Growing in Joy

Well good evening everybody it is great to have you here. My name is René, one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. You might recall that several years ago, I would say about four years ago, I showed you guys a video that had gone viral and I want to show you this video again because it happens to dovetail so perfectly into tonight's topic which is joy. This is about a grandma who is about to go on her first ever airplane trip and she's kind of scared and so her daughter says I tell you what let's go on a roller coaster to get you prepared for the plane flight and here's what happened watch this.

Meet grandma Ria she'd never traveled on an airplane before so before her first ever flight to beat her fear she took to the sky on a roller coaster. That's a chicken dairy! I don't need no one to feel it. Ria! Don't you love that? Is that not just like pure joy? Raise your hand if you want to adopt her as your grandma. Do they have grandma adoptions? Actually, that's my whole message tonight, is that you can actually go through the rollercoaster of life, all of the ups and downs, with that kind of deep down joy.

Unfortunately, and here's why I actually have to preach this message and not just tell you that, a lot of us Christians go through life looking a lot more like this. The church lady than that grandma. So let's talk about recovering joy today. Grab your message notes that are in the bulletins that you got when you came in. Miracle Grow is what we call our fall series in what the Bible calls the fruit of the spirit. We have small groups all over the county that are studying this book called Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit. This is by a brilliant guy from Cambridge called Christopher Wright. He has videos that tie into each chapter. Each chapter ties into each week of our services.

I'd encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. If you don't have money, you can just grab it or donate whatever you think it's worth. We want to put one of these books in your hands because we'd love for the whole church to be on the same page. Plug into a small group. You can get open small group lists at the info desk as well because we all want to be on the same page as we grow toward what the Bible says is God's goal for us as Christians. And it's this in Galatians 5:22–23. And why don't we read this verse out loud together. And I hope by the end of this series we all have it memorized, ready? But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, amen?

We are working our way through this verse looking at one of these aspects of the fruit of the spirit every week. And so tonight let's talk about growing in joy. People are just longing for joy in their lives right now. In fact, this week I went on Amazon, typed in the joy of, and found all kinds of interesting books like The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Painting by Bob Ross. The Joy of Mathematics, clearly a work of fiction. The Joy of Doing Things Badly. I don't need that book, I'm already an expert.

Then there's Spark Joy. This is the best seller on tidying up. Have you heard of this book? How many of you have heard of this book? It's a phenomenon right now. This is a woman who says, "Here's how to tidy up your life. You take every single thing you own and you hold it up and you ask, "Does this bring me joy? And if it doesn't, you toss it." I got rid of my cat this way. Just kidding. And this has spawned an entire movement like The Joy of Less. And now there's actually a pushback the other direction with books like this one. The Joy of Junk. This is about the beauty of hoarding, and I kid you not. Many more, there's The Joy of Yiddish. The Joy of Pickling. There's The Joy, well there's all kinds of books about joy.

But most people are not feeling it. You ever go to downtown Santa Cruz, or go to the mall and look around and just watch people's faces? You don't see a lot of joy. You actually see a lot of frowns. You actually see a lot of anger. And researchers say unhappiness levels have never been higher. And Christians can sometimes seem the angriest. And the frowniest of all, certainly right now, rightly or wrongly, our cultural perception of many Christians is that they look grumpy and judgmental all the time.

Yet did you know that God actually designed our faith to be full of joy, to be characterized by joy? He told us to party. And I'm not kidding. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, the Israelites are commanded to have several annual feasts, parties. God says be joyful at your festival. And in fact, what happened in the history of Israel was the people stopped having these feasts. And when Nehemiah rebuilds Jerusalem, he commands the people, the first thing he commands them to do is to start partying again. Because he says the joy of the Lord will be your strength.

