John 15 is John’s record of a long last walk with Jesus just before He was arrested. On this walk, Jesus kept repeating Himself, saying the most important things to His closest friends:
-Remain in Me
-Ask in My Name
-Bear Much Fruit
-Love Each Other
-Remember Me/My Words
-Be Full of Joy
Jesus wanted His FAMILY of followers to be marked by FULLNESS of JOY! What is JOY and how do we get it. One of the older definitions of Joy gives us an idea of how to get it.
Joy = The anticipation of receiving or possessing what we love or desire the most.
C.S. Lewis stated it this way, “Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.”
How full of JOY are you right now?
What if unlimited JOY really was available to you?
Are you expecting to receive what you love the most?
Jesus delights in giving HIMSELF to us. Let’s come together Sunday ready to receive him.
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Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Scott Kindig
Series: A Journey Home
July 21, 2013
Remain at Home/Full Joy
John 15:9-17
This past week, I was part of a camp. Amongst the other crazy things that happened there, the things that were fun, we had a 60-year-old church planter who had planted a church in a trailer park in Denver, and he brought a lot of at-risk kids to camp, amidst having to have talks daily with different kids who were going to have to go home a little early if they didn’t understand how to be a healthy structure, inside-of-a-community kind of deal.
What happened was that loving pastor saw over half the kids he brought come to faith in Jesus that week. Man, praise the Lord. Pray for Pastor Mike in that trailer park in Aurora, Colorado. Halfway through the week, I started getting homesick. I was like, “Man, why do I want to go home so bad?” Of course, it was because Mama was at home, and I missed Mama. I missed Kim.
Then I missed you guys. I wanted to be back with you. There’s something about this body when it gathers that joy is released when we get together. It’s like oxygen in this place, and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s what draws people to Grace. It’s to be able to worship with you and to see your joy. They know there’s something behind that that’s not human, you know? It’s a beautiful thing, and it drives an awful lot of what we do and who we are and who we want to be.
I looked up a couple of definitions I want to share with you this morning. We’re going to look at John 15 in just a minute. We’ll pass out Bibles in just a minute. Before we do, I want to just share these definitions of home. Home is the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered. Why was I homesick? Because my affections are centered in that home. I love my wife. I love my kids.
Being away is not natural. They look at me when I leave and they say, “Why do you leave us?” I’m glad they don’t want me to leave them most of the time. There are those days where they probably say, “Could you take a long walk?” but in general, they want me to be with them, and I want to be with them. So home is the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.
Then joy is the anticipation of possessing that which you most love and desire. Have you ever been on the edge of getting something you really want and you’re just so giddy about it you just can’t contain yourself? It has to find physical expression somehow. When you’re joyful, what do you do? Do you laugh? If you’re a joyful laugher, let me see you. Okay. All right. There’s someone. When joy hits you, if you cry, let me see. Where are you? Okay. Well, pretty much a male and female split right there. That’s good. That’s interesting to note.
Well, if you’re from Atlanta, you know we used to be called Loserville in the sports world. That used to be our nickname. Then in the 90s, we came along. We tried to break that mold. Maybe you’ll remember some of these moments and where you were.
On September 18, 1990, there was this guy named Juan Antonio Samaranch. He was at an Olympic meeting in Tokyo. I remember having to wake up early or just stay up late. I can’t remember which one it was, but they were over there, and I know it was dark outside when the announcement came. This guy stood up. We were competing with some people who were favored in Canada, and in Athens, for an emotional favorite.
That guy stepped up to the podium, and he said, “The 1996 Olympic Games have been awarded to the city of…” and since Atlanta and Athens sounded similar, I think he just messed with us, “…At- Atlanta!” I remember going nuts! Do you remember that? Do you remember where you were?
I tell you where I was. I was lying in my bed, and I was tired, and I was asleep, but I woke up. Here’s what happened. He said, “The city of Atlanta.” I was sitting there, and Kim was sitting there, and she was like, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!” I was like, “I know! I know! I know!”
