Sermon on Joy (2 of 3)

Let's pray. Lord God, thank you so much for another chance to gather with your people and to hear from you and to worship you,

Lord. We, again, thank you so much for everything you've given us, the many joys in life that you give us, even in situations where we don't expect it, we don't understand it.

Lord, we ask that you would help us to love you better, to appreciate your gifts more, and God, we ultimately want our hearts to be conformed to the image of your son.

So God, just ask that you bless these people and bless the reading of your holy word, in Jesus' name, amen.

So this morning we're going to continue to talk about joy, sort of. I think, unfortunately, this week's sermon is a little bit of a downer after last week's.

And you know, I do kind of relish in finding weird passages to do on certain

Sundays, but I promise I didn't do this one on purpose, this is just kind of how it happened. But we have our

Christmas celebration tomorrow and most people are anticipating that. We understand that Christmas is a celebration of how the

Lord Jesus Christ, God himself, came to us in the flesh as a man, as a human being.

And he did it to save the world from its sin and to restore creation. And you know, you think about that, it's one thing to say it, right?

And we all understand what I just said and what I mean by that. But I think that sometimes it's another thing to really appreciate it, right?

Because we hear that God came in flesh and that's crazy, right?

Like that's pretty outrageous. But we can just say it and it just kind of comes naturally to us.

We can say that God came to the world to save us from our sins and that's, again, it's amazing when you think about what it means.

But we can kind of just say it and it just kind of comes naturally to us. And I think like so many things, sometimes you got to take a step back and really understand the bad news that comes before the good news.

Like in order to appreciate something, you kind of have to go through some experiences where, you know, you know what you're appreciating,

I guess. Because our lives, you know, we're going to talk about the problem with our joy these days.

And our lives are not all joy all the time. I mean, you didn't need to come here to hear me say that.

You know that our lives are difficult. Our lives have problems. There are tears that we cry.

You know, we can all understand that. And so I want to talk about why that is.

And so we're going to read from the book of Genesis again. And so this time, Genesis chapter 3. Last week, we looked at God's good creation and we looked at all the things that God created us to enjoy.

And we said that, you know, obviously we can still enjoy these things, but those things are not all joy.

And so what happened between Genesis 2 and now? And so let's read from Genesis chapter 3 and find out what happened.

These are the words of God. Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the

Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden.

Neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die.

For God knows that when you eat of that, the tree, excuse me, when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked.

And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the cool of the day.

And the man and his wife hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the

Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

The man said, the woman who you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.

And the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.

The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock and above all beasts of the field.

On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring.

He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, surely, excuse me,

I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.

And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you are taken.

You are dust and to dust you shall return. The man called his wife's name

Eve because she was the mother of all the living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

Then the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach out his hand and also take of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the share of him and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

This is the word of the Lord. So this story is pretty much pop culture to us as Americans.

We all kind of know the basics, right? Everyone, if you walk down the street, everyone knows what happened in the garden of Eden with the serpent and Adam and Eve.

We all know about the fall of mankind. Even if most people don't understand the deeper meaning, everyone at least has a superficial understanding of that story.

But I think there's some value in telling the story. And taking a still a deeper look at to some of the things we might not have considered.

Because I think this story shows us why our joy is so often tied up and twisted and connected to things and ideas and experiences that are anything but joyous.

And I think it can be hard to untangle the two sometimes. Like anyone have that experience?

Like the very things that you love and enjoy, they're still somehow tainted with pain.

Sometimes that pain is our own doing. Like we love something so much that we like kind of smother it and ruin it.

But sometimes not. Sometimes it's not our own doing. So even in our joy, we're somehow always reminded of pain and sin.

Last week, if you remember, I talked about four areas of life that God created for us to enjoy.

Four things that were God's idea to give his creation joy. See, God created a world that was not only unique and useful, but also a world for us to enjoy.

Of course, there are more than four areas of creation for us to enjoy. But we focused on four last week. We focused on food, art, work, and family.

And I said that those things were universally enjoyed by mankind across cultural lines, across ethnic barriers.