And then when Jesus was born, the angel said to the shepherds, do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of what? Great joy, which shall be for all the people. I gotta talk about that in a few months at Christmas, because let me just give you some food for thought right now. What possible news is good news and great joyful news for all people? I mean, what possible, I mean, when you think about it, every other kind of news you could possibly think of, it's good news for some people, but it's bad news for other people, right? Football gave one team win, but another team loses. One country wins the war, another team loses. Every bit of news is always good news for some, bad news for others, except for one piece of news. And that's what we talk about at Christmas.

Then later, Jesus said, I have told you these things so that you will be filled with what? Not so that you'll be filled with a sense of obligation and duty and dry religiosity, joy. The apostle Paul says, be joyful always and rejoice in the Lord always. I'll say it again, rejoice. I could have shown you a hundred more verses. So the question is, if this is such an emphasis in the Bible, why is it that Christians lose their joy? And when I say Christians, I mean me. I am talking to me tonight. You might've figured out, by the way, in these sermons every week, I'm almost always preaching to my need.

I don't know about you all, but I need help with my own brand of crazy, okay? So what you get every week is basically my Bible study where I go to the Bible and go, God help, 'cause I'm really struggling with this, and you see what I discovered. So if you find these messages useful, that's great. But usually, I am preaching what I need, and let me just be very honest here and tell you, this last week, I found myself, especially earlier in the week, just drained of joy. I was just down and depressed and discouraged. I had the blues, and so I analyzed that, and I find that consistently in my life when that happens, it's because of three common kill joys, and maybe you can relate to these.

The first is worry. My worries can drain my joy. You know, a lot of people have told me, I'm so worried I can't get to sleep. You know what I've noticed? I often actually go to sleep happy, but then I wake up in the middle of the night anxious, thinking of all the stuff that needs to be done, and all the people that are currently mad at me, and all the people that are currently disappointed in me, and I can't get to sleep, and then finally I get to sleep, and I wake up all stressed. What about you? What are you worried about right now? Some of you are in such a severe state of worry about your family, about your finances, about the nation, that it's drained you of your joy.

You could not find any joy during the worship segment tonight because you're just drained. And then there's circumstances. Uncontrollable, frustrating circumstances. And I gotta tell you, this is probably the big one for me. Let me just tell you what happened last weekend. You may not know this because you all probably usually come on Saturday night, but I wake up last Sunday morning with complete and total laryngitis. Like I could barely squeak out a word. So now what are we gonna do? So I'm downing all kinds of cop drops and drinking throat coke tea and thinking, I believe my voice is gonna be better. Well, it just got worse.

So now we have Saturday night's video, so we'll play the video from Saturday night. Then the video doesn't work at first, and then the video announcements wouldn't work. And so Adrian had to get up there and do the videos live until he realized as he started to do the announcements live, he doesn't actually know anything about any of the announcements. And then the monitors wouldn't work, so the musicians couldn't hear themselves. And to top it all off, I probably shouldn't say this, but we had to call the sheriff because there was a guy out in the parking lot rifling through cars, telling people, it's okay, Val has instructed me to examine all vehicles for explosives. It was cray-cray, nuts! All the same hour! It's funny, I could not see the humor in it. I was in such a bad mood for like two days.

And I was like, God, I am, you know how, I don't know, I get so self-righteous, God, I'm just trying to do my best to do your will! And you let this happen! You ever have a day like that? By the way, you know the sad truth about, we're studying the fruit of the spirit, you know the way to grow in any of these fruits of the spirit is to be challenged in it? Like last week when we were talking about love, God probably had you run into somebody who was hard to love. And this week, we're talking about Joy, so he's gonna have you run into circumstances where it's hard to be Joy, just fair warning, okay?

And then finally for me, maybe for you, a surprising killjoy can be legalistic religion. When you begin to measure your spiritual maturity by how many rules you keep, like I don't do this, I don't do that, so I am a mature Christian, and this is a killjoy. And this has always been a big one for me. I can get out of it for a while, then I fall back into a rut, and now it's not really about classic legalism, like why, I don't gamble, so I'm a good Christian, I don't, whatever. Now for me, it's just about performance orientation. It's like I gotta do better, I gotta pray more, I gotta serve more, I gotta do better, so God likes me more.