That week, we had just found out we were going to have our first baby boy. I looked at her, and I said, “I’m going to be able to take our boy to the Olympics.” She said, “Yeah, you are.” Watch how good God is. He multiplied that. By the time the Olympics got here, we had three boys we took to the Olympics. I’m not real sure how that happened. I kind of do.
Or maybe January 18, 1999. I bet none of you know why this is a big sports moment. The Vikings were playing against the Falcons in the NFC Championship, a team for 40 years that has had total inefficiency. We all knew going into that game that we were not going to win that game. We knew it wasn’t going to happen, but late in the fourth quarter, the Vikings kicker, who hadn’t missed a field goal in two years, kicked a field goal this far wide of the goal post. I remember watching that and thinking, “Wow, that’s crazy.”
Let me tell you where I was. I was on a ski trip with 400 students. That’s where I was. They were skiing on the mountain, and there was one of the lodges that somebody had a nine-inch, black-and-white TV. That’s the best I had. I was watching overtime, and the Falcons were driving. I remember sitting there the whole time so nervous, like waiting for the interception or the fumble. That’s what Falcons fans do. Something is going to go horrible.
I didn’t realize it, but I was holding my head just like this right now, and I was just waiting for the terrible thing to happen. The kicker came out on the field. His name was Morten Anderson. Here’s what the commentator said: “Morten Anderson’s field goal splits the uprights, and the Falcons are going to the Super Bowl!”
Now, with 400 kids and 800 other people around there looking into the nine-inch TV, it was a little more than pandemonium. It wasn’t this; it was like I was hugging people I didn’t know. They were hugging me. It was celebration. It was joy that had to find its expression in something physical, something beyond. It was nuts.
I remember leaving, and most of my kids were skiing and enjoying it. I remember running outside, looking for somebody I knew to celebrate with, like Jim Valvano did when his team won the NCAA. I couldn’t find anybody, so I just kept running. I had ski boots on, so it looked pretty awkward. But joy causes us sometimes to look awkward.
Then maybe you remember this. October 28, 1995. Yeah, you know. You know who it is. We can get this going right now, can’t we? This is a good thing. No championship had come to our city, and it was Game 6 against the Cleveland Indians. If you’re a real Braves fan, what you do is you turn down the FOX commentators who hate the Braves anyway, and you turn the radio up. At that time, we listened to Skip Caray.
As the fly ball went up in the air, I knew it wasn’t a homerun, and I knew Marquis Grissom was not going to miss that. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, “It’s going to happen!” I was thinking it was going to happen. He hadn’t caught the ball yet, so it wasn’t official. It was the moment of joy, that anticipation of having something you really desire and love.
Then that ball landed in his glove, and Skip Caray said, “Yes! Yes! Yes! The Atlanta Braves have given you a championship, Atlanta.” Do you remember that one? You should clap for the Braves. I mean, that’s crazy. You should do it. Fourteen division championships in a row and one World Series, really? Okay, that’s what we’re dealing with, but man, we celebrated in that moment. It was huge.
This week, when I began speaking to the kids in Colorado, I messed with them. I said, “I want to break us in a little bit. I want to break the ice. Here’s what I want y’all to do. I want you to put your arm up like this. Okay. Now I want you to do it like this. Okay. Now I want you to do it like this. Now I want you to do it like this. I want you to do it like this, and then I want you to do it like this.”
Then I said, “Okay, here’s we go. I started the war chant, and they went, “Oh, no.” I said, “That’s right. Your team is the Rockies. Y’all don’t play baseball.” I just think anytime you speak to a group of people you should win friends and influence people right up front. It’s a good thing. But those are joy-filled moments. I mean, it’s hard to root for your team and when they do well not just go nuts, isn’t it? It’s hard to do that.
Maybe for some of you, sports isn’t like a big deal, but maybe it’s the personal stuff. I remember standing like right up here to the side and looking back and a door swinging open on December 12, 1987. When that door swung open, there she was in that beautiful white gown, and she was my bride. It was just a few moments before she couldn’t back out of it anymore.