All people groups, right? All people groups find enjoyment in these things. Because, you know, it makes sense.

God created them to be enjoyed. But just as universally as the enjoyment of these things, also every people group in the world also experiences pain and dysfunction in these four areas as well.

It doesn't matter what culture you come from, what ethnicity you are. Everyone has experienced pain and food.

Everyone has experienced dysfunction in work and art and family. That is also universal.

And it's been devastating. And I think Genesis 3 tells us why that is. Now, after I wrote the sermon for last week,

I understand, you know, I don't blame anyone for hearing what I said and kind of like being like, really,

Adam? Like, I don't really understand. Like I said, we're supposed to find joy in food and alcohol.

I don't blame you if the first thing you said, oh yeah, Adam, well, in my family, you don't know what obesity or alcoholism has done.

You don't know. You don't know what diabetes has done to my family. Food and alcohol do not bring joy.

They bring pain. I don't blame you if you thought that. Because as much as Genesis 2 proves that those things were made for joy,

Genesis 3 proves that these things can now bring pain. Or even when

I mentioned work, I thought about work too. Because I know from the Bible that God created work for his people to enjoy.

And I know that some of you thought to yourself, well, that's easy for you to say. You don't have a soul -crushing job like I do.

You don't have a monotonous, awful, repetitive, boring job like I do. There's no joy in work.

It's pointless and it's awful. And it sucks the life out of me. I've had jobs like that. So I hear that.

I understand if that's what you thought. Again, as much as Genesis 2 proves that work was created to be enjoyed,

Genesis 3 proves that it can bring pain. Sometimes a lot of it. So I get that. You see, mankind, we understand as Christians, mankind threw at him.

Mankind was deceived and gave up the sinless, painless joy that God created.

You see, all that joy in the garden, that's how it was intended to be. Mankind was deceived into thinking he could have that joy and even more.

Without God. Mankind was deceived into thinking that somehow

God was holding out on him like the ultimate joy. There was something else that God wouldn't give them and man could take to have real joy.

We've all collectively been making the same mistake ever since then. And so as a result, our joy is mixed with sadness.

Like I said last week, our pleasure is spiked with pain. Because God is the only source of joy.

And so when we try to get it without him, it backfires every single time.

That's the reality. You know, that's why this season, you know, Christmas, I was watching some videos from two non -Christians talking about Christmas.

It was interesting. It was a very interesting conversation. Both of them said that, you know, it's Christmas time is sort of like a magnifier.

It can show us how joyful things are. Right? It can magnify the joy we have in our family and art and food.

But it simultaneously can magnify all the pain that's associated with those things.

So many of us will go home tonight and tomorrow. We'll enjoy our family. We'll enjoy food.

We'll enjoy decorative art. Some better than others. We'll enjoy all that.

We'll enjoy a year of hard work and all of these things. But simultaneously, some of us also, even though we will enjoy these things, some of us will have sadness at this time.

Some of us won't feel like feasting. Some of us won't want to see another

Christmas light or a Christmas tree because it reminds us of our pain. It reminds us,

I think, of what we lost in Genesis 3. You see, Genesis 3 is a chapter of curses.

Curses from God. And the reality is many people can really intimately feel some of those curses around this time.

And so we want to be sensitive to that. Because as good as the world is, as good as everything

God made is, we have to deal with the reality that curses have come because of our collective rebellion against God.

If you notice too, the curses almost point for point, the very things that God lovingly and graciously created for us, the very things that he made for us to enjoy, he curses in this passage.

It seems to me like God is sort of saying, okay, you guys think you can have joy without me?

You think you can have good things without me? Give it a shot. Let's see how far you get with that.

Which is a terrifying thought when you think about it. But our God is so gracious and good that he doesn't actually take the joy away from us even as he curses it.

Because even as he does these curses, he doesn't go as far as he could. He simply still demonstrates his love and mercy by letting us keep the joy.

But now there's also a reminder of the bad, of the sin. The first thing

God curses in our passage today was verse 16, the family dynamic. God says to the woman,

I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain, you shall bring forth children.

Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. Now, it doesn't take a genius.

I don't know exactly what a lot of this stuff means, but it doesn't take a genius to know that that's not good. The family dynamic is not a good thing anymore, necessarily.

It makes it seem sort of like the task of being fruitful and multiplying. When God created in the

Garden of Eden, that was supposed to be a joyful, somewhat simple task. But not anymore.

No longer is our family relationship completely joyful and completely happy and good. It could have been that way, but Adam and Eve thought they could do better.

And so, in response, God shows them a taste of what it would be like without him. But again, he doesn't go all the way.

He lets us still have joy. He lets us still know what it's like to have children, to have a family, to experience the miracle of life and the joy of starting a new family.

But now, it'll be painful and maybe even a little bit dangerous. There's some kind of wrench that God throws into the husband and wife relationship here.

I don't know if we can flesh it all out to this morning, but clearly, your desire shall be contrary to your husband, that's not a good thing.

And clearly, this idea of him ruling over the woman, that's not a good thing. And so, we have curses.

We still get the good parts, but now it's mixed with bad. I pulled up some statistics here.

And these are, you know, I could have pulled up any kind of statistics. Some of these are kind of debated.

You know, you can kind of get a range of statistics. But from the best I can tell in the United States, almost 50 % of marriages end in divorces.

And I've seen numbers even higher than that. Not only that, but lots of people just don't get married anymore.

They're uninterested in the complications of divorce because, you know, it's a coin flip, I guess. I read a statistic that said 34 % of children, a third of children live in single -parent households.

And the statistics tell us that everything is not hunky -dory when you have a single -parent household.

There are difficulties. There are trials that arise because of that situation. And the outlook can sometimes be very grim.

I think that these statistics, again, I could have chosen a bunch of them, but just these two, I think they clearly support and demonstrate the fact that God has cursed the family dynamic.

The second thing God curses is the man's work. Work was meant to be a joy, but now

God again gives us a taste of what it can be like without his goodness. Verse 17 says,

Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.

Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. I think it's very clear that God made our work frustrating.

That's what his curse was. Our work will be frustrating. It won't always yield results.

Sometimes it'll yield thorns and thistles. It won't always be satisfying or fulfilling, at least not all the time.

And also, here's another thing. I think this passage says that our work now, after the curse, our work will be primarily just to feed ourselves, right?

It's not going to be just for the joy of working. Now we're going to work because we need to work to survive.

The statistics, again, I think support this curse. I saw a poll that said 50 % of people say they are satisfied with their work, which means 50 % are unsatisfied with their work.

That is amazing. That's such a high number. I've seen numbers take that up to 70%. 70 % of people are unsatisfied with their work.

That is a ton. And it's not just about money, by the way. Like I thought, okay, well, maybe if you make a little bit of money, you're more unsatisfied.

But maybe if you're rich, you're more satisfied. That's not how it is. It doesn't matter what your salary range is.

It's the same general statistics. There's a little bit of variation. But chances are, no matter what you make, no matter what you do, you're frustrated at work.

See, I think that's a sign that work has been cursed. The third thing

God curses is our food, if you can believe it. It's no longer as easy as grabbing the fruit off the vine and eating it.

That's how it was, but not after the curse. Verse 19 says, By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.

For you are dust, and to dust you shall return. So it sounds to me like God is saying, it's going to take a lot of effort for you to eat.

And eventually, even with all that effort, all that sweat, even your food will not sustain you.

We're going to return to the dirt because of our rebellion. I could rattle off a million statistics.

I mean, the statistics about malnourishment, the statistics about people that don't know where their next meal is going to come from.

I saw a thing that said one in nine people on the planet Earth have no idea what they're going to eat next.

One in nine people. That is a sign of a curse.

You see, that's not how God created the world in Genesis 2. I saw nothing about these things in Genesis 2.

This can only be the result of what happened in Genesis 3. And so, you know, we can study

Genesis 3 and see that God says that he cursed these things, and we can believe it because we believe God. But we don't have to study

Genesis 3. All we got to do is look around and see the devastation and the results of the curses.