It's crazy, 'cause that's not what the Bible says, but I fall back into the same rut all the time, that's killjoy. In fact, our theme verse for this series is from Galatians, and earlier in the same book, Paul says, let's read this out loud together. What has happened to all your joy? Because some very religious teachers had come along and convinced the Galatians that being a very good Christian means keeping all of these rules, and Paul's saying to them, yeah, you guys are very religious, but very joyless. And my question today is, could this sentence on the screen be said of you now? If so, how do you deal with these three killjoys?

And by the way, this is way more important than your own personal happiness level. When we are joyful through all the ups and downs, it is a testimony, it's attractive, it draws people to Jesus, so this is way bigger, this is way more important than how personally happy or fulfilled that we feel. Unfortunately, as we all know, when a lot of people think of Christians, they think killjoy instead of gives joy, so let's look at three keys to recovering my joy directly related to each of those three killjoys. And the reason I'm bringing you this is because this was actually the passage that I went to for help this week personally, all right? And these are all from just a few verses in a book of the Bible called Philippians.

We're gonna go verse by verse through chapter four, verses eight through 13, because really the whole book of Philippians is about one topic, and it's joy. Joy is discussed 17 times in this very short book. You could read the book of Philippians out loud in about 20 minutes, and so this means Paul talks about the subject of joy about once every 60 seconds in this book. And the amazing thing is the historical context of this letter. As he writes, the author of the book of Philippians, it's a letter to the church at Philippi, "The Apostle Paul's been in miserable circumstances for the previous four years. He spent two years in prison on false charges, and then he's put on a ship for Rome and is promptly shipwrecked and then bitten by a poisonous snake. He survives and then goes to Rome. Two years house arrest, faces trial by Nero, who's not known for being very nice to Christians."

And it's in these circumstances where Paul has every right to have a gigantic pity party that he talks about joy and being joyful 17 times because that's the kind of guy he was. And my question is, Paul, how did you do it? And Paul gives his reasons when he gets to this last chapter and he summarizes it all. He tells us how. This is priceless stuff. This is stuff you can start applying right now. I mean, the minute you walk out of here, this can make an impact in your life. And the first point ties into the first killjoy, which is worry and general negative thinking. He says, "I must reorient my thinking. I must reorient my thinking." Philippians 4:8. "Finally, my brothers and sisters." Finally, in other words, here's the big key to it all. Here's what I wanna leave you with. Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

If you're taking notes and you got your Bible or the notes out, circle, fix your thoughts. It's kind of a play on words in English because it means to set your mind, but also fix your thoughts. Repair the way you've been thinking. Now, I know if you've been raised in church, you already know this verse, but you know what? I don't care if you know this verse. I know this verse, but I'll be honest, I don't always practice this verse. In fact, I can get so undisciplined in my thinking. My self-talk can be so poisonous. Somebody once said, "The root cause of joylessness is the way I choose to think." The way you choose, and it is a choice, to think. You can't always choose what thoughts flip into your brain, but you can always choose what you're gonna dwell on.

And you can't always choose what you feel, but you can choose what you're going to focus on. And this is actually a relief here, and I wanna be clear. Learning to be joyful does not mean trying to feel happier. In fact, that rarely works. So don't add to your sadness shame that you can't work up glad feelings. Trying to feel happy is like trying to fall asleep. You know, it happens when you're not thinking about it, not when you are thinking about it. You can't control your emotions, but you can control your thoughts. The Bible talks a lot about when my wife, I'm gonna quote her a lot actually in this sermon, my wife calls the power of mind control. Not controlling other people with your thoughts, but controlling yourself with your thoughts.

