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February 05, 2006
Joy Unspeakable and Full of Glory
Isaiah 29: 17-19 / I Peter 1: 3-8
February 5th, 2006
The title of this morning’s message was engraved on my mind and heart many years ago by a dear old friend, Nini Stewart. She had been a Latin teacher at Sunnyside Junior Hi but was now retired. She was an avid fan of the writings of C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia Chronicles she introduced to her students. She came to our home to listen to a tape of this Oxford don’s voice reading The Four Loves, and one of the dearest friendships of my life began.
Nini doted on our toddler son, Stu, and as Bonnie was in the hospital with complications that set in as she carried our not-yet-born daughter, little Stu and I were over at Nini and Uncle John’s home often for dinner. One of my fondest memories of Nini was when her face would light up and she would say, “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
She meant something like, “What we have here is a foretaste of heaven.” Her face glowed. Her face remains before me as an image of grace, kindness, and joy. Nini knew about suffering. How patiently she accepted it. No complaining. No blaming. Till the very end when she languished in a nursing home, her face lit up quickly as I visited her. Her joy bubbled to the surface and she’d say, “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.” She didn’t make that term up.
The Apostle Peter coined this phrase for the benefit of suffering Christians in the early Church. They suffered persecution for being Christians; Christianity was then an illegal religion. How cruel was their suffering. The Roman government tormented them for their obedience to Jesus with ingenious cruelties. No matter what they’d not reject Jesus.
Apologists for Christianity a few years later wrote to the Roman Emperors, “Look at the way they live! Don’t persecute them for a name you know nothing about.” But despite the nobility of their character our earliest forbears in the faith suffered terribly for bearing the name, “Christian.” Why did they stick with it? It had much to do with the joy they discovered inside. JOY is a gift of God.
Interestingly, there are several related words in the New Testament that suggest what joy means. Xara, joy, is related to xaris, grace, and xarisma, a gift of God’s Spirit, xaragma, a mark made by engraving or branding, and xaracter, the impress that is made on wax by a signet ring. Joy is the impression on us of the Spirit of God—if we have it. It is conspicuous in its absence if we don’t. The persecuted Christians had this joy—an inward cheerful reflection of the nature of God. Joy bubbled up and was more precious than the passing security they could have found if they renounced their faith.
Paul and Silas sang at night in a dungeon in Philippi with their backs bleeding and oozing from the brutal beating of the day before. Why? They weren’t taunting the prison guards. They sang because they found joy like a fountain bubbling up from within them. Their joy struck their jailor. It put him at their mercy, odd to say. Fortunately, they were full of mercy—an outcropping of joy. So when his life was in jeopardy as the prison doors were all open and every prisoner’s shackles broken making it impossible to fulfill his duty to guard them, he turned to them and asked, “What must I do to be saved?” Surely he meant, “What can I do to escape execution for the escape of the prisoners?” But why should he ask them this?
It was because their joy that caught his attention. Instead of the moaning and cursing that suffering convicts usually emitted he heard songs in the night. Their joy demanded an explanation. People whose backs are beaten to a bloody pulp don’t sing, they cry. Cheerfully Paul and Silas told him, “Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” Thus he was invited to the joy of their salvation. In his moment of total vulnerability he found the joy of his salvation.
It was of this joy that Peter reminded the widespread tormented Christians in Asia Minor, letting them know that as they suffered their faith was being purified. They perhaps didn’t understand what was going on inside of them. Why didn’t they back away from their faith as a reflex? It is normal to take your finger off a hot burner on the stove, to run from danger. But here they were clinging to their faith despite the pain it brought them. Why?
What made them think that keeping on in the Jesus-way was better than security and freedom? They found that their faith was more precious than gold—even than life itself. They didn’t protest as their money was taken, their homes confiscated. Maybe they didn’t understand what was going on in them that they should endure as they did. Peter explained to them what was going on. Their faith was being refined. That’s why they found it more precious than gold. That’s why they were finding “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Peter didn’t tell them they had to keep on being faithful. He explained to them the reason for the joy they found as they kept on being faithful—unto death. It was Jesus Christ in their hearts.
They had what Jesus gave them. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read of this same reflex in Jesus. “Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame.” Jesus in their hearts made them do as Jesus did. They too endured their crosses and despised their shame.
These early Christians were like us in that though they hadn’t seen Jesus they knew this of Him and could love Him. I think we often assume that all Christians described in the New Testament knew Jesus personally. But the Christians to whom Peter wrote were a mix of Jewish and Gentile believers scattered in a land to which Jesus never once came. They knew of Jesus only from a distance. So they were like us in never seeing this Jesus in whom they trusted.
They were unlike us in that we do not suffer because of our claim to faith in Jesus Christ. I wonder if this difference is part of the reason why joy is not conspicuous among most of us Christians today. We keep looking for happiness, the chance favorable circumstance that brings momentary cheer. If we suffered a bit we might know a bit more about joy.
We share with these early Christians that if we live the life of faith in Jesus Christ we too may rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory—even though we do not face persecution. But we must give ourselves to the life of faith in spite of the fact that suffering does not goad us to it. I get the feeling God crafts XARA in us, and His tool is difficulty of one kind or another. It is hard to be steady in faithfulness to Jesus when it is so entirely optional, so totally lacking in any risk—other than to personal convenience. Nowadays the idea of expending some cost of inconvenience for the sake of our faith is perceived as extraordinary.
