Love for the Unseen Christ - Part A
Scripture Reference: 1 Peter 1:8-9
Visit the series page: Exiles: A study in 1 Peter
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Sermon Series: Spiritual Exiles
Message: Love for the Unseen Christ
Airdate: 9/14-9/15/25
Programs: 2356 & 2357
It's great to see and an encouragement to us. We come now to God's word, and we are back in our series in First Peter today. You know, Peter wrote to exiles in Asia Minor this letter we call First Peter, but he really might as well have written it to us. It'd be easy to read this letter and to just change the personal pronouns, change the names, and insert our own names and our own church family because what he's talking about here is totally appropriate to us as well. He writes to Christians who are experiencing trials.
They're experiencing loneliness. They are ostracized in their society. They are struggling to do, you know, Christian lifestyle in a very pagan environment, which, of course, is what we're doing as well. Here today, no doubt, we have people who are dealing with crushing trials, things that even as I say the word trial, boom, it comes to your mind, and you you're thinking about that, and you you brought that discouragement into this service with you, and you're hoping for a word from God to help you. And we live in this world that is increasingly difficult, I think, to live Christianly, especially in America as it continues to slide more secular.
It makes you wonder what are the days ahead gonna be like? What's coming around the bend? What are our children, Lord willing, if they embrace the Christian faith, what are they gonna experience in living the Christian life in a, America that's going the direction that it is? I doubt it's gonna be easier for them than it is for us. So how do we prepare ourselves for the trials that lie ahead?
And what Peter is going to talk about here, I believe to be the high point of his letter and really is one of the most wonderful passages in all of the New Testament. The word that comes to my mind with this verse is it's magisterial. I mean, it is just, it's a it's a wonderful, wonderful word that God has for us. And for me, it is a privilege to exposit it and to teach it today, and I hope the Lord blesses it truly. So let me read First Peter one verses eight and nine, our text today.
“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” Now I know it's been a couple weeks. We had snowmageddon in the in between here, but I hope you haven't forgotten what Peter has been already saying to us and teaching us, especially in, the preceding verses where he talks about trials. And he compares trials to, the fiery furnace that gold would go to.
So the analogy is our faith is like gold, and our trials are like fiery furnace. And he draws the analogy, and he says, you know, when they would purify gold, they heat up gold in a furnace. And when it it's heated, the impurities rise to the surface, and they're able to skim off those impurities. And the net effect is that the gold is unveiled in a more valuable way, a more wonderful way. Its genuineness is revealed, but it is also purified by the heat of the trial.
And this is intended, I think, to get us ready for what is to come. In fact, he says that. He says at the end of verse seven, that “our faith may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Now that revelation for us personally will either happen when Jesus returns and there is the revelation of Jesus in this world, or personally, it's going to happen when we die. Because when we die, something becomes true in our faith that has never been true before.
What is it? All of a sudden in that moment, I will see him. Right? I am going to see the Lord. “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”
And that moment of death for us will be when our faith becomes sight, as the as the hymn writer writes. So this moment will be a wonderful, wonderful moment. But for now, it highlights the fact that we are believing in somebody, trusting in somebody, talking about somebody, singing songs to somebody, gathering in the name of somebody that none of us have ever seen. Is that weird? I mean, if if just your average person was to they didn't know anything and they walked in here and they were like, hey.
What are you guys doing here? You're like, oh, this is a church that we're all about Jesus here. Really? You're all about Jesus? Yeah.
We worship him. We sing to him. We try to live our lives to his glory. Really? Really?
What's he what's he what's he like? What's he look like? I don't know. Never met him. The guy would probably be like, these people are strange.
Right? I mean, what is going on here in living the Christian faith following the ascension of Jesus when Jesus went to heaven? Other than the Apostle Paul in Scripture, we don't know of anybody who's actually seen Jesus. Right? We are all living a kind of faith and a belief in somebody that we have never met, which on the surface looks strange and weird, like we're all nut jobs somehow.
Is this kinda like a religious version of marrying a woman you've never met? Is it eHarmony for eternity? Or is there something else going on, something more wonderful that is going on here? And, of course, Peter writes this letter. And Peter, of all people, is himself an eyewitness.
Right? I mean, other than Jesus' family, Peter probably had more eye time with Jesus than anybody else. He was part of Jesus' disciples. He lived with him for three years. They ate.