Lori actually has a talk she gives, and I wanna show you this slide from her presentation, because it's really impacted me. Two of her points are, be aware of negative internal dialogue. She says you always have an internal dialogue. You are always talking to yourself about yourself. So what are you saying to yourself about yourself? How are you narrating your own life, and then be intentional about positive internal dialogue? You have to be intentional. So let me give you a little kind of peek into our family life. This last week, excuse me, I was, I think it was Tuesday, I was reciting the woes of my life to my wife. I mean, I was really down, just really, really depressed. And for the better part of an hour, I would say 45 minutes, I was going on and on and on.

I was sick, and that always drains me. I'm the worst patient. I felt overwhelmed by speaking commitments and deadlines. There was tension at the church between some people. Some friends were getting a divorce, and it was making me so sad, so bummed out. I just returned from that international trip, so jet lag was having its way with me. And I went on and on and on about all this stuff, and I'm just ranting. And after about 45 minutes, Lori goes, "René, I get that you are venting now, and sometimes we need to vent." But she says, "At some point, we have to stop venting and start redirecting." You know, sometimes I hate it when she is right. But she was.

And she said we were babysitting our grandson, Freddie, for like three days. And she said, "René, Freddie's here in our house for three days. Why don't you go look at Freddie, focus on him, give God thanks for him, and then why don't you just try to see the world through his eyes with eyes of wonder?" And I said something like, "What you're saying is you mean instead of the desiccated eyes of sad cynicism I have right now, I'm so stupid." She goes, "René, self-talk, come on." So I did. And I literally got down on his level, literally changed my perspective, and looked at Freddie, playing with his toys, and imagining all kinds of things. And it changed my, literally changed my perspective.

For me, that was one way to fix my thoughts on the good things. Again, the truth is a lot of us know this verse, but we tend to actually live when we're not careful, like this verse really says, "Finally, my brothers and sisters, fix your thoughts on what is frustrating and disappointing and aggravating and overwhelming and discouraging. Think about the ways others have let you down and hurt you." You might notice that's the RSV, the revised schlepfer version, because that's the way I think at times. But that kind of thinking is a kill-joy. And look, reorienting your thoughts is not an impossibility, it's not theoretical, because check out the very next verse, verse nine, Paul says, "Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me, everything you heard from me and saw me doing, and then the God of peace will be with you."

So what's he talking about? What had the Philippians seen Paul doing? You might remember the story from the book of Acts. When Paul was there in Philippi, he gets arrested on horrible charges, they're not true, and they not only arrest him, but the elders of the city decide to torture him, to torture him. And then they put him in stocks. And by the way, this is after Paul has a vision of a European man, Paul's never been to Europe before, he has a vision of a European man saying, "Come and help us." So he gets on a boat, and this is the first city he gets to in Europe. He's thinking, "Well, I had a vision, I guess they all wanna hear the gospel." And he like halfway starts preaching, and he's in prison and he's tortured and he's in stocks.

He had all the wheels falling off. And the Bible says at midnight, Paul and his friends, you remember what they were doing? They were singing praise songs. And it says all the other prisoners were listening like, "This is really weird." And it says that very night there was an earthquake, and the jailer was scared to death, and he comes to them and says, "What must I do to be saved?" Now I don't think he was talking about the gospel yet. The jailer didn't know what Paul was preaching. All he knew was he needed what that guy has. The calm in the midst of an earthquake, the ability to sing praises and to be joyful in the midst of what he was going through. He wanted that. That is part of what Paul means when he says in this verse, "Whatever you saw me," remember what you saw me? Remember how you heard and saw me praising in prison? And some of you here tonight need to know it is possible to praise in prison.

I was reading Viktor Frankl this week famously, he was imprisoned by Nazis in World War II because he was a Jewish man, and he wrote a book about it, and now he survived it. Watch this, he says he would think to himself about the Nazis, "You can take away my wife. You can take away my children. You can strip me of my freedom, but there is one thing that no one can ever take from me, and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me." And that's what Paul is saying. No matter what happens, no matter what people throw at me, they are not gonna control my reaction. Now, the second point flows right out of point one, and it ties into the second killjoy of circumstances. I need to learn to roll with life's changes. Roll with life's changes.

