POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON - God's Overflowing Joy
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Personal Note: I highly suggest giving something very special, and unexpected for your congregants every once in a while. I used to call these super Sundays.
Once, every 4 or 5 weeks we would change the order of service, – and give the unexpected (or better said, more than they expected.) Congregants become sleepy with the same elements every week, same statements, same prayers, same times for music. Growth comes from waking up the ministry, however not too much. They will welcome radical change, if they know that they can go back into their comfort zone the next week. Overtime you will see attendance explode on super Sundays, as well as the general offering. It has been known for super Sundays to have Easter size attendance.
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Religion should be joy! The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “A human’s joy knows no bounds when they obtain something beyond hopes.”
Beyond the realm of just hoping for something – Spiritual euphoria is discovered when you will have a happiness to be experienced with all your spiritual might.
In II Samuel 6:2-3, 5, 14-15 the Bible states: “And David arose and went with all the people who were with him from Baalejudah, to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the name of the Lord of hosts who sits enthroned on the cherubim. And they carried the ark of God upon a new cart … and David and all the house of Israel were making merry before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod.” [That means he wore a little, white apron.]
So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the horn.” I’ve always liked that scripture.
We get too rigid, serious and solemn before God. Maybe, if we really believed God is here with us, total joy would be the way we’d feel. We’d want to celebrate, wouldn’t we?
Too many people feel that their religion HAS to be gloomy, and overly serious. They think that in order to be profound and deep they have to be very solemn.
The world is God’s song of joy. It has been correctly said, we either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same. God is singing; dancing too, no doubt. The world is the song God sings. God is love, and God is joy. Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
((((Solo))))
Our FIRST, first lady, Martha Washington said, “The greater part of our joy or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.”
“To get up each morning with the resolve to be joyful … is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
God is a God of joy. Jesus Christ said that God is love. Could love condemn you? And of all things, when Love made you, could God say, “I’m disappointed I don’t really love this one? That’s not God. That’s NOT what Jesus said! That’s only a God, that somebody makes up who has a very limited concept. We say about God says more about us than God.
“Delight yourself in the Lord; and God will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4
God is unimaginable love, unimaginable life, unimaginable joy. That’s all God could be – so infinitely beyond anything we can conceive, that we can’t conceive of God except to know God’s much more than we are. I’ve always said, “Oh God, help me to be more loving than I am,” because I know there isn’t any other kind of life worth living. I know I’m not capable of that kind of love, but innately, I am. It’s just that I’ve been programmed to believe I am naturally limited as a human.
((((SOLO))))
In the Bible, Jesus said in three different gospels (so it has importance) that nobody gets into heaven except children. Nobody. Are you a child? Are you childlike? But stop and think – if you have to be a child to get into heaven, what does a child have? One thing a child has is utter, trusting love. He, or she, quickly learns from us adults do not trust our love. When I’ve been around little children, what’s always impressed me is how they run up to you, reaching out, and expect you to pick them up and hold them. They’re full of love. They know that’s the way they’re meant to be. They know that’s the way the world ought to be. We must re-learn that from them.
I hope I’ve helped you to realize to fill yourselves with love and joy. Isn’t God wonderful? Isn’t life wonderful? It can be – it’s up to you. I think God gave you all the wonderful faculties you need to live a creative, beautiful, unfolding life, IF you will. So, live it. Have faith. That’s what it takes. Have faith that you can. Dare to act like a child of God. And really trust that the world is good and full of love, and it will respond to you with love when you give love.
Approach life with the wow factor, explore, and find joy in every day and you’ll become like a little child again.
“In Thy presence is fullness of joy; in Thy right hand there are pleasures forever.” Psalm 16:11
John Piper in his book “Desiring God” says, “The chief end of a human is to glorify God by enjoying God forever. Enjoying God is essential to glorifying God.”
Consider some of the sentences from his book I highlighted:
” … it is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be found in God.”
“Praising God, the highest calling of humanity and our eternal vocation, did not involve the renunciation but rather the consummation of the joy I so desired.”
“My aim is to own up to the amazing, and largely neglected, fact that some dimension of joy is a moral duty in all true worship and all virtuous acts.”
((((SOLO))))
George Bernard Shaw said, “This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of joyful nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can in a joyful way.”
God made you with infinite possibilities. Children let themselves be what they are made to be; that’s all. The child does everything just as he or she is led to do it. We are all children of God. We are a living new joyous song of life. The more we succeed at it, the more quickly the world will begin to sing that song with us.
Let us pray:
Dear God, I worship You today in FULL joy. Help me to become like a child again with a mind filled of wow and wonder. If I have let life take too much of a toll on me, help me to again experience full joy and to express it daily and worship of You. Help me to wear a smile instead of a frown and show to all what being infilled with a full spiritual presence of You means.
I am ready to exhibit my inner joy.
In Jesus Christ’s name … Amen
God bless you!
PRAYER / MEDITATION____________________
Let’s join in prayer and turn to God as the Source of our joy. God touches within our own soul.
Let’s know God is right here with us during our prayer time, the Creator of our joy.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
Dear God, here I am in this moment. I come to you humbly and I ask for a God-given gift of new joy in my life. I consent to releasing old ways and habits that block and hinder me. I consent to the dissolving of painful memories that have kept me in a prison of silent gloom far too long. I am ready to rejoice and to worship You in full joy and love as your child.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
Whatever our need, in prayer we turn to the presence of God and rejoice. We have God, the source of ALL good in our lives right now. God’s help is at hand. Joy wells up in us like an endless spring that has been tapped in our soul. We feel it and sing our song of thanks and joy in response to its endless flow.
God wants us to meet in this Divine appointment, to accept our love and joy as a divine and permanent gift. May this give me something we carry daily in our soul and our mind and feel in our body.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
We rejoice in God’s love. We feel God’s love. Whatever you may pray, you can know that God’s will for you is fulfillment, because God is love. God’s will is for you unfolding yourself and being all that God made you to be. God made you to experience joy as a child again. God made you in God’s infinite wisdom, infinite love, and infinite joy.
God is wisdom and light. It shines in the very center of your being, at the very center of your mind as you focus on the Divine in prayer. You are never done discovering the wonders and the treasures and gifts for you to open as God’s child.
The light of God brings forth in you, awareness of the talents and abilities you have been given by God.
(Soft church bell sounds if you have them)
You rejoice anew in God’s life. Every thought in your mind, every feeling in your heart, every cell in your body, rings like a beautiful bell, just as the sound of bells is the sound of life. Let us know that life is singing its song as it courses through your body – through your nerves calming with God’s tranquility, through your veins bringing new God-given life, and through every cell of your being, shouting aliveness and new vitality.
You rejoice in God’s life.
Rest in the silence of prayer …
You rejoice in your good, because God is your ever-present good. You can know that God’s will for you is the fulfillment of your every need. God is the source of your prosperity and success. God is the source of your peace and security. God is all around you, and in you. God is love. God is joy. God is light. God is life. And God is ALL good.
Music …
And on this worship Sunday, we give thanks for our awareness of our joy in God.
In Jesus Christ’s name … Amen.
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