The Secret to Unspeakable Joy [Part 1]

Pastor, author and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Gave everybody that came in a helium balloon and just said that any time during the worship where you feel that joy, just go ahead and release that balloon.

Let it just float on up. And the pastor was sad to realize at the end that one third of the balloons had never been released. This is the Philippian Epistle is a call to go ahead and release the balloon.

Okay. Go ahead and take joy and rejoice in the Lord. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series Unspeakable Joy as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at pastoralan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Brothers and sisters, pain is inevitable but misery is optional. There's a big difference between being happy and being joyful.

You can be, believe it or not, unhappy and yet joyful. It must be so because Paul said, Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice. And we are today launching into a series on the epistle to the Philippians that Paul wrote while he was imprisoned in Rome probably 60 to 62 A.D. And this letter is different than other letters because usually when Paul's writing like the Christians at Galatia or Corinth or the Colossian Christians there was some big problem that was going on in the church.

A heresy, a wrong belief, terrible practices in their behavioral life or something like that. And Paul would write and address and we have learned as we've studied in recent years from these epistles. But the Philippian congregation was different and in many ways it was the congregation perhaps that Paul loved the most and you can just sense the warmth throughout the letter.

It is written in the style of a friendship letter, a letter written to friends. He's writing to a healthy congregation. And I just think that this is so appropriate for this congregation and for many others who will be listening on in these messages that we turn in a timely way in the midst of a world around us that's increasingly pagan but here in the womb of a church that is healthy and growing and loving and vibrant. What does God have to say to his friends in a healthy church?

And thus we come to Philippians. Joy is at the heart of this epistle and joy is at the heart of gospel-centered living. So often joy is treated as a more minor player amongst the virtues in the Christian life but it is actually at the center.

The fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace. And we tend to think I think sometimes that joy is only for the superficial or joy is for those that are less serious minded about the weighty matters of life. And in fact those of you that only know me now and have seen me for the person I am when so much joy has come in my life over the years to the presence of the Holy Spirit that you would find it hard to believe that it was not always this way for me. And in fact I had a time in my life that I really thought that people that were just joyful all the time that they either they'd had a way too easy life and that's why they're joyful they had never had to face anything or that they were sort of superficial.

You know that they just didn't understand the depths of the problems of the world and the dilemmas of life and they weren't taking life seriously enough. And what I've come to discover about joy and what we'll be unveiling in weeks ahead is just the opposite. Is that in fact the joy of the Lord is not a diversion from the serious and weighty matters of life but the joy of the Lord is our strength for walking through the difficult things in life. And then in fact a matter that the deepest people are joyful people.

G.K. Chesterton said that joy which was the small publicity of the pagan is the gigantic secret of the Christian. Someone once asked Mother Teresa what were the primary attributes that she looked for and whether to accept people to come and work with her and her ministry amongst the poor in Calcutta. And you might think that she would say well the number one thing is concern for the poor or an awareness of the injustice of the world.

You might think that she would point first to love or patience but instead she said I look for two things. Somebody needs to be able to work hard and secondly they need joy. Joy in the midst of the garbage heaps of Calcutta. Joy in the midst of seeing the worst suffering in the world. Joy is something that is not essential just for the individual but for the people for the body of Christ. I love being in a church that loves to celebrate and this takes a little doing for us as Presbyterians because it's not necessarily been our strongest suit in terms of our heritage.

Those who have been labeled the frozen chosen. Bruce Larson tells a true story of a congregation in Nebraska. True story and because these Presbyterians were having a hard time you know releasing their joy they tried an activity the minister tried to gave everybody that came in a helium balloon and just said that anytime during the worship where you feel that joy just go ahead and release that balloon let it just float on up. And the pastor was sad to realize at the end that one third of the balloons had never been released. This is the Philippian epistle is a call to go ahead and release the balloon.