How do you handle it when things are shaken up a little bit? How do you handle uncontrollable, frustrating circumstances? So Labor Day, I'm flying to Romania, and I don't know how it works in your household, but in our household, I don't know why, but usually Lori's the one who prints out the boarding passes and checks us in. She's the one who packs, including, like she packs for me, packs all our toiletries. Well, I was going on this trip without her with a team from Twin Lakes Church, but she wasn't coming with us, so I said, "You know what, honey, I got it. I'm gonna print out the boarding pass. Why are you laughing? I'm gonna print out the boarding pass. I'm gonna pack. I got it all handled."

So of course we were running a little behind, so I said, "We gotta get on the road right now, drive up to San Francisco International Airport. I'm flying to Cluj, Romania from here." So we get there, she kisses me, "Bye, hon, have a great trip." I run into SFO and I check to see what gate we're leaving on and I look at my boarding pass. I look up at the screen and I look at my boarding pass and I grab my phone and I text her, "Come back, come back, come back. I'm leaving from San Jose." Yeah. So she says, "I'll be right there." She swings around, she grabs me, I throw my bags in. I get into the car, we got like a half an hour to get to San Jose, it's a good thing it's Labor Day.

And she looks at me and she goes, "Let's roll." How grateful I am that I do not have a wife who looks at me as she could many times and say, "You know, for a smart guy, you're pretty stupid." I didn't look at the airport on my boarding pass. We made it just in the nick of time and where I go, "But let me ask a question. When unexpected circumstances strike you as your attitude, let's roll or as your attitude, I'm so stupid. How could this have happened? This is so dumb." Do you look in the rear view mirror or are you going forward to the next destination? Do you get moody? Do you get angry? Can you let it go?

There's a very funny little blog called, "Reasons My Kid Is Crying." Where parents can submit pictures of their kids and the reason why he or she is crying at that very moment. Have you ever noticed little kids, whenever their circumstances change, for good or bad, they just get super upset, right? Here's some of the best ones, "Reasons My Kid Is Crying." I broke his cheese in half. Reasons My Kid Is Crying. They received new hats. We sang the happy birthday song to him. I wouldn't buy her the Dolly movie for Christmas. You see what the movie is? It's a chucky movie. We said she couldn't have more bacon. This seems a perfectly reasonable response to me. There was a hot dog hidden in his cornbread. He didn't want to share his leg hole. Look at the other kid. She's like, "What's going on?" And finally, he met Bill Murray.

There's a lot more of these, but we can see the humor of this so clearly in little kids, right? But how often God must look at us and see just a bunch of babies who can't handle any change in circumstances? Listen, your joy in life will largely be dependent on your ability to adapt to change because change is just going to happen like it or not. You know what's weird about this? I feel like I've handled pretty intense stuff in my life pretty well. My mom's Alzheimer's, dad's death, but I get laryngitis on a Sunday morning and I'm like, "Is there a God?" Ever notice you can survive a drop off a cliff and then a speed bump makes you just lose it. What's the deal with that?

Don't miss this. Paul says, verse 11, "I have," what? "learned to be content with whatever I have." Circle that, "I've learned." Even the great apostle Paul had to learn. That means this doesn't come naturally. We all start off like those babies. So again, don't add to the joylessness, guilt over letting circumstances get you. Just tell yourself, "Ah, I'm learning. I'm learning." Watch this, earlier Paul, I wanna ask you a question. What's the key to being content? What's the key to being content whatever your circumstances are? Watch this, let's do some investigation. Earlier Paul tells the Philippians, "I want you to know, dear brothers and sisters, that everything that has happened to me," and this includes all the stuff I just recounted earlier, "has helped me to spread the good news for everyone here, including the whole palace guard knows I'm in chains because of Christ."

