Kerry Shook - Joy Like Jesus
Have you ever wondered what Jesus really looked like on this earth? Maybe you haven't, because you have this image of Jesus that you've never really questioned, the image that comes from the way artists have painted Jesus throughout the years. It's Jesus painted as a white European with blue, penetrating eyes, wearing a long, flowing robe with long brown hair. He looks a little fragile, a little weak, very somber and very serious, and really, really spiritual.
Now, I don't know what Jesus looked like, but I know it wasn't that. It was artists in the middle ages that painted Jesus as a white European. Middle-aged artists ignored the fact that Jesus was Middle Eastern. He was a Middle Eastern Jew, so his skin would have been darker, his eyes were probably brown. He was a carpenter growing up working in construction, so he would have been strong, and masculine, and not fragile and weak. In all the classic paintings, Jesus looks so somber and joyless, but Jesus was the essence of joy, and joy was the essence of Jesus. That's why when Christ was born, the angels said, "Joy to the world," because the God of joy has entered this world of sorrow and sadness.
Jesus was filled with joy more than anyone who's ever lived, and the amazing thing is he wants to fill you up with overflowing joy that comes from him, so you have the same joy that he had when he was on this earth. Well, I want you to open your Bibles to John chapter 15, because what I want us to do today is learn how to have joy like Jesus, and in John 15 it tells us. Would you stand in honor of God's Word? Just follow along with me. Jesus said this, "As the father has loved me so have I loved you, now remain in my love. If you keep my commands you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. My command is this, love each other as I have loved you".
You can be seated. Jesus says I'm telling you all this so that my joy may be in you. Jesus wants to fill us with the joy he had, and Jesus said the secret to experiencing this kind of joy is to remain in my love. We can remain in his love or run from his love. We can remain in his love and experience joy, or we can run from his love and lose our joy. And why do we so often run from the God of joy rather than remain in the God of joy? I think the reason why we try to do life ourselves rather than obeying him and surrendering to his control is because we don't know him very well.
And if we don't really know the God of joy, we won't trust the God of joy. To have joy like Jesus, we need to see the real Jesus, not some image of Jesus that we have in our head. I want us to point out three things about the real Jesus that you may have totally missed. I want us to learn these three things about the Jesus of joy, so that we can experience the joy of Jesus in our lives. The first thing I want you to see, and the thing that we need to learn, is to laugh like Jesus. Have you ever realized that Jesus laughed? Maybe you've never thought about it, but Jesus laughed. When you think of Jesus, you usually don't think of the words "fun" or "funny," but look at Mark 12:37. It says, "The large crowd listened to him, Jesus, with delight".
People loved listening to Jesus. It was exciting to listen to the Son of God. And when a non-Christian thinks of church, what do they usually think of? Boring, why would I go to church? Man, it's so boring. But church should be something you enjoy, not something you endure. Church should be the most enjoyable, the most fun, the most meaningful, the most challenging, the most life-changing place there is. Folks, it's not a funeral service, it's a celebration service because Christ is alive. It's just my personal bias that church ought to be fun, but it also ought to be challenging and life-changing. Everyone loved listening to Jesus, except for the stuffy and pompous religious leaders, and Jesus used a lot of humor in his messages.
We just don't recognize it because it's not our kind of humor. When we read it, we don't really get the jokes because Hebrew humor was different from our humor. Scholar Elton Trueblood has a book called "The Humor of Jesus," and he points out that Jesus used humor all through his preaching. Hebrew humor in that day was humor by exaggeration, and that's not our kind of humor so we don't get the jokes. Jesus would say when you judge others it's like you're trying to take a speck of sawdust out of their eye when you got a two-by-four in your eye. Oh, Jesus, that's hilarious. I mean, they'd be cracking up. It was humor by exaggeration.
