Tag: Psalms

This was a direct hit—it cut through all the noise and helped me to better understand what Joy in Christ actually is. I’ve forwarded this devotional a dozen times, to believers and those that are searching. — Glenn

Readers’ Choice (Originally published April 29, 2016)

“A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track, ” observes Zadie Smith. The author confesses, “That has not been my experience.”

Joy, in many Christian circles, has been wrongly placed in contrast to happiness. The result of this false dichotomy, Randy Alcorn points out, is a distorted view that removes joy from the emotional spectrum and secularizes happiness. “Our message shouldn’t be ‘Don’t seek happiness,’” Alcorn remarks, “but ‘You’ll find in Jesus the happiness and joy you’ve always longed for.’”

As a fruit of the Spirit, joy is given from God, simultaneously with self discipline and patience. In other words, delaying gratification doesn’t diminish the joy of God. True joy requires sacrifice. It reaches beyond pleasure and taps into something much deeper. The most talented storytellers in our culture have recognized this—noting how different joy is from the reckless pursuit of pleasure that marks our material world. Filmmaker George Lucas explains:

Joy is the thing that doesn’t go as high as pleasure—in terms of your emotional reaction—but, it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t. The secret is, that even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer.

If you’re trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you’re doomed. It’s a very American idea. Joy lasts forever, pleasure is purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure—it’s about you. It’s a selfish, self-centered emotion. It’s created by a self-centered motive of greed.

Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else, or something else. It’s a kind of thing that, in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure you’re doomed. If you pursue joy, you’ll find everlasting happiness.

When we think of the fruit of the Spirit as the transferable attributes of God—those divine characteristics which shape our lives as we live in sync with the Spirit—it becomes clear human beings were created for joy. Scripture reveals that anything we are created to receive from God we will attempt to counterfeit—to become our own god as we provide for ourselves.

Marijuana, alcohol, adventure sports, sex, and so many other little things bring us right to the outside edges of joy. We taste, if only for a moment, the glory of creation. And because pleasure is so short lived and so soon forgotten we want more. We need more. In trying to pin down a definition of joy for her piece in The New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith looks back to her drug use in the London club scene:

Was that joy? Probably not. But it mimicked joy’s conditions pretty well…. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it.

We can’t counterfeit true joy. Commenting on Smith’s experience, Alex Bayer observes, “static pleasure precludes the chance of achieving joy.” What we see—in Christ’s life, sacrifice, death, and resurrection—is that joy is found not in the flickers of earthly pleasure, but the eternal glory of God. One of Jesus’ shortest parables, then, is a story about joy—and how we find it in the happy forfeiture of this life’s meaningless pleasures:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Joy is not contrast to happiness, but to grief. We know this, deep down—if nothing else from the depth of these two emotions. We know this from the low-level grief we carry with us in a broken world. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit because it only comes as God re-enters the world from which sin kicked him out. He came and wept with us so that we might rejoice for all of eternity with him.

Grief today is but a sign of the glory to come. Likewise, the joy we find relinquishing our pursuit of daily pleasure for a greater joy is a testimony of what lies ahead. Smith concludes:

The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.

Weekend Reading List

• Joy. Zadie Smith for The New York Review of Books.
• Is There a Biblical Difference Between Happiness and Joy? Randy Alcorn for OnFaith.
• George Lucas on Joy. Video for the Academy of Achievement.
• Joy vs. Pleasure. Alex Bayer for the Stanford Daily.

Today’s Reading
Lamentations 3 (Listen – 5:10)
Psalm 34 (Listen – 2:14)

This Weekend’s Readings
Lamentations 4 (Listen – 3:42) Psalm 35 (Listen – 3:21)
Lamentations 5 (Listen – 2:03) Psalm 36 (Listen – 1:29)

Thank You, Readers!

A special thanks to all those who contributed their favorite Park Forum devotionals to our August Readers’ Choice series.

Thanks for being part of The Park Forum community. We are so thankful to be part of your devotional rhythm.

Bonhoeffer’s Lenten Prayer brought to mind a poem in a favorite book, A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken. The poem was written by a Catholic priest named Dom. Julian Stead, who was at the time dying of cancer:

If everything is lost, thanks be to God
If I must see it go, watch it go,
Watch it fade away, die
Thanks be to God that He is all I have
And if I have Him not, I have nothing at all
Nothing at all, only a farewell to the wind
Farewell to the grey sky
Goodbye, God be with you evening October sky.
If all is lost, thanks be to God,
For He is He, and I, I am only I.