Watch this, the whole palace guard, the Romans who guarded Caesar's household were known as the Praetorian guard, and the Praetorian guard was like Air Force Academy or West Point, it was officer training. And part of their training was they guarded Caesar's family in the palace, and they also guarded the top level most famous political prisoners like Paul. They were on alternating shifts, one shift in prison, the next in the palace, so they'd get this experience. So these guards are chained to Paul from his perspective, it's like a captive audience. Let me tell you more about the resurrected Jesus, right? They can't get away.

So they get sent to the palace where, what do you suppose they talked about sometimes, right? Look at this cryptic verse at the end of Philippians, "And all the rest of God's people send you greetings, too, especially those in Caesar's household." What? In Nero's palace, there's now believers. Historically, we know of at least one, a woman named Claudia Acti, she was actually Nero's, the nice word is girlfriend. Some historians call her mistress. She was Nero's live-in lover, and everybody was expecting them to be married until Nero kicked her out of the palace. You wanna know why? She became a Christian. How do you think somebody in Caesar's palace could have heard the message of the gospel from the guards who heard it from Paul? It's fantastic.

And this is why Paul can say, I've learned to be content because all this stuff is advancing the gospel. He has learned in all things God works for the good according to his purpose, all things. Somehow, God is going to redeem even your hardest times, maybe in ways you'll never know on earth, but you can be confident he will. Now watch what Paul says next. "I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I've learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it's with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little." Now be careful here, 'cause you can misunderstand this. Joy does not mean I have to like the situation. You don't hear Paul saying, I love eating gruel. You don't have to praise God for the bad stuff, but you can be confident he's going to use it for good somehow.

And the promise of joy does not mean that I won't have sorrow. Of course you'll have sorrow. Sorrow comes into everybody's life. Joy does not mean you'll feel happy all the time. What it means is all sorrow is temporary. And ultimately, joy will be permanent. Ultimately, for the believer, all sorrow is temporary and joy will be permanent, because one day the Bible says God will redeem not just us, but all creation and wipe away every tear. And we will live in pure joy. And it's that hope that gets us through the trouble times. I love the way Tim Keller puts it. The opposite of joy is not sorrow. The opposite of joy is hopelessness. We're all going to have sorrow, that's normal. But when you have hope, then you have a joy that runs deeper than the sorrow.

So Paul says, I've learned the secret. What's the secret? Here's the big reveal. Final point, Paul's about to reveal a principle that was destined 2000 years later to become a tattoo on Steph Curry's arm. Point three, rest in God's power and grace. Rest in God's power and grace. Verse 13, Paul says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Have you learned that you need more power than just willpower? You need God's power. But we all forget this, your pastor included. You know, when I was reciting that list of problems to my wife on Tuesday, I realized later I was focused entirely on my own resources. What was I saying? I don't have the energy. I don't have the time. I don't have any more good ideas. I wasn't thinking about God. I wasn't consulting God. I wasn't turning it over to God. I wasn't talking about God. I wasn't reading about God. I had limited my whole worldview to me.

My strength, my power, my ideas. It's no wonder I was in a tailspin. As Max Lucado says, when you feel like that, you have to speak truth to your despair and say, my Lord says he will help me. His strength is my strength. And even if I fail here, I know he will use it for good. Speak truth to your despair. You have to take charge of those thoughts. Don't let them rule you. And then when Paul wraps up Philippians, he ends with this line, Philippians 4.23, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen. Grace is the key. Grace means your life is a pure gift from God. Your salvation of your soul is a gift. Your eventual glorification in heaven is a gift. God lavishes more gifts of grace on you every day and you don't earn a gift, you just receive it. That's grace and that's the gospel.

And I believe the most basic reason many Christians are joyless is they forget it's all about grace. And this speaks to the kill joy of illegalism. And the cure, as we say around here, is you gotta keep preaching the gospel to yourself and you'll find your joy growing again. I can get performance-oriented and legalistic too. And this is where I wanna plug again that Christopher Wright book that we have available for you. His chapter on joy, this is where I end and his book picks up because his whole chapter is about all the gifts of grace that we have from God.