All the good things of creation have turned sour and painful by our sin and our rebellion. But, that's pretty depressing.

But I want you to again notice something. Because God doesn't just take these things away completely.

Like, the joy is still there. Did you notice that? We still get our families. We still get our...

We can still have children. We can still work and produce good things. We can still enjoy food.

It's going to take more effort, but we'll still enjoy it. Just that now it's tainted with sin.

See, Genesis 2, we had all these things, but no sin. And we rebelled and we were punished for it.

But God is so merciful, he lets us keep these things. That is amazing.

We have to pay a price, but we can still keep these things. That's amazing, and I think that's important.

Because God curses us, but he doesn't make an end to us. Right? Like, he doesn't utterly destroy us because of our rebellion.

See, these curses, they're not good. We want them undone. We want them gone.

But, the curses are there to produce something good in his people. They're not meant to drive us away from God, but rather to point us to something better.

These curses don't point us away from God, but they point us to something better. There is a person in the

Bible who teaches us this. There is a king, a

Jewish king, who teaches us this exact point. And he is known as the preacher.

The preacher, King Solomon himself. The wisest person of all time.

King Solomon, in his awesome, awesome book, Ecclesiastes, tells us about these curses.

And he also tells us what the point of these things are. I just quoted a bunch of statistics to you to sort of show you the reality of these curses.

But, you know, I don't think Solomon took a poll to figure out that there was curses.

Right? Like, Solomon is a lot wiser than that. He knew about these curses before he could do statistics and polls and things like that.

You see, he understood the reality of the curses of Genesis 3. But the book of Ecclesiastes is the weirdest book in the

Bible, I think. And I love it because of that. But it is so strange. The initial point of the book, like the first little section, if you were to outline it, the book starts off talking about how meaningless life is.

Can you imagine a book of the Bible? Do you think that a random person walking down the street, if you told them that there's a book in the

Bible that talks about how pointless life is, that they would believe it? Probably not. Probably not.

He says everything under the sun, everything in life is vain. Everything is pointless.

He says he tries everything. He tries to find value and meaning in everything. First, he starts off and he tries to find it in his own work, right?

And, you know, he was the preacher, right? He was the king. And so his part of his work was gaining wisdom and applying it to his kingdom.

And so he did that. He tried to find out everything he could. He tried to get as smart as he possibly could. He tried to find knowledge and wisdom and all these things.

And he was very successful. He became very wise. And he spends all his time doing that.

And in the end, he says, I just have more vexation. It's a waste of time. It's like chasing the wind.

That's how he describes it. It's like chasing the wind, which is like the ultimate waste of time. I've never tried for anything.

He tries everything. He says he tries to indulge himself, right? Everything he wants, he indulges himself.

I'll have the best food. I'll have the best alcohol. I'll get as many wives as I can.

I'll have servants. I'll build things. I'll do it all. Everything that people like to do, I'm going to do. And he says at the end, there's no joy.

It's like chasing the wind. You'll never be able to be joyful in a sustained way by abusing these gifts from God.

So he comes to this point where he's like, okay, trying to live wise is vanity. Living like a fool is vanity.

Building a lot of wealth is vanity. Being lazy and not doing anything is vanity. Like everything is pointless.

Everything is just vain to him. You see, King Solomon was intimately aware of the curses of God because he tried them all out.

But you see, the book of Ecclesiastes is even weirder because Solomon sees this weird problem with these things, right?

There's almost like a paradox here because on the one hand, he finds these things, these things that people love and enjoy, he finds them to be meaningless.

But on the other hand, he says, enjoying these things is good.

And what life is all about under the sun. Look what he says in chapter eight. This is after all this stuff where he's like, all these things are meaningless.

Look at this chapter eight. I commend joy. I commend joy, he says, for man has nothing better under the sun, but to eat and drink and be joyful.

For this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.

Later in chapter nine, in the same little section, he says, he says this. He says, go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart for God has already approved of you.

Let your garments always be white. Let your oil not be lacking on your head. And then he says, enjoy life with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. See, it's kind of a weird paradox.

