Some people understand the Joy of the Lord and how it is never predicated upon circumstances or conditions but is appropriated from the Lord who never changes and has no shadow of turning.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
Fragile artificial Joy from a pharmaceutical is not true joy, it is only a chemically induced feeling that all too quickly wears off.
There is a joy the people of the Lord are entitled to receive directly from Him.
A genuine joy that the world cannot give and it can not take it away!
Read on to learn about this joy from the Lord and how God helps us to obtain through His cross.
Most churches today stay clear of teaching involving the cross, but it is what can bring us into God's joy.
***
To New Levels Of Joy
Children should have beautiful and pleasant childhoods.
To that end, we should teach them principles for being joyful which will guide them through their time of growth.
Those little feet have a long way to go; those little hands have many things to learn.
Children live in a world where everything is too large for them; they always have to look up.
We need to take away their fears by teaching them that the joy of the Lord is their strength.
If you lose the joy of the Lord, life can become quite miserable.
It becomes an endurance contest at best.
The joy of marriage can be lost, making the relationship so difficult that, as one writer expressed it, a wife may have little to look forward to but her days of widowhood.
When love goes out of a relationship, a married couple may spend their later years sitting in rocking chairs, looking across the room at each other, wondering who is going to die first.
When their is no love, there is nothing left.
If there is no real love or compassion flowing between a pastor and his people, he wonders what is going to happen to the church.
He may be teaching the various truths about love and joy without knowing how to apply them so that the joy comes forth in his own life and in the lives of the people.
You can have joy even before you ever find the fulfillment of your dreams and visions for your life.
So often people live out their days and never know the reality of reaching into what God has for them.
They live from one crisis to another, not realizing that they are missing the whole meaning of their lives.
They do not have the joy.
This should not be.
Reach into what God has for you.
Reach into the joy that He has for you.
A father and a mother may look forward to the time when their child gos off to school.
They live from one crisis or achievement to another, never taking the time each day to stop and experience the joy of a relationship with that little one.
Then one day he is grown and leaves home, and the parents look back, wondering what happened to their son's childhood and to the joys that should have filled their lives.
Many Christians today are experiencing various tests and trials that are causing them to grow spiritually.
They live with this attitude:
"After this test, after this trial, I am going to be fine.
After this crisis is past, I will settle down and enjoy walking with God."
Instead they should learn to have joy of the lord now, as their strength to help them through the testings.
I Peter 1:4-8 speaks about the inheritance that is reserved in heaven for you,
Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations:
That
the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that
perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and
honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:
Whom
having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet
believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
The testings and the trials and the various circumstances are all related to each other, and in your reasoning you should never separate the joy from the pain.
If you decide that some experiences are pleasant and others are unpleasant, soon you will find yourself very anxious about experiences that trouble you.
Then you will not rejoice in that which God is doing for you or the way He is relating to you or His nearness to you.
A mother can spend all of her time, day after day, focused only upon what her child is doing.
She is always read to spank him when he does wrong, but she is never enjoying him, never sharing things, never teaching him.
The two attitudes must go hand in hand. It is natural for a husband and wife to become edgy because of the little irritating characteristics they see in each other.
Living as closely as is necessary in marriage, they find that the irritating qualities in each seem to float right to the surface and become very obvious.
In a happy marriage, each partner can accept the difficulties and relate to the other person in love.
Thereby they accept a relationship in which they can rejoice.
When you give to someone, it brings joy to you, as well as to the person who receives your gift he has joy and you also have joy.
Giving and receiving are the most blessed of all spiritual states.
It is far more blessed to give than to receive, and until that is practiced, even in marriage relationships, there will not be joy.
One of the greatest detriments to the future of a marriage is when the husband or wife feels unfulfilled and decides to go to a marriage counselor or a lawyer.
Unfulfillment can mean a number of things.
If two people really love each other, they will find fulfillment merely in giving themselves in love to each other.
There is joy that comes from giving.
