The Greatest Joy

Imagine having every sin that you've ever committed erased by God, to have every paralysis, every guilt that you have committed, and the feelings of that guilt being removed. That's what Christ came to do, to give us the joy that comes from knowing that our names are written in heaven. Hopefully you don't need to imagine that, and instead you already know the joy of salvation. And it's that joy that R.C.

Sproul will be teaching on today on Renewing Your Mind. We can pursue many things to try and find joy in this world, but everything will let you down aside from knowing God and knowing the joy of the salvation that is in Christ alone. So we need to remember, as Dr. Sproul just said, that for the Christian our names are written in heaven. Here's Dr. Sproul with a gospel reminder of the greatest joy. As we continue our study of the New Testament concept of joy, in this session I want to turn our attention to the gospel according to St. Luke, to the tenth chapter, where we have an interesting narrative of an episode that takes place during the earthly ministry of Jesus.

Chapter 10 of Luke begins with these words, After these things, the Lord appointed seventy others also, and sent them two by two before his face into every city and place where he himself was about to go. And then he said to them, The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest, and go your way. For behold, I send you out as lambs among wolves.

Now this is a scary thing. Jesus takes seventy of his disciples, and he commissions them to go all throughout the land to each hamlet and village of Palestine, proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God. But he warns them in advance that they are not in many cases going to be warmly received. He said, I'm sending you out as lambs among wolves. And sometimes I think we can identify with that commission that Christ gives because the church has always had to maintain that dimension of the Great Commission, that Christ sends the whole church out into a world that's not all that glad to receive the message of Christ.

And sometimes we do feel as lambs led to the slaughter. But listen to what else Jesus says in this context. He says, Carry neither money bag, knapsack, nor sandals, and greet no one along the road. But whatever house you enter, first say, Peace to this house, and if a son of peace is there, your peace will rest on it, and if not it will return to you.

And remain in the same house, eating and drinking such things as they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not go from house to house, whatever city you enter, and they receive you, eat such things that are set before you, and heal the sick there and say to them, The kingdom of God has come near to you. But whatever city you enter and they do not receive you, go into its streets and say, The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you. Nevertheless, know this, that the kingdom of God has come near to you, but I say to you that it will be more tolerable in that day for Sodom than for that city. And now what follows in this discourse is Jesus' pronouncement of the judgment of God against those cities that would not receive the gospel.

Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you.

And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades. He who hears you, hears me. He who rejects you, rejects me. And he who rejects me, rejects him who sent me. Now, do you understand all of these laborious, detailed instructions that Jesus gives to the seventy that He sends out?

He expects a measure of rejection. And we know from other accounts that the disciples, these seventy at times, were apprehensive and they suffered little crises of faith. They tried to cast out demons and they failed on certain occasions and Jesus told them that this kind only goes out through prayer and fasting. And so when He sends out the seventy in this episode and gives them their instructions on staying at the homes that are open and kind to them and allowing the peace to fall upon them and so on, we kind of expect a rather somber attitude among these missionaries who have been assembled, commissioned, and sent.

But what follows I find extremely fascinating. In verse 17 of chapter 10, we read this, Then the seventy returned with joy, saying, Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name. So these who go out fearful, apprehensive, filled with anxiety, return from this mission that Jesus had warned them about, rejection and all the rest, and they are elated. They come back with exceedingly great joy. But why are they so happy? Because they've been successful, and they've been used of God, and they have seen the manifestation of the power of Christ in their own ministries.

They come back and say, Lord, you wouldn't believe it. Even the demons are subject to us in Your name. So they were filled with elation because of two things, success and power.

These are the kinds of things that generally we enjoy and make us quite happy. But Jesus does not quite enter in to their joy. Listen to what our Lord says to them when they come back. And He said to them, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. And behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Nevertheless, here comes the qualifier, here comes the caveat, here comes the warning where Jesus says, however, do not rejoice in this that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven.

And we need to stop here and think about what Christ has just said. He obviously understands the excitement of His followers who have enjoyed the success of ministry, but He warns them for having a misplaced basis for their joy. He said, don't rejoice that the demons are subject unto you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven. Here our Lord focuses our attention on the ultimate basis and supreme foundation for Christian joy. Our joy is to come from and flow out of the assurance that we have of our redemption in Christ.