I looked at her. What grooms can do in that moment is anything, because nobody is watching you at all. I was thankful for that, because I was crying, and I was like, “Oh, I have to get it together. Okay. All right.” I did one of these, and then I was fine. Then more came out, and I was like, “Okay. All right. Here we go.”
Then I had to do it a third time. I had to do it three times. Then the pastor who was marrying us was a good friend, and he said something funny behind me, distracted me, and there she was. It was awesome. That was a joy-filled moment that found its expression in a physical behavior, and it changed me. It changed me.
Then I remember, for us, having our four kids. I remember the feel. Even as I sit here, I can remember how it felt, the feel of their skin the first time the doctor put them in our hands. I remember the look on Kim’s face when she said, “You need to look at the results of that home pregnancy test.” I remember the celebrations we had in our home.
Just there are things personally that when we see our kids do well, when we see them achieve their goals or accomplish things… I mean, nobody in the Kindig family had ever hit a home run out of the park. Several that people made errors and we ran all the way home kind of a thing, but never out of the park.
I remember sitting there watching Seth play baseball and having this prompt, “He’s about to hit this ball out of the park. He’s going to do it.” And then watching that pitch come and watching that ball fly and going, “How did I know he was going to do that?” I watched it go over the fence. It wasn’t just a home run; it was a grand slam. Isn’t that a good moment? Don’t you love that for your kids? Man, you’d love that for your kids. I do too.
But see, that leaves me asking this question…I wonder if joy like that, that seems to be circumstantial, is possible as a lifestyle? That’s what I wonder. I want not the perfect set of things to align and the right goal to be achieved. I’m glad when I have those joyful moments, but what I really want is a life so filled with joy that people who you hang out with walk away sort of just saturated with your joy explosions that happen all the time.
Have you ever had a bad day and then somebody with joy walks into the room and you just want to kill them? You know that. I want to be the guy you want to kill in the very best way possible. I think probably we all want that, but there are things that rob us of joy. Things like being at staff meeting on a Tuesday and having Gabe walk in and say, “Something’s really wrong with Dad,” and then finding out a few minutes later it’s an aortic aneurysm and it doesn’t look good.
In those moments, to have joy and to watch God take care of Buddy in that process was a joy-filled, tearful process back and forth. It was a trial, but I want joy in those moments too. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want joy to be because everything is going right for me. I want joy to be in spite of what’s going wrong for me. Yeah.
I want the Lord to work in such a rich way in me, and I’m so far from this goal. I want him to work in such a rich way in me that when everything is going wrong, people see this calm confidence and a little smile on our faces that says, “Hey, I know a God, and he has this no matter what the outcome is. He has it.”
Because you know a God who has this no matter what the outcomes look like. Because even in this world, if we lose everything, if we have Jesus, when we die, we win, and we win before we die, because when we have Jesus, heaven invades our lives and our hearts. It’s a beautiful thing. Joy is good, right? Joy is good. We want it, right?
Well, here’s good news. Jesus wants it too. We’re going to look at that in John 15:9-17. If you need a Bible, the guys are coming. They’re going to grab these carts. They have been practicing at the Atlanta Braves’ stadium. If you need one, you hold your hand up. They’ll throw it just like the peanut vendor. Just guard the people around you when it comes to you, and it’ll be great. That would be more joyful wouldn’t it then calmly handing it down? It’s like, “Okay, stand up and catch that puppy, and protect the people around you.”
So what is joy? Remember our definition? Joy is the anticipation of possessing that which you most desire and love. So how do you get it? John 15:9-17 is going to tell us how to get it. The best news is that Jesus wants to give it to us. So far, as we’ve come to John 15, here’s what we’ve learned. In our journey home, we’ve discovered we have a good home that he’s gone to prepare a place for us.
We have a great Dad who we can trust, and we can talk about anything for him. As a matter of fact, he reserves a place for us at his table, and he lets us ask for anything in his name, and he says he’ll do it when we ask for it in his name. This week, he wants to remind us two basic things to remain with him. Once he has won us, he wants us to remain with him. That’s what he’s about to tell his disciples. He has been in the upper room. He has had the Last Supper. He has spoken with them. He said, “Let’s get up and go.”
