I. We Will Not Get There on Our Own 00:00
…do as we just sang: create in us clean hearts, restore to us the joy of our salvation. These things we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
So today we’re wrapping up a series that we’ve been working on, on faith, unity, and joy: things that we felt God had spoken to us as we make this transition this year, as we see Bishop Kessler retiring, Father Powell becoming the rector here, a new bishop, Father Chris Moran, in Henderson, Nevada. There’s a lot going on. But it seems like God has something for us in particular at Saint Michael’s, wrapped up in those concepts of faith, unity, and joy. He wants to make us a people who can fulfill the mission that he has given us, in what Father Lewis Powell is calling “the next chapter.” And so we’re on this road to the places where God wants us to go, and it’s exciting.
As we’ve been teaching on these subjects, I guarantee you that I’ve had more opportunities to not be faithful, to not have unity, and to give up on joy in the past few months than in the three months, six months, year before that. It’s been quite remarkable how many times God has brought up my own sermons to me as a moment of discipline.
So as we dive into this, the enemies of our joy: I was listening to this song last night that I showed Haley. I love this song, I really do. It’s from The Prince of Egypt, which, I mean, everything in The Prince of Egypt is amazing. At the end of this great story, where God delivers his people from oppression and slavery by the most powerful empire in the world at the time, they have this song that plays in the credits. After the first credit song there’s another credit song, and it’s by Boyz II Men, and it’s called “I Will Get There.” And it’s this beautiful song, amazingly arranged. It’s got this gospel, old-timey sound to it, with all the modern pop boy band things going on. I love it, I really do.
But I was listening to it this morning, because I had shown it to Haley, and it just popped up in the car on my way to go write my sermon notes. Usually I like to listen to worship music, something to get in the… and I was like, “Oh, this is worshipful.” So I’m listening to this song, and there’s not a mention of God in the whole thing. The entire song is: “I will get there. I’ll never stop trying. I’m limitless. I will do this. I will find a way to cross the river.” At the end of The Prince of Egypt, where literally the entire story is that they couldn’t get there, only through God coming down and splitting the Red Sea did they cross that river. And it’s such a tragedy in our world when we do that, where we change what is the message of God’s salvation to the message of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You’re going to do it. Just push and try harder.”
And I thought that was an appropriate way to start the sermon, because we’re talking about joy, which every one of us wants, and yet we struggle so hard to obtain. And if you listen to this whole sermon, and at the end of it you go, “Man, I just need to try harder. I need to be stronger. I need to do better,” you missed the point. It’s not you that acquires joy. It’s God who gives you joy. And so we’re going to talk about how God helps us obtain joy, the promised joy that we are supposed to live by.
II. Joy Is Like a Chord 03:11
In fact, I’m going to do something a little funny here. I’m going to step over into a realm where I don’t belong. I got permission, don’t worry. And I will bring some joy into the room: I’m not going to sing to you, don’t worry. Joy just went up a couple notches. I just want to show you what I mean when I’m talking about joy, because sometimes we can get lost in our idea of joy as, like, happiness, and that’s not what we’re talking about at all. I’m going to use music to demonstrate this. Bear with me.
If I play this chord, that sounds pretty happy, pretty joyful. I could also play this chord, and it actually has some complexity, but it’s still happy, it’s still joyful. But then I could play this chord here: very sad. Okay, very basic; I’m not a music genius; I’m just showing you a couple of things. But it’s still harmonically aligned. It’s still pleasing. It’s still communicating something. But if I played this, every one of you would ask me to stop. That is not right.
And so what I’m talking about when I talk about joy: it’s not this [the happy chord] all the time. It could be this [the sad chord]. But it’s in alignment with how you are supposed to feel. And by “supposed to feel,” I mean it’s in alignment with God and how he responds. There’s this phrase that was very popular for a time that I want to bring back a little bit: What would Jesus do? What joy is, is responding the way Jesus would respond in a situation, being in alignment with your heavenly Father.