The greatest joy that a person can have is to know that their names are written in the Lamb's Book of Life, and to know that their names are recorded, that they're registered in heaven. Before we started our session today, I was talking briefly with some folks that are in my studio here in Orlando and got to meet some old friends and some people from back in Pennsylvania and some Episcopalian friends, and immediately I was reminded of a friend that I've had for many, many years who's an Episcopalian minister and now a national evangelist. His name is John Guest. When John Guest first came to America back in the late sixties, I met him the first week that he was in the United States.

He had come to Philadelphia, and I had lunch with him. As I say, the first week he was here, and he had hair down to his shoulders, and he looked like one of the Beatles that had just arrived. And of course he came with a guitar strapped to his back, and he had recorded some music with another fellow by the name of Charles, and it was the music of that era, and it was quite delightful. And John was working as an evangelist primarily on college campuses where he would go with his rock band, and he would sing and gather a crowd, and then he would preach and teach and so on, and he came from Liverpool, England, which is where the Beatles were from. Well, I remember one of the first times I heard John Guest preach, and he's one of my favorite preachers in all the world. And John told the story of his conversion back in England, back in Liverpool, how he had gone to some meeting somewhere, and he had heard the gospel, and he had a Damascus Road type of a conversion experience where his life was turned upside down.

He met Christ and experienced the forgiveness of his sins. And he tells the story that when he went home that night by himself, walking late with the streetlights there in the city, he was by himself going down the sidewalk, and he said he didn't walk home. He skipped home like a child, and he said as he came down the streets of Liverpool, he said he was skipping and dancing and playing leapfrog with the fire hydrants there in Liverpool.

And of course, I wasn't there, but when I heard John tell that 25 or 30 years ago, I can just see him running down the streets of Liverpool, leaping over fire hydrants. And I could relate to that. I could identify to that the joy of having one's burdens removed, the joy of having one's sins remitted and taken away. What a tremendous relief because we've talked about barriers to joy. We've talked about anxiety.

We've talked about fear. But probably the greatest enemy of Christian joy is the enemy of guilt. Guilt is fundamentally a depression, or I should say a depressant. It squelches any feeling of well-being. It robs us of our peace.

It torments the soul. Now, there is a difference between guilt and guilt feelings. Guilt is something objective. Guilt is incurred as a reality any time we violate or transgress the law of God.

And our feelings are not always in touch with reality. There are people in the criminal justice system that are met who are described as sociopaths or psychopaths who can commit heinous crimes without feeling any remorse whatsoever. But that doesn't affect the reality of their guilt. Guilt is determined not by how we feel but by what we do.

Nevertheless, there is often a close relationship between the objective dimension of guilt and the subjective dimension, between the reality of the transgression itself and our subjective feelings of remorse and paralysis that flow out of the reality of that guilt. I see guilt feelings as being somewhat analogous to physical pain. Physical pain is a symptom of something that is objectively wrong in the body. Pain is a tremendous benefit to us medically because it gives the signal that there's a problem present that needs to be treated. And there are people who have lost their capacity to feel things physically, and they're in grave danger every moment because they don't know when a serious illness has afflicted their bodies. But pain is the warning signal, and so it is with guilt and guilt feelings. But who enjoys pain? When I get a toothache, that tells me that something's wrong with my tooth, and it's the toothache that drives me to the doctor because I want to get that tooth fixed because I want to get rid of the pain. And the pain of the feelings of guilt can be worse than physical pain.

And to have the guilt removed and the guilt feelings removed is a tremendous stimulus for great joy. Now, I can remember when I was a little boy myself and I went to church and the church where I attended as a child, I went there on Sunday morning, every Sunday morning, because my parents made me go to church. I had no desire to go.

