Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Joy to Jesus and Joy in Him

Psalm 16 "Pleasures Forevermore"
Sermon by Guest Blogger Russell J. Muilenburg

Not Original

Today we are going to continue looking at our new vision statement here at Hope Church. We are using this short, simple statement to summarize what Hope Church has always stood for; to explain what the Bible expects of the church; and to paint a picture of the kind of church we want to be.

We've put the emphasis on joy. We've said that:

We are here to bring joy to Jesus and to experience joy in Him.

I think this statement captures the heart of our church while also conveying an invitation to those outside of the church.

Now, today, I have a confession to make. As much as I would like people to think this statement is an original idea, it's really not. This isn't something that the consistory pulled out of thin air. Rather, this statement is really just a re-wording of a document that's about 360 years old.

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks: “What is the chief end of man?” In other words, “Why are we here?” “What's our purpose?” The same basic question we've been asking about the church. And the answer given is this:

Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Now, I don't know if you know much about the Westminster Catechism—it's kind of a big deal in the Presbyterian church—but this is a summary of Christian belief that has been around for a while and it is pretty well-respected. Personally, I think this is about as good an answer to the “Why are we here?” question that has ever been penned.

And the thing I want you to notice is the emphasis on joy. The Catechism doesn't just say that we are here to glorify God, it says that we are also here to enjoy Him. Or, as our vision statement says, “to experience joy in Him.”

Now, I think that is remarkable. Again, you might not know much about the Westminster, but the folks who wrote this were what you would call Scottish Puritans. A group of people very similar to the Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts. Calvinistic, with long beards and very plain clothing, these were not necessarily guys you would associate with joy. History likes to paint them as very severe.

And yet, when they sat down to write a summary of the Biblical reason for human existence, they put an emphasis on joy. We are here to enjoy God. We are here to experience joy in Him.

The Power of a Conjunction

In fact, I don't see the two parts of this answer as if they are separate things.

The word “and” could imply that there are two activities that constitute man's chief end. We are here to glorify God AND enjoy Him forever. Two different things. But the question doesn't ask for two answers, it asks for only one.

John Piper, a pastor up in Minneapolis, and one of my heroes, points out that we could really replace the word “and” with the word “by.” The answer could read:

Man's chief end is to glorify God BY enjoying Him forever.

Because, really, that's what is being said. Our reason for existence, our purpose for being, is to glorify God. And the way we will do that best... the way God will most be honored by us... the way to bring the greatest joy to God... is to find our joy in Him.

John Piper puts it like this:

God is most glorified in us
when we are most satisfied in Him.

In other words, it is when we obey and trust and follow and worship God—when we show that His promises are sufficient and that His will for us is good—that we most honor Him. When we find our happiness and our contentment and our joy and our pleasure in God, then He is indeed displayed to be the greatest thing in our universe.

Or, to put it in negative terms, if we find no pleasure in God, if we are not seeking to find our joy in Him, then we are not really glorifying Him.

So I don't see our vision statement as two things, but one thing.

We are here to bring joy to Jesus and to experience joy in Him.

As we experience the joy of belonging to Jesus, and display that joy to the rest of the world, we are in the best position to put a smile on our Savior's face.

Psalm 16

So that's our vision statement and where it comes from. Now, in the time we have left today I want to look at the second half of the statement—the “experience joy” part—and show you that this isn't something that theologians have just made up. I want you to see that this is a very Biblical idea. The Bible invites us to experience our greatest joy in God. In Jesus.

And to see that, I want to invite you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 16. Psalm 16 will be our text today. Here's what it says:
1 Keep me safe, O God,
for in you I take refuge.

2 I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing."

3 As for the saints who are in the land,
they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

4 The sorrows of those will increase
who run after other gods.
I will not pour out their libations of blood
or take up their names on my lips.

5 LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup;
you have made my lot secure.

6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.

7 I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.

8 I have set the LORD always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.

9 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,

10 because you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

11 You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
What I want you to notice from this Psalm is the number of words that express joy: “delight” in verse 3, “secure” in verse 5, “pleasant” and “delightful” in verse 6, “glad” and “rejoices” in verse 9, “joy” and “pleasures” in verse 11. The Bible really does want us to be happy. God really is interested in us experiencing joy.

Look more closely with me at verse 11. To me, this is the key verse to the whole Psalm:

11 You have made known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

God's presence is where true joy is found.

“Eternal pleasures at your right hand.” The King James Version says “pleasures forevermore.” That's where I got the title for this message.

