Once again, I would like for us to turn back to Ephesians chapter 1. We're kind of in this passage of scripture looking at it, dealing with it a little more in depth. Ephesians chapter 1 and verses 18 and 19, eventually we're going to look at a little more, but verses 18 and 19 will consume our attention this evening. And so we'll look at it, we'll do some reviewing before we cover some new material. It's always good to review. We need to be reminded of some of the things we've already looked at to make sure that they're securely planted in our minds as we take in new material. And Jesus often reviewed with his disciples. We don't realize that sometimes, but he did. He taught them and then he retaught them and then he retaught them again. They had a hard time getting it then just that's this way it is being human I guess and I know it's true in my life So once again, let's look at Ephesians and we're gonna look at verses 18 and 19 for writing verse 19 will probably serve as our basis but beginning in verse 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, and I hope that you've been praying that, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. We'll stop there. I don't know how your particular version of the Bible reads my version of the Bible puts a period right there and then begins a new sentence and a new thought But we'll stop right there because it'll serve our purposes for tonight. So we've been looking at this subject of Christian joy and our joy, although emotionally it may feel the same as as Various other kinds of joy believers are those who are not believers nonetheless Our joy is distinct because it's not based on anything. That's temporal. It's not based on any Circumstances or passing emotions, but as we've been covering time and time again our joy is in the Lord and We go back to Philippians 4 for what Paul commands us to rejoice in the Lord That's the foundation of our theology when we rejoice in the Lord what we mean It sounds theological you say well What does that mean to rejoice in the Lord? That seems so esoteric, it's out there somewhere. But what Paul had in mind is that the Lord is to serve as the boundaries or the borders. In other words, all that Christ is, all that Christ has done, those are the boundaries, those are the borders that serve As the basis of our joy and we have seen number one how this serves us by carrying us through times of difficulty Everybody life is not always rosy. You know, we all have struggles. We all have difficulties We're going to that is the nature of this world in which we live And that joy that we have in the lord are living within those borders of the lord so to speak living within those boundaries will secure our joy for us when we go through hard times, when we go through suffering, when we go through persecution, because we will. When we start basing our joy on relationships outside of Christ, when they become the permanency of our joy, we're going to be disappointed. I cannot place, I love my wife, but I cannot place all of my joy in her, in my relationship with her. And she sure can't place it in me, because I'm going to disappoint her. I just am. I have weaknesses, I have fallacies, I have limitations, and therefore, there's going to be disappointment. Jesus Christ doesn't have any of that. And so that's why our joy in Him is going to be secure. There are a lot of great and wonderful marriage counseling sessions, and I encourage them. I'm not opposed to them. I don't want you to misunderstand me tonight. As a matter of fact, I won't marry anybody normally. Unless they have unless they have a premarital counseling session with me I will in extenuating circumstances You know those who are who are experienced in life. Oh, well, I prefer experienced in life I will make exceptions. I will not say never. But generally speaking, I encourage there to be some amount of premarital counseling. But really and truly, if you were to take all those counseling sessions and boil them down This command to rejoice in the Lord is going to be what's going to keep you from being disappointed in each other. I mean, it's going to secure you when you are disappointed in each other because that time is going to come. You're going to find out that the only real thing that you have in life that's going to carry you through all disappointments and struggles in life in your marriage is going to be the fact that you have the security of rejoicing in the Lord. Period. That's what's going to hold you together. And that's what's going to hold your marriage together as well. Well alright, so we've looked at that a little bit. We looked at this idea of the Son of God practicing that same principle. Jesus Christ rejoiced in the Lord. You say, wait a minute, how can Jesus Christ rejoice in the Lord because Jesus Christ is the Lord? That seems an impossibility. How can you say that? prayer in John chapter 17. John chapter 17 is great. I mean Jesus, this truly is the Lord's Prayer. John 17 when you people talk about the Lord's Prayer, Matthew chapter 6 is the model prayer, but John chapter 17 is the Lord's Prayer. And this is what the Lord prayed just before He was crucified. But in that prayer that He was praying to the Heavenly Father He made this statement, and it is incredible to me. He said in verse 13, but now I come to you. personal pronoun referring to the Heavenly Father. But now I come to you, He says, and these things I speak in the world so that they, speaking of the followers of Christ, the disciples of Christ, may have my joy. So Jesus is praying and He says, I'm coming to you, Heavenly Father, and I'm speaking these things in the world so that my followers, my disciples may have my joy. Jesus says, I've got joy. Not only do I have joy, but I want my followers followers to have the same joy that I have. That's what he said. That's what he said. You can go look at it yourself. And he said that they may have my joy made full in themselves. So Jesus says