I sometimes wonder if it is possible to have this joy without some inconvenience, some element of suffering. How can our faith mean much to us if we identify with it so easily and loosely? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose book, The Cost of Discipleship I am now reading with one of you, discovered in the harsh climate for Christians in Nazi Germany, that grace, though free, was costly in its demands. Grace that we would accept without cost, cheap grace turns out to be not Christianity. It has the name, but none of the stuff of the way Jesus commanded. Christianity, as Bishop Westcott put it, becomes a euphemism, only a nice-sounding word.
Jesus said to those who follow Him, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” We are not Jesus’ friends if we don’t do what He commands. It seems to take suffering, or at least some inconvenience to help people realize whom they have in Jesus Christ. Obeying Jesus’ commands always seems more an imperative if it costs something to obey. Obeying Jesus commands is the key opening the lock on joy.
From what the New Testament tells us, the evidence of this joy is the litmus test of being a Christian. Some would be known as Christians for the intensity of their convictions about this or that. Some would be known as “proper” Christians. Christendom is criss-crossed with fingers pointing at others who call themselves Christians whose doctrines are not proper, whose morals, particularly sexual ones, defy the Bible’s teaching. A lot of people like to be identified as Christians by the display of bumper stickers or the use of pious vocabulary. But a clear distinguishing mark of the faith of Jesus Christ is this joy, “unspeakable and full of glory” that results from a life of obedience to Jesus’ commands.
It is hard to accept this in churches that take justification by faith alone seriously. It is hard to teach this because we have focused so hard on Paul’s reminder that it is “by grace we have been saved, through faith; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” But Paul goes on to remind us that we are saved for good works that God has before ordained that we should walk in them. There can be no works that please God if we do not accept the discipline of obedience to Jesus’ commands.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us that there is no faith where there is no obedience, and no obedience without faith. They are the warp and the weft result of being adopted into the family of God. And the clear evidence of lives of disobedience to Jesus’ commands is the absence of joy.
We read together from the Prophet Isaiah a bit earlier this morning. Somewhat earlier in the passage from which our Old Testament lesson came the prophet told his people, “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men learned by rote; therefore, behold, I will again do marvelous things with this people.” But first their wise men’s wisdom had to die. Those clever religious leaders had to be shut-up--who trotted out their commonsense feel-good advice that if they did their bad deeds in the dark God wouldn’t see them, and that they had the right to tell God, their heavenly Potter, how He should make them.
Isaiah goes on to write that it is the deaf, the blind, and “the meek that will obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.” There has always been a common element in popular but wrong religion. Whether in ancient Israel or in modern America, what grabs the popular mind, that brings teeming results, always misses the point of the way of God. Upstanding Judahites in Isaiah’s day would have protested against any suggestion that they followed a religion other than the Divinely revealed religion. They maintained the sacrifices and perhaps carried on other ceremonial functions. As Cardinal Ratzinger points out in his marvelous book, Introduction to Christianity, the religion of Israel was essentially a religion of faithful observance of the law. But it was possible to live a way of life totally at odds with the way God commanded, while maintaining the system of Temple sacrifices. The elite of society carried along this way unaware how distasteful to God they were. They trusted their prophets, after all.
But God found in the deaf, the blind, and the poor those who could receive His word. “In that day the deaf shall hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the poor among men shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.” He goes on to promise, “Jacob shall no more be ashamed . . . for when he sees his children, the work of my hands, in his midst, they will sanctify my name.”
The prophet Isaiah pointed at a way of life fulfilled in the life and promises and commands of Jesus. Sanctifying God’s name meant a way of life obedient to God in ways of worship and in ways of life. The plan of God had not yet unfolded with One who would be wounded for Israel’s transgressions, bruised for their iniquities—as we read in Isaiah 53. The finished work of grace; the gift of salvation received by faith was not yet understood. But the way of life was already there in Isaiah’s words to Israel.
We might say that Jesus calls us to sanctify His name by bearing the name Christian in such a way that we trust in Him for His forgiveness of our sin, and then proceed to obey His commands—proving to be His friends, and thus discover joy arising from within us—as individuals, and as a community that meets together to worship, and then, by the grace of God, as a world-wide communion, the Body of Christ. Oh, if it were only the distinguishing feature of the Church before the world, “Look at their joy!”
I remember that Jesus said, “If I be lifted up I will draw all people to myself.” How do we lift up Jesus? Not by saying His name loudly everywhere. Not by demanding external observances as a right in a pluralistic society. But by living together as Jesus’ friends, keeping His commands, and displaying the joy that is the inevitable consequence of living in trust and obedience to Jesus.
Two weeks ago we presented to you a plan for reaching the families of our area with the love of the Christ. If the joy of the Lord shines through us, we will succeed beyond our wildest dream. If it is evident that here people trust in Jesus, love one another as Jesus loves, serve one another as He served His disciples, and deal with one another’s faults tenderly with forgiveness, who will be able to resist what we will bring. But if we do not bring the way of joy, any amount of well-conceived programs will fail.
What does this say to you and to me? “Joy unspeakable and full of glory.” What a good ring that term has to it. It is ours if we trust Jesus fully, if we prove to be His friends, obeying His commands—and receiving joy, fullness of joy, joy unspeakable and full of glory.
Let us pray: O Lord, we bless you for your great kindness that you should be pleased to give us joy. Grant that we may receive your gift with hearts wide open to receive your Son, Jesus, to be His friends, doing as He commanded us. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at February 5, 2006 09:30 AM