Joy Will Return!

Hi, this is Bernie Dake. Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life.

Welcome back to Words of Life. I'm Cheryl Gillum. And I'm Bernie Dake.

Hey, Bernie. Last week, we launched our Christmas series with Commissioner Phil Needham. In this series, Phil is taking a few devotions out of a book he wrote a few years back called Christmas Breakthrough. This week, he's discussing finding joy in the midst of tragedy and how God speaks to us in a song. Now, songs are very important to me. I know they're very important to you as well, just in your general life as you're going through your every day, but are there any songs that just speak to you, especially when you're going through a tragedy or a rough time? I mean, I'm inspired by music in general.

It is a gift from God. One particular one, and I don't know if we have to pay any endorsement money for this, but Stephen Curtis Chapman is a great Christian singer, songwriter, and he wrote a song years ago called His Strength is Perfect. When my strength is gone, he'll carry us.

When we can't carry on. Yeah, I shouldn't sing. The listeners probably can't stand that. But this time of year, there's a young Christian artist named Jackie Velasquez, and she wrote a song called It Wouldn't Be Christmas Without You. And she talks about hanging the lights and the snowball fights. It's her favorite time of year. But, you know, when we're all spread out, all throughout, in our case, the United States and other people's cases, different continents, you just miss family.

Particularly over what we've all been through in these last two years, I grieve not being near my family as much as I wish I could be. Right, right. How about you? Yeah. So there's a song that I learned probably about, I guess it's been nine years ago now. It's called He's Always Been Faithful. And it goes, it's a contemporary version of Great Is Thy Faithfulness. I say it's a contemporary version. It goes along with that song. As a matter of fact, it has the melody of that in the midst. Is it Sarah Groves? I do believe it is.

Yes, it is. He's amazing. And so that one always speaks to me, especially going through rough times and tough times thinking about God's faithfulness. He's done it before.

He'll do it again. Amen. And he's faithful no matter what the circumstance is. So that speaks to my heart in particular. What a great way to communicate Christmas or communicate the message of Christmas. God's Son sent to us to save the world, literally, in the form of a baby.

Yeah. And if you, during this Christmas season, are having a difficult time, please know that in Christ, your joy will return. And please let us know how we can pray for you. Send us an email, radio at uss.salvationarmy.com.

Or call 1-800-229-9965. Hello, this is Phil Needham, and we're continuing our series for Advent and Christmas. Today, we're talking about joy. And you may want to look at Isaiah 55, 1 and 2. The Israelites are exiled in Babylon.

They are virtual slaves in a foreign land. Their joy has departed. What word is there to lift their spirits enough to see them through the ordeal? They find the words in the book of Isaiah.

The prophecy is not launched with rational arguments to put minds at rest. It begins with singing. Isaiah sings about deserts and wilderness blossoming like crocus bursting into bloom, rejoicing with joy in singing. He sings the melodies of hope in a hopeless situation. I cannot imagine what it was like for those exiles to be waiting years for a deliverance for which they had no earthly guarantee nor observable signs.

Could they believe Isaiah's optimism? It isn't easy to sing when you are disheartened or despondent, unless, of course, you know a lament that matches your sadness. The book of Isaiah and other prophetic books have plenty of laments that reflect God's sadness and anger over a nation's unfaithfulness and ungodly behavior. They are love songs laden with the grief of a rejected lover who longs for the loved one's return. But this song is different. It flows in a major key. It dances to good news. It pulls us out of the doldrums.

It drives away fear and claims victory even before the battle. Such songs are sung throughout the Old Testament, whether they are great anthems of praise at the dedication of the Temple or a terrifying songster brigade at the head of Jehoshaphat's victorious army, or Gideon's drum and bugle corps leveling the walls of Jericho, or the for-adults-only extravagant love songs of Solomon. Some poets intimate that God sung all of creation into existence, launching a song that became a world, and us, his beloveds. God speaks to us in song.

When we turn away from him, he laments. When we follow his ways, he sings his pleasure. He is the pied piper of a fallen world, luring us with his love song, not some cheap sentimental love song, no, a love song with pain and suffering and enormous sacrifice for us, his beloveds. And when we are lured by such a song, we answer in the words of Paulus Gerhardt's hymn, What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend? For this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end, O make me thine forever, and should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to thee.

Such answering songs are sung from deep within us, from our souls. We are singing to our divine lover. We are entrusting our lives to the one who gave his life for us.

Even though our present circumstances may not seem to prove his loving presence, we believe that he will not abandon us and that he will have a future and a hope for us. This is the kind of assurance the Israelites needed. God gave Isaiah the words and the music to sing his assurance of their future. It began with a vision of joy, sung with the imagery of new life bursting forth.

It is a vision they could picture because they had seen the world come to life in springtime. There was little joy under the ongoing circumstances, but there was joy in their future. We live many centuries later. The Christ has now come in the flesh, but the world still mourns in lowly exile. The joy we sing still directs us toward the future, to a promise still to be fulfilled.

Yes, we feel the joy, but it doesn't settle us down as if the future has arrived. Rather, it pulls us forward and says that if we live the joy, it will spread far and wide, pulling others in. Too often, perhaps, we lose the joy because we are depressed by a world being torn apart by hatred and violence, discouraged by the seeming complacency and dysfunction of other Christians, paralyzed by our own personal compromises and failures.

There is plenty to rob us of our joy, and the lifelessness of some congregations can add to the sadness. Almost 300 years ago, when Isaac Watts was a teenager, he came home from a Sunday worship service complaining of how sad and solemn and dry the hymns sung by the congregation were. His father suggested he write some new hymns with more life and joy.

Well, he did. There's 600 of them over a lifetime. One of them is among the most buoyant of carols. Can you imagine not singing Joy to the World this season? We love to sing it in a loud voice and with a snappy tempo. We're singing with all of heaven and nature. The fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy.

It's a privilege we get to join in. We should pay special attention to the second phrase in the carol. The Lord is come, not has come, is come.

The whole carol is in the present tense. It calls the earth to receive her King now. It calls us to open our hearts to him today. Let every heart prepare him room. If we do not reopen our hearts to him again this Advent season, how much meaning does the Bethlehem miracle 2,000 years ago have for us?

It would be a stale gift. It seems to me this is the key to the last verse. The verse is a bold statement that Christ rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glory of his righteousness and wonders of his love. Present tense. We do occasionally see glimpses of his rule and righteousness, but this world has a long, long way to go.

Why is that? Perhaps the answer lies with church inhabitants whose hearts do not prepare him room. Christians locked within the dirge of a dull and compromised Christian religion. Christians who don't have the compassion and courage of a joyful heart.

Christians who do not really sing while they march their witness into the world. Isaiah saw the future, sang it, lived it, even though he didn't know when it would actually come. We do know the when. We do know that Christ was the fulfillment of the promise of a new kingdom of love and righteousness. We are now called to sing Christ's new kingdom with joy and live it with conviction. If enough of us do, that last verse of the carol will prove accurate.

The glories of Christ's righteousness and the wonders of his love will become more and more apparent in a world moving toward Christ's second advent, when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Please join me in this prayer. God of hope, save me from the weakness of spirit that belittles my own ability to stand up against the bleakness around me and the influences of those forces that undermine your kingdom. Give me your song and the courage to sing it in a strange land. Give me melodies that convey the joy that nothing can take away. Prepare my heart for a new and needed way for you to come to me this season. I pray this in the name of the Christ, who drew me to himself with a joyful love song I could no longer resist.

Amen. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us at radio at uss.salvationarmy.org. Call 1-800-229-9965 or write us at P.O.

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