sorrows, acquainted with grief.” But the sorrow of God, like the anger of God, is His
temporary response to a fallen world, and it will be banished forever from His heart on that
day which will come when the world will be set right…for Joy is God’s basic character.
Joy is God’s eternal destiny for those he has called.
God is the happiest being in the universe. And here’s why that matters. Jesus says:
“I have said these things to you. I’ve taught you, I’ve been with you, I’ve modeled to you,
I’ve shown you what life can be about, and I’ve done it for a reason. I’ve got a mission. I
have said these things to you so that my joy might be in you, and your joy might be filled up
to the top.” That’s why He said what He said.
Now, that makes a statement about the kind of a person Jesus was. You don’t say that
kind of thing to people who know you best, if they think of you as a somber, unsmiling
person.
As we close hear this: God’s goal is for you to abide with Him and be filled with
authentic, God-honoring, truth embracing, pain-defying joy.