I have joy. So what is the foundation of Jesus's joy? He tells us what the foundation is in the very beginning when he says, I am coming to you. He's talking about the fellowship and the relationship that he has with his Heavenly Father being the basis of his own joy. The basis of the Lord's joy was the relationship and fellowship that he himself had with the Heavenly Father. And Jesus is saying, I want that same joy that I have. that I have with my relationship with God, I want it to be in you as well." And it was that joy that Jesus Christ had with His Heavenly Father through the relationship they had with His Heavenly Father that secured Him when He faced those hard times in life, when He was being persecuted by the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and when He was on the cross. The book of Hebrews says that he went through the sufferings that he did for the joy that was set before him. Well, what was the joy that was set before him? It was the same kind of joy that he's talking about here in John chapter 17, where he says, I'm going to come to the Father. I'm going to come to the Father. He looked forward to the life past this life, the relationship, the reality of the relationship and fellowship that he had with the Heavenly Father. It is that joy that made him forgiving. It is that joy that's going to make you forgiving as well in your life. It is that joy that's gonna make it easier for you to confess your sins. It is that joy that is gonna make it easier for you to accept the faults and failures of not only those who are around you, but those that you've got in your own life, in your own self. So, next thing we talked about. was rejoicing vicariously. I think you might remember that one, rejoicing vicariously, where Paul said, rejoice for those who rejoice. In the book of Romans, rejoice for those who rejoice. And Paul commands us to do that. When God is pouring out, you know, this is so counterintuitive to us, but when God is pouring out his blessings on somebody else, You're supposed to rejoice in that. It's not envy that God wants from you. It's not covetous that God wants from you when he's blessing somebody else. But it's sometimes, I read a deal, and you probably, you might have read it too, it's on Facebook. I read it this week and they've done studies on people who are involved in Facebook. Does everybody here know what Facebook is? I'm assuming everybody here knows what Facebook is. A social media thing that tells you what they had for lunch and supper and where they're going to go on their vacation and how sick they were and all that kind of stuff. And so they put this online for everybody to see. And they did this study on 5,000 people. It was a little over 5,000. I can't remember the exact amount now. But anyhow, it doesn't matter. So they did a study on these people who are watching on Facebook. And at the end of the study, they said that your Happiness, that's not exactly what I'm saying, but it goes something like this, that your happiness is proportionate to how much of Facebook you are taking in. In other words, if you are taking in more Facebook, you are less happy. The less Facebook you are taking in your life, the happier you are. This is what they did. This is what they discovered. This is the conclusion after their study that they came to. Because everybody's in their Facebook and they're saying how wonderful their life is. And you're saying how terrible your life is compared to them. Folks, we're not to be envious of other people. We are to enjoy the blessings that God gives to other people, folks. This is an avenue, an extra avenue to joy. God increases your joy by blessing somebody else. Now, is that not counterintuitive or what? That's just crazy, man. That's just crazy. But that's what he said. That's what he said. That's what we're supposed to do. So, now, so we talked about that, and then for the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about this union or this tie between having authority and power and joy. Authority, power, and joy. These things do go together. And I've really been planting my spiritual feet down into this idea of power and authority and joy. You know, the basic theme is that we tend to let the world intimidate us. We wind up living in intimidation and we wind up in fear and when we do that, we are robbed of joy. Fear and intimidation robs us of joy. To use a contemporary word, it's called bullying. I don't know why bullying makes the news as much as it does, but it has. Bullying is a big problem. When I was in school, It was part of life, but today it's a serious emotional issue. And so we have the government's tentacles involved today in trying anti-bullying, whatever it is that we need to do. And don't get me wrong, you say, don't you think bullying is wrong? Why, yes, I believe bullying is wrong. At least, at least to some degree, but not completely. I mean, they're telling me now that I am bullying somebody if I don't agree with their homosexual practices. I am bullying somebody if I'm against transgenderism. And that's where you step over the line of just common sense in my particular way of thinking. that is not bullying somebody when you disagree with their moral standards and you state that according to the Word of God, according to God's teachings, that their moral standards are wrong. That's when you're censoring my right to free speech and my freedom of thought and my conscience as well. Those are God-given rights. But we're living in this culture today that's attacking God's moral standards of right and wrong, and we are the ones who are being bullied through soft persecution today when we take a stand for what God says is right. Well, anyhow. We're if we're not careful. We will let the world intimidate us and put fear in our hearts and Rob us of our joy that comes with even standing for God's principles and God's truths So the grunt of the greatest weapons in my person in my opinion instead of the Word of