They talked. They they, ministered together. He went to the top of the Mount of Transfiguration. He was there in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was part of the inner three.
Jesus appeared to Peter after the resurrection more than anybody else. So you could say that Peter, of all people, had eye time with Jesus, and now here he is writing about people who have no eye time with Jesus. You might think that Peter be like, oh, you age of minor people. I've seen him. I know.
You have no idea what you're missing. And we, of course, are in the same situation here today, singing “Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne.” “Your great name.” These songs, very Christ centered, uplifting songs to somebody we've never seen with our eyes. And Peter writes here so wonderfully about the Christian experience post ascension.
And he says here, you have never seen Christ, yet three things are true. We love him, we believe in him, and we rejoice in him. And let's just walk through the text here now, those three things. First of all, unseen, yet we love him. “Though you have not seen him, you love him.”
Now for us, love and sight naturally go together. You sometimes hear couples, they'll say, oh, it was love at first sight. Well, now on my side of the marital covenant, I will say to you that only a very superficial understanding of love would make that kind of statement true. What kind of love or is is Peter talking about? That kind of love?
Is it a is it a is it a marital love? Is it I mean, it it's not. It's not an erotic love. It's not even a friendship love that is used here. In fact, the Greek word in this text is that Greek word that the New Testament writers pulled and infused with all kinds of redemptive truth and meaning.
Agape love. Agape is the is the word there. We've talked about this at length here at Bethel. We've defined it as self giving for the good and joy of another. It is a kind of love, the kind of love that God has.
It is a it is a love of a different kind, a love of a deeper quality. It was this love, this agape love that God expressed to us when he sent his Son Jesus into this world. “For God so loved, agape the world, that he gave his only Son,” John three sixteen. It is this agape love that Jesus expressed to us as he hung on the cross. “Greater love is no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friend.”
“But God demonstrated his love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” This giving of myself, geez God expresses it to us through Jesus. Jesus expresses it to us through his cross and his death in our place. So what is our response then as as believers? First John four nineteen.
“We love him because he first loved us.” Amen. Right? And so our love for for God is not self generated. It doesn't it doesn't come from us.
We would naturally not love God Jesus this way. But it is an act of God's sovereign grace whereby through the gospel, we come to hear and to understand what Jesus has done for us. And that work of God by his spirit, this new birth, this regeneration explodes in our heart. We believe in Jesus, and the response to the love of God to us is that we love him. K?
We don't take credit for that love. We would never come up with that love on our own. This is a part of God's good work in us. It is producing agape for God, agape for Jesus. But our agape of Jesus is different because we've never seen him.
It is an unseen love or it's an unseen Christ that we are loving. I tried to think of some analogy of of this. And for obvious reasons in my life right now, I think about a parent's love for a child in the womb. Never seen that child yet. Love him or her already.
Unseen child, love for the unseen child, love for the unseen Christ. The love that saving faith creates in us is a genuine love, but it is an agape kind of love even though we've never laid eyes on him. Unseen, yet we love him. Secondly, unseen, yet we believe in him. “Though you do not see him now, you believe in him.”
Notice the tense change. The first clause was you did not see him, yet you love him, present tense. Here, you do not see him now, presently, yet you presently believe in him. Now I wonder, does this remind you of anybody? Somebody in the story in the gospels who, refused to believe something that he couldn't see.
Now maybe this is coming to your mind already if you're with me. I think about the disciple Thomas. Do you know the story? I trust that you do. The story is that Jesus is resurrected from the dead.
He makes his first appearance to the disciples in the upper room. Everybody's there except Thomas. And Jesus is there. He says, here I am. Give me food to eat.
Believe. I'm alive. And the disciples, of course, are in awe at this, and they just are marvel at Jesus leaves. Well, Thomas comes in, and they're like, he's alive. And Thomas famously says this.
“Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger into the mark of the nails and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” Thomas is like the patron saint of the cynic or the skeptic. The kind of person who says, unless I have empirical evidence with my eyes, unless I can put this in a in a test tube and and sort of prove it, I will not believe until the empirical evidence that my own eyes have seen tell me that this is true. These are the people that refuse to believe the testimony of other people regarding Jesus' claims to deity, regarding the miracles that he did in his earthly ministry and his supernatural life, his resurrection, and all the rest. It's not enough for them.
They refuse to believe unless they see it with their own eyes. Notice what happens to Thomas. Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas imagine this moment, by the way.
