Read 1 John 1:1-10 and John 15:1-11 to start.
Who remembers Marie Kondo? Of course, I say remember like this is ancient history, but her Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo only came out five years ago. For those who are unfamiliar with Ms Kondo, she is an author and TV presenter specializing in organization. She has sold millions of books and was on Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. She has some controversial and frankly ridiculous ideas when it comes to how to organize and declutter your home, such as the recommendation that you should have no more than 25 books. No, that’s not 25 books on the table at one time, but rather 25 books in your house. In total. Yeah, we’re a bit over that at my house. When I was writing my sermon I took a look around the room and stopped counting at 25 books, and that was before I got to the bookshelf. Or the other bookshelf. Or the rest of the house.
The concept that Marie Kondo is perhaps best known for is the idea of sparking joy. Gather the items in your house, pick them up one at a time, and with each item, ask yourself “Does this spark joy?” The idea is that if something does not cause joy, then you get rid of it. If it does cause joy, then you keep it. This is supposed to help you reduce clutter. Frankly, I’m up for trying it. Of course, if I did, I might end up throwing out the bills from Maritime Electric and Eastlink, and probably the bathroom scale, too.
In all seriousness, though, my topic this morning is joy. And yes, I do recognize the irony of talking seriously about joy. Of course, we’re not talking about whether or not objects in your home provoke joy, but the joy that should be found in each one of us.
I think it’s safe to say that we are at least somewhat familiar with joy. We sing songs about joy, think of “Joy to the World” and ‘I’ve Got the Joy, Joy, Joy,” to name a couple of easy ones. Scripture of course brings up the subject of joy many times. The word “joy” appears more 150 times in the KJV, and “rejoice” another 183. We see it mentioned in the Psalms and Proverbs, in the major and minor prophets, and certainly in the gospels and the epistles. And frequently when it is mentioned, joy is not mentioned as a minor, insignificant thing. Joy comes up as a repeated topic in the Psalms, and we are told in Philippians 4:4 to rejoice in the Lord, not occasionally, but always. In Galatians we have the well-known list of the fruits of the Spirit, and not only is joy on that list, it’s the second item, right behind love, and ahead of hope. We know about love, and likewise, we know the necessity of hope. If anything, we have more songs in the hymnbook about hope than we do about joy – My hope is in the Lord. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We know about hope, and we hear it mentioned from the platform on a regular basis. Likewise love, I don’t want to discount the importance of love, but we do hear about it quite a lot, as well we should.
We pay attention to love and to hope. We should pay perhaps a bit more attention to joy.
I say perhaps, but clearly we are told that if we follow God, we should have joy and that we should have it in great measure. In the scripture reading earlier, Seth read from John chapter 15, and at verse 11, Christ tells the disciples (11) These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. And in a similar vein, in the passage I read to start, John states at verse 4 that his purpose in writing this letter was so that the readers’ joy might be full.
Before asking why it might matter that your joy be full, first the question needs to be asked — What even is joy? Maybe you think you know that already. You likely have some thoughts about joy, it’s not like it is some strange or esoteric foreign concept. But what is joy, exactly, in particular when we see it used in scripture? The world and the church probably don’t see eye to eye on this.
We often use the word joy interchangeably with the word happy, but they are not really the same thing. You probably know what it means to be happy. And you probably also recognize that happiness is a fleeting emotion, usually based on external factors. A warm sunny day or a tasty ice cream treat can cause you to be happy. But that only lasts as long as the sun keeps shining and the ice cream doesn’t run out.
Joy is different from happiness. Joy is an enduring state of gladness and delight. Think about that for a moment. It may look similar to happiness, it may have many of the same emotional responses as happiness, but joy is long lasting. It’s not temporary or transient, which the feeling of being happy generally is. More importantly, joy is an internal condition rather than a surface emotion.
