Well, after years of research and after just countless wasted hours, I have a great announcement. I have found a Christmas romance movie that doesn't stink. It was actually really good. It's a movie called Your Christmas or Mine. I think I can recommend it. I don't remember anything offensive in it, but my taste may not be yours. You might want to check. But it was a great movie, and it's about this sweet, cute couple that they've just now fallen in love, and they're saying goodbye at the train station. They're both going home for Christmas, and they just can't stand to be away from each other. So at the very last second, they both jump off of their train onto the other train. And so they both end up going to the other person's house to celebrate Christmas. It's really a really cool, cute idea and it's a beautiful story of Christmas and of traditions and of family. It's a story about joy and the importance of joy in our lives and how experiencing joy together can be a healing thing. And you know what was one thing, the only thing that was just overwhelmingly obvious and missing? There wasn't a single reference to Jesus. Isn't that funny? I just found that funny. Like, we don't even think about it. Of course that's missing. But this secular world that is post-Christian, that does not really feel any religious need whatsoever and has no reason to celebrate Jesus being born and God coming into the world, they still, even though they're beyond that, they still need Christmas. They love it. And they recognize that we need healing. We have relationships that need healing. And that healing comes through traditions. And that healing comes through celebrating together. But they have nothing to celebrate. Isn't that funny? I want you to see how advantageous the church's posture is, okay? I mean, it's like we have this huge head start on the world. We've got a reason to celebrate, and they're dying to celebrate. They want to celebrate so badly, they just don't have anything to celebrate, so they just make something up. They make up Christmas. They kind of try to take it away from us, and they want to celebrate Christmas, without celebrating Christmas, without celebrating the birth of Christ. We have such a, that just gives us this huge open door because we of all people have a reason to celebrate. We have a religion with joy at the center. Joy is the very center of Christianity. It is the primary experience of the Christian. Joy is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Joy is experienced and shouted from the rooftops from the very entrance of Christ. We're told that the shepherds went with great joy. We're told that And Jesus suffered for the joy that was set before Him. We have a future of joy when God will, when Jesus will present us to the Father in exceeding great joy. And we have this beautiful, amazing passage in 1 Peter that says, though you have not seen Him, you love Him and are filled with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. The standard Christian emotion, your resting needle, so to speak, should be on joy. That's what Christianity is about. Even us Presbyterians who were terrible at joy, let's just be honest, it is not our strength. I actually heard this, this is not made up. I went to a seminar on joy once. And the teacher, who was not known for joy, spent about 25 of the 30 minutes telling us what joy was not, right? It's not giddiness. It's not happiness. It's deeper than that. And finally, he gets around to saying, but the Lord commands you to be joyful, so be joyful. something was missing from this. We're just not good at it, but we should be. It's right there. If you ever read the Westminster Shorter Catechism, you only have to get to question one. Why has God created you? Why do you exist? What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him. Enjoy Him forever. Joy is the center of what we're about. Joy is the feeling that we have jubilee. That's why we put it in the middle of our vision as a church. It's one of our values. It's the value that I love the most. Jubilee. We celebrate. We celebrate important things. We celebrate that we have been set free from our debts. We have been set free from our sin, that we have been set free from death, that we have a hope, that we have a joy set before us. We celebrate that we have a good God, a good God who knows us, who cares about us, who cares about the little things in our lives and who loves us. We celebrate. We celebrate Jubilee. We understand that Jesus brings joy. That is the simple message of today's sermon. We are reading along with the children. The children are reading through a book called The Way to the Manger, and we are celebrating the traditional Advent candles and their meaning. And first we did hope, and last week we talked about Love and this week we talk about joy. So please stand as we read these great scripture texts about advent and joy Hear the word of the Lord Remembering that Jesus brings joy First Hebrews chapter 12 verses 1 through 12 1 and 2 therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses Let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." And then this end from Jude, verses 24 and 25. Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy. To the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Please be seated. Word of God, all men are like grass and all of our glory is like the flowers of the field. Not God's word. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but not God's word. God's word stands forever. Amen. Joy. Jesus brings joy. What is joy? Joy is the emotional response to having what your heart desires. Joy is the emotional response to having what your heart desires. And there's all kinds of joys. It's not like Christians have a monopoly on it. Everybody experiences joy when you when you have, when you possess what your heart desires, it gives you joy, right? Whether it be the Eternal Lord of the Universe or the Sky High Rescue playset, whatever it is you desire, when you see that you have it, it brings you joy. And that joy will last as long as you desire it and you have it, right? It can die from either one of those two things. Like, you know, the Sky High Rescue playset gives you a good 15 minutes of joy. And then you don't desire it anymore, right? The McDonald's Happy Meal was designed to give you 10 minutes, to give parents 10 minutes of quiet. There's 10 minutes of joy. The people who designed that thing designed it for 10 minutes of a kid being happy. 10 minutes of joy. As long as you desire it, it brings you joy. So there's two ways you can lose it. You lose your desire. You no longer want this person. You no longer want this job. You no longer want this house. You've seen something better out there, and that which brought you joy for a while doesn't bring you joy anymore. Or you lose it, right? This person leaves you. This job lays you off. You can no longer afford this house. You have to move. The thing that brought you joy is taken away. And Christian joy is profound and it is deep and it is rich precisely because if you know him, your heart never stops desiring Christ. He is altogether lovely. He is the deepest desire of our hearts and he never leaves us. and we can't be taken away from Him. No one can snatch us from His hands. He who gave us to Him is greater than all, and no one can snatch us from our Father's hands. It is an eternal joy. It is a joy that is so rich that we will spend eternity unfolding it. It is a joy that will never be taken away. That's Christian joy. That's what it is. It has different expressions. It can be different, right? It's not always giddy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's giddy and loud. And sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes you can think of shallow joys and deep joys, you know? The shallow joy of the child opening up his Christmas presents. It's like a babbling brook, you know? It's loud precisely because it is shallow. compared to a deep river which flows on quietly almost mysteriously quietly if you've ever stood beside the the Mississippi River and just which I don't guess you have because you live a long way from it I forget not everybody's lived eight miles from it with nothing else to do But if you've ever just gone and stared at it and just allowed your mind to fathom how all the water in the country has been funneling down to this place, and it's channeling out, and it's deep, and it's powerful. You could never walk across it. Some people, I guess, can swim across it. A lot of people have died trying. And you could never stop it, but it's just silent. It's profound, it's silent. That's the way our joy sometimes is, but honestly, just because of our tradition, we spend too much time with being silent. We probably need to babble a little more. It needs to be an experience, something that we celebrate. Joy is expressed differently and sometimes, sometimes it is overwhelmed. Sometimes, even though it's there, it's overwhelmed by other experiences. It's buoyant. It's like a buoy out in the ocean. And sometimes, sure, a wave will cover it for a few seconds. And sometimes we go through seasons without joy. That's life. Sometimes we mourn. The Bible doesn't say we only experience one emotion. Sometimes we mourn. Sometimes we experience sadness because something else that we love has been taken away, a very valid thing that we love, a person, a church, a relationship. It can be a thing that is a valid love and it's gone and our hearts break and we don't experience joy and we grieve, we lament. Other times, we don't experience joy because of our sin. David says, when King David, if you've forgotten the story, committed adultery and murder, and he just kind of clammed up and shut up about that for almost a year, for eight months. and was silent, and he wrote in Psalm 32, he described that period. He said, during the days when I kept silent, my bones waxed within me. Your hand was heavy upon me. My strength was sapped like in the heat of summer. I think of that passage every August. He had no joy because of his sin, and he was refusing to repent of it. And the interesting thing about Christian joy is it's so strong that we can grieve, we can repent freely knowing that the joy is going to come back. I think without Christ, sometimes people in the world live so afraid of sadness, afraid of grieving, afraid of lamenting, because they're afraid that they're gonna get sucked down in this hole and the joy is never gonna return. But we don't have to live like that. The joy is our baseline. And because we're confident that our grief has a floor, because we're confident that our God wants us to experience joy, we can be sad. And we can go through the healthy experience of sadness, or repentance, or anger, knowing that the joy is gonna come back. Our joy is strong, it's deep, it's buoyant, and it ultimately ought to be our experience. It should be the richest and the most common experience of our lives, and