When you are in God's presence—living for Him and trusting in Him and seeking to do His will—then you are in the best possible place a human being can be. A place where not only does God receive joy, but so do you!

I phrased it like this: God has designed us to find our deepest joy in Him. The way God has made the world, the way He has put us together, is so that we will find our greatest happiness in Him.

If we are seeking our joy in anything less than God, then we are short-changing ourselves. With apologies to Snickers, nothing can satisfy like our God.

And if we go back to the rest of the Psalm, we will find four ways in which this joy can be experienced.

Delight in the Saints

First, there is joy in the company of God's people. We experience joy in God when we spend time with His people.

The first verse of our Psalm is a general prayer for protection and a declaration of faith. “Keep me safe, O God; for in you I take refuge.” Then verses 2-4 start to talk about where the Psalmist gets his joy:

2 I said to the LORD, "You are my Lord;
apart from you I have no good thing."

3 As for the saints who are in the land,
they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight.

4 The sorrows of those will increase
who run after other gods.
I will not pour out their libations of blood
or take up their names on my lips.

On the one hand, the Psalmist can say that apart from God he has no good thing. God is his only treasure. Yet on the other hand, he can say, "I delight in the saints of the land. They are a good thing." You want to ask, “Which is it it?” But the Psalmist evidently sees no either-or, no competition between having God as his only good, and yet placing a very high value upon the saints in the land.

The point seems to be that it is because they are saints—that is, they are people who love God and trust Him and obey Him—then our delight in them is simply an indirect delight in God. In other words, God is honored when we enjoy being in the company of His people.

The implication, then, is that we should enjoy being with other believers. We should delight to be in the company of people who love and worship and seek to follow God.

Like I've been saying the last couple of weeks, being here on Sunday, being together to worship and learn and pray, ought to be the highlight of our week. We should look forward to this gathering, we should delight to come and be with God's people.

To go back to the painting in our lobby, that picture of the party thrown for the lost sheep from Luke 15, we should reflect that party atmosphere when we gather together. Maybe there won't always be dancing and balloons, but that same spirit of joy should be present in our time together. Because when we experience joy together, we are experiencing some of the joy of following God.

It follows then that we're not going to run with the wrong crowd. That's what verse 4 is about. If we find our delight with God's people, then it will keep us from falling in with those who worship and serve other gods.

So, God has designed us to find our deepest joy in Him, and one of the ways we do that is in the company of God's people.

Delight in the Plan

Second, there is joy in the results of God’s faithfulness. We experience joy in God when we reflect on the blessings of our lives. Verses 5 & 6:

5 LORD, you have assigned me my portion and my cup;
you have made my lot secure.

6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.

When we look back over our lives, we will find that God has been faithfully blessing us all along. He assigns us our portion and our cup, our food and our drink.

I like the way verse 6 puts it: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” That's an allusion to what happened when the children of Israel finally made it to the Promised Land and God assigned the parts of the land to the various tribes. The Psalmist is saying that his inheritance was pretty good. Metaphorically speaking, he's saying he's happy with where the boundaries of his life came out.

It's kind of like having a map of your life. And if you stop and look back on it, you'll find that God has been faithful throughout. That He's taken the circumstances of your life and—as Romans 8:28 says—worked them out for your good.

This doesn’t mean that every follower of Christ has a perfect life. Quite the opposite. Christ told us that those who follow Him will have to carry crosses of their own. He made it clear that in this world there would be trouble. And yet, for those who follow Him, He promises that He will always be faithful. That we will find joy even in our trials.

Take Chris Klein for example. Chris had a difficult child birth. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his throat and for 45 minutes he was deprived of oxygen. He has cerebral palsy. The muscles in his body never stop moving, but he has no motor control. He needs to wear gloves, because his index fingers are constantly digging into his thumbs, causing painful sores. He is confined to a wheelchair and needs help just to go to the bathroom, bathe, or eat.

But Chris can communicate by typing onto a computer with his left big toe. The computer speaks for him. He is highly intelligent and graduated from Hope College and Western Theological Seminary. Today he is a traveling preacher who speaks at camps and churches. This is what Chris says about his disability:

I had faith in God, but I didn't rely on it because I thought God had given me a bad deal. But suddenly I understood that God had given me a gift of disability. It is a gift because I am able to boast in my weakness, and people will be able to see Jesus shine through me.

Now, I'm not trying to make light of your difficulties or struggles. I'm not saying, “at least you don't have it as bad as this guy,” or anything like that. We all have had bad experiences and bad breaks, and some of you may be in the midst of some rotten stuff right now.