Even if you cannot have the joy of receiving, you can have the joy of giving.
A walk with God is not something merely to be endured; it should make you altogether joyful.
Two passages on the Feast of Tabernacles, Leviticus 23:40 and Deuteronomy 16:13-15, reveal a requirement that the people followed when they came before the Lord.
They were to be altogether joyful.
Being joyful is a matter of your own faith and your own response to certain guidelines.
The passage from I Peter states that a person can go through terrible experiences and yet rejoice with an inexpressible joy that is full of Glory.
You may be waiting for the glory of God to return, thinking that then you will have joy.
Isaiah prophesied of that day:
2 In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel.
3 And
it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he that
remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is
written among the living in Jerusalem:
4 When
the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and
shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the
spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning.
5 And the Lord
will create upon every dwelling place of mount Zion, and upon her
assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire
by night: for upon all the glory shall be a defence.
And
there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the day time from the heat,
and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.
Isaiah 4:2-6
When God has purged the filthiness away from Zion, than He brings the greatest revelation of glory.
This glory, however does not come immediately after God begins to purge you.
It happens step by step: a chastening and a glory.
Each interlocked with the other in such a way that you are made to rejoice, as Hebrews 12 says, in the present chastening.
The Lord keeps working on you and disciplining you.
When this message explodes in your mind and in your heart, it will open the door for you to press on with joy and rejoicing.
You will find that God does not have to keep coaxing you along in order to accomplish His will in your life.
Each revelation of the Lord will lead you to a revelation of yourself and deeper repentance.
Any revelation of yourself and repentance will lead you to a greater revelation of the Lord.
Any testing or discipline will lead you to a deeper revelation of the Lord, or it will come as a part of His revelation.
Repentance, and the righteousness that comes from it, will prepare you for even greater glory that is to come.
This is the sequence of action that God used to reveal a great many things to Isaiah.
The Lord met him, as Isaiah 6 describes, with a very wonderful call.
Isaiah went to the Temple and saw the Lord high and lifted up; and the glory of the Lord filled the Temple.
He reacted to this revelation of the Lord, saying, "Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips" ( Isaiah 6:5 ).
Then the Lord brought the purging, the burning coal of fire to his lips.
This was symbolic of the disciplines that had to come, symbolic also of what the Lord does to refine everything in you.
The tongue is the unruly member ( James 3:8 ), and it is the last one to know the purging f the Lord.
Symbolically, therefore, Isaiah had received the total dealing of God within his own being.
The Lord said, "Who will go for Us?
Whom shall i send?"
After the fire had purged Isaiah and he said, "Here am I; send me," from that time on he began to receive even greater revelation from God ( Isaiah 6:8 ).
Can you see this sequence of action in God's dealings?
This is the way it will work in your own life.
You may come to the house of the Lord and receive a marvelous
revelation of the Lordship of Christ.
That is good, but what will happen to you next?
Very simply, that revelation will lead you to repent, because suddenly you will see where you stand in that light.
The Holy Spirit comes to minister to us for sin, for righteousness, and for judgment ( John 16:8 ).
The revelation of your own need, the revelation of righteousness, the revelation of sin, and the revelation of the deliverance that is yours are all mixed in together.
You cannot have any revelation of Christ without having also a revelation of the sin in yourself and in others.
You cannot have a revelation of the New Testament Church pattern without having also a revelation of the wickedness of Babylonian religious systems.
Every truth that you receive from God should lead you to repent for something; and as soon as you repent, His righteousness will come and open the veil a little more so that you can begin to have an even clearer vision.
The purpose of the Lord's discipline is to enable you to see the Lord, so that you will become holy and righteous.
Without holiness no man shall see the Lord ( Hebrews 12:14 ).
What is the purpose of seeing the Lord?
It will enable you to see the greater need and the greater vision, so that you can go on from glory to glory.
When people say that they have had a great vision of the Lord, and yet they are still proud and egotistical, it is obvious that they did not really have a revelation from the Lord.
