The Pastor’s Joy Challenge – Part Eight: Diving Deep Into Jesus’ Joy

I strongly believe in every suggestion I’ve shared in this series of eight posts on the subject of the pastor’s joy.

Every one of them has been helpful to me and I imagine that none of them have been original with me for, “If it’s true it’s not new and if it’s new it’s not true.”

Next week I’ll wrap up this series with a few more great suggestions. The last one may surprise you, so stay tuned…

But there are times when our sorrow, our discouragement, our hurt or our pain, is so deep and so overwhelming that we’re beyond the help of tips, techniques and suggestions. We can’t hear them and we can’t make them work.

Many pastors – including this one – have been there.

There’s only one place to turn on days – or weeks – such as these.

We must turn to God Himself in heartfelt desperation.  The two suggestions I’ll share today are both on this theme of diving deep into Jesus’ joy.  I’ll explain below, and I pray that you’ll be blessed.

Meanwhile, here’s where we’ve been with this series of posts: I’ve shared five reasons why the pastor’s joy is so important, fourteen reasons why it’s so challenging and, fifteen suggestions for achieving “pastoral joy.” 

1. Work at getting good at rejoicing in the Lord.
2. Take responsibility for your own joy.
3. Dig deep into your position in Christ.
4. Seek to get Jesus Christ obviously present and actively in charge of your church.
5. Pursue the joy that comes from fruit bearing.
6. Keep one foot on solid ground as you descend into the “hole” of another’s sorrow.
7. Be gracious to yourself.
8. Cultivate hope.
9. Expect that trouble will increase your capacity for joy.
10. Share your story and His story.
11. Don’t resort to looking for bosom friends in your church; find a good pastor fellowship instead.
12. Stop taking responsibility for other people’s choices.
13. Develop godly assertiveness.
14. Work towards a reasonable, joy-producing job description.
15. Go to a pastor’s retreat center, or create your own re-energizing retreats. That brings us to:
16. Seek the fulness of the Spirit, every day and every hour.

I would understand if I heard that some of you are thinking, “Well, of course; I’ve known that and taught it forever.” Bear with me.

Ephesians 5:18 commands, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” You probably know that that second phrase says, quite literally, “be continually being filled with the Spirit.” It is both active and passive; we choose to depend fully and constantly on God’s help.

And you probably know that “filled” isn’t something spatial, it’s something volitional.

The Holy Spirit is a person and He is God. He resides permanently in every true believer in Christ. As a person who is God, He knows that He ought to be in charge of this entity known as your life. He is more than willing to empower you, but He insists on being able to control you.

Practicing dependent obedience to the author of the Bible enables us to obey the Bible. The wonderful Holy Spirit turns the commands of Christ (someone has counted 50) into promises; if He tells us to love our wives or our deacons or be kind to everyone (II Timothy 2:24), He will give us the power to do it.

You knew that, of course.

The “catch” is, that it’s easy to forget it. It’s easy to write and preach sermons, counsel, plan meetings, and do the thousand other things you do, with the underlying attitude that you’ve “got this,” even though you know that Jesus said that “without me, you can do__________” (you can finish the verse, John 15:5). We are deceived by the fact that it doesn’t look like we’re doing nothing; it looks like we’re doing a lot.

Which means that – while you are going through the motions of those thousand and one duties – you’re doing them in your strength with your personality, which probably doesn’t look too much like: “love, joy, peace, patience…” and you know the rest of Galatians 5:22 and 23.

Immediately after Paul mentions love and before he mentions peace or patience, Paul said “joy,” and that’s our topic.

How does the Spirit’s control of our lives produce joy?  I think it works like this.

As the Spirit of God empowers our lives and overpowers our flesh (our unredeemed humanness), His character is manifest rather than our own.  We even feel what it’s like to be Him, not us. What a joy this is – and there’s our word again: JOY.

Theologians speak of the “felicity” of God. God is joyful, in and of Himself.  Without doing anything, gaining anything, watching anything, listening to anything. All by Himself, as a Trinity, He’s joyful, because He’s God, and if I’m filled with, controlled by and empowered by the Spirit, “filled to the measure of all the fulness of God,” (in Ephesians 3:19), then I’m going to be joyful. So a blessed aspect of God’s character is God’s joy, and we receive it as a gift; a blessed by-product of walking in the Spirit.

Which takes us back to that wonderful concept of “rejoicing in the Lord” and the Apostle Paul’s experience of finding joy in God Himself while waiting, in a long line, in a prison or under house arrest, to be tried by the Emperor Nero.

At the risk of sounding simplistic, If God can be joyful “just sitting there,” I should be able to be joyful by just sitting there with Him, controlled by Him, filled with Him, empowered by Him.

I’ve made this a 16^th suggestion, but it should probably be our starting point, every day: “God, I desperately need to be filled with, controlled by, empowered by, blessed by, your Holy Spirit, for every moment of this day. I need every one of your communicable attributes, including your joy.”

This is what I mean by diving deep into Jesus’ joy. When I feel like drowning myself, because I’m drowning in the troubles and sorrows of my beloved people, on top of my own troubles and sorrows, I choose to dive deep into Jesus’ felicity, His joy, which can bear me up and carry me along until my life gives me something external and temporal to rejoice in.

17. Embrace the meekness and humility of Christ.

Here’s a passage you may know and love like I do:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11:28-30

Let’s start with three notes: (1) Of course I can’t properly expound this awesome passage in this space (2) I’ve explained why I would use the work “meek” instead of the more popular, “gentle,” elsewhere (click here), and (3) The passage doesn’t use the word “joy,” but the “rest” which it speaks of may be understood as a companion blessing.

Here’s the joyful truth I want to highlight: Learning (growing into) the meekness and humility of Christ’s character, an important aspect of our sanctification, brought about by walking in the Spirit (as above) plus time, brings the rest, the “lightness,” the joy of Jesus to His regenerated followers.

In the simplest terms – and I would point you to A.W. Tozer’s masterpiece, The Pursuit Of God, for more on this subject – meekness (submissiveness) brings rest and peace and joy by freeing us from the enslaving, misery-producing need to have our own way, while humility (a totally realistic, truth-informed view of ourselves) frees us from the need to defend, praise and promote ourselves.

There is much joy in the profound sighs that accompany meekness and humility.

“Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, tis a gift to come down to where we ought to be.”

Exactly. Those Shakers were unto something, weren’t they?

When we come down to where we ought to be, we find that Christ was already there waiting for us, with His meekness, His humility and His joy, all of which can be borne like fruit in our challenging lives by way of His Spirit. “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” (Colossians 2:27) becomes the ultimate source of our joy.

Pastor, seek the fulness of the Spirit, every day and every hour and embrace the meekness and humility of Christ.

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If you’d like somebody to talk to or pray with regarding any of this, send me an email at churchwhisperer@gmail.com.  I don’t have all the answers, but I can listen and pray.