Joy of the Lord is Our Strength 1976

We hear our quotation from Scripture more and more these days, and we surely need to hear it. And if we understand its meaning and we really pursue this statement right back to its source, it blesses us immensely. And I'm talking about the quote from Scripture, the joy of the Lord is your strength.

And this is for sure. To find the joy of the Lord as our strength, it's important to also understand exactly where you get hold of this. And so I'd like to have us look at that portion of Scripture where this term is used, where this expression is used, and really give it some thought and some prayer during the sermon and then throughout the day.

And as long as the Lord takes to get it through to us and to truly bless us. So I'm going to read today from Nehemiah chapter 8, starting in verse 1, about the first 12 verses, skipping a few lists of names. And all the people gathered as one man in the square before the water gate.

And they told Ezra, the scribe, to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. And Ezra, the priest, brought the law before the assembly, both men and women, and all who could hear with understanding. They must have had a nursery for the small ones.

The little, the ones that could get it were there. On the first day of the seventh month, seventh facing the square before the water gate, from the early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

And Ezra, the scribe, stood on a wooden pulpit, which they had made for the purpose. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people. And when he opened it, all the people stood.

And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, Amen, Amen, lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra, the priest, and scribe, and the Levites, who taught the people, said to all the people, this day is holy to the Lord your God.

Do not mourn and weep, for all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. And he said to them, go your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet wine, and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord. And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, be quiet, for this day is holy. Do not be grieved. And all the people went their way to eat and drink and send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they understood the words that were declared to them.

If we can just try to get hold of the picture of what was going on here, this vast assembly gathered in the square of a Jerusalem that was now but a ghost of the city it once had been. And this assembly is made up of people who have spent their entire lives in exile, and all their lives they've been told by their parents and grandparents what a magnificent place Jerusalem had been. And now they come back to this.

It's a special day, and they're gathered to hear the word of God. Ezra, the scribe, gets up in this wooden pulpit that they have made for him, a kind of a scaffold of some kind, a platform, and opens the scroll containing the Torah and blesses the Lord God for this. And quite spontaneously, everybody says, Amen.

And then as he begins to read the law of God, a very strange thing happened. Down toward the front of the assembly, a huge hulk of a man begins to sob like a baby. Ezra keeps on reading, and pretty soon a woman, way back toward the rear of the assembly, just cries as if her heart is breaking.

Ezra continues to read, and the people drink in the words, and men who hadn't cried since they were little children find their faces and their beards wet with tears. And everywhere you look, you see weeping. What does this mean? It means that the Spirit of the living God has moved upon this assembly and given it the gift of deep, genuine, broken, heartfelt repentance.

Finally, Ezra stops reading. The word of God has done its work. Their hearts have been broken, and now they're ready for the comfort of God.

And so now, Ezra says, do not mourn and weep. This day is holy unto the Lord. Go your way, eat the sweet and eat the fat, and drink the sweet wine, and send portions to those for whom nothing has been prepared, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Gradually, the weeping subsides, and in its place comes a joy such as they have never experienced before, the joy of the Lord. And they rise up, go their way, and eat, and drink, and send portions to people who have nothing. The same Spirit, see, that had moved them to weep, now moves them with a joy that they were meant to have when man was first created, a joy that will now be their strength as they rebuild the ruined city and revive the wasted nation.

The joy of the Lord is your strength. Very strange thing about the joy of the Lord. Almost invariably, it comes to us by means of the gift of weeping.

Now, the weeping may not be on our faces, but it will surely be in our hearts. When we are visited truly by the joy of the Lord, and not by some cheap counterfeit, the first evidence of the coming of the joy of the Lord is that the heart of stone in here begins to break, and all the hardness, and all the indifference, and all the bitterness, and all the arrogance crumbles. We begin to see ourselves as in the sight of the living God.

And as we do this, all the flesh strength that seemed to hold us together in the past drains away, and we have no choice but to somehow break, somehow to weep. And then, we are visited by the joy of the Lord. What was it that caused these people to weep as Ezra reads this word? Now, as they're listening to Ezra read the word of God, they know that they haven't been doing it.

They have fallen far short. They're so far from God. They've wronged him in so many ways.

You know, and this is all very spontaneous. They just, there's no choice for them, but they just break inside their hearts. And the minute they begin to admit that they have been wrong, you know, they're no longer defending themselves, no longer trying to give excuses for where they're at, but they simply repent.

Then God comes in with joy that becomes their strength against all the failures, and all the disobedience, and all the unbelief which had plagued their lives in the past. Now, exactly the same thing happens to us. The joy of the Lord is our strength against all the things which have defeated us, you know, and made a mockery of our intentions to walk with God.

It's our strength, but the joy of the Lord does not come into our hearts initially by means of singing and dancing, but by means of weeping. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth bearing precious seed shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

So if you ask God to give you joy, and you find that shortly after that he takes you through a valley of tears, don't get the idea that he's playing some weird trick on you. You must understand that he's doing it, he's answering your prayer, he's bringing you to your heart's desire by means of the only possible way you will ever have it. For instance, the joy of the Lord is our strength against despair.

Now, no doubt there are some of us here who are living right now in despair, and some who have lived perhaps for a long time in despair. By despair, I mean that your soul is numb. Your heart is dry.

You just see no hope, nothing to look forward to, nothing to live for. You're just dry up inside. Now, the weird thing about despair is that when it gets hold of your heart, you can't cry.

Oh, you can shed crocodile tears to get sympathy. You can weep, you know, little tears of self-pity. But the deep, broken-hearted cry of repentance is impossible to you.

Notice, when Judas finally realized what he had done to his master, there is no record, as far as I know, in Scripture of Judas weeping. And the reason is he could not weep. It was impossible to him.