Whenever you observe someone who is very religious, who talks about the wonderful vision he had of Jesus, and you see spiritual pride oozing out of him, you can be assured that the vision never happened.
The true response to a vision of the Lord is to grovel at His feet. No revelation of the Lord exalts flesh; it cannot.
Every revelation of the Lord puts down the flesh.
When people are still in sin, the objective is not to make them repent first.
If the Lord is exalted first and a revelation of the Lord is imparted to their hearts, then they will come to repentance.
Every sermon should begin with a revelation and an exaltation of the Lord; then in the light of His presence, we can see what a miserable state we are in, we can say, as Isaiah did, "Woe is me, for I am undone."
When Isaiah saw the glory, nothing could keep him from crying out in repentance.
Whenever you see your need and repent because of a visitation from God, you can be assured of having another visitation from God, you can assured of having another visitation that will meet your need and heal you so that you can draw closer to the Lord.
The closer you come to Him, the more you will follow Him.
The greatest repenters in the world are those who are walking closest to the Lord.
The writer of Hebrews tells us to run with endurance, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:2
If God has been meeting your heart, anticipate a work of the cross to occur soon in your life.
In the dealings of God you seem to pass from a cold shower to the hot shower; but you can endure, as Christ endured the cross, by looking forward to the cross you endure, if you keep looking to the joy that is to follow the cross.
Some people are like the imaginary bird that always flew backwards. He was sad, always crying.
He could never see where he was going, only where he had been.
If he had an unhappy time, he would cry, thinking about how unhappy he had been.
If this bird had a pleasant time, he would cry because he was leaving the happy time behind.
Because he was always looking back, he was always unhappy.
Joy comes when you can see where you are going and when you continually reach forward to the things that are before you.
The apostle Paul spoke of forgetting the things which are behind.
People probably often asked him, "Paul, how can you be so happy and write about all of this joy, when your enemies beat you and throw you in jail and treat you so miserably?"
"Oh, I'm pressing on to the goal that is set before me."
"But you don't know what they are going to do to you in the next town; they will probably club you to death."
"Perhaps, but there will be joy beyond that. The people there who will be won to the Lord will be my joy and my crown."
If you genuinely evaluate the problems you are having, you will come to the conclusion that God does not deal drastically with you nearly as much as He blesses you.
He only deals with you to accomplish whatever is necessary in your life to prepare you for greater blessing.
He uses a shovel to throw blessings at you, but He uses only a little ladle for the problems.
Joy becomes a matter of focus.
If there is a cross ahead of you, endure it for the joy that is set before you, the joy just ahead.
It has to be in that sequence.
If the Lord does not test you through a cross in your life, you will not expand your capacity for His next joy and glory.
The testings come to stretch you.
When a little child really begins to eat, nothing grows in that child as fast as his little belly, which grows progressively each day to hold more and more food.
We can be vessels that are full of the blessing of the Lord.
When we first come to the Lord.
He fills us to overflowing; and though our capacity is like a half-pint, we are happy to have all of that blessing overflowing.
However, since we are more like wineskins than glass jars, to be full today today means that we will expand a little bit more tomorrow, so that we must be filled again.
Soon our capacity has increased to a whole pint.
Then when we are full to overflowing, we have more of His blessing and glory.
The babe in Christ is not yet able to handle some of the deeper truths while he is still on milk; but later on, precious truths begin to unfold to him, because by reason of use his senses have been exercised to discern both good and evil ( Hebrews 5:14 ).
He is then able to reach into greater revelation.
The life of the a new convert is like that of a teenager or a child.
It is wonderful to be a child or a teenager, and yet life can be miserable at the age of twelve or thirteen.
Some people like o talk about the good old days of youth-but was there anything about those "good old days" that you particularly want to go back to?
If God were to give you the privilege of going backward or forward, you would do well to forget the things which are behind.
Believe God enough to trust that the joys He has set before you are unspeakable; they are greater than any experiences of the past.
