True Hope: Journey to Joy

Just for a moment, I’d like you to think about joy, which is the theme of the third week of Advent.

When was the last time you felt a deep sense of joy?

Who is the most joyful person you know?

Now, think about your perception of God. Would you use “joyful” to describe him?

Lots of people imagine that God is dour, stern, and generally not joyful. Sometimes, we even think that God forbids fun.

But Micah says that God “delights in steadfast love” (7:18). And as we finish reading the words of this prophet, we will see that his journey from woe to joy was anchored in the truth that God is in himself the source of true joy.

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Grace Fellowship Church

Jon Stallsmith

Series: True

December 14, 2014

True Hope: Journey to Joy

Micah 7

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and open them to Micah 7, and we’ll get to that passage in just a moment. If you don’t have a Bible, you can slip up your hand, and we have some folks who will give you a Bible so you can read along with us. Also you can get a sheet for notes.

Yes, as we’ve been reading through these Prophets, where we started, if you remember way back to the end of August actually, it was in Amos 7 with this vision that God gives to the prophet Amos. He says, “Amos, what do you see?” Amos sees a vision of a man standing on a wall holding up one of these. It’s a plumb line. Of course, an ancient tool used for measuring what was truly vertical in construction.

Amos sees this guy standing on the wall holding the plumb line up to the wall, and the meaning of the vision is that God is coming alongside the wall, which is really the lives the people of God have been building, and he’s just holding up truth, what is truly upright, the upright way of life against that wall to reveal any places that are crooked or off kilter.

So we’ve been taking that as a lens for reading these Prophets, the words of these prophets, as they relay to us the true words of God, the true heart of God. What does God’s true love look like, as we saw in Hosea? What does true justice look like, as we saw in Amos? Now we’ve been reading through Micah. What is true hope from God really like?

We’ve been holding up this plumb line of the words of the prophets, the words of God to our own lives. It has been a really rich time for me. As Aaron and Michael mentioned this morning, it’s the third Sunday of Advent. Advent means arrival. It’s the church season that historically has been observed by believers everywhere in advance of Christmas. It’s a preparation of the heart to celebrate the arrival or advent of Jesus on Christmas.

The third week is traditionally the week of joy, and there’s an interesting thing, because as I’ve been remembering what we have studied through the Prophets to this point and been thinking about this upright way and then in terms of joy, as we’ll see in Micah 7, I realize that oftentimes there seems to be a pretty big split or divide in many of us as we think about God’s upright way and what’s really fun or joyful.

Maybe a good example of this is maybe sometimes you’ll be talking to college students. I’ve heard a number of college students say this. They say, “I will figure out the God stuff later. Right now I just want to have fun.” Have you guys heard that? We articulate that in a lot of different ways, but there’s this idea that, “At some point, yeah, we’re going to get serious, but right now go have fun,” as though the two are totally divided from one another.

In fact, I shared this opinion when I was graduating from college and I was coming down here to interview with Buddy Hoffman, who started this church 30 years ago. This was 10 years ago that I was coming down here to interview with Buddy for an intern-level position, to live in his basement, make a pittance, and learn about God, serve the church, and all the rest. This was before we had begun planting churches down in Midtown, Grace Monroe, Grace Athens, way before Grace New Hope up the road and everything.

So we’re sitting there and closing the deal down in the basement with Buddy, and I said, “Buddy, this all sounds really good. I’d love to live in this basement, and I like the guys who live here. I think this could be a good year for me, but I’m a little concerned because I’m single, I’m in my 20s, and I really want to have some adventures, and I’m pretty concerned that working at a church I will not find any adventures,” because that was what was in my mind. “Yeah, this is the church world over here. It’s very upright. But over here is adventurous.”

I still remember Buddy just sat back in his seat and chuckled like he does. “Heh, heh, heh. Yes, I think we can find some adventures for you.” It’s true. Since that time, our life has been almost a nonstop adventure of traveling and seeing God work all around the world and seeking what God is doing in these schools and even this last year, the great adventure of Buddy going up to New Hope and leading there, planting that church, and me increasing my responsibility to lead here. All of this has been a massive adventure.