The last couple of weeks, we’ve been in John 15, where we learn we can’t bear any fruit apart from him. We can do nothing without him, and he wants us to remain in him. Then he says, “I also want you to remain at home. Be at home in me.” Then he gives us the kicker. “I don’t want you just to be at home, but while you’re at home, I want you to be full to overflowing with joy.” Are you ready to take the journey home? Are you ready to go get joy? Let’s go get it. It’s in this passage, so let’s read this passage together and receive the incredible gift of full joy.
Here we go. John 15:9: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide [Remain] in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide [remain] in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide [remain] in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that…” That’s the purpose clause. “… my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Or complete depending on the translation you’re looking at.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” Then he tells us how to do that. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.” (John 15:9-17)
All right, now I want to invite you to do two things with me. I want to invite you to go back and map this passage. Let’s look at where Jesus is saying joy is and how we can make our way there, and then I want us to look at specific ways we can walk out of here and imagine a joy-filled life spilling out on the people around us.
Then beyond that, I want us to imagine as a community what it would be like if joy invaded this room in such a way that over the course of this day, 3,000 to 3,500 people walk out into this community and spill it out on everybody. Can you guys take that journey with me and imagine those two things? Are you ready to go? All right, let’s do it.
1. Remain. Back at verse 9, Jesus wants us to remain. He wants us to receive joy, and the first pathway we have to stop by to get there is to remain. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide [Remain] in my love.” (John 15:9)
Now he provided a home. He’s a great Dad we can trust enough to talk to. He made a place for us at his table, and he wants us to stay with him. What he wants to become for you and me is our home. He wants the thing we miss when we’re not with him is a home in him. We have a home in him, and he wants us to remain in him.
Now what does it mean to remain? Did any of you ever get in trouble as a kid? I’m sure none of you did. Was it just me in Tennessee? Just Tennessee folks. If you got in trouble with your mom, here’s what my mom did. She would get angry at something I did, and it was purely my fault, not her fault. But then she would chase me.
If somebody chases you, what are you going to do? Run! That’s right. When Mom would chase me, I would run, and it would make her madder. I wanted to say, “I won’t run if you don’t chase me! I’m 7 years old. Give me a break.” She would say, “Stand there and take it like a man.” I remember hearing her say that. “I’m 7! What do you want me to do? If you chase me, I’m going to run. It’s the natural fight-or-flight syndrome. Fighting wouldn’t be good, so I’m flight-ing. That’s what I’m going to go do.”
Then even when she would catch me, she would say, “Let me tell you something right now. I love you, and this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” You believe that, right? She would reach back, and I would even try to run from the spanking. You know how they would start to swing and you would start to try to move out of the path of it. That would make her even more angry. I was like, “I can’t win here. You chase me and I run. You try to hit me and I try to swing out of the path, and I get in more trouble. It’s just horrible.”
Did any moms ever do that in this room? No. See, you’re not going to raise your hand. That’s good. Husbands, do your wives do that? No, I’m just kidding. Husbands, don’t do it. Don’t raise your hand. It’d be a long day.
But here’s the deal. Jesus didn’t want fear to motivate us as his followers. He wanted love to motivate us. That’s why he said, “As the Father has loved me, I have loved you. Now remain in my love.” He’s such a good God that we don’t want to run from him when he comes running toward us.
When he comes running toward us, it’s to receive us, like a father receiving a prodigal. We should run right back to him, at him, so this holy collision takes place, and he snaps you up and holds onto you, and everybody around you sees you don’t run from your Dad; you run to your Dad. When you get there, you want to stay with him. You want to remain with him.
When you got married, it wasn’t just really all about the ceremony, was it? No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t about, “Hey, come into a room, stand in front of everybody, and before God commit yourself forever to someone, and then once you leave the room, just go do whatever you want to. Don’t ever see each other ever again.” That would be crazy for a marriage to take place like that.