And so what I was showing you with those chords is that when a chord is properly built, it can be complex, it can be interesting, it can even incorporate dissonance and sadness, but it’s still in alignment. It’s still musical. And in the same way, your soul might experience dissonance, distress; it might even experience sadness. But when you align yourself with God and his purposes, it doesn’t sound like that crazy thing I played at the end. What happens when we lose our joy is that we’re out of alignment with where God has us.
And so when I’m talking about these things, I’m not talking about just the major chords, the happy-go-lucky “Yay! Woohoo!” I’m talking about how, throughout your entire life, you can actually live oriented towards Jesus and his purposes in your life, and you can respond the way he did. We have a great verse: “Jesus wept” (John 11.35). The shortest verse in the Bible shows us that even the person who was living proof of God’s joy could experience that sorrow, because he was responding as God responds to death. God hates death. It’s the last enemy that we will all defeat, through his grace and power (1 Cor 15.26).
III. The What-Ifs and the If-Onlys 06:48
And so all of that is just a little framework for what I mean when I’m talking about joy. So what are the things that get us out of alignment? What are those notes that are dissonant, that don’t belong? What are those things that cause us to lose our joy?
Well, I’m going to start by talking about what I call the what-ifs and the if-onlys. The what-ifs are the “But what if this happens?” The what-ifs are anxiety. It’s that voice inside your head that says, “But something bad could happen. What if this awful thing occurs?” And the other one is the if-onlys, and that’s the tone of depression and despair and hopelessness. “If only this had happened. If only I had that thing that I needed. If only my brother hadn’t died.” Think about the story of Lazarus again: “If only, Jesus, you had been here, you could have saved my brother.” That’s a moment of just despair that can rob us of our joy.
And it doesn’t have to be something that big. We can be saying “if only” about the promotion that you missed. We are very sensitive people, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think God made us that way, because we’re supposed to respond to the world the way God does. But the problem is, we get out of alignment. We let the what-ifs and the if-onlys overwhelm God’s purposes in our life.
IV. Anxiety 07:54
So let’s talk now about anxiety. I wrote a couple of adjectives: anxiety, like that choking, that overwhelming, that paralyzing feeling of general unease. Now, we tend to hear about anxiety quite a lot these days, because all of the reports say that anxiety, loneliness, depression are on the rise. I’m here today to say: not among us. By the power of God, not among us. We’re going to be a people who live counteracting anxiety with the joy of the Lord.
And so what is anxiety? Let’s understand it a little bit. Anxiety is actually a good system, just like I was talking about with the chords, where you can have sad chords or complex chords that aren’t just purely happy, but they’re actually doing something. They’re working together to make a beautiful sound regardless. And what anxiety is for is to tell you that you’re not paying enough attention to something. I described it like this (and I got this from a podcast; you know, what do we do? That’s how we learn nowadays): the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear says that there’s a tiger in the room and you need to run. You can see the tiger; get the heck away from the tiger. Anxiety says that something’s going to get you. You don’t know what, you don’t know where, but something is out to get you. And you can feel that when you’re feeling anxious, because when somebody says, “What are you worried about?”, you have a thousand things to tell them. “I’m worried about this, I’m worried about that.” And every time you talk through one thing, you find another hiding behind it.
And what anxiety is supposed to do is remind you to look at your situation with greater clarity, to slow down and assess. Did you forget to pay that bill? I get a little anxiety. Oh, I check. “Oh, I did pay the bill.” That anxiety goes away. That’s healthy anxiety. It’s a red flag that says you forgot something; you didn’t look closely enough. Or maybe you’re feeling anxious about your relationship with your wife. Well, maybe you need to spend some time with her. Maybe you need to slow down and have some conversations. Maybe there’s something you’re picking up on that she thinks she’s shouting, that something’s wrong, and you’re just like, “Hm, something seems weird.” There are things that anxiety helps us with. It helps us understand one another. And it could be in your mind; it could be spiritual discernment; it could be a lot of things.