But there’s sometimes this split in our thinking, like, “Over here is the upright way of God and over here is fun, adventure, and joy,” like that. This morning, what we’re going to see is that actually upright doesn’t mean uptight. Okay? In fact, the way to really live joyfully is here in the upright ways of God. If the wall of your life you’re building is off kilter, it is weak and it is stressed. All fall, we’ve been looking at what are the places in our lives that are weak and stressed because we’re off kilter, and what does it look like to build the upright way?

Jesus is the perfect example of how joy and uprightness come together. Hebrews 1:9 is a beautiful verse. It says Jesus loved righteousness and hated wickedness. So he’s fully upright in all of his ways. Therefore God, your God, has anointed him with the oil of gladness above all of his companions, all of his brothers.

What it’s saying is that Jesus in his love of righteousness, in his upright living, was anointed with the oil of gladness above everybody else. That word for gladness is one of the strongest words in the Greek language to speak of happiness, joy, real deep joy. I wonder, is that what comes to your mind when you think of Jesus? “Boy, he was a blast to hang out with! He was just a joyful man.” That’s what Hebrews is saying and Hebrews is saying it’s linked directly to his uprightness.

It’s interesting because it’s a quotation from Psalm 45, this whole idea of the oil of gladness, anointed with the oil of gladness. So the author of Hebrews is taking from Psalm 45 and applying it to Jesus to describe Jesus. There in Psalm 45, that psalm if you remember, is a psalm all about a wedding day and the beauty of a wedding day. The original context of that line is about a groom on the weeding day who is so excited to get married. That’s the level of joy, that’s the level of gladness that marked Jesus’ life throughout.

Of course, yes, he was a man of sorrows. He had hard days. He had days when his heart was grieved or he felt compassion for the brokenness of the city, but overarching all, deep down his baseline disposition was profoundly glad. So as we’ve been thinking about joy and gladness and getting ready to dive into Micah 7, I was studying unfettered gladness, joy. What really brings joy to our hearts?

As I was at my desk and I was poring over the commentaries and riffling through the lexicons, I discovered another resource that could be helpful…YouTube. I got on YouTube this week, and I found a few video clips that I think may be helpful as we get going on this discussion of joy. So we’re going to watch four or five of these. Go ahead, guys, you can roll them. They’re just short little clips.

[Video clips showing babies laughing]

Oh, man. Laughter. Oh, that’s such good, good medicine for the soul. I was thinking, “When was the last time I laughed just as freely as one of those little kids?” It’s beautiful. So I was at YouTube, and you know how YouTube can kind of be a black hole, so you get in there and start watching laughing baby videos, and you’re cracking up. You’re having a good time. Three hours later, you’re going, “Oh hey, I still have to write a sermon.” Which I did, by the way. I have one.

Then I had an idea. I was like, “This is interesting. I wonder if there are as many videos of older people laughing?” So I started looking for adults laughing, grownups laughing, old people laughing, like that, and I didn’t really find anything except for this one video of kind of a strange older gentleman. The camera was straight on, and he just sat down in a chair and laughed maniacally into the camera. I thought, “This black hole! I have to get out of this black hole. I don’t know what’s going on here.”

But it’s an interesting illustration, isn’t it? For children and for babies often laughter is just a natural response and pretty simple. Tear a piece of paper, have your dog eat a bubble, and it’s like the funniest thing in the world. But then as life goes on and the cares of the world begin to press in and we have more responsibility and we’re more aware of hardship and tragedy hits our lives in various ways, sometimes it seems like a world weariness can begin to overshadow or even smother that pure laughter God put in the hearts of human beings from the very beginning.

It’s a shame. So I think we’ve all probably been in that place where joy seems pretty far way. It seems really distant. Whether it’s because we’ve bought into this unbiblical split between upright and over here, this is where the real fun is, and we’ve found out this is not that satisfying apart from God, or maybe we’ve tried to live our lives as uprightly as possible, but we’ve turned into pretty uptight people. “I love God and I’m joyful! Praise God.” You’ve met people like that, where you go, “Are you really joyful? Because your face is communicating something different.”

Maybe you’re in that spot where there is the care of the world and the tragedy of the world and the hardship of the world pressing in, and joy is elusive. No matter where we might be starting or at what point we might be starting, Micah in Micah 7 is in that same place.  He begins with that world weariness, a real woe as he looks at the world around him. Joy is elusive at the beginning of Micah 7, but Micah takes a journey from that place toward wonder and real joy in the Lord.