What Jesus is saying is, “I want a covenant relationship with you where the way the Father loved me, I’ve loved you, and you love me the way I love the Father. So now you can’t stand to be away from me. You can’t stand to reject me. You always want to be in my presence.”
I can’t help but think in marriages even around this room and in our community that if we learned how to stick with and remain in the love of Jesus and rest there that that would train us, everything we needed to do, to stay committed to our spouses and to love them no matter what. Joy is the fuel of endurance, and it’s the fuel of the Christian life.
That’s why in Nehemiah 8:10 it says, “The joy of the Lord is my…” What? Strength. Now say it like it’s strength. The joy of the Lord is my strength. It’s your strength. The joy of the Lord is your strength. The reason we want joy in the Lord is because it helps us in a world filled with trouble and calamity and Tuesday morning staff meetings where you find out that one of your mentors and one of your idols is in danger.
It’s the joy of the Lord that gets you through those moments. Amen? Am I alone? Okay, amen. It’s the joy of the Lord that gets you through those moments. It’s knowing he has it under control, and even if the outcomes we don’t want happen that he’s still in control and we’re going to receive from him our greatest desire, continuing relationship with Jesus.
You can be with Jesus forever and every morning still receive more of him. Do you agree with that? Because if you don’t, that’s one of the ways the enemy is going to steal your joy. It’s like, “Oh, well, this gets boring.” It doesn’t get boring. It gets more and more and more satisfying. The joy of the Lord is our strength.
2. Obey. This one is from verse 10. We have to move from remain, which sounds like a decent thing, and then we have to go to the second word in verse 10, obey. How many of you, it’s always good news when somebody looks at you and says, “I expect you to obey me”? Do you like that? How many of your kids love it when you look at them and say, “You’d better obey”? Is that good news to you?
Jesus is looking and saying with a heart of, “Remain and stick with me, trust me. I’ve loved you the way my Father loved me. I’m teaching you how to love me back, and if you trust me and if you love me (verse 10), if you keep my commandments, you will remain and abide in my love just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain and abide in his love.”
Now Jesus has done this twice now. In verses 9 and 10, he asked them to do something, and he said, “Just like I’ve done with you. I want you to remain in me the way I remained in my Father and I remained in his love. I want you to remain in me and remain in my love.” Then he says, “I want you to keep the commandments just the way I kept the commandments of my Father.” He was the perfect role model for these eleven ragtag guys at this point on the walk.
He is talking to them, saying, “Everything I’m asking you to do, I’m not just asking you to do it now; I showed you how to do it. You got to walk with me, and you got to talk with me and ask questions. When I would teach the crowds, you pulled away with me.” According to Mark 4:34, he explained everything to them that they would ask him when he was alone with the Twelve. He showed them how to do it. He taught them how to do it. They had the perfect model to imitate.
Did any of you ever have an older sibling that when you were growing up your parents thought they were perfect? Okay, that’s good. Any of you same people have a younger sibling who was just the baby of the family who everybody just loved? Okay, so those of us caught in the middle, it’s like, “Okay, well, I can’t be perfect like him, and everybody just automatically loves goofball over there, so I’m stuck in the middle.”
Jesus is the firstborn of the new creation, and he’s like our older brother who did everything perfect, only you don’t want to hate him. Why? Because he didn’t tear up your stuff growing up like your sibling did. Why? Because he lived out the perfect life and showed us what it looked like to have joy and to spread joy. It was an easy thing.
If we trust him and we keep his commandments…watch this…it means not just, “I love you and I want to remain in your love,” but, “I know you know what’s right in every situation, so I’m actually going to do my best with your power to keep your commandments. Why? Because you know better than I do.”
How many of you could say to God this morning he knows better than us? Yeah. How many of you think he’s much more fit to run your life than you are? Yeah. Have you seen how we run our lives? I mean, really? Have you seen how tired we are? Have you seen how worn out we are? Have you seen how many times we hurt the people we care about? We’re much better letting him run our lives than we are running our lives on our own.