On the one hand, it's all meaningless and vain, according to Solomon. And we also know, you know, all these things can cause pain as well.

So on the one hand, that's not good. But Solomon knows. And, you know, here's the thing about Solomon as well.

Like Solomon wrote the Proverbs, most of them, right? And in the Proverbs, we see warnings about eating. We see warnings about family.

We see warnings about drinking. So he knows all these things are dangerous and they need to be, you know, need to be controlled in the right way.

But even though all of that is true, even though it's vain, it's meaningless, there's danger there that can cause pain.

He still says, God wants us to enjoy them. They're there for our joy.

Eat your bread with joy, he says. Drink your wine with a merry heart, he says. Enjoy life with your wife or your husband.

Because you know what? They're meant to be enjoyed. That's what Solomon says. There's nothing better under the sun than to enjoy these things.

Yes, they've been twisted. Yes, they're a sin we must war against. Yes, these good things have been tainted.

So we have to be on guard. We can't just indulge the way he did. But listen to this.

We shouldn't be so afraid of sin that we give up joy in our lives. Because God has already approved of us enjoying life.

It's a weird paradox, right? It's actually not that weird, if you think about it.

It isn't that weird. Because I think Solomon was clued in on something very big. He was clued in on something that was important.

He doesn't explicitly say it, but I have a feeling that he kind of knew. You see, God had a plan that would allow his people to enjoy life, even through suffering, even through pain.

God had a plan to redeem joy for his people and reverse the curses of Genesis 3.

Take a look at the end of his book. This is the end of Ecclesiastes. Solomon concludes from all of this.

In chapter 12, he says, Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth.

Later in that chapter, he goes on. He says, The end of the matter all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments.

For this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

You see, Solomon was clear on this point. After a life of vexation and meaninglessness and chasing the wind, which

I think we can all relate to if we think about it, Solomon was clear on this, that the best things under the sun, in other words, the best things here on earth, were created by God, and God approves of us enjoying them.

But the best things here on earth are not the best things of all. They are the best things under the sun, but they are not the best of all things.

Because unlike Adam and Eve in the garden, Solomon knew that the best of things are from above.

The best of all things come from God. Because the good things under the sun, they only get their goodness because God gave them the goodness.

And so the end of the matter is respect and honor the Creator. Obey the

Creator. That's how you have joy. That's how you can even have joy with the things under the sun. Obey the

Creator in enjoying those things. You know, if you do that, if Solomon were to have done that his whole life, he wouldn't have had a vain and pointless life.

He wouldn't have faced all this vexation. That's why he says, remember your

Creator in your youth, because that's what he didn't do. And he found out at the end, that's what he should have done. And so that's how we can have joy.

We'll talk about this in more detail next week, because this doesn't end on a downer, right?

We don't have to just put up with this joy mixed with pain all the time.

We don't have to always have it that way. Because all of this is going to be redeemed.

All of this is going to be reconciled. And that's why Christmas is so awesome. Because at Christmas, we celebrate

Christ coming in flesh, and he's the one who redeems all these things. He's the one who comes, and he's the one who point by point, just like God cursed all these things, he's the one who point by point reverses those curses, and reconciles things to himself, reconciles us, saves us from our sins.

But he also restores our joy in this life. So that's why we celebrate at this time of year.

That's why we celebrate every Sunday. Let's pray. Lord God, thank you again for your word,

Lord. Thank you for the book of Ecclesiastes. It's such a relatable book.

Some of us more than others, I think. But wow, just an amazing thing, God, that you would put something that was so honest, and so real to us in the

Bible, Lord, that we can understand it, that we can kind of learn from Solomon's mistakes. In a way, we all have to learn these mistakes for ourselves.

But it is so good to know that the wisest person on the earth can teach us before we fall down, before we fall into the pit,

God. So I just thank you so much that you sent your son, that you've saved us from our own sins,

Lord, but you've also shown us a way that we can enjoy life, God. Again, I just pray that you would apply this message to our hearts,

Lord. Help us to enjoy the good things that you've created, God. Help us to enjoy them, not sin,