So if you’re the kind of person who sometimes is predisposed to get into these cycles of negativity or you’re even wrestling with depression or you’re just struggling with discovering joy, I would actually highlight or underline Micah 7. It’s a great chapter of the Bible to read through and take the journey with Micah from that place of woe to a place of joy.

So we’re going to unpack this a little bit this morning, and really I think some of the greatest fruit from this passage may even come in your own time in your own meditation and study as you read this and let it saturate your souls, but hopefully we’ll get started on it. Now Micah 5 is where we were last week. We saw that beautiful prophecy of the Messiah who will be born in Bethlehem, and he will be a Shepherd to his people. He will be their peace. Beautiful note of hope. Beautiful pattern of the way God brings peace in Micah 5.

In Micah 6, the prophet is back to identifying some of the problems that are going on in the world, the way the people are running away from God. We’ve heard a lot of that through this study of the Prophets in the fall. Then of course there’s the great passage, Micah 6:8. “He has told you, O man, what is good and what God desires from you. To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord your God.” A very powerful verse. In fact, we started our study of Micah with Buddy sharing from that passage.

But then we get to Micah 7, and he’s in this place of woe. So we’re going to start these first six verses. This is Micah 7:1. Micah says, “Woe is me! For I have become as when the summer fruit has been gathered, as when the grapes have been gleaned: there is no cluster to eat, no first-ripe fig that my soul desires.

The godly has perished from the earth, and there is no one upright among mankind; they all lie in wait for blood, and each hunts the other with a net. Their hands are on what is evil, to do it well; the prince and the judge ask for a bribe, and the great man utters the evil desire of his soul; thus they weave it together.” (Micah 7:1-3) It’s a picture of the conspiracy of the powerful, the princes, the judges, the great leaders of the community all working together to take advantage of the people.

Verse 4: “The best of them is like a brier, the most upright of them a thorn hedge. The day of your watchmen, of your punishment, has come; now their confusion is at hand. Put no trust in a neighbor; have no confidence in a friend; guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your arms; for the son treats the father with contempt, the daughter rises up against her mother, the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; a man’s enemies are the men of his own house.” (Micah 7:4-6)

This is a woeful situation. Micah is looking around, and he is not happy. Look at this first little illustration. He compares himself to a field that has been harvested and there’s no fruit anywhere in the field. So he’s dealing with this sense of disappointment because he has this picture of walking in, looking for anything that will satisfy, looking for something that would bring a little bit of sweetness to life and can’t find it.

Remember he’s referencing the ancient tradition among the Jewish community. Even if you were harvesting your field, you wouldn’t harvest everything out of the field. You’d leave some of the edges, and there’d be some fruit and stuff left over so the poor could walk through and find at least something, something that would bring some sweetness, maybe a fig or maybe a little bit of a grape or something like that.

Micah is saying, “Here’s what my life feels like. It feels like I’m walking through, I’m poor, and I’m just hoping to find some little fragment of sweetness, and I can’t even find that. On top of that, the whole society around me feels like it’s consumed with violence. There’s no justice. If I get abused, nobody is going to take care of me. There’s no honor here.”

He even says there’s no trust. He says, “Put no trust in a neighbor,” verse 5. He says things have broken down so badly, you can’t even trust your own wife, the person who’s in your arms at night. Don’t speak too loosely to your son. These family relationships are breaking down. This is a serious moment of woe. Micah is down. He is not joyful in this moment. He’s actually very honest about his situation. This is important because in the journey to joy, starting at a place of honesty is incredibly significant.

For example, sometimes we have these conversations. I do this myself. I come in, and I am talking, and I know my life is a mess, and people ask me, “How’re you doing?” I’ll say, “I’m fine.” I’m not fine! Like maybe Amy and I just had a disagreement. Or maybe something is not going well at work at the church or something like that. That happens from time to time at Grace, even though you may imagine Grace to be this utopian staff where everything runs smoothly. No, stuff is challenging and there’s friction. Everybody is passionate.