God in the world's arsenal against Christians today is fear and intimidations and one of the reason it works so well is because we are all We are so inclined to naturally fear. We are fearful beings. Fear is a part of our sin nature. It's a part of this fleshly body, and it's a part of living in a materialistic world. Folks, listen, there's nothing wrong with wanting to avoid pain. I don't want to go out here and call myself pain. I don't necessarily want to go out here and have needless suffering, and I don't want to be miserable, and I don't want to be tortured, and I don't want to be persecuted. But the reality is that we have to count that as part of the Christian life. And that's reality. Jesus said something. He warned his disciples before he ascended into heaven. And he said, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Jesus said, he's talking to his disciples. He's lighting them up. He's giving their orders. He's telling them about the future. And he says, here's what the future holds. If you are not willing to bear your cross and come after me, you cannot be my disciple. What did Jesus mean by that? What did he mean by this idea of carrying the cross? What he meant by that, and we're not going to go through all the particulars of it, but what Jesus Christ meant by that is that you have to leave the things of the world behind. When you take up the cross, what that simply means is that you are crucified to the world. That's the practical application, not necessarily all of the theology that's involved in what Jesus said there by bearing the cross, but that is a practical application. In other words, everything in this world becomes secondary. Every physical relationship that you have in this world is secondary. That's what he was talking about. When Jesus said, I want you to take up the cross, what he was saying in practical terms was this, I am in first place in your life. That's what he was saying. Practically speaking, I am in first place. If Jesus Christ is not in first place in your life, you will have, mark it down, fear and intimidation. It is the natural result of elevating things and people over Christ. It's the nature of the program. That's simply how it works. And so Jesus is telling them, in order to get them to the position where they are not afraid of losing what they have, where they're not afraid of what someone will say to them, where they're not afraid of what someone's going to do to them, where they're not afraid of someone's attitude toward them, where they're not afraid to say, this is the moral standards of God. In order to get them into that position, he had to say, You gotta take up the cross. In other words, you gotta put me first, because if you don't, you're gonna let all this stuff take control of your life. That's what he was saying. You can always tell, beloved, when Jesus Christ is not in first place in your life. There is a clear, distinct way to tell when Jesus Christ is not in first place in your life. And you know what that distinct and clear way is? When you're afraid that you're gonna lose something. When you are afraid, you're going to lose something. Because here's the deal. Here is the deal. Here is the deal. Here is the deal. If you've taken up the cross, you've already lost everything. You don't have anything to lose when Jesus Christ is in first place. You've already crucified everything. Everything else is always in second place. And that's what he was trying to say. Fear is always connected to loss. Always. If you feel like you're going to lose something, Jesus Christ is not in first place in your life. Now, to counter, so how do we counter, realistically, how do we counter this fear and this intimidation that sometimes comes into our lives? This is why I've been preaching on having Christ's authority and Christ's power. having Christ's authority and you've got to meet fear and intimidation with Christ's authority and Christ's power. And this is what I've been talking about the last couple of weeks. Last week we distinguished between authority and we distinguished between authority and power. We saw that authority, authority is the result of your position. particularly in our context, in Christ. Authority is the result of your position, who you are, in Christ. Power, then, is the implementation of that authority that results in behavior or actions. Doing things so to speak power. Okay as a result of that and so we looked at it It's imperative for your joy is imperative for your joy that you claim your rights your position as a child of God This is your this is your assignment for the week your assignment for the week This week, you are to claim your authority as a child of God. This is your position. This is who you are. This is what it means to be in the world, but not of the world. You are in the world as a child of God, but because you are a child of God, you are no longer of the world. You have broken all of your connections, you've broken all of your ties, you've broken all of your bonds to this world as a primary source. God is going to destroy this world. Everything in this world is going to be gone. Okay? He's going to totally wipe it out. There is nothing here for you of any great value. You are a child of God. Your world consists of the kingdom of God. And you and I are to think of ourselves in those terms. We have to reorient our thinking. Here's what Paul said. Here's how he described it. He said in Romans chapter 12, Therefore, I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It's where we begin to think of ourselves as being a child of God taking into account the authority and power that we have in Jesus Christ. Okay, this is the mind-changing element here so that you may prove what the will of God is that is good and acceptable and perfect. In other words, you cannot do the will of God. It's impossible for you to do the will of God unless you make this mind transition here in yourself and see yourself as Paul is describing