INTRODUCTION
In 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Paul asks us to
do three impossible things:
v16: “Rejoice
always.”
v17: “Pray
without ceasing.”
v18: “Give
thanks in all circumstances,”
and then he adds: “…for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
I wonder:
Was Paul always happy?
Did he manage to be constantly saying
prayers, no matter what else he was doing?
Did Paul thank God even while he was being
arrested and thrown into prison, or while he was being flogged or stoned? Did
he thank God when people insulted him?
Today I choose to talk about the first of
those three verses: “Rejoice always.”
Since this is Holy Scripture, we need to look
deeper to understand how—even in a life as busy and as full of trouble as
Paul’s—Paul was still able to rejoice
always.
And then we can learn something of how God
wants us to live.
We shouldn’t take this instruction to
“rejoice always” to mean that we must always be smiling or laughing. Rejoicing
in the Lord is something deeper than what the world calls “happiness.”
The Bible speaks of a special kind of
happiness that’s called “blessedness.” Blessedness is happiness with God at the
core.
We can rejoice—in the sense of knowing we are
blessed—even as we suffer the various difficulties that are the common lot of
all people.
I. And sometimes Christians suffer more—not
less—than people without Christ.
A. Christians are called to suffering as we
are called to discipleship.
In Acts 14 we read that in each city Paul
preached in he warned the new believers that it is “through many tribulations we must enter the Kingdom of God.”
He wrote of himself that at one time he was “so utterly, unbearably crushed that he
despaired of life itself.”
So how could a man who led such a trouble-filled
life tell his spiritual children in Christ to “Rejoice always”?
He tells us in 2 Corinthians 4.8-10:
“We
are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed,
but not driven to despair;
persecuted,
but not forsaken;
struck
down, but not destroyed;
always
carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be
manifested in our bodies…”
And in 2 Corinthians 6 he describes himself
as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing…”
B. Sometimes our hearts are breaking, but we
still can take heart…
…because God still loves us…
…because God always has something for us to
do…
…because we know that God can make even our
troubles bring about something good…
…because we know that however many
difficulties are in our road, our road will finally lead to glory…
II. Compared to the pagans around them,
Christians in New Testament times were very cheerful people.
A. We see in the writings the Greeks left
behind that they were gloomy people.
Here is one of their famous sayings: “Do not
envy one who seems to have good fortune until you see him dead.”
In other words, no matter how happy one may
be, disaster could be just around the corner.
They felt that they were at the mercy of
unseen forces of evil all around them.
The gods they worshiped were capricious. The
Greeks believed that their gods were powerful, but they never supposed that
their gods loved them.
Here is another of their sayings, “The
world’s a stage. Life is the side entrance. You came. You looked. You
departed.”
B. When Christians told their pagan friends
about Jesus, his death for sin and his resurrection, many of them turned to
Jesus too. And so the church grew.
One of the biggest appeals of Christianity
was the promise of eternal life. The pagans didn’t have anything to look forward
to that could compare with that.
We who trust Christ look forward to a far
better world than this, a world that will last forever—with no more tears, no
more sickness, no more death, no more loneliness.
C. God means for us believers to have a deep
well of joy within us—a joy that the world can’t give and that the world
couldn’t take away.
I think of the story in Acts 16 in which Paul
and Silas were beaten with rods, thrown into a prison, and their feet locked in
the stocks.
“But
about midnight,” we read “Paul and Silas were praying and singing
hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.”
We know that there was a happy ending to this
story, but when Paul and Silas were singing hymns in that dark prison at
midnight, they didn’t know there would be a happy ending. They were just
rejoicing in the Lord. They were keeping their spirits by singing hymns to God.
The very night Jesus was betrayed, as he and
his disciples ate supper together—the “Last Supper”—he said this to his
disciples: “I have said these things to
you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
CONCLUSION
I want to read you a story I heard years ago
from a radio preacher named Leontine T. C. Kelly. Pastor Kelly says:
A few years ago a friend of mine asked me to
accompany him to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where we had the opportunity to
visit an elderly woman who had started a church in her community.
She lived in a housing project, and there in
the midst of people who were very needy she had opened a little store-front
church where the children gathered around her as she told them the stories of
Jesus. She had lived a very noble life.
News of her had reached us in Richmond, and
we had gone to visit her. When we got to the house, the daughter said to us, “My
mother was very ill during the night. We almost lost her, and I’m not sure you
can see her.” Then as we started away, she changed her mind and said, “But come
on in. Mamma would want to see you.”
As we went up the steps and inside, I was
prepared to see a very ill woman. To my amazement, as we walked in the door,
there in a rocking chair sat a woman as black as mahogany with a crown of white
hair, the Bible open at her lap.
Here she was with strength that seemed to
belie the fact that she had been ill at all. As we entered the room, she looked
up at us and made a statement I had never heard before.
“Children,” she said, “don’t let the devil
steal your joy.” I had to laugh at that because I’m aware of the fact that
many, many times in our lives it is very difficult to be joyous. We find that,
indeed, the satanic forces do tend to make us aware that life in Jesus Christ
may not be a joyous life.
As she sat she talked to us and read from the
Book of Philippians, which was open on her lap. She said, “I could not die last
night. I told my daughter to sit me in the chair. I did not intend to face my
maker with anything less than a smile on my face. Don’t let the devil steal
your joy.”
No, the Lord doesn’t expect us to be always
smiling or laughing. Sometimes we grieve. We know heartache. God grieves with
us.
But through it all we have reason to rejoice.
Sorrow and joy can go together in our lives.
We sorrow, but we don’t sorrow as those who
have no hope.
Even though we have reasons to grieve, we
never forget that God loves us…that he has a home for us…that the best is yet
to come.
God means us to rejoice, even in the midst of
our troubles.
“Don’t let the devil steal your joy.”
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