Or maybe it’s something deeper. The problem is, and this is especially something in the suburbs… You just drive through neighborhoods and you can see this happen. We become really good at maintaining perfectly manicured lawns even when the house is a mess. Or maybe we become really good at having a very clean entrance room, but the bedrooms are trashed. See, we’ve become experts at mitigating how much of my mess you will be permitted to see. We live an insulated life. As long as we can deal with all this stuff over here, then…

That’s just wrong. What we need is to be able to be honest. “Yeah, this is a mess. Yeah, that’s not going well. Yeah, I’m actually in a state of woe. I’m not going to put on this happy, joyful face of denial.” Godly joy is not denial. Often godly joy is defiant in the face of the mess. It’s looking at it, going, “This is a mess, but I know God is going to help me.”

This is where Micah begins shifting. He starts off in this place of woe, but then in the next step of his journey, listen to this. We’ll read the next several verses. In verse 7, Micah says, “But as for me, I will look to the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication. Then my enemy will see, and shame will cover her who said to me, ‘Where is the Lord your God?’ My eyes will look upon her; now she will be trampled down like the mire of the streets.

A day for the building of your walls! In that day the boundary shall be far extended. In that day they will come to you, from Assyria and the cities of Egypt, and from Egypt to the River, from sea to sea and from mountain to mountain. But the earth will be desolate because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their deeds.

Shepherd your people with your staff, the flock of your inheritance, who dwell alone in a forest in the midst of a garden land; let them graze in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old.” (Micah 7:7-14) You might remember from Amos, Bashan was a very fruitful region that made some hefty heifers.

Here’s what happens. Micah is in this place of woe, but then he turns, and the next step is stepping into waiting on the Lord. What do you do on that journey toward joy from the place of woe? The crucial element is waiting on God. In general, we don’t like waiting. We don’t like to wait in line. We don’t like to wait for food too long. We don’t even like to wait for our phone to load an app. “I just wasted three seconds waiting for my emails. I need to upgrade.”

We don’t like waiting, but throughout the Bible learning how to wait actively is one of the essential skills of cultivating and maintaining joy, even in the midst of woeful surroundings. The words Micah uses. He says, “I will look to the Lord.” That word look in Hebrew has this idea of very much climbing a tower and scouring the horizon to see if there is any sign of God’s help. Like, “I am actively looking to the Lord.”

Then he says, “I will wait for the God of my salvation.” That word is kind of the same word as a hope. It’s a confident expectation. It’s tenaciously enduring and expectantly waiting on God. So what we see is when Micah talks about waiting, he’s not just talking about this passive thing, sitting in a chair, laughing maniacally and twiddling his thumbs. He’s talking about something that can be done.

There are several words in Hebrew that are used for waiting on God. One of the words is not used here, but one of the most common words for waiting on the Lord in the Hebrew language literally means to be bound together, to be pulled together like that. It’s the same word that’s used to describe at the scene of creation at the beginning of Genesis when God gathers together the waters to reveal dry land. Okay, so this idea of waiting on God is somehow being bound together. What does that mean?

When it’s used to describe waiting on God, it’s this idea of just gathering up all of ourselves, our cares and our worries, our responsibilities, all of the woes and all of the rest and binding them to the Lord, going up to God and saying, “I’m waiting on you,” with a big hug. Everything is in there just bound together with the Lord. It’s an active thing. It’s an active kind of waiting.

We see that Micah in his waiting engages in confession. Again, confession is being honest about the mistakes we’ve made. Here in verse 9, he says, “I have sinned against the Lord.” He’s not just speaking for himself, but he’s speaking for really his people. “We’ve sinned! We’ve sinned, Lord. I’ve sinned. We’ve missed the mark.”

So part of waiting often involves some level of introspection, inviting God’s Spirit to search us and know us and reveal any wayward tendency within us so as we wait we might allow the Lord to be purifying, cleansing, and forgiving us in our areas of weakness. Not everything we wait on is our fault, but sometimes we are complicit, we are a part of the issue that’s creating the woe.

So Micah, in his waiting, in his gathering himself to God, in his looking expectantly to God, he’s confessing, but he’s also praying. In verse 14, he says, “Shepherd your people with your staff.” That God shepherd. Remember Micah 5. One of the great promises of God about the coming Messiah is that the Messiah would be a Shepherd.