I mentioned earlier a couple of songs about joy, and there is a surprisingly important and well stated truth in the simpler of those two songs. I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart to stay. It’s a repetitive little children’s chorus, but it perfectly captures the ideal condition of the believer. We are supposed to have joy in our hearts, and it should continue there. We are to have joy inside us on an ongoing basis.
It should go without saying that an enduring state of gladness and delight is a good thing, is a welcome state to be in. God wants to us experience joy, and to have not only a little joy, a sample of joy, a fun-sized serving of joy, but fullness of joy. Christ wanted His joy to remain in His disciples, and for their joy to be full. He said this quite plainly. That is central to the Upper Room Discourse.
You can be happy for a moment, you can be happy for five or ten minutes, and then the feeling passes. Joy is not like that. You can’t be joyful for five minutes. If you think that’s the case, then you weren’t really experiencing true joy in the first place.
Now you might be thinking that this means we should be bubbling over with glee 24/7, but that isn’t really what joy means, not true joy. Joy, as mentioned, is marked by gladness and delight. That doesn’t mean that you have to be happy, or even should be happy with everything that happens to you or the people around you, or with your situation in life in general.
There is a common cliché that you can’t buy happiness, but it would probably be better stated that you can’t buy joy. You can’t really buy happiness either, but you can maybe rent it for a few hours. Whatever external things you might have or experience that may be pleasurable and fun can make you feel happy for a while, but they do not bring lasting joy.
I don’t know about you, but there are many, many things that do not make me happy. I’m not happy about being tired or thirsty or hungry, for example, and those are things that happen on a fairly regular basis. I’m not happy about deadlines or long meetings at the office. Some days, I’m not happy about getting up in the morning. My term for those days is “weekdays”.
In all seriousness, though, and whether I’m happy or not, I can still find joy. I might be hungry or thirsty, but there is joy in being able to have a drink of water or eat a nutritious meal, and then being satisfied. There is joy in knowing that God has provided for me in such measure so that I don’t have to worry about starving or dying of dehydration. There is the opportunity to take delight in the simple details of this life, because much of life is filled with small, basic, and unremarkable things which may seem insignificant taken separately, but when considered together paint a glorious picture of God’s provision and His grand design.
And then of course beyond that there is the joy of salvation, of knowing that no matter if this life is easy and smooth, a veritable highlight reel of triumph and achievement, or difficult, brutal, and filled with struggle and pain, that there is something more. Something to look forward to that runs not simply beyond this life, but for all eternity, and that something is a heavenly existence with the Saviour, free from the suffering of this world.
The sufferings of this world are of course the outcome of sin. This includes both the sins that we have committed ourselves and that have been committed against us directly, as well as the result of all the sin that has come before us, originating with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and continuing for the 60 centuries that have followed. Sin leads to suffering and death, that is the natural outcome, and that is the natural destiny of every person born on this planet, with but one exception.
That exception of course was a baby born a little more than two thousand years ago, born in a stable in a little town in Judea. His birth was proclaimed by an angel, who told the shepherds “I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
Why was there joy, and joy for all people, at the birth of this child? It was because of who He was and what He would do. He was Immanuel, meaning “God with us.” He was Jesus, which means “Jehovah saves” because He would save His people from their sins. He was Christ, meaning the anointed one, as He was the fulfillment of hundreds of Old Testament prophecies of the Redeemer who would come to deal with the problem and penalty of sin.
His birth was cause for joy because sin and everything it brings are directly opposed to joy. Sin brings suffering, sadness, and death, and those are not compatible with enduring joy. Salvation from sin solves those problems and removes those obstacles to experiencing the joy that we should. That is what the Lord Jesus Christ promised and it is exactly what He delivered. His sinless life, atoning death, and glorious resurrection have given any and all who believe and trust in Him eternal life. That is not merely a slim possibility or an outside chance, but it is assured. If that is not cause for joy, true, lasting joy, then it is hard to imagine something that could be.