The problem is when anxiety becomes our god. We start pledging our faith not to God but to the idea that the universe is full of misery: that if something’s good, you’d better watch out, because the other boot’s going to drop. We start orienting ourselves around the signals that anxiety sends. And that is what people wrestle with. That’s the paralyzing sensation. It’s kind of like a general sense of unease, and over time that builds to, like I say, a paralyzing level.
So I’m going to read you something in the Psalms, just so you know this is not a modern-day phenomenon. We’re going to go back to Psalm 55, and we’re going to read verses 4 to 8:
4 My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen upon me. 5 Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me. 6 And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; 7 yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; 8 I would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest.” Ps 55.4–8
Some of you thought, “Wow, that’s dramatic.” And I am here to tell you, some of you have been that dramatic. Okay? I get it. When you’re feeling that anxiety, it can feel like everything is going to fall apart. And the reason I bring this up is to connect: you are not alone in that. We’ve all been there.
Let’s talk about my buddy Jack. Remember Jack and Jocelyn from a little while ago? I’m going to pick on them again. If you’ve ever argued with somebody in the midst of their anxiety, or if you’ve ever tried to argue with yourself in the midst of your anxiety, it might go something like this. “Hey, what are you worried about?” Jack goes, “Well, my boss hasn’t replied to my email. What if he’s mad at me? What if he’s going to fire me? What if I lose my house?” You see this kind of trickle-down situation that anxiety does. And then you say, “Well, that’s not necessarily true. Maybe he just didn’t see it.” And Jack goes, “Yeah, well, I think my hairline’s receding. I might go bald. Jocelyn’s going to fall out of love with me. I’m going to be alone the rest of my life. What if…?” And you go, “Well, that’s not going to happen. What if you look better bald?”
V. Cast Your Burden on the Lord 13:11
You start having these conversations, and those are just a couple of silly examples, but that’s what anxiety does. It doesn’t matter if you answer the one objection. It’s the 17 different ways that your life could go terribly wrong, or, if you’re really good at it, the thousand different ways your life could go terribly wrong. And what happens is we actually agree with that spirit of anxiety. We start telling it, “Oh, that’s a good point. That could happen. They probably don’t like me. I probably will die alone. I probably will push everybody I love away from me.” And you start reinforcing this, and you give your faith, your belief, to that spirit of fear and anxiety.
And so what I’m saying is, we’ve got to turn that on its head. The what-if can work for you. That’s called dreaming. In the kingdom we call that dreaming with God. You can think of all the ways things can go well in your life, all the things that God’s planting. What if I get a big raise today? (Because I wanted to put that out there while Eric’s in the building. You know what I’m saying? No.) What if my aunt who’s sick just miraculously gets healed? What if my wife, who is running late coming home, didn’t get in a big car accident but actually stopped to buy me a gift? We have all of these reasons why our anxieties sound more plausible to us than all of the promises of God. But what I’m saying is, we’ve got to use that system, that anticipatory system, to know what God wants to do in our life instead.
We could even (and I’ve suggested this a few times) ask God what he thinks about the situation. We can bring him into our anxieties, and he’ll help us. And you know what? If you bring God into your anxieties and you still can’t figure it out, here’s the answer. The psalmist, the same one talking about how the terrors of death are surrounding him, says this, in Psalm 55:22:
22 Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved. Ps 55.22
If you can’t figure it out even with God’s help, well, give it to him. “It’s your problem now, God.” Exactly. It always was. It’s always God’s problem. And what I mean by that is, God came in the form of his Son, Jesus, and he took the entire burden of the world, every anxiety, every fear, every sin, and he bore it on the cross. And then by the power of God he rose again, that we could die in our baptism and be raised to newness of life with him. You’re not supposed to live anxious. You’re supposed to live full of… what, you might ask? The Holy Spirit and joy, every one of us.