So Micah is not just praying off the top of his head, like, “Hey, it’d be great if you came and shepherded.” He’s actually taking a promise of God from Micah and he’s bringing it back before the Lord, and he’s saying, “Lord, I’m in a woeful place. I’m waiting on you. Here’s your promise. Please fulfill it.” Holding those promises before the Lord. This is what’s sustaining Micah in his waiting.

Now the next thing that happens in verse 15 is that God speaks. Sometimes it’s difficult when we’re reading the Prophets to recognize who is speaking. So you have to pay extra close attention to the you’s and the we’s and the he’s, all those pronouns that would mark a shift in who is speaking. So in verse 15, God speaks in. This is really the breaking in point. Micah is at a woeful place, he’s waiting on God, and then in comes God’s Word. See how these words start with W? It’s convenient. So the Word comes in!

In verse 15, it says, “As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt, I will show them marvelous things. The nations shall see and be ashamed of all their might; they shall lay their hands on their mouths; their ears shall be deaf; they shall lick the dust like a serpent, like the crawling things of the earth; they shall come trembling out of their strongholds; they shall turn in dread to the Lord our God, and they shall be in fear of you.” (Micah 7:15-17)

Here comes the word of the Lord. Yeah, it’s woeful now, but God is going to show up and he is going to show marvelous things. It’s an interesting thing that happens because when God reveals himself, shows his marvelous ways, it says that all of the strategies and schemes of the people around, the nations, will actually be ashamed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had that happen. Maybe you’ve been working really hard on something. We were cooking a ham this week. It was so funny. I was trying to illustrate this point, and the last couple of days I’m like, “Lord, what’s a good illustration of this?” I couldn’t come up with it, but I remembered.

We were cooking a ham this week. A couple of hams, actually. We had some people to the house, so we got these hams. You’re supposed to cover the hams in the casserole dish with tin foil. So I got the tin foil out, and Amy was working on some other stuff, so I’m trying to get this tin foil around the pan, but it’s too big for one sheet of tin foil, so I have to have two sheets of tin foil. It’s kind of one of these things where I put the tin foil on, and I go, “Okay, that’s good.” Then I bring the other one, and that one falls off. So I go, “Okay.” Then I try to put that.

Then I’m walking around the whole thing trying to get this, and Amy was like, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m just trying to get this tin foil on here.” This is my strategy. My effort is very bad. I don’t know what I’m doing. Then Amy comes in and she says, “Just let me do it,” and she does a marvelous thing.

She takes two sheets of tin foil, puts them next to each other, rolls the edges so that it’s like one sheet of tin foil, then she puts it on the casserole and…it just fits! Like, the moment Amy did this marvelous thing, all of my silly strategies were just shameful to me. I was like, “Ah, I am awful at tin foil!” I thought I was doing a good job. I thought what I was doing was going to result in a deliciously cooked ham, but now I see!

This is kind of what’s going on here on a much larger level than hams. I’m not even involving ham. I mean, it’s not even kosher. This is the Old Testament. But, anyway. So this is kind of what’s happening on a larger scale.

God says, “I’m going to come in and I am going to do marvelous things. I’m going to do stuff you couldn’t even think of. If you tried to imagine or you tried to ask for this, I would exceed it. It’s going to be greater than that. When I come in and do my marvelous things of redemption and restoration and resurrection, all the people who are piddling around on the fringes, trying to be joyful on their own or trying to get might through their military strength or trying to assert their power or whatever it is, satisfy themselves through corruption, they’re going to look at it and go, ‘Ah! This is shameful to me. This is not even the way.'”

See, this is how God’s judgment works. He comes in, reveals himself, and everybody else goes, “Oh man, I don’t know how to use tin foil,” or, “I’m going to lick the dust,” sort of a thing. I don’t know if that’s the perfect illustration. Sometimes you come up with those on the fly, but that’s kind of what’s happening.

But the point is that when God speaks his Word to Micah as he’s on this journey here in chapter 7 and Micah hears it, it shifts the whole temperature of the passage. This is what we need. So often, we’re in the place of woe, and that happens. Life is hard, and it can beat us up. It’s easy to become world weary, and we’re waiting. We’re saying, “Lord, how long? It has been 20 years. It has been 2 years. It has been 20 minutes,” whatever it is. We’re in that place of waiting before God.

