Join in the Joy
Through the years, I have frequently preached about joy. It is more than an emotion (although it includes emotion); rather, it is a settled attitude, a stable and sturdy approach to life that focuses us on the things that matter now and forever. Joy is much greater and much more powerful than happiness, which is event or circumstance driven. There is nothing wrong with happiness. It is certainly better than unhappiness. Also, we have different personalities. For example, my wife is happy-go-lucky. Of course, she has every reason to be, being married to me. However, not everyone can be married to me. We need something more substantial than happiness; that something is joy. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
In Philippians 1:18, Paul expresses joy that the gospel message of eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ is being preached. It would be easy to say, “Of course Paul was joyful at the Gospel being taught; he was a missionary and a preacher.” However, Paul’s circumstances were unusual. First, verses 12-14 tell us that Paul was imprisoned. He was an active, driven man; what could be a worse predicament than prison for such a vigorous person? Paul, however, found spiritual strength in the ongoing work of others and in his own work of evangelizing his guards: “palace” (verse 13), means the palace or prison guard assigned on a rotating basis to watch the prisoners. Each shift lasted six hours, and Paul took advantage of this captive audience to speak heavenly verities. The irony of situation – a captive with a captive audience – was to Paul another sign of His Savior’s sovereignty and another reason to rejoice. Second, some were preaching from wrong motives (verses 15-17) but preaching the right message. Paul refused to be drawn into a convert-counting contest (certainly a joy-killer) and instead rejoiced in the furtherance of God’s work. For Paul, joy was an uplifting certainty, covering both the present (“do rejoice”) and the future (“will rejoice”). May we decide to rejoice now and determine that we will continue to rejoice, no matter how hurtful or hard our conditions may be.