I. A Refuge from the Storm 00:00
Lord, we thank you this morning that we have a place to come together before your throne and to worship you. I thank you for each person in this room. I thank you for the love you have for them and the love you’ve created between us. Bless us as we hear your holy word. In Jesus’ name, amen.
So to begin today, I just want to start by addressing something that may be weighing on all of our hearts and minds, and that’s obviously what’s going on in Israel this week. If you haven’t seen it or read about it or heard about it, all I want to say about it is that last week we read a passage that said it is wrong to call evil good and good evil (Isa 5.20). And the church’s job is to be able to say clearly and definitively, “This is good, and this is evil.” And if you’re looking anywhere else for that information besides God and the church, be careful, because it’s the Holy Spirit that divides the good from the evil.
And so as we look at that… I mean, we were reading this passage in Isaiah, and I just invite you, if you’re feeling really broken up about this situation, or you know anybody who’s impacted by it, I invite you to that passage in Isaiah where it says:
4 For you have been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shade from the heat; for the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall. 5 You will reduce the noise of the aliens, as heat in a dry place; as heat in the shadow of a cloud, the song of the terrible ones will be diminished. Isa 25.4–5
That was a promise given to the same Israel thousands of years ago, who was facing similar oppression and pain and violence. And so I just encourage you: if you’re feeling oppressed by the news (and I know it’s so easy to enter into that spirit of oppression and depression when you see what’s going on in the world, and the heaviness of it), just pray through that passage. Let God minister to your heart. But also participate in his will in the world, because it is his will to save the oppressed, to end violence, to bring peace where there was war. And so I just encourage you to enter into prayer.
II. Rejoice in the Lord Always 02:32
And with all of that, as we enter this, I’m so happy to say that what God has told us to talk about this morning is “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.” And I picked that… God told me to preach on that before I’d ever heard about what was going on in Israel. And then all week I’m getting texts, I’m reading articles, I’m seeing all this stuff, and I’m like, “God, ‘Rejoice’? ‘Rejoice’ is what you want to talk about? How about ‘God wants to kill the enemies,’ and all the other fun stuff that’s in the Bible?” And he said, “No.” Our call today, as the people of God, is in this passage in Philippians 4.
So today let’s read through some of what is being said here. And of course we start with that iconic phrase that my mom loved to sing nearly every morning: “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice” (Phil 4.4). Bishop, let me back on the praise team! Come on! No, I’m just kidding.
There’s such goodness in this verse. It’s one of the few times you see with Paul (he doesn’t do this often) where he literally repeats himself, and he makes a point of it: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.” Why does he say that? Because, guess what, we need to hear it more than once. You’re not going to get that on a first go-round. In fact, if my experience is anything to go by, you won’t get it the thousandth time you hear it. And so when we look at this, we want to make sure that we take this seriously. It is not naive. It is not some delusional optimism.
III. The Discipline of Rejoicing 04:44
So, basically, when he says this, I want to start by saying this is not Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, my favorite punching bag of a Christian. It’s like the guy next door, and, you know, the tornado tears apart the house, and he just goes, “Rejoice in the Lord always!” You know, it’s like, no. This is deeper than that. It’s not just “be happy.” It’s a command to do something. It’s a command to live a different way.
So when we look at this, and we look at “rejoice,” I want to separate spontaneous joy versus the discipline of rejoicing. Because spontaneous joy most of us are pretty good at. In fact, if somebody walked in… You know, you’ve got this guy MrBeast. He’s the most popular YouTuber on the planet. He’s got more followers than Jesus. No, not really. But he’s got a lot of people following his content. And if he walked up to you while you were at work and said, “Hey, I’m going to give you a house” (which he has done in several of his videos), your spontaneous joy wouldn’t have to be something you practiced. You would be happy. That’s not what Paul’s talking about. Paul’s talking about something that’s difficult, and that’s the discipline of rejoicing, or, like I like to call it, the disciple-ine of rejoicing. Because don’t you know that the same word that is “disciples” of Jesus is the word for “discipline”? It’s actually something you have to practice. You have to walk it out. They didn’t sit in a classroom for three years with Jesus, where he gave them this download of doctrine. No, they walked out the reality of the coming of the kingdom of God. And yet we sit in pews and we hear a good sermon, and we’re like, “Man, I’ve done my work this week. Woo!” Not really. Hopefully what I’m saying, what people say when they get up at the pulpit, encourages us to go out there and follow Jesus, actually walk it out, do the discipline that we’re called to.