The disciples are like, we've seen him. We've seen him. We've seen him. Thomas said, I don't I refuse to believe. Now all of a sudden, Jesus is there.
What's the look on Thomas' face? I want a picture of that someday in heaven. Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” And Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God.”
Notice Thomas doesn't say, okay. Well, let me come over there a second and see if I can put my finger in that hole. And how about if I put my side my fist in the side? He doesn't have to do any of that. He sees Jesus standing before him, and now it is enough, and he says, “My Lord and my God.”
Notice the next verse though. Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you've seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Who is Jesus talking about in that verse? He's talking about us, isn't he?
Has anybody here seen Jesus? I doubt it very much. And yet, there we have Jesus saying, the real blessing is not the person who is in the upper room and actually sees the resurrected Jesus. The real blessing is the person who doesn't see that and yet has put their faith and trust in him. He's talking about us.
He's talking about 99.999% of people who have ever believed. He's talking about Old Testament saints. He's talking about Moses. He's talking about Abraham. He's talking about David.
These are all people that they they they had revelation a little bit from God in the Old Testament. They believed in the coming Messiah. They believed in the one that God promised who would come. They never saw him, and yet they believed. The Old Testament states he's talking about every Christian after the ascension of Jesus.
Here we are, having never seen him, and yet we believe. And here we are now in a central truth about the kind of faith that saves us. Christian faith, saving faith, has a kind of seeing, a kind of perceiving, a kind of discerning that goes beyond the eyes. Faith has its own eyes, if we could say it that way. Faith sees the unseen.
The writer of Hebrews gives the classic definition. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” You know, Christianity, some people wrongly, in my opinion, accuse it of being somehow anti intellectual. It is not anti intellectual. It is a thinking faith.
There is enough evidence in the world around us in the testimony of the eyewitnesses, and the story of Scripture that we can think deeply and intellectually about our faith. But here's the thing. There is not enough evidence to simply reason our way to saving faith. There comes a point where I have to see the unseen. I have to believe in something that I can't put in a test tube.
I have to trust in the eyewitness account of others who saw these things. And if you're here today and maybe you have not yet believed, I want to encourage you, and my prayer has been before even preaching this message, that God would somehow use it for that person who maybe is high on the kind of the Thomas scale to help you realize that the faith that saves even by the description of Scripture is a kind of seeing that goes beyond the eyes. But it is a kind of seeing all the same. A kind of faith and trusting in the claims of Christianity, in the claims of Jesus being the Son of God, the eyewitness accounts of people who saw him dead and who saw him alive, and the testimony of two thousand years of Christians whose lives have been changed by faith in this Jesus. And maybe God would use this message to draw you into, finally, a faith relationship with Jesus and that you would put your hope and trust in him.
That would be a great thing. And join the rest of us who have not seen Christ but who believe in him truly and fully. So unseen, yet we love him. Unseen, yet we believe in him. Thirdly, unseen, yet we rejoice in him.
Again, the text. “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not see him now, you believe in him. And rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.” And that little phrase right there, in my opinion, is one of the most sublime, one of the most wonderful little clauses in all of Scripture describing the Christian experience.
Rejoicing with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. Here, I think Peter is describing the Christian experience at its highest, at its its most joyous expression. Our faith sees through the gospel. Our faith sees the loveliness, the beauty, the desirability of Jesus. And inside, there is a kind of resting, trusting in who he is and the fact that he did indeed die for my sins.
And there is then in this resting and this assurance that I have that Jesus indeed is not just the savior but my savior, there flows then within us a love, a gladness, a a joy. I mean, imagine somebody receiving Jesus as savior, knowing now my sins are forgiven. My guilt is not held against me. I have the righteousness of Jesus by justification. I have eternal life.
I'm a child of God. Heaven and the new earth is mine forever. And on the other side of that being like, bummer. Can you imagine that? I mean, that would be so inappropriate.
Right? How can you not have all of these things now by faith and truly in your heart believe them to be true and there not be joy from it? Are you with me? Indeed, joy inexpressible. The word here for rejoice in the original means this.
Here's the lexicon. To experience a state of great joy and gladness, often involving verbal expression and appropriate body movement. Some of you are getting uncomfortable now. To be extremely joyful, to be overjoyed, to rejoice greatly. And the lexicon adds this.