if it's not, let's just be honest, it's not always. If it's not, then we need to ask why and we need to see how to get it back. And I want to talk to you about getting it back. But before I do that, I need to talk to you about what brings Jesus joy. Because I think that gives us insight into how to get Christian joy back when it's gone. What brings Jesus joy? And not to put too fine a point on it, But the answer to that question is you. You bring Jesus joy. Do you know that? And I hope you did. I've told you that a billion times. I hope you knew that. Do you believe that? Do you believe that? Think about this passage we put in the bulletin. Set your eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the what? for the joy set before him endured the cross. Now Jesus describes that, he says, the night before he goes to the cross, he tells his disciples, and he talks to them about the kingdom of God, and he said, it's like a mother who goes through the pains of childbirth and then forgets them for the joy of having a child. We've got to remember that he's speaking B.E., right? Before epidurals. When childbirth was a life and death situation. And it was painful. And there was no anesthetic. There was no, nothing to relieve your pain. It was just pain. And he says, when her hour has come, she forgets the pain because of the child that's been born. Now, that sounds, you're like, ah, come on. But I've actually witnessed that. My wife, on the day after Brundage was born, my oldest son, the day after she was born, and she was kind of the first of a lot of her friends to have a child, and she was on the phone with someone, and I heard her say these words, it wasn't really that bad. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Where were you for the last 24 hours? It was bad. It was so bad you were yelling at me. for the joy set before him, for the joy of this child. It's real, it's true. And the interesting thing though is the way Jesus describes it. He says, when her hour has come. Isn't that an interesting way? He doesn't say when the baby has come. He says, when her hour has come. Isn't that an interesting way to talk about childbirth? It's something that if you've ever studied the book of John, sounds very familiar. Because it's a phrase that Jesus uses throughout the book of John. In John chapter 2, Mary comes to him and he says, they're out of wine. And he says, what's that got to do with me? My hour's not yet come. And over and over again, we're told his hour has not yet come. When his hour does come, he's going to draw all people on earth to him. My hour has not come. My hour has not come. My hour has not come. And then these Greeks come to the feast. And it almost catches him by surprise. Andrew comes up to Jesus and says, these Greeks have come and they want to see you. And he says, my hour has come. My hour has come. And then before he prays the last prayer in John, before he goes to the cross in John chapter 17, he starts it out by saying, Father, the hour has come. He's talking about his crucifixion. In that great song, Joy to the World, we talk about the joy of God goes wherever the curse is found. And we often talk about Jesus suffering the curse of Adam and going to the tree to bear the curse of Adam and the thorns being put upon his head and the sweat and the pain. We don't often talk about him bearing the curse of Eve. The pain of childbirth. He experiences that on the cross more than any humans ever experienced it. He experienced the pain of childbirth, being separated from his father, crying out, why have you forsaken me? All that pain to bear the child that when the hour has come, It causes Him to stop experiencing the pain and to have joy. Joy that is so great that He forgets the pain. What does Hebrews say? For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross. You make Him joyful. I want you to believe that. I want you to understand that the thought that sustained him, and you know that love will do that. Love has this amazing ability to do that. We're told in Genesis when Jacob is told that if he works for seven years, he will be given Rachel. as a wife, and he works for seven years, and he's given Leah instead, and he's all sad about it and angry. He has to work seven more years to get Rachel, and we're told the 14 years, we're told that Jacob's love was so great that the 14 years was as but a small amount of time, like a day. So great was his love for Rachel. The thought that sustained Jesus on the cross was you. I get you. And we're told that why does he get us? What is the fulfillment? What is the day he's waiting on? When he presents us to God without stain, with exceeding great joy. Isn't that an amazing way to describe how Jesus feels when he presents us to God, when he presents us to his Father? Here she is, she's perfect with exceeding great joy. That's what makes Jesus joyful, the idea of spending eternity with you, with you. And I want you to understand that. I want you to have that deep in your soul. I want you to believe it. And if you do believe it, then you can work from that to experience joy. I want joy to be your baseline experience. It should be. And so if it's not, let's talk about joy in the life of a believer. How do we experience that joy? And the first way we experience it would be through reflection and repentance. If joy is the experience of having that which your heart desires, and you have Jesus, but you still don't have joy, then we need to ask ourselves the