It’s like going to the weight room, or playing the piano. My son Rowan just started taking piano lessons, and he knows absolutely nothing. He’s really bad at it. But he has to practice. When you go into a weight room… I remember when I first started lifting weights. We had a great coach, an Olympic weightlifting coach, who had done all these great things. And you walk in there, and you’re in high school (I was a junior in high school at the time), and I’d just been meeting these people, and he hands me a stick about this long. And I’m like, “No, look at all those people. I’m strong. I don’t need a stick.” And he’s like, “You’re going to be on this…” Or actually, I think it was a piece of PVC pipe. And he said, “You’re going to be on this for a while.” Because what did I need to learn in the weight room? What do we need to learn when we start learning the discipline of rejoicing? I needed to learn the form. I needed to start by learning the form.
So how do you learn the form of rejoicing? Well, that’s what the liturgy is. It gives form to our worship. It gives form to our prayer. Why do we do the Daily Office? Because it forms us. It gives us a place. It teaches us the technique for rejoicing. Does that mean that if you do the Daily Office you’re just going to be ten times happier all of a sudden? No. I promise you, I wasn’t lifting all that much weight for a long time in the weight room. And in the same way, if you commit to a new discipline (let’s say the discipline you’re committing to this morning, and I’m inviting you to this, is rejoicing), it may take a while for the form to change the heart, to build up that muscle of rejoicing when things are difficult. You might pray the Daily Office, get a phone call that makes you upset at work, and immediately go from the form of rejoicing to the form of complaining, to the form of frustration. Because, you know what, we have a lot of practice at complaining and frustration. At least I do. So we need to learn a new form. We need to learn a new discipline.
We need to pick up that bar. What do they do? They go from the PVC pipe, they give you the bar with no weight on it, and you learn the forms that way. Then they put a little bit of weight on. This is the way that God will walk you through your life, if you let him, if you take on the disciplines, if it’s not just up here but actually lived out in your life. So you come to a situation eventually, when you’ve entered into this, that has weight, something where you have to exercise that muscle of rejoicing, and it is hard. And maybe even, I will argue, sometimes it’s impossible. You encounter a situation where it may even be well beyond your limit to exercise rejoicing in the midst of it.
IV. Not by Your Own Strength 09:09
But then we remember what Paul says. He doesn’t say, “Rejoice always, and again I say rejoice.” He actually says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.” And I want to highlight that it’s also not by your own strength. If you left this room with just the word about the discipline of rejoicing, and you worked your butt off to get your rejoicing muscle hard, and then something along the way comes along that takes you off track, and immediately you’re going back to your old ways, you’re frustrated, you might say, “Man, I failed.” Instead, I encourage you in that moment to say, “God, I need your strength to do this.” Because if you’re trying to do it on your own, you will never learn to rejoice. Not just rejoice, but rejoice in the Lord. That requires surrender. That requires you to let him minister to your weakness. It says in Scripture, in our weakness he is made strong in us (2 Cor 12.9).
V. But What About Hamas? 10:23
But maybe you’re thinking, “Well, what about Hamas? What about the evil in the world? What about these tragic situations? How does my joy muscle come into contact with that? What does that even look like? Am I supposed to just say good things when bad things happen?” Not exactly. See, the beauty of Christian joy is that it doesn’t limit your ability to lament. It doesn’t limit your ability to enter into those places of greatest agony. Jesus from the cross, our hope of salvation, the author of our faith, the picture of rejoicing, said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27.46). We have language in our Scripture to inform the entire gamut of human emotion and experience. You can bring your broken heart to God. It’s not a failure when you cry out in pain and agony when you encounter painful and agonizing circumstances. It is a failure to let that pain and agony turn into despair, or to let that pain and agony rob your life of light and joy. And I’m not saying here that it’s a failure of you, but I am saying that that’s not where God’s going to leave you. If you let him, he will bring you through the pain, through the agony. He will weep with you when you weep, and yet he will bring you into healing. What are we told? Sorrow may come for the night, but joy comes in the morning (Ps 30.5).