When he says, “Remain in me,” it’s for the purpose of keeping his commandments as a demonstration of our love for him. Does that make sense? If you have kids, you want your kids to obey you not only when you’re physically in the room, right? You hope to hear from other people in other places, “Hey, when they’re not with you, they’re the most respectful, kind, amazing kids ever.” I know as a parent, what you look back at them and think is the same thing I do when somebody says that to you, “Why don’t they do that at home?”
But in reality, we take more pleasure in seeing they actually are doing the right things when we’re not physically in the room making sure they do the right things, because then we know they get it. What Jesus was saying is, “I want to see that you get it. Don’t just remain in my love, but let that love cause you to trust me enough to obey my commands.”
3. Love. He does a trick on us here. He jumps down to verse 12, and then we come back to verse 11. So if you remain and you obey, then he gives us verse 12. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) Now that’s a pretty simple statement, isn’t it? That’s a pretty simple statement.
So, “Remain in me. Obey my commands. Now here’s the command. This is it.” He has already told them to love him and remain in him and remain in his love. So the command is this, “Love each other the way I loved you.” Do you know what that formula is for? The formula of remaining in Christ, keeping his commandments, and loving other people, that’s the formula for joy. That’s what he’s saying.
If you want a joy-filled life, these three things will be part of your existence. If we don’t know how to love each other, then that’s what verses 13-17 are for. That’s where he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) What does it mean to love someone else? You lay down your life, you lay down your preferences, for the benefit of someone else.
It’s what Bharat does in Kosovo. He lays down whatever selfish human desires he has to remain in the love of Christ, to obey his commandments, and to spread the love of Christ to those who are around him. It’s what we try to do on a weekly basis in our neighborhoods, on our kids’ ball teams, in extracurricular activities, at work, all those sorts of things. We try to do that. We want to do that. We long to do that. It’s Jesus’ nature in us to do it.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Friends is a new title, by the way. Keep reading. “You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you…” He’s talking to his Eleven, and since John included it here, he’s talking to us too. “…servants…” (John 15:14) “You’re not like a servant of my Dad’s business who comes and draws a paycheck and then goes home and does what he wants to because he has to in order to get the benefits. That’s not what you are. You’re a friend.”
What does it mean to be a friend? “You’re friends if you do what I command you.” “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing…” The servant doesn’t understand the Father’s business. He just comes and does his task, gets his paycheck, and goes home. So the servant doesn’t understand what his master is doing, “…but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (John 15:14-15)
“Everything he taught me, I freely gave you.” That’s what Jesus is saying. “So if you remain in my love and you obey, you keep my commands and love one another, then you look like me, and the joy I have becomes a part of your life.” Servants work for a payoff; friends know the Father’s business.
What’s the Father’s business? Look at verse 16, where it says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide [remain, last]… (John 15:16) It’s lasting fruit. It’s not like Atlanta wins the World Series in ’95 and we really didn’t win anything else; it’s like an abiding, constant awareness of the incredible benefit and blessing of grace in your life when your sins got paid for by a Savior who had no sin and made a relationship with God possible.
His resurrection made new life possible to you. When he ascended and sent the Holy Spirit, that life comes alive inside of you, and guess what? The Holy Spirit is the One from the inside out who gives believers inexpressible, outrageous and contagious joy. He wants you to have it and he wants me to have it.
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” (John 15:16) Do you know what the formula for getting what you pray for is? Find out what God wants and pray for that. When you find out what God wants and you begin to pray for that, even that prayer or conversation/communication begins to change your heart.
Listen. God will supernaturally reach in and change your circumstances, but he doesn’t do it every time because some people don’t have their trials released. What he wants in us is a joy that lasts even through that, but he can supernaturally change your circumstances at any moment he chooses to. So we want to pray knowing and understanding.
We want to bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? It means to make disciples. We want to bear fruit that remains. We want to do the Father’s business. We want to make disciples. We want to plant churches. We want to go to Kosovo. We want our lives to be a mission field, and we want to pray and play and rest and work harder than anybody on the planet. Don’t you want to do all four of those things well? The Lord wants us to do those well, and when we do, joy will be spilling on everybody around us.