I shout because of my joy. K? So glad that I'm just raw. But then Peter adds, this joy is inexpressible. So Peter takes it to another level then and says that it is beyond words or description.
Now we've probably seen a child open a present or have some moment of such joy that they're just they they run-in place. Right? And they they go in circles like this. They're just they're just so excited. Right?
They can't hardly contain themselves. There's an overflow of joy because of it. Adults, similarly, although somewhat more subdued, typically, we clap, we shout, we dance. There is a kind of joy that goes beyond verbal expression. That is this joy inexpressible.
Now it would be easy for me right now to lay a massive guilt trip on the church and to say, alright, you Christian people. This is what it's supposed to look like all the time. And if you're here right now and you if I gave you the chance that you would run-in circles and dance and shout but not be able to say words, if that's not your experience right now, you're a bad Christian. And what's wrong with you people? And there are probably a few good meaning people here that would even amen something like that.
It's about time we get more that way around here. But I suspect if I did that, most of us would leave very depressed. And I would as well because my Christian experience would not match up with joy inexpressible every moment of every day. My Christian experience and having been around this church long enough now, the vast majority of us are struggling to be faithful to the Lord in the ups and the downs of life. And there is a lot of times that I don't feel joy, I feel disappointment.
And there are times that I don't feel joy, I feel depressed. There are times when the criticism hits home. There are times when the relationship struggles just cause despair. There are times where, like, following Jesus, it's not running in places like literally grabbing this leg and forcing it, you know, to follow the Lord and saying, I will, but inside, it doesn't feel like it. Can you relate to that?
Life is painful. In fact, you could in mass Peter, why would you talk about joy inexpressible in the verse following the verses about fiery furnace trials? Like, how do those go fiery furnace trial, joy inexpressible? Like for me, when I'm in a trial, I'm not happy. And when I'm when I'm happy, I'm probably not in a in a trial at that moment.
Right? I can have some joy inexpressible when everything is fantastic. I wanna live on that plane. Life isn't that way, though. And I have wrestled with this passage, and I wanna tell you what I think it's saying.
At least at this point in my spiritual walk and my spiritual maturity and my understanding of scripture, maybe in ten years, I'll say, I think something different. But as best I can tell, this is what Peter is doing. Peter is describing here in such emotionally rejoicing language, he is describing the Christian faith as it can be, as it should be, and as it will be. As it can be, as it should be, and as it will be. Let's start with the as it will be because I think all of us are on the same page with this one.
Who here wouldn't want to experience joy in Jesus like he's describing here? Well, be encouraged. Our entire eternity will be this. Listen, Christian. Our entire eternity is going to be the experience of perpetual and unending joy inexpressible.
What am I talking about? I am talking about the day that is coming for us when we are standing in the presence of the Lord, when we are living on that new earth, when we are in our glorified bodies, when we have received all of the redemptive benefits that God has promised to us, when we are not living in this sin sick world anymore, when we are living in the next one, that experience there is going to be so far beyond this one and so far better than this one, I I wonder how we'll look back on these days. Imagine it. Every moment, joy inexpressible. That's our eternity.
To think that our brothers and sisters who've died and have already gone there to think about Pete Erhammer and Merle McCleskey, two members of our church that died recently, both faithful, godly men. If we had, like, a little if we could FaceTime them right now and say, hey, Merle and Pete, how's it going up there? What would they say? I think they would say, it is so much better than I ever imagined. And we'd be like, why do you say that?
I believe they would say, we have seen him. We've seen him in all of his glory, in all of his beauty, in all of his majesty. We have seen him. He talked to me. He talked to me.
He ministered to me. He's seen me. I see him. You're not gonna believe what it's like. It's fantastic.
Why? What's so great about there? There, the faith has become sight. And that sight is not Jesus in his more subdued, stealthy, incarnate human body. It is Jesus in all of the splendor that is his as the Son of God at the right hand of God the Father.
And that will be for us since he is our savior, Lord, and friend. That will be for us a source of unending, unexhausting joy inexpressible. And our dear brothers and sisters, they're there right now, and they are experiencing that. And our faith, even right now, has capacity for that. And we have moments of that, but not like it is there.
Psalm sixteen eleven, “in thy presence is fullness of joy, and at thy right hand is pleasures evermore.” And so Peter here is giving us a glimpse of what eternity's joy will be like. It'll be perfect joy. It'll be inexpressible joy, and that day is coming for us. But Peter is also here describing Christian faith as it can be and as it should be.