Jesus would say it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Jesus, cut it out, you're killing me with these jokes. I mean, people would be belly laughing, but we don't get it because it's not our kind of humor, but that Hebrew humor in that day was humor by exaggeration. And if you read Scripture, you see that Jesus had so much humor in his messages because he knew laughter was such an important part of life. He created laughter. The Son of God laughed. He didn't shoot hoops with them, but he laughed with his disciples. He laughed with the children. Just imagine the sound of the Son of God laughing. You ever thought about that? He was God, and yet he never acted too important to laugh.
And some of you are taking yourself too seriously. I mean, you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and that's not your job, and you're thinking that what you're doing is so important. If you stop, the whole world is gonna crash, and you're not the general manager in the universe, you can resign from that and the world is gonna keep going on. A big problem with a lot of Christians today is they take themselves far too seriously, but they don't take God seriously enough.
At Woodlands Church, we don't take ourselves too seriously, but we take God very seriously, and we want to follow him with all of our hearts, but we can laugh at ourselves. It's not about being serious, it's about being spiritual, which has nothing to do with just being serious. Sometimes we need to be very serious, and then other times we need to laugh like Jesus.
In Luke 7:34 it says, "The Son of Man came enjoying life". Most people don't enjoy life, they just endure it because they mistakenly think that everything has to be perfect before they can enjoy the moment they're in, and that's not reality. No one had more pressures and problems than Jesus Christ. He was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet he still chose joy, and joy is a choice. Joy is a focus, not a feeling. We've been talking about that. And if you're ever going to experience joy at any time in your life, you gotta choose it right in the middle of the problems and pressures of life. To have joy like Jesus, I need to learn to laugh like Jesus.
I need to learn that I'm not the general manager of the universe, and I can laugh, and I can see humor in even the problems of life, but I also need to learn to cry like Jesus. One of the most powerful verses in all Scripture is the shortest one, John 11:35, "Jesus wept". The God of the universe didn't act too important to laugh, and he wasn't too proud to cry. Jesus experienced the most sorrow of anyone who's ever lived. He grieved more than anyone who's ever walked this earth, and yet Jesus was the most joyful person who ever lived. That's because you can't experience great joy unless you grieve your losses.
So, if God grieves, if Jesus grieved, that means grief is good. Grieving is a good thing. It's part of the healing. But we don't like to grieve, it feels awkward, it feels awful. We just want the pain to go away. We just want to feel some measure of happiness again. And in our culture, we don't know what to do with grief. We feel like we need to be happy, and when we're around someone who's grieving, we want to make them happier or lift their spirits up, but that's not our job. We need to grieve. Our job is to be there grieving with them, and we want to be happy, and sometimes we just stuff it down and we go on and we don't want to grieve, but so many times we run from our pain.
We anesthetize the pain with an addiction, or we want to be in crowds and keep the noise going so we don't have to think about it, or we use workaholism so we just keep going, or we turn to pleasure, or we stuff it in, don't talk about it, and think I just need to buck up, I need to be strong. But if you don't grieve, it will explode in some way in your life at some time. It will come out in some crazy way, like a midlife crisis, or a decision that devastates your life. We have to grieve our losses. If you don't grieve your losses, you can't experience deep joy, but it's so easy just to run from your hurt. Don't run from your hurt, bring it to the healer.
Look what Jesus said in the greatest sermon ever preached in Matthew 5:4. He said, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted". The word "blessed" literally means, oh, how joyful. So, what he's saying is, how joyful you are when you're sad. Now, that sounds like just the opposite to me. That makes no sense to me. He's saying how joyful you are when you're really sad. No, that's really true, it just doesn't seem true to me. What he's saying is when you're crying, you can experience the comforter. It's when you're crying, it's when you're hurting the most, that you can experience the healer. It's the tears that wash away the illusion of happiness so we can see clearly to take hold of lasting joy. It's when you can't hold on that you discover that God will never let you go, and that starts bringing you joy, even with the tears.
As the tears of grief stream down your face, all of a sudden, joy starts welling up in your heart as you realize no matter what happens in your life, God's gonna get you through another day, and God is gonna hold you, and happiness can't hold you when everything's falling apart, but God can. He can fill you up with his joy and you can have joy in the middle of the pain. And without grief, when you're going through loss, you can't experience joy. But I have a passage for you today, a promise for you, that I know some of you guys need desperately. This is a passage that is for somebody out there. You're the one he loves, and you're the one that he has this promise for.
"Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning". You may be going through a night of weeping, and it feels like your night of weeping will never end. It's the night of weeping that brings the morning of joy. Without the weeping, there can't be the morning of joy. Maybe you can't see any joy right now. The darkness in your night is just too dark to see anything, but just because you can't see it now, can't prevent the joy from coming in the morning. Maybe you're in the darkest night of your life. It's always darkest before dawn. And I'm telling you, joy is coming in the morning. The morning will come. The dawn is coming.
But here's the great news, you don't have to bring the joy, all you have to do is grieve, and the God of joy, and the God of sorrow, sits with you in your grief. And as you grieve your loss, he will start bringing the morning of joy. One day, we'll have the morning break and we'll be in heaven one day, the place of perfect joy, but I'm telling you, for those of you who are in the darkest night of your life, I'm telling you, joy is coming in the morning. Joy is on the way, not just in heaven. The good thing is, you don't have to work up joy, you don't have to bring the joy, all you have to do is just stay with God.
You keep coming to church, you keep connecting online, you keep believing, you keep trusting even when you don't feel it. You pour out your heart to God, your anger, your grief to God, you keep grieving. Don't run from your pain, keep bringing it to the God of sorrow and the God of joy. And as you bring it to God, he's gonna bring the joy. It's not your job to bring the joy. You hold on and you keep following God. Resurrection Sunday is just around the corner. "Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning". And so, I need to laugh like Jesus, cry like Jesus, and love like Jesus. In John 15:12, let's get back to John 15 again. Jesus said, "My command is this, love each other as I have loved you".
So, we're to love others like Jesus. That's impossible without Jesus's power, because Jesus loved people so sacrificially that he gave his life for them, and so the only way we can love others like Jesus is with the power of Christ in us, and then we also need the pace of Christ. Jesus was never in a hurry, even though he had more to do and more to accomplish than any human being who's ever lived. He was never in a hurry. He was never too busy for relationship. His schedule was never overcrowded. He always slowed down for relationships. The priority of his life was love, loving his Father and obeying him, and loving others, loving his disciples, loving his friends, loving his followers, loving his enemies.
And some of you are too busy for relationships. And we talk about quality time. There's no such thing as quality time when it comes to relationships. You can't skim over relationships and give a little quality time. It takes quantity time. That's the only way you can build relationships. It takes quantity time, and some of you are just too busy for relationships, and you're forgetting what's most important in life. One night I came home late from a meeting, and Chris looked at me and she said, "You're missing it". I said, "What do you mean"? She said, "You're missing the most important thing in life".
And I'm telling you, you're going to regret it. You're going to regret it for the rest of your life. She said, "Your kid's in preschool," and we had a couple in grade school, that were just going to grade school. But she said this preschool time, especially this grade school time, is such a formative time, and if you're not here during this time, and connecting with them, and all there, but you're out all the time, every night, you're always thinking about the problems that are going on, and the stresses, you're missing it. And you only have this time for a very short time and it is gone in a blink of an eye. And if you don't slow down and connect with them, you will never have another chance.
This is the time. You're missing it. It's gonna be the biggest... I know you well, and you're gonna regret this for the rest of your life. And then that just sort of woke me up. I'm so grateful for my loving, amazing wife. I need that from her many times on things, to remind me of what's most important. And I started to change then, and I realized something so important. I realized that God was building the church. I've also realized that every step I was totally wrong about everything. Every step there's just more problems and pressures. Every step, you know, oh, we got a building, wow, we have a lot more problems now, a lot more things to be concerned about, you know?