So cast your burden on the Lord. Elsewhere it says, give God your anxieties, for he cares for you (1 Pet 5.7). He cares. You think nobody else in the world cares? Well, I know at least one person who does. In Proverbs, David’s son Solomon (and David wrote that Psalm 55, so his son) puts it this way:
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Prov 3.5–6
I love that verse. It says, “Do not lean on your own understanding.” Why does it say that? Your own understanding is the what-ifs and the if-onlys. That’s where your own understanding leads you: you without God, an anxious mess; your life will fall apart. What this does, trusting in the Lord with all your heart, not leaning on your own understanding, is it adds God back into the equation. And you plus God is eternal life, joy, freedom, salvation. Everything you’re afraid of: if you add God to that equation, it changes the math. It breaks the system.
We know all the ways that our life can fall apart. We’re really good at diagnosing that, making multi-point outlines: “This is what’s going to go wrong.” I’m saying you started with the wrong premise. Add God and start over. What can God do in this situation, rather than what is this situation going to do to me? That is how we fight anxiety. You trust the Lord with all your heart. He is better than we know.
VI. Depression and Despair 18:03
Okay, let’s move on to depression, despair, hopelessness. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this at some point, but it’s like the weight on your chest, where it feels like not just everything is going to fall apart, but everything has fallen apart: that there isn’t any goodness anymore, or there’s just not enough. People say, when they’re struggling with this (and I know I’ve felt this way as well), it’s hard to just get out of bed. Everything just feels so heavy.
Well, let’s talk about that. Depression says to us, “Everything is awful.” In fact, I will sing at you. It’s like we turn the Lego song upside down and we say, “Everything is awful, everything sucks, and there is no hope.” That’s the anthem of depression that I came up with this morning, for some reason. It’s like a song, because it gets stuck in your head, and everything you encounter, you go back to this anthem that you sing: “No, everything is awful, everything’s the worst, there is no hope.” That is the blanket of depression that robs us of joy.
So let’s talk about what to do when you’re feeling that. If you’re here today and you’re like, “Wow, I’ve been going through that myself,” well, here are four things you can do. The first one is just, you’ve got to do this, and then the other three are like a system, so we’ll get to those; they’re separated a little bit. But the first one is: connect with someone who loves you. Because the biggest lie of depression is that you’re alone. In fact, we even see that in Psalm 22, where the psalmist writes:
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? 2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. Ps 22.1–2
The idea of being forsaken is central to the idea of depression. It’s that you’re alone, that there is no help, that nobody is hearing you. But where else do we know that verse from? We know it from the cross, as Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And in that moment he joined with everyone who has ever felt alone and forsaken by God. He actually encountered them in the cross. You know how we talk about Jesus being crucified since the foundation of the world? It’s not just a historic event. It is the cosmic reality that changed everything. And so if you’re there, if you’re at that moment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, Jesus is with you right there in that moment. He’s not separate. You are not alone. Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” so that nobody will ever believe that God has forsaken them ever again. How amazing is that? He joins with us in that moment.
So “connect with someone who loves you” could mean God. Absolutely, it should. But I also want you to look around, and if you feel like nobody loves you, well, let me just tell you: I love you. These leaders and their wives love you. You are surrounded in this room by people who love you. Reach out. Connect. Isolation is the drug that makes depression kill you. It hyperdrives that spirit of despair, and it makes it so that hopelessness just ends the conversation. Don’t isolate yourself. Connect with people. Don’t be alone.
VII. Restore to Me the Joy of Your Salvation 21:21
Okay, three more steps, that came out of Psalm 22. In fact, what’s so great about that Psalm is he says, “My God, why have you forsaken me? You don’t hear me.” It’s like the pit. You imagine Jesus on the cross, the despair. But the very next thing he says gives you the response to that feeling of depression. In Psalm 22, it says in verse 3:
3 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. 4 In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. Ps 22.3–4
It reminds me, in fact, of this song we were just singing, where we said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence” (there’s that “I feel alone, I feel forsaken”: “Cast me not away from your presence”), “take not your Holy Spirit from me.” And this verse that we’ve brought up many times: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit” (Ps 51.10–12). You, in your depression, need your joy, the joy of God’s salvation, restored unto you.