Now let me close with this. I've actually heard on and off for 25 years, René, don't emphasize grace so much. Don't emphasize joy so much because it's all too happy. People are never gonna learn the disciplines of the Christian life, the serious part, the hard part of the Christian life. You know, we can be so suspicious of joy. So suspicious of grace. But on my trip, when I finally did get on the right plane in the right airport a couple of weeks ago, I did go first to Romania to see the work of Connie Fortunato and Music Camp International. And it's incredible, Connie takes kids, some of whom live in this dump outside of town. It is literally a toxic waste dump.

And many of these kids who live there have been told they are garbage, worthless, stupid. And Connie builds confidence in them by teaching them to sing and to play instruments and to take bows and so on. And as the week goes on, they visibly change, they just blossom. And then by the end of the week, these kids are playing with a symphony orchestra in a legit concert hall. And much of the music she's teaching them is sacred music so they're hearing the gospel message too. But you have to ask, how in the world does Connie take these kids in in five days? Many of them have never picked up an instrument before and in five days they're playing with an orchestra. I mean, it is stunning.

Well, Connie actually wrote a book about how she does this. And in her book she says, are you ready for this? The secret is you start with joy. Here's what she says. The brain has an area that's dedicated to joy. She calls it the joy capacitor. And let me get this right. It's the right orbital prefrontal cortex. That's a link to the area of the brain where dopamine is made. It's the reward center of the brain. We tend to think of joy as nice, but joy's not really that important. Well, behavioral scientists are discovering that joy is essential because joy creates social bonds. Joy increases our ability to face stress. Stress, joy helps us process trauma. Joy helps us learn.

So Connie starts with joy. See, in Romania under the communist dictator for many years, the education system was all about rote learning, just shaming students into behaving. And in many ways, school there is still like that. In fact, this little girl hugging Connie in this picture, a second before this photo, she had just told me, I said, I asked her, what do you like about music camp? And Jamie Rahm, our video production person, was there filming her response. And she said, well, my teachers make me feel useless and stupid, but here I feel I can do things. And she ran over, she starts hugging Connie, and both of them are just crying like crazy.

So Connie bases her instruction, not initially on the rules, how to play, but on the joy of playing an instrument. She says, I just have them pick up the instrument, start making noise, start having fun. Why? Listen to this. If you start with joy, you will get to technique, and more kids will stick with it longer. And the more they stick with it, the better they'll learn to play. And consequently, the more joy they'll feel, and the more joy they feel, the more they'll play, it's all a good cycle. But if you start with technique, you lose a lot of the kids who feel frustrated or ashamed. Are you seeing how this applies to our faith? You could call it the joy cycle.

As you enjoy God's grace, you're drawn closer to him. And as you're drawn closer to him, you'll enjoy him more deeply. And as you enjoy his grace to you, God draws you closer, and as you draw closer, you find more joy in him, and that draws you closer, and it just keeps going. God designed joy to be the motor of our faith. This is why it's so important. This is how the joy of the Lord is your strength. And this is how what your soul looks like really can turn from this to this. Let's pray together to the author of joy. Would you bow your heads with me?

With your head bowed, I just wanna invite you to pray with me, because I'm praying this from my own heart. Lord Jesus, help me to reorient my thought life. I'm tired of focusing on the negative, and you know what, I'm tired of focusing on myself. Help me focus on the positive, and especially on your grace. And Lord, help me to roll with the changes. Help me learn to adjust to change. Help me stay flexible and adaptable. And help me to rest in your power and your grace. Help me realize how much you love me, that you're not against me, you're for me. Help me to stop living like I'm trying to earn your approval. And with heads still bowed, if you've never made that initial commitment to Jesus, in your heart, you can say, "Jesus, I don't understand it all, but this sounds right to me, and I feel drawn to you, and I wanna have a joyful relationship with you that goes beyond religion. So restore to me the joy that comes through your grace." Thank you, Father, for your word. Thank you for its relevance to our lives, and thank you for the joy you give, in Jesus' name, amen.