Then he says in 17, “These things I command you, so that you will love one another.” (John 15:17) What is his command? To love one another. Why does he want us to know that command? Because he already said he wants us to obey the commands, and that’s part of remaining and abiding in him. Then in verse 11, this is the kicker.
4. Joy. “These things I have spoken to you, that…” That’s the purpose clause of this whole section of Scripture. “…my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15:11) I want you to hear what he’s saying to you and me. He doesn’t want it to be optional that we have joy; he wants it to be automatic that we have joy.
He doesn’t want our circumstances to determine when we get joy, even though it’s great to celebrate the home run when your kid hits it, or the good grade, or the perfect score at a band competition. Those things are wonderful to do, but when those things aren’t coming and when the trial and the temptation are on top of you and that joy still spills out of you, the world looks at us and says, “I cannot possibly understand those people.”
Now I want to tell you something about my previous life. There was a nine-year stretch where part of my job was to go to Georgia churches (about 3,600 churches in Georgia) and to preach. I remember coming back from several of those first ones and asking them, “Are you sending me to the churches as the new guy and the young guy that nobody else wants to go to? What are you doing? Because if the joy of the Lord is their strength, nobody has notified these people’s faces. I’d like to see evidence of that joy.”
Literally, I’d sit in some churches where every man in the church was sitting back with his arms folded like this. “Go ahead and bless me if you think you can, punk.” It’s kind of a Clint Eastwood attitude about sermon delivery. It was intimidating. I remember looking out and seeing and thinking, “If the expression of joy this community sees is represented accurately by this room, O my Lord, please do your work.”
But that’s what I want to tell you. I want to brag on you. When I meet new people who come to Grace for the first time, one of the things they comment about is, “Coming to Grace is like getting fresh oxygen, because those people don’t just sing songs and listen and walk out. They worship. They engage with a God they obviously believe is there and who they love. It’s very obvious.” It’s the oxygen. Oxygen is the fuel for fire, and fire brings revival. That’s what we want to see happen. The Lord giving you joy and you expressing joy is amazing.
Listen to these four verses that are real popular that have joy in them and see if you can think of what they have in common. “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds…” (James 1:2) That’s James writing to a church beginning to feel persecution.
Again, Peter doing the same thing in 1 Peter 1:8, where he says, “Though you have not seen him, you love him…” (1 Peter 1:8) Peter is saying, “I saw him. I walked with him.” The people he was talking to here, “You may not have.” “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy…” (1 Peter 1:8)
You didn’t get to see Jesus walking around the way Peter did, but your joy is inexpressible and full. When I hear your voices bouncing off of this roof because of the joy that’s in your heart in Jesus, I can’t tell you as a pastor what that does for my heart. I love to sit at an angle where I can watch you worship, and God fuels my worship by seeing your joy.
Nehemiah 8:10 we’ve already mentioned. “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” That came right after the rediscovered the Law. They’d been away from it for years. Ezra opened the Book and began to read, and people with no music and with no fog and with no lights and with no amplifier began to stand up and lift their hands because they had the Word again. They got on their faces and they prayed because they had been without Word, and they received what their heart anticipated possessing and what they loved the most.
Hebrews 12:1-3: This is about Jesus. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” (Hebrews 12:1-3)
Joy is the fuel for your endurance in the faith. Why? Because in this world there is trouble. Spurgeon summarized it this way. “The chief aim of man is to glorify God and enjoy him…” How long? “…forever.” C. S. Lewis said it this way, “Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify him, God is inviting us to enjoy him.”
So what is it? It’s the anticipation of possessing what you love and desire the most. You want joy? You want to remain, obey, and love one another, and have the purpose clause of your life be so that your joy can be complete? How does that happen? Desire Jesus more than anything else.
