Dead Serious - Seriously Celebrating (Hannah Heather)

I want you to think for me about the best party you've ever been to. Cast your mind back and try and think of the time. Picture the people, the food, the venue, the entertainment maybe. I want you to have that picture in your mind this morning as we dig into god's word because a central motif of scripture is a party. Festivals and feasts punctuate the narrative of scripture, and right at the heart of the biblical hope is the ultimate feast, what Revelation calls the wedding feast of the lamb when God will return for his church, his bride, and we will celebrate being together forever. [00:00:10] (50 seconds)  #HeavenlyFeast

God says, picture that moment. You arrive at a wedding ceremony, and you look at the front, and there's this nervous, sweaty guy pacing at the front, just freaking out, pale, sweaty, full of excited energy. And then finally, the bride arrives. Everybody stands, and he turns around to look at her for the first time. So my favorite moment in every wedding, just that first look at his face as he's usually choking back tears as she walks towards him. God paints that picture and says, that's how I feel about my people. That's how I feel about you. [00:11:49] (43 seconds)  #GodsDelight

Have you ever been around someone who is not so joyful, who's maybe a bit morose or grumpy or critical or cynical? And it's like, in your presence, there is fullness of but the psalmist says, with god, it's not like that. In your presence, there is fullness of joy because god is so full of joy. And so when I'm around him, when he is with me, there is fullness of joy. The room is full of it. The atmosphere is full of it. My heart becomes full of it. And then he says, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. [00:12:55] (44 seconds)  #FullnessOfJoy

Joy as a verb changes everything. It makes it a choice. So biblical joy is more than an emotion, and it is something that requires intentionality from us. Author Henry Nouwen says this, joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It's a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to god and have found in god our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take god away from us. See, happiness might come and go, but joy is something we can choose and keep choosing because happiness is rooting in rooted in circumstances which change, but joy is rooted in something unchanging, steady, eternal. [00:07:04] (49 seconds)  #ChooseJoyDaily

And the same is true, you know, for our god. God knows pain with us right now when we are in pain. He's deeply grieved by the sins and the sorrows of our broken world. We see this in Jesus. He empathizes with our pain completely because he felt it. He knows it. And Jesus is described as being a man of sorrows, but, and this is very important, Jesus will not be a man of sorrows forever. Those sorrows will end. You know what won't end is his joy. Jesus' sorrows, just like ours, will one day come to an end, and in eternity, he will be a man of joy. [00:25:06] (43 seconds)  #JoyBeyondSorrow

Joy is rooted in the love of God and the reality that we belong to god and that nothing can take that away from us. And what that means is that joy is available to us whatever the circumstances, whatever realities come and go because joy is rooted in the eternal ever present reality of our salvation in Christ. Now Ian goes on to say, we can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there. It's important to become aware that at every moment of our life, we have an opportunity to choose joy. Joy, he says, is based on the spiritual knowledge that while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, It is, and we know that, and we see that. But God has overcome the world. [00:07:52] (49 seconds)  #JoyRootedInChrist

But this word for joy, it literally means jumping, dancing, moving. It's the overexcited, bouncing up and down joy that just can't be contained. And guess what? The word for rejoice, that jumping word, gil, is the word that God uses in that scripture when he's talking about you. He will rejoice over you with joy. He will joy over you. He will gale over you with singing. Have you ever pictured God dancing? I'm like jumping up and down for joy, spinning around with joy because of you. [00:10:51] (43 seconds)  #GodRejoices

This is a command to put rejoicing, to put celebration in God at the center of our shared life together as a church. Rejoicing is a choice. It's an act of the will. It's a decision that we make to honor God by delighting in him. Now most of us don't think of joy this way because we kind of think of joy as an emotion rather than as a verb. And so as a result, it's easy to think of our relationship to joy as being passive, not active. Like happiness, it comes and goes. But unlike happiness, joy also has a verb form, rejoice, an action which actually often yields its noun form joy in the participant. [00:06:10] (49 seconds)  #RejoiceByChoice