Christianity is a Joyful Religion                                            1/30/49

 

Scripture:  John 15: 1-11

 

Text:  John 15: 11;  “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.”

 

The Bible deserves thoughtful reading.  It is by no means in the same class with the Sunday newspaper, the colored comics or a detective yarn.  It is literature so timeless in its insights and instruction as to be worth reading over and over again.  It has proved itself, by the testing of time and experience, to be the Divine word for the experience of mankind.

 

But if anyone thinks it is all solemn reading, he ought to begin re-reading it with a different point of view.  If he were to take the trouble to count the times he finds the words “joy” or “joyful” or “joyous” used, he would find, literally, hundreds of such references.  And he might find the word “joy” used in very surprising context.

 

The Old Testament is filled with the word “joy.”  In particular, it bubbles forth like a spring of happy song in the Psalms: “Make a joyful noise unto God.”[Psalm 98: 4].  “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with singing.”[Psalm 100: 1-2].  “Break forth into joy.”  “They that sow in tears shall reap with joy.”[Psalm 126: 5].

 

Not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament is full of references to joyousness, particularly in the face of what the world knows to be sorrow, harshness and suffering.  The “tidings of great joy, which shall be to you and all people” at the birth of the Savior were spoken in a time of oppression and ruthless governmental efficiency.  [Luke 2: 10].  The apostle Paul exhorted the Christians to joy repeatedly in the face of opposition, persecution, oppression, imprisonment, and the prospect of violent death.  See how he refers “to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” [Hebrews 12: 2].

 

According to the standards by which most of us live, that is a strange use of the word “joy.”  Joyfulness is not commonly associated with a betrayal, a “fixed” trial, or with a criminal’s form of execution.  And yet that is the way Paul put it, and with sound experience to define it, too.  The early apostles were, some of them, called to court and brutally lashed for preaching the name of Christ.  And they departed “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.” [Acts 5: 41b].

 

One of history’s dramatic pictures is that of English coal miners in the 18th century - the time of John Wesley.  Exploited, cruelly underpaid, so neglected that they took it for granted that even the church had no use for them, they heard John Wesley preach.  They heard him not by going to church, but because he came to them, preaching, if need be, in some open field near their shacks.  They heard him only after some of them had thrown lumps of coal at him, convinced that this was only another form of condescension and oppression.  But when they became convinced that he truly, unselfishly spoke the gospel of salvation to them, many of them went to their knees with tears of joy streaking their dust-blackened faces.  Powerful as was Wesley’s preaching of the word, it could not then and there lift the shameful exploitation of those miners by other Englishmen who are interested solely in the comforts and profits to be derived for themselves from the coal miners’ labor.  But the astonishing, joyful transformation of those exploited lives when they discovered that they were cared for by the preacher and by the God whom he preached is evidence of what it means to discover that God deeply loves us.

 

The joy of that discovery has the power to remake any life, to redeem any nation.  If we Christian folk really know this, it is no mere Sunday formality, but rather a spontaneous joy to sing:

 

            Rejoice, ye pure in heart,

                        Rejoice, give thanks and sing;

            Your festal banner wave on high,

                        The cross of Christ your King.

 

I can remember hearing a Sunday School fairly shout the words of music to:

 

            Joy bells, Ringing in your heart.

            Take the Savior here below

            With you everywhere you go.

            You may have the joy bells, Ringing in your heart.

 

It is not “grade A” poetry; but the Christian enthusiasm with which it was sung had a genuine ring!

 

The skeptic doesn‘t make much sense out of the lines:

 

“Your festal banner wave on high, The cross of Christ your King.”

 

It doesn’t make sense to him to tell people to rejoice and at the same time wave a cross as the banner of joy.  The cross in history, has been symbol and implement of black despair, bitter suffering, dark infamy.  How can people who profess to love the man who suffered unjustly there, rejoice in the cross as a symbol?  As if in answer to this query, Paul assured the faithful that “God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” [I Corinthians 1: 27].

 

Christian joy means vastly more than escape from suffering.  It is a shallow fallacy in our thinking to expect that faithfulness to the ten commandments, regularity of worship, faithful profession of our faith, love for God -- that these things are to bring us immunity from the troubles and suffering that beset mortal beings with no more discrimination than the snows that maroon the just and the unjust alike.

 

Questions like: “Why should my mother, who has been a good and God-fearing woman all her life, be stricken with a fatal disease?”  “Why should my neighbor’s splendid, Christian son be one of those mortally wounded in the war?”  “Why does this tragedy come to me when I have tried faithfully to serve the Lord?” are all questions beside the point.  The point is, not what am I going to get out of a spiritual bargain, but do I love God and do I know His love for me?

 

Jesus must have known profoundly that he was not to escape the cross.  And he knew all of the suffering it meant.  When he was a boy, the city of Sepphoris, near his home, revolted against Rome.  It was wiped out as ruthlessly as was Lidice during World War II.  Its male inhabitants were crucified.  Crosses were planted on the hills outside like groves of trees.  It may have been that Jesus saw those grisly crosses, and that his sensitive soul knew what monstrous agony had been suffered there in brutal mass executions.  He very well knew how Rome treated those who were accused of rebellion!  The possibility of its cruelty colored every decision made by these people of Palestine or anywhere else in the Roman empire.  It fell like a fateful shadow across his decisions.  Should he remain a carpenter, or go out fearlessly to preach and heal?  Should he reap the possible profits inherent in his powers or should he serve his people?  Should he go to dangerous Jerusalem for the Passover, or should he seek the safety of the countryside?  Should he wait in the Garden of Gethsemane for the traitor to bring Roman soldiers, or should he flee under cover of the night?  Or should he demonstrate his right to say to his followers: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”?  And he chose the course that he believed to be right in the sight of God.