What we need is that Word of God to come in. We need to hear the Word of the Lord, because remember how God created the cosmos with his word. He spoke and he said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. When we’re in that place of woe and waiting, God can speak and the power of his Word has the strength to recreate a whole new reality for us. That’s what happens to Micah. He hears from the Lord.

The Lord says, “I’m going to do marvelous things.” “Yes, though I fall, yet I will rise.” So then verse 18. Here’s Micah’s response, and he moves into wonder or even real joy. “Who is a God like you…” The name Micah itself means, “Who is like the Lord?” actually. “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance?

He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old.” (Micah 7:18-20)

Beautiful passage, Micah. A final word in his book, a word of wonder, a word even of joy in knowing God. In the midst of all this woe and waiting, here’s this marvelous, magnificent God who delights in steadfast love. This is so important as we’re talking about joy, what it means to live in joy or live in God’s joy, to discover joy in the upright ways of God. Micah says God delights in steadfast love.

Just think for a minute…What do you delight in? If you have a Saturday just totally to yourself, you could do anything with it, what would you want to do? What would you delight in doing? Maybe some people would say, “Fishing. I delight in fishing.” I’ve had some fishing trips and it is fun. I like fishing. That’s a good thing. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe some people would say, “I delight in cooking good meals and having people to the house, hosting them.” Some people might say, “I delight in playing sports, competing.” I do. That’s one of my things. If I could do anything on a Saturday, it’s like, “Let’s go play some basketball or baseball or whatever.”

Maybe it’s, “I delight in making crafts,” or maybe it’s just, “I delight in my wife. I just want to have a good time hanging out with my wife,” or, “I delight in my children and watching them laugh or flourish or do well.” What are the things we delight in? Those are those sources of joy in us.

Here Micah says God delights in showing steadfast love to his people. If God had a Saturday and he could just do whatever he would want to do, do you know what he would want to do? Oh, he would want to shower love on his people, and he would delight in it. He would be so happy. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m obligated to forgive these people.” It’s like, “How can I show up and reveal my steadfast love to you?” This is God’s delight.

God, in fact, is deeply joyful. This is why thinking about the upright way of God and joy as though they’re divorced from one another is so wrong. It’s because God himself is full of joy. I don’t know what you think of when you think of God. Old guy with a beard, a grumpy guy. I don’t know what comes to your mind when you think of God. Hopefully not those things. What needs to come to mind is the most joyful being in the cosmos.

Dallas Willard, who passed away recently, wrote a book called The Divine Conspiracy, and he talks about this point a little bit in the book. He says this. It’s a little bit of a longer quote. It’s about two and half paragraphs, but I want to read it to you because I think it’s so good.

He says, “We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys.” It’s a huge fish tank! “We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem.

We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them.  But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.  This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being.  This is his life.”

God is joyful. Jesus is anointed with the oil of gladness. God, though he is depicted occasionally as angry, even though even here it talks about God’s anger, Micah says he does not retain his anger forever. It is a temporary reaction to brokenness, but God’s fundamental constitution is joyful, which is why when we walk in the ways of God, trust God, receive forgiveness from God, we find our lives flooded with wonder and joy.

It’s something interesting. In the New Testament, the word for joy is chara in Greek, and the word for grace is charis. Even in that Greek language, they understood and knew that there was an inseparable link between chara and charis, that somehow grace is linked to joy. This is what Micah is talking about here. He’s saying God shows incredible grace. He forgives. He treads our iniquities, our mistakes, our brokenness underfoot. He casts our sins into the depths of the sea.

God shows us so much grace, and that grace, when we taste it, experience it, know it, live in it, becomes joy in us. What do we have to lose? Here’s this joyful being who invites us to live in the knowledge of him and with him forever. This is where that deep joy of our salvation begins. This is why when the angel appears to the shepherds on that night of Christmas… Shepherds are lowly in the social strata of the day. They smell like sheep. If it rains, they smell like wet sheep.