Okay. Go ahead and take joy and rejoice in the Lord. And I want to point first to the fact that in only 104 verses in Philippians there are 16 references to joy or its derivative word rejoice. You might want to just follow along if you're there at Philippians just I'll give you a couple examples a few examples of this.

Philippians 1 verse 3. I thank my God and all my remembrance of you always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy. He's praying with joy. He's remembering them with joy. Verse 18 in chapter 1.

What then? Only that in every way whether in pretense or in truth Christ is proclaimed and in that I rejoice. Yes and I will rejoice for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance. Verse 25. Convinced to this I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy in the faith. It is chapter 2 verse 1. If there's any encouragement Christ any comfort from love any participation in the Spirit any affection and sympathy complete my joy by being of the same mind. Chapter 2 verse 17. Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith I am glad and rejoice with you all.

Likewise you should be glad and rejoice with me. Chapter 4 verse 1. Therefore my brothers whom I love and long for for my joy and my crown. And then the well-known verse 4 of chapter 4. Rejoice in the Lord always.

And again I say rejoice. There's a spiritual battle to try to rob us of joy and I think probably the biggest problem that competes against our joy is the temptation to let the circumstances of our lives be the determiner of our joy or of the level of our joy. If you take one thing away from Philippians you just have to just keep focused on this that the man Paul is in prison and he has joy. He might be facing execution and he has joy. He is in prison because he'd been mistreated his life has been filled with suffering and he has joy.

But more than that think of this this man who is in prison is writing to people who aren't in prison encouraging them. Wanting them to have have joy. So the point of this is that it must be possible to rejoice in the Lord always or else we would not be given such a command from the Lord. And so there's something very different about about happiness which is related to having good circumstances. It's quite all right to be unhappy.

It's quite all right. In fact if you're never unhappy there'd be something that's probably wrong with your soul because in this life you're going to face trouble and when you face grief the proper response is to be sad about that right. I mean the proper response to life itself is not sadness but the proper response to the difficulties and the disappointments and the losses in life that's that's sadness. Think about Jesus he he was he wasn't like the stoics the Greek philosophers who always try to conceal their tears and always try to act as though he had no feelings but but instead he openly showed his tears. He was openly sad even though he knew of the the glory of the outcome of his mission he was still sad.

And Jesus was angry at times flinging furniture down the down the steps of the temple in a rage against the misuse of the message of God. And so Jesus is very real and and and God's calling us to be real but what we're talking about when we talk about joy we're talking about a spiritual thing. We're talking about something that is of the heart something you might say is of the spirit. You might say that happiness is something of the soul but joy is something of the spirit. It is something that is produced by God's presence within our life and and that's what we really want to learn about and we see in in Paul's life.

And there's a principle that Paul's lifting up here of the power of having joy in the midst of something that's very difficult. Author Leo Buscaglia told a story some years ago about his mother and what he called their misery dinner. His dad came home one day from work and said to the family it looked like that they would have to file bankruptcy because his business partner had absconded with their firm's funds. And Buscaglia said his mother did a very strange thing. She went out and she sold some jewelry in order to buy food to come home and prepare a sumptuous feast. And they had this big feast and some of the family members extended family members scolded her for it. But she responded and said the time for joy is now when we need it most not next week.

the circumstances of life. Though Paul was in jail when he wrote his epistle to the Philippians he spoke of joy 16 times. No matter what you're going through you too can discover the secret to unspeakable joy as Pastor Alan Wright leads you through a life building exploration of Philippians. When you make a gift to Sharing the Light Ministries today we'll send you the new CD album The Secret of Unspeakable Joy as our way of saying thank you for your partnership. Your gifts are the only way we're able to continue broadcasting the message of grace all over the nation. Happiness may rise and fall with happenstance but joy is ever present in the spirit.

So become a partner today and discover joy like never before. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. And everything about Paul's letters pointing to this truth that your joy is not determined by whether life is going the way you want it to go. And this is so important because I don't know about you personally but in my life the great competitor against joy is not just difficult circumstances but it's those times when life is just not being fair at all. And it's a hard thing to accept that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. That's a very hard thing to accept.