 

The skeptic may still demur at this point.  “It may be so for Christ, but not for me.  The way I test life, there is no joy in self-denial.”  Well, he will not know any such joy, nor will you nor I, unless we try it in the spirit that Christ tried it.  There is indubitably something in the nature of man that does respond to the daring of so-called self-sacrifice.  Much of patriotism is built upon it.  Garibaldi in days long before the sorry military record of the Italian nation he founded could make patriotic fighters of men!  How?  Listen to what he offered them:

 

“I am going out from Rome.  Let those who wish to continue the war against the stranger come with me.  I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions.  I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle and death.  Let him who lives his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me.”  Those were words that found a later echo in the solemn words of Britain’s fighting prime minister when, in his country’s darkest hour, he assured Englishmen:  “I promise you nothing but blood and sweat and tears.”  And you know how the people responded to it, not in despair but in grim, hopeful determination, in the joy of doing what was right!  In Garibaldi’s time, and in Britain’s desperate hour, following such leadership meant defeat, disaster, encompassing death -- deep trouble followed by deeper trouble -- until at last the nation was freed of its evil peril.  And had the issue been one of a lost cause instead of success, conscience and the world would still have acclaimed joyfully that these people did the right.

 

We need to get ourselves straightened out in this matter of self-sacrifice.  For most of us have a warped and lop-sided view of the matter.  Is not self-denial in some form inevitable and unavoidable?  Here is a little boy with a dime wanting to buy an ice cream cone.  “Well, why should he deny himself an ice cream cone, with the price right there in his hand?” we ask.  The question is, however, whether he is going to have the dime or the ice cream cone; whether he is going to deny himself the ice cream cone or the dime.  Either way, he gets something and denies himself something else.  He gets the ice cream cone and he does not have the same means of getting a candy bar or a pencil or a few cents more on the saving for his first Scout knife; perhaps he gets the self-respecting satisfaction of adding it to his other dime for the March of Dimes.  Or he does get one of these satisfactions and goes without the cone.

 

If you read one book, you cannot at the same time read another.  Choose the pleasure of this vacation spot and you deny yourself the pleasure of the other vacation spot.  Choose any pleasure and you deny yourself another.

 

You remember the fable of the mule who stood between two hay stacks that looked exactly alike.  Hungry, he could not choose one for fear of losing the other.  According to the fable, the wretched mule died of hunger there, unable to enjoy one hay stack because he would not deny himself the other.  Self-denial is just that inevitable.  It is as inescapable a part of life as breathing.

 

The question for each of us in life is not whether we shall deny ourselves, but what shall we deny?  There is no freedom from self-denial; there is only a choice of denials and directions.  Our choice is whether we deny ourselves joys that perish or persist.

 

Is a youth going to deny himself the joy of a Christian home, conscience free, mentally straightforward, physically healthy husbandhood and parenthood, for the more fleeting joy of irresponsible satisfaction of his early passions?  Or will he deny his first adolescent urges toward mating until he can establish a home of which he can be proud, with a partner he loves with all his heart and soul?  He can’t escape self-denial.  He must only choose what he will deny, and what he will purpose to have.

 

Or will those who have established a home that meets fully requirements of the accepted sexual code nevertheless be spiritually unfaithful?  In order to indulge an ungoverned temper will one deny himself or herself the contentment of harmony in the home?  Carlyle never mastered that much of self-denial in his relations with his wife.  After her death, as he remembered his outbursts of temper, he mourned: “Ah! if I only had five minutes with her to assure her that I loved her through all that.”  He would not deny himself the indulgence of an ungoverned temper while she lived, so he denied himself the contentment of a clear conscience when she was dead.

 

My mother used to be an ardent member of a Woman’s Foreign Missionary society.  In the days of my boyhood, when I was big enough to harness the pony to a buggy, but not old enough to work a team in the field, I sometimes drove her to the occasional meetings of that Society.  I remember hearing some of the more sentimental women speak and pray, at length, of the self-denying sacrifice made by the church’s missionaries to the foreign field.  But I have since met a goodly number of people whose work has been preaching, teaching, healing in the name of Christ in some country away from this favored land.  I never met one who felt that it was a sore denial of himself!  It may have meant some hardship for self or family in certain cases.  But generally the work was a joy that would have been the sorest denial to have had to give up.  Talk with one who can’t get back to his or her field because of age or lack of mission funds or political changes sometime.  You’ll get a spiritual “eye-opener.”

 

Sir Wilfred Grenfell, battling mammoth odds, braving hardship, giving his life and skill for poor fisher folk of Labrador, declared he disliked to speak of self-sacrifice, for he could not recall that he had ever indulged in self-sacrifice!  David Livingstone, passionately desiring the salvation of Africa, could write, “People talk of the ‘sacrifice’ I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.  It is emphatically no sacrifice.  Say rather that it is a privilege.”

 

So it is written of the Master, “Who for the Joy that was set before him, endured the cross.”

 

Well, shall it be so written of you and of me after our choices have been made?  Christianity is a religion of joy!  Despite your burdens and the cares of life that you can’t control, lay hold on the joy of Christ!  It is yours for the receiving!

 

------------------------

 

Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, January 30, 1949.

            Wisconsin Rapids, March 4, 1962.