The angel appears and says, “Hey, I bring you good news of great joy that today is born in Bethlehem a Savior who’s Christ the Lord.” This is good news of great joy. Why? Because this perfect being of joyfulness, the one who showers grace, and the one who forgives iniquities and casts sins into the sea, the one who shows up and speaks and creates new worlds, the one who shows us marvelous things is now on earth and opening up access to all of that in a whole new way.

That’s what Christmas is about. Jesus coming, living, laying down his life, being resurrected, and as the resurrected King summoning us to follow him and to trust him. As we do, it is a way of sacrifice. It is a way at times of even suffering, but as we follow Jesus, we’re following the one who’s anointed with the oil of gladness. We’re walking in the ways of the most joyful being in the cosmos, the one who delights in showing steadfast love to his people. This is where joy really begins to spring up like a well in our souls.

So as we finish this morning, I want to tell you about a couple of weeks ago on a Wednesday night at KidzLife. As I mentioned, KidzLife is the discipleship time we do with our kids fifth grade and under. They memorize their Bible verses. They come and they study the Scripture together. Many of you are volunteers who are discipling these kids, or maybe your kids are part of KidzLife. It’s going on at the same time as LUG, when our middle schoolers are getting discipled by the high schoolers.

So we rarely actually give an invitation at KidzLife where we ask kids to express or come into the kingdom because we believe, first of all, especially with kids, coming into the kingdom and that whole journey and that discipleship is primarily the responsibility of parents. We want to come alongside and support, but really that delight, that pleasure of parents walking with their kids into the kingdom is crucial.

But at the same time we recognize some kids come from families where they don’t have that opportunity. A lot of these kids who go to the Good News Clubs in elementary schools, maybe their families are not families of faith, and so from time to time, maybe once or twice a year, at KidzLife we like to give kids the opportunity to respond. Again, we try to just give it a very simple way.

So all fall we’ve been talking about how God has worked through Moses, and we’ve been reading the Psalms together, and we’ve seen David the king. In the last several weeks of this fall in KidzLife we’ve talked about how Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of the way of Moses as a leader, the promise of David as a King, that Jesus is the perfection, he is the fulfillment of these things and how Jesus really calls us to trust him.

Then we just said, “Think about how you would respond to Jesus. Who is he?” Then in their groups they had time to write on their cards. These are fifth grade and under, smaller kids, but we asked them to write on their cards how they understand who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.  So as we close, I just want to read to you a couple of the cards of their responses.

We’re celebrating fresh salvation this morning. It’s a day for great joy, but I just want to celebrate because sometime in that simplicity, just like a baby laughing or a child expressing faith in a simple way, it’s a reminder that the upright life maybe isn’t as complicated as we make it out to be. What happens if we start trusting God, bringing our woe and waiting on him, hearing his Word and allowing him to create wonder within us? So let’s read a couple of these together. I’ve blacked out their names just because I thought that would be better.

They say…Who is Jesus? “I think he’s God’s Word and our Christ and Savior. I love Jesus and God.” Do believe Jesus is God’s Son who died to take away your sins? “Yes.” When did you first believe? “In the fourth grade when it was the first time I came to KidzLife.” That’s sweet.

Who is Jesus? “The Son of God. The King of all.” May this young man hold onto that for the rest of his life. “Yes, I believe Jesus is God’s Son.” If yes, when did you first believe? “When I first came to KidzLife.” Naturally.

Another one. Who is Jesus? “He is God’s only Son. He’s the man that died on the cross. He is Savior.” “Yes, I do believe Jesus is God’s Son who died to take away sins.” It says, “I truly believed last year in the middle of the year just because of KidzLife.” And the Holy Spirit.

Who is Jesus? “He’s the Son of God. He came to save the world through God.” Do you believe Jesus is God’s Son who died to take away your sins? “Yes.” If yes, when did you first believe? “Now. Today at church.”

Who is Jesus? “He is my Savior. He is a person who helps everybody in their lives and helps them in life.” “Yes, I believe those things.” When did you first believe? “Today on November 19, 2014, at KidzLife with my leaders and group, in fifth grade I first believed Jesus died to take away my sins.”

Yeah, let’s bless the Lord for these responses. This morning, let us remember what it’s like when God shows up, speaks words into our hearts, and we are not world weary but heaven refreshed by the joy of salvation.