It's a very hard thing to accept. I was reading the paper this week that there was a couple in Virginia, maybe you saw this, that won a share of a million dollar lottery. And the problem is they bought the lottery ticket with stolen money. And they had proof of it because this couple worked in a grocery store and money was disappearing from the grocery store so the owners installed hidden video camera. And the video camera showed them what they were doing is they would ring up phony returns like somebody had returned an item. So they'd ring up like there was a return and then they'd pull the cash out of the drawer and put it in their own pocket.

And they had video of them ringing up phony returns taking the cash out and buying lottery tickets. And then they win the lottery. I'm like come on God. Now I mean you know like that it's like now wait a minute.

Wait a minute. If you're going to let somebody win the lottery don't take it to give it to the person who just stole the money to do it but in life funny like that. I had an old friend in town this this week my evangelist buddy Richard and we got the opportunity to go out and play some golf and we came up to a hole that's a dog leg right and the only real problem on this hole is a big tree that's right there just at the edge of the fairway on the right. And so if you try to cut off too much you'll hit that big tree you got to play it out to the left. So I told Richard I said listen play it out to the left side of the fairway forget about that tree.

I stepped up there and what did I do? I hit it right into that tree. I mean I hit it hard right into that tree and I said get through it. And the ball listened to me and the ball just made it through this thick tree and went 30 yards on the other side leaving me a small lob wedge into this green. It was the best drive I'd hit in a long time.

Never been that close to that hole. And Richard said yeah you know I guess the Lord loves you. And I laughed with him and I said you know it's so funny whenever I play golf with people if I get a good break like that everybody's always like well that's a preacher you know you get the good break like that. And we laughed about that a little bit and then he got up there and he hit the exact same shot that I hit right into that exact same tree. I mean he hit it about the same pace the same height it was the same shot and he said get through it.

And instead it rattled all around the tree and dropped right behind the tree totally blocked from going at the green. And Richard is 50 yards behind me doesn't have a shot at the green looked up and said Lord I serve you too. Wouldn't it be silly to say well you know what that's proof the Lord loves Alan. Mordney loves Richard. Obviously Alan's ministry is going better than Richard's right now and God blessed him with that. Wouldn't that just be silly?

So why would you ever do that about big things in life either? I'm going to tell you something that's very interesting about Paul. We only got time to go in this but the Philippian church got started in part because Paul and Silas were in prison put in shackles and into the innermost part of the prison at Philippi. And then by a mighty act of God in which there was an earthquake and there was a powerful visitation from the Lord the shackles fall off the jail opens up and they are set free. And I mean it's so powerful it is so amazing that the jailer gets converted and becomes part of the of the church there at Philippi. And then instead of just slipping on out of town and getting out of there you know the jailer's like well you guys better get on out of here. And Paul he's so confident he said no we don't want to go out of here quietly I want some other people to know about this. They put us in here in secret we're not going to leave in secret come and let them see God set us free. He's so powerful so confident and yet he's writing the letter to the Philippians incarcerated in Rome for a couple years with no earthquake.

How do you figure? But Paul doesn't say because now I'm in prison and then I was broken free that now I'm not blessed and then I was. We don't understand everything about the ways of God do we? And in this world the rain falls on the just and the unjust. If the rain falls and we need it and one farmer needs it who loves the Lord and he's right next to another farmer doesn't love Lord the rain falls right down on both their fields.

And the unfairness of life can make it where we just feel like man it's so hard to feel blessed when life seems so unfair. And Paul though in this epistle he just surprises me. I just my first beginnings of the study that this I just went through and I just started writing down all my surprises of the things that Paul doesn't talk about. I was thinking about myself man if I was writing from prison and I was writing to you guys and I was over somewhere in another country wrongly imprisoned.