And this is what I think he is getting at in context here in the passage is that heaven's joy is part of the present Christian experience. Only here, we have to fight for it. In this world and in this body, I have to fight for heaven's joy to be a part of my experience here. And the reason that it is a fight is because of indwelling sin. It is a fight because there are all of these joy stealers all the time that are wanting me to put my hope, trust, identity, and belief in them, but they are not Jesus.
And they ultimately are disappointing. Trials are this. Trials cloud our thinking so easily. You know, in moments when I have spiritual clarity, and maybe you can relate to this, there are there are moments I could tell you some of the high points of my whole Christian experience where maybe it's on the other side of a trial or maybe it's in a particular worship service or there's something going on in my life. All of a sudden, I have clarity.
Like I see things truly biblically. I see my life and I see my forgiveness in Jesus and I I don't know. I just have these sometimes these moments of clarity and I have inside of me, I just feel like a yes. There's a there's a genuine joy that I that I I'll have. And I'll bet, Christian, you've had some high points in your walk as well.
Somehow, there's just a refreshment in your perspective, and there comes in your soul a kind of gladness in all that you have in Jesus and all that God has done for you and the love of God and just all the promises and the hopes that comes in him. These are wonderful moments in our life. But then we give into a temptation or some opportunity comes and we think there's greater joy in gossip or in porn than in Jesus and a life lived to his glory. There's more joy in having what my neighbor has or wishing he didn't have it. There's more joy in some other kind of sin or some good thing, but a lesser thing.
And what happens in that? Where does the joy go? Boo. Out the window. Right?
There it goes. Think of David as an example of this. David, King David, the the sweet singer of Israel, the writer of the Psalms, the man who God himself said was “a man after my own heart,” wrote beautiful language about his relationship to God, to the Lord. He says just says, “I love the Lord.” Right?
“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” I mean, he he must have had such joy in his heart as he was writing such beautiful language about what God is like. What happened to David? One day David sinned with Bathsheba.
And in Psalm 51, he describes the experience of one year of living without repentance. And he says, “my bones groaned within me.” And he writes in Psalm 51, his desire is this, “restore to me the joy of my salvation.” What did David miss in his time away from God? He missed that sense of gladness in God, that everything was right.
I'm living for the glory of God. And maybe you're there right now. You remember good old days spiritually. You remember times of gladness in Jesus, but you've been living for something else. Or you've given into some temptation, and your heart longs for the good old days spiritually, so did David.
He wanted that joy back, but it had been stolen from him. What is David writing in Psalm 23 or Psalm 51? It's the same thing that Peter's writing in First Peter one eight. What are trials? What is the what is “the valley of the shadow of death”?
What do these have what to do with joy? Simply this. Trials magnify like nothing else the joy of knowing Jesus. And the result of that is that we love him more. Is this not true?
Think about it in your own life. Think about it from scripture. The writer of Hebrews I'm gonna give you one example. The writer of Hebrews writes to a group of people that had gone through a particular experience. Listen carefully to what how he describes what they went through.
This is Hebrews 10. “But recall the former days when after you were enlightened, in other words, after you had come to saving faith, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly be a And You're since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.” He's talking about Christians who went through horrible experiences, persecutions, plundering of what they have. Imagine a Christian, for example, today living in Syria and seeing ISIS approaching. What would you expect to find in their hearts?
Are they they're going, yes. Here they come. On one level, obviously, no. But on another level, all the trials and sufferings that come into our life do something good for us. They refine our thinking about what really matters in life, and they magnify to us the enduring value of knowing Jesus.
Because, typically, all these trials involve losing something. They lost their possessions. Imagine, for example, that you're here in church, and we come to find out that even right now, there's a group of people, and they're robbing your house. How many of us are going, love that? We're not happy about that in one respect.
But in another respect, if somebody did rob your house or like the family in our church whose house burned down this last year, give the testimony that spiritually, it's been a wonderful experience for them. Why? Because when your house burns down, it helps refine what really matters in life, doesn't it? And this is what trials do. They help us realize that these temporary things that in the matter in the end don't matter, that knowing Christ is the thing that matters.
He is the enduring source of joy, and the joy in Jesus is magnified by the loss. Let me illustrate it this way. Let's just imagine that it's last week and you're in Phoenix. And you didn't realize it, but the Super Bowl was going on in Phoenix. And you're like, that's I've always wanted to go to the Super Bowl like you're a lifelong NFL fan.