Believe to always be going from glory to glory by the Spirit f the Lord ( II Corinthians 3:18 ).
Do not be anxious when you go through a trial.
Remember Peter's exhortation that for a little while you are under distress, yet you rejoice with a joy unspeakable and full of glory.
It is a joy that anticipates a greater joy.
The revelation of the Lord throws you into dealings that will cause you to receive a greater revelation of the Lord.
You grow increasingly aware that the Lord is helping you to go from glory to glory by the revelation of the Lord.
Whenever you find yourself under some dealings, take another look and you will see that you are a little bit higher.
This should help you to endure the cross and to live with what you are experiencing.
The believers in Jerusalem were reminded of this truth, and we should remember it also:
5 And
ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto
children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint
when thou art rebuked of him:
6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Hebrews 12:5-6.
Why does God do that?
Suppose you have a little boy who is feeling very spunky as he is growing, and so every once in awhile you have to discipline him.
While he is little you can put up with his behavior, but when he grows older, you will not be able to live with the same kind of behavior.
You do not want to create a monster that you will have to live with.
Neither does God want to create a monster that He will have to live with.
Therefore, He chastens you so that you will be a partaker of his holiness.
The Father looks down upon you while He gives you a beating and says, "Son, you are going to be just like Me!"
You are to be just like the Heavenly Father- perfect just as He is perfect.
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?
But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
Futhermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits and live?
For they disciplined us for our good, that we may share His holiness.
You learn and appropriate things very quickly when you are under discipline.
Holiness is appropriated.
All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Verses 7-11.
Not only are you to be disciplined so that you can relate to one another, but you are to pursue peace with all men and the sanctification without which you will not see the Lord.
It is wonderful to have a revelation of Christ as the Head of the Body and to relate to Him as your Head and your Lord.
However, as the Head, Christ controls the relationship of every other member in the Body as well.
Learn to relate to your brothers and sisters with the same dedication to oneness with the Body that you have to oneness with Christ the Lord.
This is where the difficulty comes.
You relate more easily to the Lord than you do to His servants.
That is one reason for discipline.
As you experience the work of the cross and the discipline from year to year, it is surprising how your problems do not seem to be great as they once were.
You encounter more and more people as you walk on with the Lord, but the more the work of the cross is done in your life, the better other people seem to behave.
Everyone else seems to become more loving and kind.
Actually, the change is being wrought in you.
You learn to pursue peace with all men, and you pursue the sanctification, so that you may dwell in unity in the Body of Christ.
The objective of all of this is to please the Lord and to do His will.
Psalm 15 shows you the way to please the Lord: O Lord, who may abide in Thy tent?
Who may dwell on Thy holy hill?
He who walks with integrity, and works righteousness, and speaks truth in his heart.
He does not slander with his tongue, nor does evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend; in whose eyes a reprobate is despised, but who honors those who fear the Lord....
Psalm 15:1-4.
If you are going to please the Lord, first He must cleanse you.
If you want Joy, you must go through trials looking forward to the joy.
The two go together as you move on from glory to glory.
You will move to new levels of the cross experience in your life.
The deeper the pressures, the greater will be your capacity for an awareness of the Lord and of your brother.
You dare not to be discouraged for a single minute.
Never be discouraged or feel sorry for yourself because the Lord is chastening you.
The Lord may deal very strongly with an individual, but the next time you see him, most likely he will be reaching into more from God on a level in which he formerly had no capacity.
God knows what He is doing.
Look up and say, "Father, You are wonderful! Thank You for treating me as a son.
Thank you, Lord, that You love me and are continually chastening me to make me grow up and appropriate Your holiness."
Earthly fathers, for a little time, discipline their children.
Many a child has heard his father say, "While you are under my roof, you will obey me.
When you are on your own you can do whatever you please, but as long as your feet are under my table you must listen to me."
But the Heavenly Father uses a little different approach.
He says, "I am dealing with you so that you will have your feet under My table forever."
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