This weeks promise: God promises to fill you with joy!

This weeks promise: God promises to fill you with joy!

Romans 14:17-18 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.

You see the joy God gives us is not based on our physical circumstances. They have nothing to do with it. Our joy comes directly from the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. Our joy comes from the fact that we've been saved and the realization that God loves us. Do you remember the first time you were filled with this joy? For many it occurs the day of their salvation. What a wonderful experience! It's just a taste of what we'll experience in heaven with Him!

This joy is something non believers see in us and they wonder what it is that makes us so happy. This is especially true when our circumstances don't warrent the joy they see in our eyes. This joy can be a great witnessing tool because of that. It's unlike a human joyful feeling...it's deeper and more meaningful...almost personal. It's very hard to explain isn't it?

Acts 2:46-47 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Zechariah 2:10 “Shout and be glad, O Daughter of Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares the Lord.

Today, people get saved and may feel this joy, but afterward, because of the apathy of the Church, it can be like a big let down. The joy fades and the new believer is left wondering what happened and if what they experienced was real. This, as I said, is most often due to the lack of discipleship in the churches today. When we read Acts we see what the early church was like. “They met daily”, not just once or maybe twice a week. More, when they met it wasn’t an experience outside their daily lives, but instead was an integral part of their daily lives. They experienced being saved as the most important event that had ever happened to them or ever would, outside of eventually being reunited with the Lord. This was such an integral part of them that it carried over into everything they did. They wanted to be with others who had also experienced this fantastic miracle and because they did, they sought them out and those others became “family” to them. That’s who they spent their time with when they weren’t at work or doing necessary daily chores. Other believers became their closest friends and confidants. They couldn’t get enough of hearing about Jesus and what He had done, nor could they have stopped themselves from telling others about what He’d done for them! Their lives weren’t divided up into work, home and church; their lives were church! This is what today’s churches have lost. Today, many, if not most believers lives, look no different from the lives of an unbeliever. How that must break the Lord’s heart!

The reason I bring all this up is because this is why many are not experiencing the joy of the Lord. They have relagated the Lord to a specific corner of their lives rather then making Him the head of all of it. Instead of hanging out with fellow believers, they’re just as content to hang out with unbelievers, even though they should have nothing in common with them anymore. So instead of growing spiritually and being renewed daily with fresh joy, they are just ploding along life’s path wondering what’s wrong. Often they will look into the heresy of the false teachers and prophets because they know they are missing something and hope that will fill the hole. Sadly for them, it only fills them with Satan’s lies and leads them further from the Truth they so badly need: God’s word, rightly divided.

The bottom line is that these verses show us two things: that the Lord fills us with the joy of the Holy Spirit and that in order to keep that joy, we must stay in tune with the Holy Spirit. We stay in tune with Him by always remembering our first love, Jesus and what He did for us. Secondly that we keep in mind our blessed hope, that He will be back soon!

Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

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