question, well, what is it that our heart desires? What are we desiring more than we desire Jesus? What are we wanting more than Him? Because we have Him, and if that's not bringing us joy, then there must be something else we're wanting more. Is it status? If every time that someone is recognized who's not us, and that steals our joy, we need to ask ourselves, why do I want it so badly? Why do I want that more than I want Jesus? Is it a way of life? Is it a relationship? Is it something to do with your job? Is it, and this is tough, right? It's really hard. Is it our children? Is our inability to trust our children in the hands of God, is that keeping us from experiencing joy? Can we not trust them to Him? What is it that we're wanting more than we want Jesus? That's a question for repentance. If your Christian life is more serious than joyful, if it's more somber than joyful, Maybe your own righteousness, maybe your own desire to get things right is more important to you than Jesus. One of the kind of spiritual fathers of our church is a man named Jack Miller. And when Jack was a pastor, the names of certain men came up to be elder. This one guy who's very, you know, loved the Lord, a good theologian, was a real leader in the church, was discipling people. He had all the external kind of marks of an elder, and his name came up for a nomination. And Jack goes, you know, he's just not joyful. When I think of him, I don't think of a joyful person. Let's let him wait a little bit. He just doesn't believe he's a sinner yet. Once he is convinced that he's a sinner, then he'll be ready to be an elder. Why does he say that? Well, until you're convinced that you're a sinner, you just take yourself a whole lot more seriously than you ought to. Once you realize that everything you have that's good in life you didn't deserve and you've fallen backwards into it, it just makes you a lot more joyful. Until then, you're trying to earn God's approval by getting things right You don't understand that He just likes you. Let's let Him be a little more joyful. Let's let Him experience His sin a little more. Let Him have a little more repentance, and then joy will come. Beyond that, maybe you just need to study a little bit. Maybe you need to meditate on who you have in Christ. Maybe you need to ask whether you really have Him. You know, I've challenged you with this before, but a lot of you, you know, basically you think you're Christians for the same reason that you think Oklahoma State is a good football team. Your parents just believed that, and they taught you that, and you believe it. And you assume you're, you know, you assume the Pokes are everybody's favorite team, and you assume that you're a Christian. because you've just been brought up going to Pokes games and you've been brought up going to church and you need to ask yourself, do I really have Jesus? Or maybe I'm just going through the motions and I don't have him so he doesn't bring me joy. If you have him, he'll bring you joy, he says that. Study what you have. Think about what it means that the Lord of the universe, the God of all creation, is aware of the small things in your life. It's tremendous. It brings us joy. And the final thing, if you don't have joy, I want to encourage you to ask for it. It's okay to ask for it. God responds to that. Joy comes as a result of the Holy Spirit, and joy unspeakable, full of glory, is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit is in us, we're told that the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy. It's right there at the very beginning of the fruit of the Spirit. if that joy is missing it's it may be the proof of a Sign at least of the absence of the Holy Spirit and we're told this is a fascinating verse It's always really stuck in my mind God Jesus when he's teaching the disciples. He said, you know No parent is so awful that if you ask your if a child asked you for an egg You're not gonna give him a serpent right like nobody's gonna do that and And then he says, if you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Holy Spirit, well, I'm sorry, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask? He kind of backhands us a little bit, right? He's like a little backhanded compliment. Even you evil people, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your loving Father in heaven give good gifts to you? How much more will he give you the Holy Spirit, if you ask? Joy should be the soundtrack of your life. And I want it to be. And if it's not, maybe it's a temporary loss, that's okay, I understand, but if you go through long periods without it, Seek it. Seek it. Ask for it. Wonder why it's not. Don't grow accustomed to it missing. This Christmas, I want you to regain your joy. I want you to restore your joy. So ask yourself, what happened to it? Please pray with me. Father, this is a topic that makes some of us really sad because we haven't experienced your joy in a long time. And I pray, Lord, that that sadness would be turned to joy. I pray that we would experience grief for a short period, that we would sow our tears in the evening, that in the morning we might reap bundles of joy. Father, would you allow us to ask the question, where is it gone? What are we looking to? Would you give us the grace to just come to you and ask for it? Father, we ask you now. We want your Spirit. We don't want to miss out on a thing. Would you give us joy? Would you give us the Holy Spirit? In Jesus' name we pray, amen.