He had closed and locked his door against the joy of the Lord. You know, and the only thing that he knows now is the prison of despair, and that there's only one way to go. Now, this one last desperate step he has to take, and he does it without one tear.

Compare with this what happens to Peter when he wakes up and realizes what he has done in denying his Lord. It says, Peter went out and wept bitterly. And as Peter wept, he was beginning already, though he didn't know it, to taste the joy of the Lord, which would just dawn on him three days later.

And when the joy of the Lord comes to us, when we are caught down there in that valley of despair, the same thing begins to happen. You know, when the joy of the Lord comes, the first thing that takes place is that we suddenly realize that our numbness and our dryness are not some kind of hurt from a God who doesn't care, but rather that this numbness and dryness is nothing other than unbelief on our part in the face of a God who has given us everything he has, laid down the life of his only begotten, and in a thousand ways tried to manifest to us his mercy, and we wouldn't. We refuse to have it.

But now we see, you know, when we see how we hurt God, broke his heart, now we begin to break. And as we offer to him the sacrifice of a broken heart and a broken spirit, joy comes to us as if we've never known. And that joy becomes our strength against ever having to fall back into despair again.

The joy of the Lord is our strength against vanity. Perhaps some of us are living in vanity, have been for years. By vanity, I mean when you're building your life on a foundation which has no more substance than air.

You're pinning your hopes, drawing your satisfaction, laying up your treasure in such a way that one good storm will just take it all down the drain and you'll have nothing left. When you're living this way in vanity, it's impossible to weep for anything except, you know, your own little petty disappointments. They didn't let me in.

They rejected me. My dreams were shattered. You'll weep over this, but to weep for what you have done, the fact that you, you know, wasted your life on nonsense, the fact that you're just throwing it away, that won't be possible.

You can't weep until the joy of the Lord begins to visit. And when the joy of the Lord begins to visit those of us who are living in vanity and we open the door of our heart to it, first thing that happens, we suddenly see what's going on. We realize how we've been throwing our lives away, really, and all the people we've been hurting and all the people we've been letting down, all the damage we've been doing, you know, and the God whose heart is breaking over us.

Then we begin to break ourselves, you know, and we crack inside and turn around and we offer to him again the sacrifice of a broken heart. And then we receive the joy of the Lord. When Jesus told Zacchaeus to come down out of the tree, Zacchaeus was living in vanity, but the fact that he climbed that tree was already indicative of the fact that he was making a change now.

And we're told in Scripture that Zacchaeus scrambled down out of that tree and received Jesus joyfully. And the fact that this joy was the joy of the Lord is evident because it was the kind of joy which brings about a heart change. Now, we don't see here anything in Scripture in this account of Zacchaeus crying, but we do see in Scripture that before dinner is over, Zacchaeus stands up and says, put yourself in his shoes.

Half my goods I give to the poor, and that means from now on. And if I've defrauded anybody, I'm going to restore it fourfold. He doesn't just say, I'm safe, you know, and go right on doing the same junk he was doing, but he makes this heart change.

That means that Zacchaeus was weeping in his heart for what he had been, what he had done, and he made the change and he did it with joy. The joy of the Lord is our strength against a fruitless life. In John 15, we read, by this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.

A few verses later, he says that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. I have said these things to you. And it's amazing how we can go for years without ever batting an eyelash over the fact that we have produced absolutely nothing with our lives for anybody else.

Having done anything for anybody, perhaps, maybe a little bit for our immediate family, maybe. It doesn't even bother us if we send people away empty again and again. Then one day we wake up and receive it.

And now we want to begin to serve. We want to do something and comes the second shock. You know, we often think, well, okay, now I'm going to start really serving people and helping them.

And you discover when people come to you for help. Now, now that you want to do something, you can't, you have nothing to give them. They come for advice.

You can't give them anything. They come for help. You don't have anything to give them.

Your cupboards are bare. And when you finally get to the place where you start going next door to your neighbor, who happens to be the heavenly father and pound on his door and cry out for bread, somebody has come in the middle of the night and I have nothing to set before him. Give me something when you're doing this, then you're approaching the joy of the Lord and you won't be pounding on that door very long before it will open and into your heart will flow the joy of the living God, which will be your strength to feed the hungry with the living bread of the true and living God.

We can write down a catalog. I don't plan to do that, but just consider one more thing quickly that the joy of the Lord is our strength against any temptation that comes. Now there's nobody who doesn't walk through temptation and temptation always carries with it, even if it's a temptation to choke somebody, you know, or to do some harm.

Um, it's always a temptation that involves pleasure. You know, you're, you want to do it because it'll make you feel good. But now if your heart is filled with joy, everything else comes into perspective and you're not going to fall.

For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. And then he said to them, go your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet wine and send portions to him for whom nothing is prepared for this day is holy to the Lord, our God, and do not be for the joy of the Lord is your strength. May it be that joy that comes into our hearts afresh this day, even if it has to come to us as it came to them by means of weeping, brokenness, repentance, that we may rise up out of our despair and out of our vanity and out of our fruitless lives and out of our temptation and do the will of our father with hearts that are absolutely filled, overflowing with no other joy but his.

Let's pray. So much to be done here and everywhere. Lord God, you show us again a vision of things far beyond us here through Alan Marlene this morning, needs that are there and all around us, such heartache and such tragedy and such need and people who are crying to us, Father God, and we know, Lord, that we just yet have not what they need.

We pray, Heavenly Father, at whatever cost to our own comfort, we may be filled with that true joy which comes only from you, that we, no longer relying upon ourselves and broken and contrite before you, may be able to go forth, Heavenly Father, and do your wonderful, merciful, gracious will in the power and in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.