— Greg

Readers’ Choice (Originally published February 24, 2016)

“Christ’s time of passion begins not with Holy Week but with the first day of his preaching,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “His renunciation of the empire as a kingdom of this world takes place not at Golgotha but at the very beginning.”

Jesus could have been Lord of this world. As the Messiah the Jews had dreamed of, he could have freed Israel and led it to fame and honor. He is a remarkable man, who is offered dominion over the world even before the beginning of his ministry. And it is even more remarkable that he turns down this offer. He knows that for this dominion he would have to pay a price that is too high for him. It would come at the cost of obedience to God’s will.

“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Luke 4:8). Jesus knows what that means. It means lowliness, abuse, persecution. It means remaining misunderstood. It means hate, death, the cross. And he chooses this way from the beginning. It is the way of obedience and the way of freedom, for it is the way of God. And therefore it is also the way of love for human beings.

I Cannot Do This Alone

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.

Help me to pray

And to concentrate my thoughts on you;

I cannot do this alone.

In me there is darkness,

But with you there is light;

I am lonely, but you do not leave me;

I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

I do not understand your ways,

But you know the way for me….

Restore me to liberty,

And enable me to live now

That I may answer before you and before men.

Lord whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

Amen

Today’s Reading
Lamentations 2 (Listen – 4:55)
Psalm 33 (Listen – 2:08)

Submit a devotional for Readers’ Choice

Contribute your favorite Park Forum devotionals to Readers’ Choice.

Email me the title or link. If you don’t mind adding a sentence or two as to why each post was significant to you, I would love to include your voice as well.

Thanks for being part of The Park Forum community. We are so thankful to be part of your devotional rhythm.

If the greatest effect of God’s love in me is only that I love those similar to me and who agree with me, then I need God as much as I need a new kind of toothpaste. — John

Readers’ Choice (Originally published May 17, 2016)

Love covers a multitude of sins. — 1 Peter 4.8

“One of the reasons why there are so many exhortations in the New Testament for Christians to love other Christians is because this is not an easy thing to do,” D.A. Carson explains. “The church itself is not made up of natural ‘friends.’ It is made up of natural enemies.” It is Christ himself who unites faithful Christians—in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, “nothing more and nothing less.” Carson continues:

What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or any- thing else of that sort. Christians come together, not because they form a natural collocation, but because they have all been saved by Jesus Christ and owe him a common allegiance. In the light of this common allegiance, in the light of the fact that they have all been loved by Jesus himself, they commit themselves to doing what he says—and he commands them to love one another. In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.

Carson argues that unity is not intrinsically good. The first church was united around the work of Christ; the people in Babel were united around building glory for themselves. If you want to know what a community values most, look to what the members hold in common.

Churches formed around commitment to a political party—rejecting or ostracizing members of the other party—are confessing their idolatry. Churches which bind around economic status, hobbies, or ethnicity reveal their self-centeredness. Christian unity is an extension of Christ’s love and sacrifice for us, not a sign of our strength.

We are to love Christ more than our ideologies, but we are also to love him more than our desire to penalize or seek retribution from those who hurt us.

There is no Scriptural expectation that love will cover all sins between people. Abusive relationships, even marriages, are to be exited—with Scripture’s blessing—for the benefit of both parties. Short of this, love is expected to cover a multitude of sins. Why? Because living in a broken world exposes us to a multitude of grievances.

Ideological pettiness is the scourge of social media—and it’s bleeding into the real world a little more each day. Not-so for the faithful Christian. Carson concludes, “The reason why Christian love will stand out and bear witness to Jesus is that it is a display, for Jesus’ sake, of mutual love among social incompatibles.”

Today’s Reading
Lamentations 1 (Listen – 4:44)
Psalm 32 (Listen – 1:34)

Submit a devotional for Readers’ Choice

Contribute your favorite Park Forum devotionals to Readers’ Choice.

Email me the title or link. If you don’t mind adding a sentence or two as to why each post was significant to you, I would love to include your voice as well.

Thanks for being part of The Park Forum community. We are so thankful to be part of your devotional rhythm.