It's been a dream of yours, but they never have the Super Bowl in at Soldier Field, so you never have the opportunity. But you just happen to be in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Super Bowl is going on. You get online, and sure enough, there's a ticket. You buy this ticket. It's extraordinarily expensive, but you're like, I'm going anyway.
It's a once in a lifetime chance. And so you go to the Super Bowl and you got your ticket and you you go in there and you're like, okay, where's my seat at? They say it's up there. And the next guy goes, it's up there. And the next guy goes, it's up You're in the last row of the stadium.
You're all the way at the top. You're sitting behind a pillar next to a drunk guy. And you're sitting there, I can't believe this is gonna be my Super Bowl experience sitting here. And you're, like, looking around the pillar trying to see the game. When all of a sudden the guy comes up to you and says, he goes, hey.
How'd you like to be in the front row? And you're like, really? He goes, here's the thing though. To be in the front row, you gotta give me your back row ticket. Now what would be the natural response to that?
No problem. Best day of my entire life. You bet. You can have this ticket right here. You just frame it for all I care.
You can have that. I get the front row ticket. And so down you go all the way to the front row, and there you are, best seat in the house, 50 yard line. The game's going on in front of you. And and what do you do in the entire game?
You're watching the game, but every once in a while, you're looking back up at the seat that you were supposed to be sitting in. And you're thinking to yourself every time you look at it, what? Yes. Right? Look where I am.
Look what I have. Fantastic. How many of us would be in the front row going, oh, the old ticket. Sounds like a country song. Right?
The old ticket. Maybe I shouldn't have given that up. We don't think that. Why? Because we realize what we have.
And trials are that for us. Suffering is that for us. It is always loss. Trials are it's a loss of my health. It's the loss of my job.
It's the loss of my spouse. It's the loss of my financial security. It's it's somehow it involves the losing or the threatening of losing something that I am deeming valuable, but they are always things that are temporary. Even life itself is the loss of something temporary. I don't get to keep any of these things anyway, including my life.
But as I go through these trials, they are and I'm losing things or maybe losing things. They are reminding the Christian that there is one thing that is enduring. There is one possession that trumps all of them. It is the front row ticket. And my joy is in this, not in that.
Are you with me? And so we have to live our lives. And this is what Peter is saying. You haven't seen him, but you love him. You don't see him now.
You believe in him. And the result of my gladness, my hope, my assurance being in Jesus and not in these other things is that I can have a joy that is paired with the pain. I can have a joy in the midst of the sorrow. I can have joy in the midst of the plundering of my possessions. I can have joy in the midst of the cancer treatment.
I can have joy in the midst of the marital counseling. I can have joy in the midst of the painful pregnancy. I can have joy in the midst of anything that is temporary because my joy isn't something that is eternal. Right? And this joy, in the words of the old preacher, the world didn't give it, and the world can't take it away.
Trials magnify what really matters. When I think about things that I've gone through in my life, I turned 47 two weeks ago. I'm not the oldest in the room, and I am not the youngest anymore. I've been around the block a few times, and I've had a few hard things that I've gone through. When I think about even the worst moments of my life, I look back at them now, and I can appreciate them because God used them in my life to refine my faith, to get my clinging from things and people and affirmation from people and a host of other things.
And they have been good for me. Good for me. And I got a long way to go in this. And you catch me on the wrong day, and you're gonna walk away thinking he ain't living out his sermon very well. But neither are you, friend.
And that's why heaven will be all of us living the sermon out perfectly. Joy inexpressible, filled with glory, seeing him by sight, being in proximity to him, knowing his love, not by faith, but by the full experience of human sensory knowledge to touch him, to hear him, to see him will be for us as a joy that our hearts can't even imagine now. And that day is coming. So how about you, friend? You're in a trial right now?
You got some pain going on? Is your joy in the thought that maybe that trial's gonna go away? Is your joy in the thought that maybe that pain will go away? You got everybody praying that God would take the pain away. Might not the actual solution be pairing the pain with joy in the Lord?
“Rejoice in the Lord always. And again, I say rejoice.” And that is how we live the Christian life in the ups and the downs, in the trials and in the blessings, awaiting a day when our faith will be sight and we will see him. That will be a great day. Amen.
Would you please join me for a word of prayer?
* This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.