And then, oh, we got more staff, more problems. The church grows, man, if the church was just 150 that was perfect, you know? I mean, there wasn't all these problems. And so, and then God calls us to step out more than ever and I'm going, God, I'm more scared than ever. You're calling us to step out more than ever. Never changes, you don't have the same problems, praise God, but you just have bigger ones, bigger pressures. And so, if you don't learn joy right in the middle of your problems and pressures, you don't learn to take a step back and move at the pace of Jesus and be more effective rather than running around doing all these things with no overarching purpose, you're gonna miss the most important thing in life, and that's love, loving God and loving the people in your life.
You're gonna miss out on life and you're going to regret it at the end of your life. You gotta learn it now. To really love people, you have to put themselves, you have to put them ahead of yourself, and stop focusing on yourself, and focus on others. In Philippians 2:5 it says, "Think of yourself as the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God, but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave. He became human. Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges, instead he lived a selfless, obedient life, and then died a selfless, obedient death, and the worst kind of death at that, a crucifixion".
He said have the same attitude about yourself as Jesus did. You know, Jesus served us, and he wanted us to have salvation so much that he gave his whole life for us. He didn't try to say, hey, wait a minute, guys, I'm God, I'm God, everybody serve me. I'm God, did you forget I'm God? I'm God. No, he didn't do that because he was confident in who he was, and all he tried to do is please his heavenly Father, and his heavenly Father wanted him to love because he is love. Wanted him to express his love, and so what did he do? He just loved people and he put others ahead of himself. The Bible says Jesus saw the crowds and had compassion on them.
That is, he was able to see into the hearts of all the people that were smiling and so busy running around, he saw the brokenness. And I don't know everything about the people you'll run into tomorrow in your workplace, in your neighborhood, at the grocery store, but I know one thing about them, they're carrying a hidden hurt. In Sue Monk Kidd's best-selling book, "The Secret Life Of Bees," a 14-year-old runaway named Lily is welcomed in to this very loving and wonderful home of sisters. And August is the oldest sister, and she's the matriarch of the family, and May is the sister that's struggling the most and the most needy.
Now, the exterior of this very loving home, their house, is painted with this unmistakable, gaudy, bright pink. And one day Lily says, "If blue is your favorite color, then why did you paint your house so pink"? And August answers, "That was May's doing. She was with me the day that I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish flamenco". And I thought, well, this is the tackiest color I've ever seen, but if it can lift May's heart like that, I guess she ought to live inside it. And Lily said, "All this time I just figured you liked pink a lot," and August laughed again. "You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily, like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart, now that matters. The whole problem with people is," and Lily interrupted, "They don't know what matters and what doesn't?"
"No, I was gonna say the problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters most". And that's so true, we know what matters most. Every one of us would say love is the top priority, relationships, loving God and loving others, that's all that matters. But we live our lives doing the urgent rather than the thing that matters most, because the hardest thing in the world is to choose what matters most, because it's choosing God and others over ourselves and what we want. The hardest thing in the world is to choose what matters most. The reason why we don't do what matters most is because it's hard. But when we choose what matters most with God's power, and we choose that love is gonna be our top priority, that we're gonna love, we're filled with joy. Let's look at this verse, the last verse.
Let's go back to John 15 again in verse 9. Jesus says, "I've loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you'll remain intimately at home in my love". I love that. So, God wants us to remain at home in his love. That's what it's all about. To have joy, you remain at home in his love, and to remain home and his love, what does he say? You obey him. You do what matters most. You obey God even when you don't feel like it. You obey God even when you don't understand it. You obey God even when you think you know what's best. If you want to remain at home in his love, you have to obey God. But like the prodigal son, instead of remaining at home in his love, I've run away from home.
So many times I've run away from home, and disobeyed God, and done what I felt like or what I thought was best, rather than surrender to what God knows is best for me. And I've run away from home, and far from home. I'm far from joy, I'm restless, and I can't rest at home in my Father's love. But there it is, far from home, that so many times I feel totally broken and empty of my pride, and I finally stop running and I return home. And when I stop running and return home, the God of joy runs to me. And even though I'm covered in filth, and my clothes are tattered and torn, he gives me a big bear hug with tears of joy streaming down his face.