Because I will tell you, our rejoicing and our joy is not about our present circumstances. It’s about the hope of our eternal life. Because what does it say in Revelation? (He’s actually quoting a part of this passage we read this morning in Isaiah.) It says our hope is in a God… well, I say “our hope,” but the passage is: “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21.4).
So what do you do when you encounter the heartbreaking, the tragic? You respond appropriately. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. We should weep when we encounter death and pain and tragedy, absolutely. But we also never lose trust that there is a hope. In fact, the Christians are the only people in the entire world who can authentically say “hallelujah” even at the grave, because our God has been, and has established himself, and will always be a God of resurrection. Our whole faith revolves around that truth. That’s why it’s not Ned Flanders optimistic garbage. Because we can look at a tragic situation, we can acknowledge the tragedy that it is, we can weep with those who weep (Rom 12.15), we can experience the fullness of the reality of this broken world, but we hold on to hope, and our rejoicing is born of hope.
So when we look at the discipline of rejoicing, don’t just muscle through it. That’s not the point. Run to God with whatever you’re feeling, and let him lead you back to that place of joy. It’s not on us, but it is a practice. It is a discipline.
VI. Let Your Reasonableness Be Known 14:23
So, continuing, it says in verse 5:
5 Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Phil 4.5
Your reasonableness, or your gentleness. No matter the circumstance, we are encouraged to choose gentleness, reasonableness. That, in light of the world, can be hard. But I have to tell you a couple of things here. You actually don’t have a right to lose control when you encounter anger. I was just talking about these situations where you’re allowed to weep, and I don’t mean that you lose control weeping, mourning, et cetera. But it says, “Be angry and do not sin” (Ephes 4.26). And it says that the gift of the Spirit is self-control (Gal 5.23). And so when your emotions overwhelm you, take them to God. Don’t take them out there and ruin people’s lives with them. Or let’s minimize; I’m using some real dramatic language here. Maybe if you’re angry with your job, take a second before you walk into your house to love your wife and your kids, and let it go. Give it to God. If there’s something that needs to change, make a note of it: “I’ve got to have this conversation tomorrow.” But there’s a real sense here that you actually have the power, by the Holy Spirit, to respond reasonably in unreasonable situations. God has given you the power to walk into chaos and bring order by the power of his Spirit. And the first place that you have to bring order is in here.
Your emotions are liars. Do you know that? They are out to trick you. I’ve got a couple here. Our emotions tell us things like slamming on your brakes because that guy’s tailgating you and flashing his high beams is a good idea. That’s not a good idea, in case you didn’t know. Our emotions tell us that getting even or plotting revenge would be so satisfying against that person who just offended you or told a lie about you. Our emotions tell us that, you know, we could just stay in bed all day; that would be better than going to work and doing our job. Our emotions are liars. And yet we use them as well: “I felt this way, so I had to do something.” No, you do not have to do anything. God has given you not only free will to make choices, but the Holy Spirit, so that you can have self-control over those choices. You are not ruled by your emotions. That’s why we can be reasonable and gentle in the face of unreasonable and vicious people and situations. Our emotions are extremely helpful, because they indicate how our heart’s doing. But what we do with that has to be informed by the Holy Spirit and the rational mind that God has given you. You have to discern what your right response is.