But I am saying that if we are alert to what God is doing in our lives, then we will find that even in our most trying circumstances God is still faithful. Like Chris Klein, we can say that the boundary lines have fallen for us in pleasant places.

Delight in the Rules

God has designed us to find our deepest joy in Him. There is joy in the company of God's people. There is joy in the results of God's faithfulness. Now, third: there is joy in the wisdom of God’s counsel. We experience joy in God when we follow His rules. Look at verses 7 & 8:

7 I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.

8 I have set the LORD always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.

The Psalmist talks about the Lord's counsel. The Lord's instruction. What he has in mind here are God's commands. God's instructions for how to live the best possible life.

You see, a lot of people have this idea that God's commands are restrictive. All these “Thou shalt not”s and “don't”s, it seems like God wants to keep us from having any fun. That's why there is so much controversy about teaching the Ten Commandments, we're a libertarian society, and telling people what they can't do tends to cramp their style.

But what we have to realize is that God doesn't give us rules to ruin our fun, but to protect us. God's instructions for living are all about how to have the best possible life. He doesn't want us to short-circuit our joy, or settle for a lesser joy, by settling for sin.

There's a great verse in the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 2:13, that goes like this:

My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,
The spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

A cistern is a basically a bucket, something that you store water in. And God is saying that we all have a bucket inside of us; a bucket in our souls that can be filled up with our contentment or joy. The fuller our bucket, the happier we are.

And so we need to go to the bucket store, and get a bucket. And sin has this really fancy looking bucket store. Like a Crate and Barrel or Bed, Bath and Beyond. And sin has all this glitzy marketing and slick advertising and you walk into sin's store and you see all these high-end buckets. And they all look so good: Anger, getting back at those people who have hurt you. Pride, making yourself feel good by pointing out other people's weaknesses. Selfishness and greed, thinking life is all about you. Laziness. Lust. All these fancy buckets that promise instant happiness.

And God has a bucket store too. Only it's nothing fancy. Just a humble little main street shop. And the buckets at God's store are not too exciting: obedience, doing things God's way, trust.

So the buckets, the cisterns, that sin offers look so much better. But, here's the thing, you buy one of sin's buckets and you try it out, and it fills up your capacity for joy for a while, but then it springs a leak. It always happens. Sin's buckets can't hold water. And so you always have to go back for more, and more.

God's buckets, on the other hand, might not fill up as fast, but they are always reliable. They always hold water. Our capacity for joy when we draw from the spring of living water, is always so much greater.

What the world offers to us in sin is a counterfeit. Sin promises pleasure for a moment, but it is always with consequences. I read a great line on the Internet the other day: “Sin will always take you further than you want to go, it’ll keep you longer than you want to stay, and charge you more than you want to pay.”

And God wants to spare us from that. He doesn't want us to settle for counterfeit joy, but to go for the real thing, the kind of joy that is found in obedience to Him.

There's joy in the wisdom of God's counsel.

Delight in the Resurrection

Fourth and finally, there's joy in the security of God’s protection. We can experience joy in God when we look ahead to eternity. Verses 9 & 10:

9 Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,

10 because you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

When the Psalmist thinks about the future, one thing he is sure of is that it will not be the end for him.

He knows he will die. He knows that some day these bodies of ours will give out and we'll stop breathing. He knows there is a casket and a narrow plot of earth waiting for all of us.

But he is not afraid, because he also knows that God will not abandon him to the grave. For those who trust in the Lord, there is joy in God's presence and eternal pleasures to come.

Verse 10 is a verse that gets quoted in the New Testament with reference to Jesus' resurrection. According to the Apostle Peter, Jesus is the “Holy One” that this verse refers to (Acts 2:25-32).

That doesn't really change the promise of this verse for us, though, because it is only by the death and resurrection of Jesus than any of us have any hope of being resurrected ourselves. By virtue of Jesus' resurrection, the resurrection of all who believe in Him is also guaranteed. If you have taken Jesus as your savior, you too know the joy of security for the future.

And if you haven't taken Jesus as your savior, you can do that today and know with a certainty that you will be in the presence of God for eternity.

There is joy in the security of God's protection.

A Place of Joy

So, God has designed us to find our deepest joy in Him. He wants us to experience joy. He wants us to be deliriously happy. And He knows that will only happen if we are seeking our joy in Him. As Psalm 16 says, there is joy in the company of God's people. There is joy in the results of God's faithfulness. There is joy in the wisdom of God's counsel. And there is joy in the security of God's protection.

At Hope Church, we want to be people who experience joy in God at the highest levels, and we want to invite those around us to experience that joy as well.

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