us here. Every child of God wants to do will of his father. And that's what Paul is talking about in Romans chapter 1, Romans chapter 12, verse 1. Doing the will of your father, making this transition. In John chapter 1 and 12, John said, but as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name. It's always the desire of the child of God to want to do the will of his heavenly father. When we're praying the model prayer, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, that is the prayer of a child of God who's coming to God as the Father and asking for the Father's will to be done in his life. Our authority and power comes from being in a kingdom relationship with our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That is where our power and authority comes from. It isn't that God just wants to save us from hell. God does want to save us from hell. It's very important to be saved from hell, and I'm not trying to minimize that, but God wants to complete His plan for the world, which is to redeem the world, and He's using you as a child, as His child, who has power and authority over this earth to redeem the world. That's the plan. That's the ultimate plan. That's the covenant. God gave the first Adam power to rule over all that God had created. That was God's original plan to operate in God's power and in God's authority over the earth that he had created. That was the plan that God gave to Adam. That plan is still in effect. Sin has, of course, ruined the original plan. We understand that. Now, we understand that the world is under the dominion of Satan. And to some degree, this is Satan's cosmos. This is his arrangement currently. but we're in the world, we're in his cosmos, but we're not of his cosmos. Paul said in Colossians 1.13, for he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians chapter one, verses 13 and 14. Your joy is gonna be proportionate to the ability that, I don't know that I like that, to you claiming Christ's power and authority. Not your power and authority, but Christ's power and authority. Now, I want to go back to Ephesians chapter one here. I want to show you something. I'm going to kind of bring it together here. Go back to Ephesians 1.19. So all this being true, everything I've been sharing with you is true. How do we effectively implement this? Okay, I've given you a boatload of theology. Man, I've been chucking out this theological stuff to you tonight. I've been filling you up full of theology and all this kind of good stuff and principles and jazz like that from the Word of God. But what are you going to do with it? Yeah, and you just sit there and say, well, that's great information. Preacher, I'll send it home. Amen, yeah, all that stuff, you know, you're good. I mean, the word of God is good, but what do we do with it? How do we implement it? How does it work in my life when I get up tomorrow morning? Tomorrow's Monday. How am I gonna apply this to my life Monday morning? How am I gonna apply this to my wife? How am I gonna apply this to my relationship with my children? How am I gonna apply this to my relationship with my coworkers? Ephesians 1. In particular, what I want to do is I'm going to go to verse 19. Okay. So he says in verse 19, And what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe? Two words. Who believe. Who believe. Now, I hope that that doesn't surprise you. I don't think it does. I mean, we're told what? We live by faith, right? And not by sight? We live by faith and not by sight. This is the only way that you're going to apply what I'm telling you to your lives, is if you actually believe it. Now what I want you to do here is I want to give you an example. I want to stop with a little bit of theology here and I want to go back to an example. So I want you to go back to Luke chapter 9. When we started this whole thing, we kind of looked at Luke chapter 9. So I want you to go back there for a second here. I want to show you something in Luke chapter 9. Because Luke chapter 9 kind of brings us all together. So we go back to Luke chapter 9. Okay? And again, I want you to go back to verse one. Okay? We looked at Luke 10.1, and we also looked at Luke 9.1. They're basically saying the same thing, but I want to go back to Luke 9.1. And so here we are in Luke 9.1. Okay? And you remember what we said. You remember we read this verse, and it says, And he called the twelve together, and he gave them power, right? And he gave them authority, right, over all the demons and to heal diseases. Now, I'm going to give you a negative contrast in order to accentuate the positive. I'm going to come in the back door. So, we go on in here in Luke chapter 9, and we read some of the other parts of this chapter, and something very interesting takes place later in this chapter. And you'll skim down there, and you might have a heading in your Bible, if you have a study Bible, that says, The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ. And you remember the story, how Jesus took with him Peter, Paul, and James, and they went up on a mountain. And they were on the mountain, while they were on the mountain, you know, Moses comes down to them, and Elijah comes down to them, and appears to them, and Peter says, Oh, Lord, this is great, this is wonderful, and what we need to do is we need to build some tabernacles, and we'll stay up here, and this will be great, this will be wonderful. Okay. Well, you remember what's going on down below the Mount of Transfiguration. What's going on down below, what's going down on the edge of the mountain? Well, a guy comes to the rest of Jesus' disciples, and he brings his son, and he says, You need to, my son is demonically possessed and I want you to cast this demon out because this demon is taking him and he's throwing him in the water, he's throwing him in the fire, you know, and he's causing him to writhe and all this kind of stuff and I want you to heal my son. And so the Bible says that the disciples, the