VII. SNAP and HALT 16:58
I’ve got two tools for you today. I’ll keep bringing them up periodically. They help me quite a bit. One of them is SNAP. When you feel like you’re going to snap: SNAP. Stop, notice, ask, and pivot. Okay, break it down. Let me use a story from my past; I pick on my kids all the time. Once upon a time, I was a little child, and I was a little terror. And my dad had locked away in his room some guns and a nice camera, stored well, all that stuff. I picked the lock to my dad’s room at like four or five years old, got in there, and I doused all of those guns and cameras in Vaseline. A lot of you have heard this story before. I was cleaning them, dumping them in the toilet to get the Vaseline off. I was doing a really good job, guys. In that moment, the Dallas Cowboys were losing a particularly painful game. My dad was watching that game. My dad is a Dallas Cowboys fan. And when he came upstairs to see me with all of his wonderful things completely covered in Vaseline, the camera broken irreparably, he had a moment where he could have snapped. Okay, to be honest, he did snap the spanking rod over his leg and threw it in the corner. So he snapped something. But then, guess what? He walked away. And thus I am here today. Thank God. I don’t know if I would have made it through that. But he snapped: he stopped, and he noticed what was happening, he asked himself, “What is a better way to handle this situation?” and he pivoted out that door. That is what you do when you’re going to snap. You stop, you notice, you ask yourself, and God (I recommend asking him) what you should do, and then you pivot.
One more tool that goes right in hand with this. While you’re doing that, one of the tools you can use to analyze what’s going on is called HALT, another moment to stop. HALT: if you’re hungry, you’re angry, you’re lonely, or you’re tired, it might not be the best time to decide the future of your life. We like to do that. We’re starving, we’re pissed because somebody cut us off on the freeway, we’re lonely because we’ve been away for work from our wife, and we’re tired because we’ve been working really hard. And then we try to decide, “Okay, we’re going to have this really intense conversation about whether we’re going to go on this trip, or whether we’re going to spend that money.” And things just build and build. And it doesn’t even have to be that big of a situation. But “I’m hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I need to halt. I need to stop.” You actually don’t have to solve every problem in the moment.
All of that to say: let your reasonableness be known to all. Use these tools. They are helpful to cooperate with what God’s already doing inside of you. They give you tools so that you can do what he wants you to do, not what you feel like doing, because your emotions are liars. Helpful, but they don’t guide our actions.
Okay, once again, the last thing to emphasize on that: the Lord is at hand. Would you be saying this, doing this, acting this way, if Jesus was in the room? Guess what: he’s in the room. In fact, more than just some metaphysical idea, he’s in the person that you want to cuss out at that moment. Dang. “Love others as I have loved you,” he says (John 15.12). It’s a tall order. But we have God’s Spirit in us, and if you cooperate with him, you will not recognize yourself in 50 years. If you walk that out, you’ll be able to see, “Man, God has changed me.”
VIII. Do Not Be Anxious About Anything 21:44
Okay, number six. It’s a hard one today:
6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. Phil 4.6
Okay, let’s take the precedents that we set in the others and apply them here, because I know that this is where the rubber often meets the road for us. Don’t be anxious about anything. Well, first of all, remember: our joy is rooted in our hope in Christ. That means that your present difficulty has to be seen in the light of God’s eternal plan of salvation. And all of a sudden that bill you can’t pay shrinks a little bit. Holy cow: God’s eternal plan of salvation, or “I can’t pay $500 to get my car fixed.” Which one of those weighs more heavily in your heart and mind? I know which one weighs more heavily in my heart and mind. Generally speaking, our joy, our hope, our lack of anxiety, rest in Christ. Jesus sustains and empowers us to rejoice, and our emotions are liars that need to be managed as indicators used by our God-inspired reason to make the right decision. So when anxiety comes up, and you think that that piece of carpet that got stained because the roofers didn’t seal the thing, and then they came in with their shoes, that that is the end of the world… It may not be the end of the world. Your emotion might be lying to you, whatever that thing is.
Now, anxiety does need a special call-out, because most of our fights internally, for our entire life, are between fear and love, and we have to choose which spirit we’re going to operate out of. Even our anger is almost always a mask for our fear. And so when you get to a place where you’re snapping and you’re halting, remember: “What am I afraid of in this moment?” That’s a great question to ask. “What am I afraid of that’s causing me to lash out or behave irrationally?”
