Joy (Bowie)

I've heard this sermon before, but I had to go back to it this morning because I was needing a good dose of Joy. This is probably my all-time favorite message of ANYONE and it is well worth listening to. Johnson Bowie, at www.victoryatl.com, is a guest speaker in the series, "Inside Out". What would it look like if the outside of us truly reflected what was inside of us? Would it be a good thing? If we would just take off our "Love Mask"", we might begin to experience real love and joy. When we allow Jesus Christ to work in us, we become a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are in this process of slowly dying to ourselves. But if it is 99% us, then it's only 1% God. In Galatians 5:19-21, it shows us the fruit of the human flesh. It's nasty stuff! But if we allow the Holy Spirit in, look at what we can experience: the fruits of the Spirit. Wouldn't these be awesome things to be remembered by. One of the fruits we find is "love". But God tells us to love our enemies. How hard can that be, right? "Lord, bless them with weak brakes". It's not easy to love our enemies. The number two fruit of the Spirit is "Joy". How many people are realy happy? We aren't happy all the time. Life is not happy, but life CAN be Joyful. Iraq is imploding, we'll probably get the bird flu, we might get fired, our marriage is crumbling and there's a nail in our tires. We smile at church and try to hold it together until we get back out in the real world. The problem is that we confuse Joy with Happiness. In Philippians 4:4, Paul says to rejoice in the Lord ALWAYS. But Paul had been shipwrecked 3 times. left for dead, stripped of clothing, bitten by snakes, beaten by rods 3 times and died from being stoned, but was raised from the dead. Yet Paul was joyful! Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians while he was chained to a guard. "Guys, I've got some crazy joy right now." He tells the prison guard about Jesus. Paul was completely wrongfully imprisoned, unlike Paris Hilton. But how could Paul be so happy? He wasn't happy; he was joyful. But how can we have this joy "that passes all understanding?" The Latin word for Happy is "Hap" which is a meaning associated with circumstances. If we are controlled by our circumstances, we ride a roller coaster of emotion. We make a million and get an Escalade, but then it gets repoed. We have a ton of friends who love us, but then they hate us and talk bad about us. We stay in our comfortable bed on a quiet morning, but then we hear our children screaming for us. We have ton of money, but then we only have $4.12 in our bank account. We all know these circumstantial people, right? In the movie, "Pursuit of Happiness", Will Smith talks about how our founding fathers wrote "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution because the word "pursuit" means we never actually achieve it. But Jesus, himself, was not always happy. He cried all the time. He wept over Jerusalem and over Lazurus. So, why do people think we are supposed to be happy? God doesn't offer us happiness. He offers us joy. "Joy" means to leap or to spin around with pleasure. Johnson says he doesn't know how to dance, but when he thinks about Jesus and what He's done for us, he loves to dance. In Psalm 16:11, David gives us some ideas of how to be joyful. He says that, in God's presence, we can truly be joyful. But when we leave God's presence and go to our sins, we begin to rely on alcohol or pornography to find our joy. God wants to heal us of, not only our physical ailments, but of our circumstances as well. Johnson was on a mission trip in the middle of nowhere. They were told that they were going to have to travel for a while. At first it was comfortable in a bus, but then they were packed into the back of two pickup trucks. There were 12 or 13 people crammed in the back of each truck. Three and a half hours later, he expected the people to be grumpy and complaining, but they were doing the work of God. Everyone was ready to go. So they start walking and it begins to RAIN. So, when they get back to the trucks, it was muddy and they had to get in the mud to push the trucks out. Then they had to drive another three and a half hours back to their place, but there was this aweful party music playing that kept them up until 6am in the morning. "We were exhausted, but we had the Joy of the Lord...It was awesome." There was this 70 year old lady in Nicaragua, with a football size hernia on her side, who's son had a terminal disease which she treated daily. That was her life; turning her son over to avoid bed sores! But she was joyful. She met the missionaries saying "other followers of Christ!" She wasn't defined by her circumstances. "We went there to bless her and we got rocked." Paul says he wants to stir us up by the way of remembrance; by reminding us of what God has done for us. Life just isn't the best sometimes, but we can stir our selves up. We are new persons! When we meet people who say they are just sinners, they are not realizing that they are NEW. Jesus called what he was doing "the good news". We can give all of us for all of Him. In His presence is fullness of Life. Think about where we are going and the eternal nature of it. We walk around being happy here and sad here without focusing on the thing that doesn't change; the good news of the gospel. We are adopted as sons and daughters of the Living God. Jesus looks at our past and says, "Oooh wow... Look at this... you have some of this... Hmmm...Okay, let him on in.." That's it. God takes out the old and gives the new. Johnson's favorite verse in the Bible is Zephaniah 3:17. It talks about how God rejoices over us. He says, "Whoooo, that's my boy!" The angels might be saying, "are you kidding me? Have you seen this guy's life?" But it says that God rejoices over us. In Corinthians, it says that we carry the aroma of God with us. We have joy because we are His own. We are His handiwork. We might have misconceptions about Heaven, like it's a really long church service. But it's so much more. In "Chronicles of Narnia", C.S. Lewis writes these stories that are reflective of our life with Christ. In the story, there's this conversation between Aslan and Lucy, which Johnson reads to the audience. When we enter Heaven, our story will actually BEGIN. In Revelation, we see the Holy City where we, as the bride of Christ, will be united with our God. He will wipe away every tear. He will make everything new. John did not see a temple because we will be in God. He will give light to everyone. The glory and honor of nations will be here. There is a real book and a real place of Heaven. It's our inheritance. Death is only Paradise in disguise. There should be no fear in death. Easter wasn't and elder's meeting; it was an inzone dance! Take Joy, stir yourselves up and be joyful. Nothing can take this away from us.

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