disciples could not heal him. What did verse one say? It's said in verse 1 that Jesus gave them the power and authority to heal them. So you've got to be going, you've got to be scratching your head or scratching your beard. If you have one, you've got to be going. What happened? Obviously, obviously, in the preceding portion of the Scriptures here, these guys had the power and authority, and they healed, and they cast out demons, and all of a sudden, we get down later in the chapter, we get a book of Bible, and they don't have the power that they had before, that they were obviously exercising before, and so you've got to go, what in the world is going on here? Interesting. Was it God's will for this man's son to be healed? Was it God's will for this man's son to be healed? Absolutely. You say, how do you know that? Because Jesus healed him. That's why. You know? And Jesus only does what the Father's will is. He says, I don't do anything on my own initiative. I do what the Father tells me to do. And so it's obviously, I mean, it wasn't that these guys were having problems healing this guy because it wasn't God's will. It was obviously God's will. So again, you've got to scratch your head. You're going to be going through your set. Really, what's going on here? Now, Luke doesn't give you the whole scenario. So what I want you to do now is I want you to read the rest of the story. Who used to say that? Here's the rest of the story. Paul Harvey. Okay, we're going to do that. We're going to do Paul Harvey. I want you to go to Luke or Matthew. Go to Matthew. We're going to finish the story. So, you know, because Luke, Luke goes, you know, he's inspired. And there's nothing wrong, absolutely, with what he wrote there. But, you know, the Gospel gives us very different perspectives on the same scene. And so we're going to go back to Matthew here. Okay, we're going to go to Matthew chapter 17. Matthew chapter 17. And we're going to get the rest of the story. Okay? Because it's very important for you to understand what's going on here. Hopefully your interest is peaked, right? So here we go, Matthew chapter 17, look at verse 19. It says, Then the disciples came to Jesus privately, and they said, Why could we not drive it out? And so here they are, they're going, Whoa, what happened? We obviously had the power before. We've always done this before, but hey, we don't, why didn't, why can't we do it now? And so they're just as curious as we are, okay? So they're curious. And so they asked Jesus, you know, how come we can't do this? And Jesus said to them, notice what Jesus said, because of the littleness of your faith, Fortunately, I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will be able to say this mountain moved from here to there and it will move and nothing will be impossible for you. But this kind goes or does not go out except by prayer and fasting. Okay. Jesus said, you messed up. And he says, you messed up because of your littleness of faith. Well, what does he mean by that? Well, he explains that at the end when he says, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting. What he was saying by the littleness of faith is that their faith was misdirected. Littleness of faith here is misdirected faith. In other words, they had faith not in the Lord at this particular time but their faith was being exercised in their own ability, in their own authority, in their own power to do this. And Jesus said, if you had faith, you would be praying men. The characteristic of great faith, folks, is great prayer. The characteristic of having true faith is being a man, woman, child of prayer. He connects faith with prayer. And he connects faith with fasting as well. And he says, look, here's the characteristics, here's how I can tell that your faith is so small and that your faith is in yourself rather than your faith being in me, rather than your faith being in my power, rather than your faith being in my authority, is you have a sick prayer life. You have a weak prayer life. You have a little prayer life. And it results in small faith. You cannot skip this spiritual discipline. Your faith and your prayer life go hand in hand. Most everybody here who is an adult, Everybody here who's an adult, you have had bad times in your life. You have had hard times. You have had times that you did not know whether or not you were going to make it through or not. And when those times came, where did you find yourself except on your knees crying out to God? And when you found yourself on your knees crying out to God during those hard times, did you not sense within you an increase in faith, in power, in assurance that God was working in your midst? Yes, that's the way it works. And I'm not talking about praying when you're standing, when you're at the meal table. I'm not talking about praying when you go out to eat. I'm talking about the kind of prayer that Jesus had in mind when he said, When you pray, go into your inner room and close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. That's the kind of prayer that I am talking about. That's the kind of prayer that Jesus Christ has in mind. Personal, individual, devotional prayer time is imperative to your overall experience of joy. And prayer done properly is going to energize your faith in God. And it is your faith in God that is going to cause you to exercise your power and authority or the power of Christ's power and authority in your life over this world. And you will have victory. You will have victory through Christ's power and through Christ's authority that you exercise. You'll have victory. That's the way it works. And this is not me just talking. These are the principles of the Word of God. This is God's way He works. I could have never dreamed anything like this up. It's God's way of operating. It's His way of operating. Well, anyhow, those are the thoughts I want to share with you tonight. Anything else you would like to share with us this evening?