As a matter of fact, you can’t love your wife and your family, your spouse and your family the way you can unless Jesus is first. When you do that, you love your family best, you love your friends best, you love your mission best. Joy is the fuel of our endurance. Even Matthew 24:13 said this, “…but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13) Joy has to be the fuel that gets us there.
I want to challenge you to do a few things this week. Maybe these are things you could personally consider. Read John 15:1-17 with your family at some point this week at the table, or with some friends. Either one. Just read it out loud and just let the joy of God, the remaining in him, just saturate your heart and your environment and your mind.
Pay for something for somebody today. Find some way to sneak somebody a blessing they’re not expecting. Even if it’s cleaning their room or letting them have something that’s yours they like. Figure out a way to extravagantly bless somebody today, and watch joy invade your world. Dance with your spouse. Go turn some music on and go to a room by yourselves and just hold each other and dance. Or dance with your kids. All of you. Just sit around and goof around and dance with your kids.
Maybe you could call an old friend just to catch up and say, “Hey, I was thinking about you today, and the memory of you brought joy to my heart. So I just want to hear how you are doing. How are you doing?” Those are a few practical ways you could do that. If you want some others, page 82 of the A Journey Home guide has some other ideas in there, and it’s on the white sheet, I believe, of what you guys have as well.
But what if we could imagine, what if we could cast vision for a minute as a community? What would it look like if we imagined churches in this community where “Love one another” was the theme and not just a memory verse for the kids? Wouldn’t that be a cool thing for the believers in this part of Gwinnett County all to say, “That’s my life theme, to love other people”? Imagine a community dotted with homes where husbands loved their wives as Christ loved the church. Wouldn’t that be an amazing difference maker, with the joy of God spilling out?
Imagine, again, what would happen in one week if everybody here treated everybody we came into contact with just for one week as if they were so valuable that Christ died for them. Wouldn’t that be cool…3,000 people walking into other people’s lives? Imagine what would happen in our culture if thousands of teenagers abandoned the lies the world tells them about purity and said, “Do you know what? Even in my romantic relationships, I’m going to have joy and love the person I’m dating the way Jesus would…purely.”
Imagine what would happen if for three months we managed all of our resources as a church and as individual families as if everything belonged to God and it was given to us to share his love effectively with the world. What if we harnessed all of that potential and said to God, “Lord, we’re going to tackle these things, I’m going to tackle these things”? Wouldn’t it be amazing to just watch how much joy invades the communities we live in because God’s people left this place and other houses of worship regularly with joy ready to just spill out on everybody?
That may not result in the Atlanta Braves winning the World Series. “Lord, come, okay?” It may not result in that. It may not result in everybody in the community going, “Yeah!” but we’re looking for the joy that’s a lifestyle. The good news is Jesus stands ready right now this moment to give it to you if you ask for it. Will you ask for anything in his name? He just said, “I want you to have my joy and I want it to be full in you.” Are you ready to ask him for joy?
Has life gotten you down? Circumstances tough? Some of the people I prayed for after the first service, circumstances are tough. Through tears, they cried that the Lord would give them joy in the midst of the crisis. We prayed that God would change their circumstances miraculously. But we want both, don’t we? So let’s ask him. Pray with me.
Lord, we want your joy. This journey home is really a journey to joy, because you have given us a good home. You are a great Dad we can trust and talk to anything about. You make a place for us at your table that we could remain and abide with you, and you let us ask for anything in your name. But Lord, then you told us what to ask for. You said you want to give us joy, so Lord, this morning, we pray you would supernaturally spiritually give us joy. Give me joy.
If you’re sitting there right now, and you’re thinking, “I want that,” just kind of reach your hands out as if you’re receiving a gift, and say, “Lord, give me joy. I want to receive it, and I want to deflect it to everybody in my world.”
So Lord, as we worship now with our resources, let’s just imagine we’re going to use these resources in a way that spreads your love to the whole world.
As we continue to worship and respond to God, wherever you are, wherever he’s ministering to you, just reach out like you’re receiving a gift, and ask for the joy of Jesus to invade your soul.
So Lord, we ask it now, in Jesus’ name, amen.