Jul
15
2009
Suffering With A Smile
In the early 1960′s, from the pulpit at Westminster Chapel in London, the late Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached a series of twenty-one sermons on consecutive Sunday mornings entitled Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cures. Those sermons were transcribed, edited and put into book form in 1964. It’s an excellent and very helpful book. I have read portions of it many times over the years.
Lloyd-Jones believed very much that a “revived and joyful Church” is the greatest need of our time. He wrote, ”Unhappy Christians are, to say the least, a poor recommendation for the Christian faith; and there can be little doubt but that the exhuberant joy of the early Christians was one of the most potent factors in the spread of Christianity.” To be joyless, according to Lloyd-Jones, is to be a bad evangelist–a poor advertisement for the grace and mercy of God. John Piper echoed this sentiment recently when he wrote: “The one who knows and rests in the sovereign grace of God should be the happiest saint. Don’t be a sour or glum or hostile false advertisement for the glory of God’s grace. Praise it. Rejoice in it.”
Lloyd-Jones continues:
Christian people too often seem to be perpetually in the doldrums and too often give the appearance of unhappiness and lack of freedom and absence of joy. There is no question at all but that this is the main reason why large numbers of people have ceased to be interested in Christianity.
God used these convicting lines from Lloyd-Jones to remind me that regardless of how difficult life becomes, Christians are to “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say Rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). The Gospel makes it possible to suffer with a smile because in Christ, all that we need we have.
We may endure the difficulty and pain and loss that accompanies life in this broken world with joy and thanksgiving because the Father “has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgivenss of sins” (Col. 1:12-14). God plus nothing equals everything; everything minus God equals nothing.
Praise God!
4 Comments
Thank you for sharing this.
“Lloyd-Jones believed very much that a “revived and joyful Church” is the greatest need of our time. He wrote, ”Unhappy Christians are, to say the least, a poor recommendation for the Christian faith; and there can be little doubt but that the exhuberant joy of the early Christians was one of the most potent factors in the spread of Christianity.”
If I were the pastor of a church lacking in Joy, I think I’d preach a series on Nehemiah 8 where the post exilic Israelites experienced new-found joy as they (re)discovered the Word of God.
I was amazed when I mentioned Nehemiah 8 to my wife and she responded with “The Joy of the Lord is my strength.” I’ll bet there aren’t a lot of people (in that hypothetical joyless church) that could make the connection between that well known verse and Neh 8.
Anyway my hypothetical sermon to my hypothetical church would have three points; 1. Read the Word 2. Receive the Word 3. Rejoice in the Word. I would work in the quote from that chorus that goes,
“Joy is a flag flown high from the castle of my heart, For the King is in residence there.”
Understanding my conscience, I would also probably have to credit Scottish pastor and seminary professor, Dr. David P. Murray for preaching it better than I, hypothetically, would have.
What is happiness? Today’s church has a very shallow definition of happiness. We are happy when God is blessing us, and sour, dour, and down when God “doesn’t seem to be blessing us”, just like the world. We base happiness on circumstance and situation. I find that we are superficial in our happiness. We wear a plastic smile as a badge of joy. A friend of mine and I, many years ago, spent one Sunday morning determined to tell the truth about how we felt. When asked, “how are you?”, we told them. People didn’t like our answers and I don’t remember one person asking what was wrong or if they could help. This illustrates to me that one, we don’t understand true happiness (or Biblical joy) and two, we don’t know how to respond when others are struggling.
Shouldn’t our happiness come from what Christ has done for us, the gospel? If this is so, our grid through which we see all things should be fashioned by Scripture, by His grace and goodness planned for us as one of His own beloved. This should make a difference whether we land the perfect job, or lose our job one month from retirement, marry a Proverbs 31 woman (like myself) or be on the edge of divorce.
Now, having said that, life is full of both the mountains and the valleys, small and large in size, and our joy, even founded in Christ, is often influenced by what happens around us. This shows us how important our Covenant Community of brothers and sisters is. We often need, in our success, a word of admonition against pride. But, just as easily, in our valley, we often need a word of encouragement. What I’m saying is that “joy” is not an individually arrived at position. Yes, we are given the ultimate reason for joy in Christ, but living it out is a different story. We are people still with sinful natures along with new hearts (just ask the Psalmists) and we need the community (yes, the “Christian Village”) to walk victoriously with Him. Sometimes, this is not an over night process but takes some time. Let us with one another be patient and encouraging, truthful and honest. This is the Church’s most sacred service after worshiping the King, to love one another and bear each other’s burdens.
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