I mean I tried to put myself in what would I be writing to you guys. It wouldn't sound like Paul's I'm telling you it wouldn't sound like I mean I'm surprised I'm surprised I'm surprised he doesn't even talk about being wrongly imprisoned. There's no reference here about how the Jewish people shouldn't have come against him how he wasn't really doing anything wrong how he doesn't deserve to be in prison.

He never even says anything like that. He doesn't refer to the difficulty of the circumstances except to say that he's learned to be content in whatever circumstances. He doesn't write about how vexing it is to try to figure out why God would allow it. I mean Paul's a human being I mean he's got to wonder why does why does all these things going on but he just doesn't go there with his mind. He's not trying to answer unanswerable questions and he doesn't allow his soul to be vexed by these difficult questions.

He's not even dealing with that. He doesn't try to rally support to get him out of prison. Now he wants to get out and he's saying I appreciate your supporting me financially I appreciate you praying for me and I'm believing for my deliverance from this prison. I mean he wants to get out. It's not that he wants to stay in prison but I think if I was writing you guys I'd be like organize all the lawyers. Get a protest, a petition going to the government. Send help now. Get me out of here.

We've got a lot of good we still need to do. I can't do it from I mean I'm honest. I mean Paul didn't talk like that. You know it's interesting he doesn't denigrate the Roman government. This stupid government.

These pagan people don't even know the Lord. No wonder I'm in prison. This is our whole problem.

We need to protest against government. Sometimes people get frustrated with me for not talking more politics from the pulpit and if you're one of those who gets frustrated about that I want you to know this. Don't think that doesn't mean that I don't care a lot. Don't think that I don't wake up in the morning and look at the paper and get mad about what I see.

Don't think that I don't wake up in the morning and feel like just writing a letter to the editor every single day about something. Don't for a moment think that I don't care but just this is my model is that Paul's in prison in a pagan government surrounded by phony gods and goddesses and instead what does he do? He just keeps preaching the gospel. I care and you should care. I care and you should care but the point of the thing is that he doesn't spend any time here talking about the evil empire that has put him into it. He doesn't vent his anger against the Jews who were responsible for his imprisonment. He doesn't talk about the wretched evils that are rampant all around him through the paganism and the idolatry that surrounds him.

There were gods and goddesses that were celebrated on every street corner where he was. He doesn't spend time addressing any of that and Paul is not on the other hand in any sense of denial of the difficulties that he is facing. Alan Wright in today's teaching as we kick off this new series Unspeakable Joy it's the secret to unspeakable joy. Alan is back in a moment with additional insight on this for your life and a final word. CS Lewis said no soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. In other words joy isn't an elusive dream reserved for a select few who have no problems or for those who were born with a joyful disposition. Actually joy is a fruit of the spirit available to all in Christ. No matter what you're facing you can have the joy of the Lord in the midst of it.

The apostle Paul did though he wrote his epistle to the Philippians while imprisoned he spoke of joy 16 times. Alan Wright's newest CD album The Secret of Unspeakable Joy takes you chapter by chapter through Paul's explanation of the secret of joy in Philippians. When you make a gift today to Sharing the Light we'll be delighted to send you the new CD album as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Become a partner today and discover the secrets of unspeakable joy. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website pastoralan.org. Alan we're excited about launching this new series and right in the middle of this first teaching the secret to unspeakable joy. What is our takeaway from the series as you pray over this? It's a huge surprise that Paul doesn't talk about being wrongly imprisoned, doesn't talk about the difficulty of his circumstances, doesn't write about how vexing it is to try to figure out why God would allow it or why there is so much injustice in the world. He doesn't denigrate the Roman government which was so oppressive, doesn't vent his anger against the Jewish people originally responsible for his imprisonment.

Daniel, he doesn't spend his time in that but he's not in denial. Instead this is an authentic joy that is not connected to circumstances. Instead it is connected to the experience of the gospel of grace and that's what we're going to be learning about all throughout this incredible journey the secret of unspeakable joy. If you only caught part of today's teaching not only can you listen again online but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.