If you look around at the world at large, though, you see a definite lack of joy. People are sad. People are angry. People are hurting. It’s easy for me to say that they need salvation, they need Jesus, but it’s true. The tendency of this world is to dismiss God, to dismiss His grace and all His wonderful provision, and to take much for granted and to be thankful for little to none of it. Why should we expect the world to have joy when it rejects the giver of joy, the giver of life?
But if we know the Saviour, if we have the hope of eternal salvation, then we should have joy. We should be different from the world; we should look different from the world. Which brings me to a challenging and perhaps uncomfortable question: How about your own joy? Is it full? Is it even close to being full? Do you have much in the way of joy at all?
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I don’t find that I have as much joy in my heart as I would like. I definitely don’t have as much as I should, not if the desired level is full.
Why does it matter that we have joy, and that our joy be full? Why did John write with this as the objective? Why did Christ tell His disciples that this was what he wanted for them? Part of it is certainly that joy is better, and certainly healthier, than most other emotions. But I think that an even more important aspect is that what we are full of is what will come out.
If an open container of any type is full, then whatever it is filled with is what will spill out of it should the container be squeezed or bumped or even overturned. If you have ever filled a glass of water right to the very top and then tried to carry it, you know what I’m talking about. This glass on the pulpit here is not full, it was closer to full earlier before I drank some of it, mind you, but if you moved it when it was almost full, you likely would spill some of the water.
This applies to you and me much the same. If you are full of something, then that is what will spill out of you when pressure is applied. When things challenge and upset you, when your plans are derailed and your road is far from smooth, something is likely going to come out. Will it be joy, or will it be something else, something darker?
This does not mean that you should be pleased when things go ever so wrong, or that you should be happy about suffering. But if we are trusting in Christ to save us, if we are looking forward to an eternity with Him, then the concerns of this life should start to slide to the background, rather than being front and center in our lives.
The world says you should get upset when things go wrong, it says you should get angry when you are hurt or mistreated, that revenge is reasonable and good, it says you should look out for yourself because no one else will. It says that darkness is fine, sin is normal, and that we exist in a balance between light and dark. There are entire worldviews structured around this principle, running the gamut from ancient Chinese philosophy and the idea of Yin and Yang to Star Wars with the light side and dark side of the force. But look at what it says in 1 John chapter 1, right after John mentions how he wrote the epistle so that the readers’ joy might be full.
(5) This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (6) If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: (7) But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
Do you think that these two very different sounding ideas might be directly connected? We might think of fullness of joy as being bubbly and effervescent, but it doesn’t mean that at all. God’s holiness and purity are essential attributes of His person, and they do not leave any room for evil, darkness, corruption, or sin. That is not how the world may see God. There are millions of people in this world who look at how their standards differ from God’s standards and rather than adjusting their standards and changing their behaviour they instead criticize God. They push God to the side, they want Him out of schools and out of government and out of so-called enlightened society altogether, and where does that get them?
We probably know the answer to that already. The world at large does not, but there are perhaps some concerns. Famous atheist, author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said in a recent interview that He does not believe a word of the Christian faith, but that he considers himself a cultural Christian, and the United Kingdom is a Christian country, and that he would be very concerned if it were otherwise, if some other religion, he specifically mentioned Islam, were to take its place.
I don’t agree with Richard Dawkins on a lot of things. But when the high priest of atheism laments the decline of Christian values in western culture, it’s time to take notice. We’ve already noticed the decline in mental health and the increase in suicide across a wide swath of society. That’s what living without joy and without hope will do.
As believers, we have the hope of eternity. We have the love of our God and Saviour. And we should have joy. But all too often it feels that we are lacking in that category. I know that I’ve said that having joy is not the same as being happy, but joy and happiness have far more in common than joy or anger, or boredom, or depression, or grief. If we have the joy of the Lord in our hearts, then there should be some evidence of that.
Remember that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit, and that fruit is an outward expression of internal condition. You can tell the difference between an apple tree and a pear tree most obviously by the fruit that each produces, and so it is with you and me. We are supposed to be filled with joy, but often we are not, or at least we don’t look like it. I know that that applies to me as much as anyone. This is a problem. If my joy is not full, if your joy is not full, then something is wrong.