I was bored to death. I couldn't wait for church to be over so that I could get out of there and go play or do something constructive rather than to be involved in church. The only good thing I enjoyed about church was the social program that the church had. I learned how to dance in the church, and we would have parties in the church, and we would do all that sort of thing. That was the positive side of my life, but then we had to go through catechism class, and that was the nadir, that was the lowest point of my childhood experience in church because now not only did I have to ruin a Sunday morning, but we had to go to classes on Saturday morning. And that meant school from Monday to Friday and then church school on Saturday and Sunday too, and I hated it every minute. And we had to go through this communicants class, and we had to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. And I did all of that stuff just to satisfy my parents to pass the test to become a member of the church and finish the course. I wasn't converted until several years after that, but the only thing I remembered from that Shorter Catechism was the first question. And the reason I remembered the first question is because I never could make sense out of it. The question was this, what is man's chief end? And the answer that we were required to learn and to recite was man's chief end is to glorify God and to help me. Enjoy Him. See, somebody else has memorized it.

Enjoy Him forever. I just couldn't put those two things together. I did understand, even as a child, that this idea of glorifying God had something to do with obeying Him. It had something to do with the pursuit of righteousness, which was not the thing that I was most singularly concerned about. It wasn't my chief end to be an obedient child of God by any means. And because it wasn't my chief end to be an obedient son to God, I couldn't understand how there was a relationship between glorifying God and joy and enjoying Him. To me, it seemed that the two were antithetical, incompatible.

And I'll tell you why. Because as a child, I was confused about two foundational ideas. I didn't know the difference between pleasure and joy. What I wanted in order to be happy was pleasure because I assumed that the only way I could really have joy was by the pursuit of pleasure. But then I discovered that the more pleasure I sought, the less joy I received because I was seeking pleasure through things that required that I disobey God. You see, that's the attraction of sin. We don't sin because it's painful. We sin because it's pleasurable.

That's the enticement of disobedience. The enticement of sin is we do these things because we think they will make us happy. We think that they will give us joy and personal fulfillment.

But all they do is give us guilt, which undermines and destroys authentic joy. And so I discovered in my own conversion the same thing John Guest discovered. My conversion was fundamentally an experience of the forgiveness of God. And if there had been a fire hydrant where I was, I would have jumped over it because I experienced the difference between pleasure and joy. If you go back to the Old Testament to Psalm 51, which is the greatest example of repentance that we find anywhere in Scripture where David, under the conviction of the Holy Spirit, is brought to repentance for his sin against Bathsheba, and he is broken and contrite in his heart, and he comes before God and begs God to forgive him.

Remember what he said. He said, God, restore to me the joy of your salvation. You see, those who have experienced the forgiveness of God and know what I'm talking about in terms of that initial joy of forgiveness always need to have the restoration of that joy, to remember to go back to the basic foundation, to the beginning of our joy the day that we discovered that our names are written in heaven.

I'd like to ask you today if you could identify with the story I told about my friend John Guest. Have you ever been moved to run down the street skipping and leaping, jumping over fire hydrants because you know the joy of salvation? There are people this very moment who are hearing my voice, who have never, ever experienced the joy of salvation.

And for those people, I want to say to you, there's nothing like it in the world. Just imagine having every sin that you've ever committed erased by God, to have every paralysis, every guilt that you have committed and the attendant feelings of that guilt being removed. That's what Christ came to do, to give us the joy, not of power or of conquest or of success, but the joy that comes from knowing that our names are written in heaven. It can be so easy to forget that glorious and great truth as we navigate life in a world filled with fear, anxiety and distraction.

But what a great joy we have as Christians knowing that our names are written in heaven. Thanks for being with us for this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. That was R.C. Sproul from his series on joy. If you'd like to return to these messages again, you can request lifetime digital access when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343. In addition to the series, which you'll be able to stream in the free Ligonier app, we'll also send you two books by R.C.

Sproul, Can I Have Joy in My Life? and his recent Christmas devotional, The Advent of Glory. Respond today to ensure you get these resources in time for Christmas and know that your generosity is bolstering the reach of Renewing Your Mind that now has countless listeners from around the world. Use the link in the podcast show notes or visit renewingyourmind.org to donate before this offer ends tomorrow. What is the true source of our joy as Christians? Tomorrow R.C. Sproul will answer that question as we conclude our series on joy here on Renewing Your Mind. .