So I’m going to tell you how. There are three steps. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that; you actually have to do them, which is hard. But here are three ways that you can enter into the joy of God’s salvation for you. First, the secret to the joy of God’s salvation is that God has saved you, God is saving you, and God will save you. And that gives us our three steps.
So we’re going to start with this one. First, remind yourself of the ways God has saved you before. If depression tells you that everything is awful and there is no hope, then look at all the ways God has given you hope. He has resurrected, he has changed, he has saved, he has done miracles to set you free. Remember the ways God has saved you. And if you can’t remember the ways God saved you, we’ve got a whole book of ways that God has saved other people, called the Bible. Go back and read the stories. Or talk to somebody. You’re connecting to somebody: ask them, “Where has God shown up in your life?”
And I know that this is unbelievably difficult when you’re in that moment of depression. That’s why I want to tie this, even as I give you these simple steps to do, to what I said at first, which is: it’s not about your strength, but his. You look towards him. He’s already reaching towards you with your salvation. This is a path you can follow, to look for him reaching toward you. You can remind yourselves of the ways he has saved you in the past.
I will say, you need to start writing down when God does things in your life, because we have terrible memories. I know I do. Throughout all the Old Testament we see the heroes of faith: what did they do when God saved them? They made an altar. And then when things got hard, they went to that altar to remember: “Oh yeah, remember when he saved me here? Well, I’m going to worship him on the spot of his salvation. I’m going to look for him to restore the joy of his salvation to me at this spot.” So write it down. Put it somewhere that you can reference in those moments.
Secondly, I said God has saved us, God is saving us. Look for the ways God’s moving in your life right now. He is. Ask him to open your eyes to see the way he’s moving right now. Nothing good is coincidence, because we’re told all good things come from God (James 1.17). So look for ways to thank him for the ways that he provides for you every day. In fact, even in the midst of your pain, he may be using that pain, because what the enemy meant for evil, he turns for good (Gen 50.20). He may be using that pain to draw you near to him, in that moment that’ll save you from depression: encountering God, the God of joy and love. God’s present salvation is about transforming us into the people he’s called us to be. He is taking you from glory to glory (2 Cor 3.18). You’re not there yet. He will bring you there.
Third, we have faith that the salvation of God is coming. Hopelessness has to die when you have faith that God is coming. Our hope is in the coming of our Lord. So when we look at this, you’ve got to ask yourself… if it’s not good, it’s not the end. That’s it. If it’s not good right now, it’s not over. God makes all things work for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purposes (Rom 8.28). If it’s not good, it’s not over. Don’t give up hope. Look for him to save you.
Now, maybe you can’t believe it. Maybe you’ve followed all these steps, and you just are struggling to believe it. Well, I’ll challenge you, then: act like you do. Act like you believe that God has saved you, he is saving you, and he will save you, and watch the power of God transform your life. If you just get up and live like God is present, it’s going to change you. It’s an interesting thing, because I talked about faith. Some of us think faith is this feeling: “I did it because I was feeling like God was going to show up.” No. Sometimes you just do it, and that’s the faith. What would you do if you believed that God loved you, that he was working all things for your good, that you were called according to his purposes, that he was saving you right now, and he would save you? That’s how you live. That’s how you live like Jesus lived.
And even Jesus wrestled with this, because remember the garden: “Is there another way, besides being crucified and betrayed by everyone I love? Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done” (Luke 22.42). What did Jesus do? He acted out his faith. He didn’t feel it when he was sweating blood in the garden. We get so twisted with our feelings. No, it’s not just about how you feel. It’s about acting like you believe God, which means you love people even when they’re unlovable. It means you step out even when you feel afraid. It means that you do the things God has called you to do, trusting in the Lord with all your heart.
VIII. For the Joy Set Before Him 28:22
I think that’s enough for this morning. We’re going to end with this verse that has been kind of central to our conversation about joy, in Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2:
1 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, 2 looking to Jesus, the founder and 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. Heb 12.1–2
Amen.