In 1 John chapter 1 again, we see a key answer to the problem of insufficient joy. God is light, and does not have darkness, not at all. But if we have darkness in us, in our actions, in our words, in our walk, in our hearts, then we are not experiencing proper fellowship with God and with one another. If we want to follow the path that God has set out for us, if we want to be like His Son, then we can’t do it by remaining in sin. We can’t enjoy the light if we insist on staying in the dark.
The rest of the chapter stresses the importance of acknowledgement and confession of our sin. I’ll read those verses again to drive the point home. (7) But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (8) If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (9) If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (10) If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
There is no wiggle room here, no leeway for wickedness. God wants us to enjoy fellowship with Him and with each other, he wants us to have joy in our hearts, and sin directly impedes that. We will not have joy while we are mired in sinfulness.
In Psalm 51, I won’t have you turn there, but it’s likely the best known Psalm on the subject of confession and repentance. We read in it David’s prayer after his sin in the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah. He was guilty of lust, adultery, deceit, and conspiracy to commit murder, and the prophet Nathan had called him out on it. David knew that his heart was contaminated, his ways were evil, and he was not okay with this. He needed to put things right. I’ll read a few verses to make the point clear. (10) Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. (11) Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. (12) Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation;
David saw that the problem was in his heart and his spirit, in his inner man, he sought to have that made clean. He also recognized that he was missing out on the joy of the Lord, the joy of salvation from God, and he needed to be restored.
If you have sin that you are holding on to, sin that is living rent-free in your life, then that will take up space in your heart and your mind. That leaves less room for joy. It’s simple math, a very basic equation that we often fail to do.
If I go to the store with one green bag, that means I’m only going to be able to carry a limited amount of groceries. If I fill my cart with chips and pop and cookies and candy and other assorted junk food, then that leaves precious little space for fruit, vegetables, meat, and other healthier food options. Choices have to be made. There isn’t room for everything, and trying to make it all fit isn’t going to work, is just going to lead to increased misery. And frankly, there shouldn’t be room for both. I shouldn’t be buying junk food in the first place, I’m an overweight diabetic and I should know better. But sometimes I do anyway.
In our lives we often try to fit in the healthy with the harmful, the holy with the profane, and it does not work. We are all sinners, sinner saved by grace if we have accepted Christ as our Saviour, but inside we still have that sin nature. We cannot allow sin to share space in our hearts and minds, we can’t try to live in two worlds. It does not lead to a joyful existence, quite the opposite in fact. If we fill out lives with the things this world offers, then what result should we expect?
Remember earlier when I talked about Marie Kondo and sparking joy? Think about that again, not about physical items, but in choices, in actions, in the way we spend our time, in our desires. Do they spark joy, not a momentary smile but true joy, or do they lead away from it? If the things we are holding on to impede joy, then it’s time for them to go.
There is joy in confession, in having a clean heart, in walking in the light. There is joy in connection. The verses in 1 John chapter 1 talk about fellowship with God and with one another that is best achieved when we are in the light, and not darkness. And in the passage we read earlier from John chapter 15, the Lord talks about how He is the vine, and we are the branches, and are thus connected to Him, and bring forth fruit accordingly. Joy should be prominent among the fruit that we produce. At verse 11 of that chapter, I mentioned it before and I will close with it, (11) These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
Do you have joy in your heart this morning? Or is there darkness, depression and doubt? Or perhaps are you simply moving through life on cruise control, not experiencing much of anything, not letting things effect you? Only one of those is right.
Look at your life, look at your heart this morning, and ask yourself if you are the way you want to be. Ask yourself if things need to change, if things need to go, if things need to be confessed. God wants to have fellowship with you, for you to have fellowship with other believers, and he wants your joy to be full. Don’t let the sins and distractions of this world prevent that.