Okay, think of that list, that thing that you’re carrying today, that you brought to church with you: the list of things that have to be solved in order for you to have peace, in order for you to have joy. You need the money, you need the situation to be fixed, you need the relationship to be healed, you need the house, you need the job, you need whatever. That list that you’re carrying around with you, that you have to figure out before you can live the abundant Christian life: God has the answer for you today, and it’s not that list. We make all these lists to tell God what we need, because he doesn’t get it: “I need these things.” Your Father knows what you need (Matt 6.8). What he wants for you today is joy, peace, and a worry-free life. I’ll take that over any list.
Okay, let’s think about this. We’re going to manage that list in two ways. We’re told to give them to God in prayer, which most of us are pretty good at: “God, I need help with this. God, help me with that.” We get that prayer. Sometimes. I do want to say one more thing. Sometimes we forget to pray, because God doesn’t care about that little thing that you’re holding on to. I want you to know today, that is the farthest from the truth. If it’s on your mind, it’s on his. If you’re carrying that load, he wants to take it. So let’s start there. Do pray to God.
But secondly, you’re going to do this with thanksgiving. Yes, this is the hard one. If you can get in the discipline of going to God with your problems, you have made it so far. Let’s go further. Let’s do that with thanksgiving. How do we do that? Well, the forms are helpful once again. When Jesus… we talked about how he was weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, this great moment of heartbreak. How did he pray in that moment? He started with, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me” (John 11.41). He started with thanksgiving. And sometimes we just minimize. We’re like, “It’s Jesus. He knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead.” No, he was a man like you and me, whose heart was broken over the death of his friend. And he didn’t know the answer to the situation, but he knew his Father had the answer, and he was going to do whatever his Father said to do. And so he called forth, and God answered him. But he started with that place of trust. He started with, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me.” You don’t think the enemy was whispering at that moment, “Lazarus is gone. Nothing you do is going to change that”? And then he completely sidelines the enemy. He says, “Father, thank you that you have heard me.”
Okay, are you praying about finances? Well, later in this same chapter, chapter 4, in verse 19, it says:
19 And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. Phil 4.19
Hold on. What if we started our prayer with that verse? God’s riches compared to my financial difficulties: once again, what weighs more heavily in your mind and heart? So when we pray to him, we can start with thanksgiving. But, just like the weight room, use the forms. There are a lot of prayers in our liturgy, in our Scriptures. Start there, and then tell him what you want to tell him. And over time your heart actually will change, not because of the words themselves, but because of the Spirit that lives within you. He will use that moment of thanksgiving, that moment of acknowledgement, to change your heart about these situations. Practice is essential.
IX. The Peace of God 27:48
And then we get to number seven:
7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Phil 4.7
So all the stuff that we were doing up until then, all the work we were talking about, the stop, the SNAP, the HALT, the giving thanks, our joy is in our hope: all of that leads to the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, and it guards our hearts and our minds. So when you’re out in the world and you encounter something broken, something horrific, something tragic, or something plain frustrating, you can trust the peace of God. It is actually guarding you. What a promise! We spend our whole life trying to find the thing that will make us happy or fulfilled, or just avoid pain. It’s right here today, in God’s power.
So, as we read in the Scripture earlier, it also encourages us to think on those things that are true, that are noble, that are good (Phil 4.8). We’re not going to talk about those things today, but remember that passage. Go back to this passage if you need help learning the language. Think on those things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely. You’re not going to learn how to do this if your entire life is spent revolving around darkness and pain and deception. Like I said, we’re not going to talk about all that today, but there’s stuff here. The key that I want to pull out is in verse 9. It says:
9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. Phil 4.9
So as we leave today, practice these things. And if you have anything in particular where you’re like, “Well, God could never fix this,” or, “I could never let go of this,” or, “I’ll never have joy till this…”: bring it to the table. Bring it to Communion. Offer it to God. He meets us here. And if you want help praying through things, we’ve got home group leaders, we’ve got clergy, we’ve got many people who can stand alongside you. Because I guarantee you one thing: you will never be able to do it alone. God made us for each other, for relationship with him and for relationship with one another. Amen.