Pursuing Joy

Joel Zumaya, a hard-throwing pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, fractured his elbow pitching on Monday night against the Minnesota Twins.  This article on the Detroit Free Press talks about his injury and his thoughts after learning that though it is a season-ending injury, he will be able to pitch again.  After reading the piece, I thought of three things I would say to Joel if I had the opportunity.

First, the article’s title is “Joel Zumaya hopes to return next spring”.  To that, I say, “Joel, hope in Christ alone.”  All things in this world fade away.  There will come a spring that you will not spend in Lakeland, Florida getting ready for a season of playing baseball.  A life worth living is a life lived to display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, which is the ultimate purpose for the existence of everything. Living to that end will be the path of finding true joy, whether God allows you more seasons or not.

Second, if baseball is taken away from you, God means for it to be a way of pointing to the only thing that will truly satisfy your heart’s desires.  All the idols of this world are worthless and those who love them become like them… deaf, blind, empty and dead.  But sometimes we don’t know what we are idolizing and it takes God removing what we’ve put in His rightful place to realize how backwards we are living.  Suffering exists as a means of giving us more of God while weaning us off the idols of our hearts.  All we need in life is God.  We were made to see and enjoy and proclaim the glory of God.  Anything else we live for will always leave us empty.

Third, Joel said, “I felt like I had no one on my side.”  To that, I say, “When Jesus was taking the final steps of His path towards the cross, he was all alone.  The crowds were against him, the religious leaders were against him, his best friends had deserted him and one of them even denied knowing him.  In fact, even God The Father forsook His own Son at the cross.  Jesus knows what it is like to be utterly alone.”  1 Peter 3.18 says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God”.  Through Christ’s suffering, God’s enemies were made His sons.  Christ’s suffering enabled us to regain fellowship with God.   So, Joel, whether you are experiencing the joy of playing baseball or the pain of having it taken away, anyone who believes in Christ alone and pursues their joy in God alone are rich beyond comprehension and have so much to live for.

So, Joel, believe that Jesus Christ, the Righteous Son of God, died for all our sins and conquered death by rising eternally triumphant over all his enemies and that there is now no condemnation for those who believe, but only everlasting joy in the fellowship with the One True God, both in this life and one to come.

Do you remember when life first entered your dead heart, when the chains of sin were broken, when the dungeon of your sin-dead life flamed with light?  In those first days, weeks, months, Andrew Murray in Abide in Christ says, “you experienced that His word was truth; all His promises fulfilled; He made you partakers of the blessings and the joy of His love.  Was not His welcome most hearty, His pardon full and free, His love most sweet and precious?”

Yet many lose the blessings they once enjoyed and the love and joy of their first days with their Savior becomes “faint and feeble”.  Listen to Murray explain why:

“Often you have wondered what the reason could be, that with such a Savior, so mighty and so loving, your experience of salvation should not have been a fuller one. The answer is very simple. You wandered from Him.”

If your affections for our Savior are faint and feeble, if your joy in His saving love has waned, put off everything you are abiding in and abide in Christ.  The power of sin has been broken, so take hold of the everything spiritual blessing God has gracious given His people in Christ.  The gospel is not only the door to life with Christ, but also the power to abide in Him every day.  We cannot do this in our own strength… all “this Jesus Christ himself alone must do by His Holy Spirit. But what I would fain by the grace of God be permitted to do is, to repeat day by day the Master’s blessed command, ‘Abide in me’”.

Let us abide in our great and glorious Savior today through the power of the gospel and with the help of the Spirit.

“God is the ultimate focus of Christ’s death on the cross.  Yes, Jesus died for sins and for the unrighteous, but ultimately Jesus died for God and his glory.  For when Christ brings us to God, he brings us into a right relationship with God.  It’s as if the universe is set back where it should be – a relationship in which he is the center and we orbit around him in a safe proximity and nearness, a relationship in which his glory is the point and we find our joy and meaning in being a display of his worth rather than our own.”

~ Michael Lawrence, It Is Well, 215

When we find our joy and meaning in living as “a display of his worth rather than our own”, we do what we were created to do.  We find ultimate joy when we decrease and He increases because He is the ultimate focus of everything.  Though everything around us and everything within us tells us to put ourselves on display for all to see, Christ died so we could live for Our Father and His glory.  When He is the center, everything is as it should be… even when thinking about the ultimate purpose of the cross.

“But may all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you; may those who love your salvation say continually, ‘Great is the Lord!’”

Psalm 40:16

Seeking God is one of the main priorities of the church.  “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4).  John Piper, in a sermon on Psalm 40, says, “We seek to behold his beauty, to be with him, to meditate on him. This is our central business in the church—to see the beauty of God. To get our heads into the heavens. To know him for who he is. He is the main reality—not buildings, not Christians, not missions, not heaven. God himself is what we seek.”

But this seeking isn’t complete, it seems, until we proclaim His greatness.  In verses 9-10, David tells how he did not hide or conceal what God has done for him.  He told the people about God’s faithfulness, steadfast love and salvation.  In verse 16, the seeking in the first half is concluded in the second half with proclamation, namely continually saying, “Great is the Lord!”  Piper says, “He is supreme and his supremacy is your passion.”  Part of having a passion for His supremacy is proclaiming it!

So the church’s mission to our neighbors and the nations in which we tell them who God is, what He has done and that salvation is found in Him alone through Jesus Christ flows out of the church’s pursuing God.  A passion for evangelism does not simply flow out of a burden for the lost.  It flows out of a heart that seeks God, a heart that rejoices and is glad in God (Psalm 40:16a).  When we go hard after God and pursue our joy in Christ alone, God is glorified.  When God grants joy and gladness in Him through our seeking, we find that our seeking and loving and worshiping of God is not separate from our proclamation of Him.  Piper says:

“Our passion for God is our persuasion for the nations… our joy in God is both our worship and our evangelism.”

The Resurgence, an arm of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, has posted a helpful article outlining John Owen’s On The Moritification Of Sin (you can buy Justin Taylor’s excellent edited version of 3 Owen books combined here, buy the standalone book here or download the original treatise here).  You can also download a 12-page pdf reading summary.  Although Owen is “heavy and hard to read” (JI Packer), it is definitely worth the effort.  Download the reading summary and use the outline to assist as you read through this important work.  It is important because, as Owen says, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”

We’ve just returned from 3 days in Minneapolis at the Desiring God Conference For Pastors.  It was a refreshing time of learning, listening, pondering and fellowship.  All the audio and video of the sessions can be found here.  Though I am share some other things later, I wanted to share one thing that I found extremely helpful, convicting and encouraging.

“Disobedience will kill our pleasure in Jesus.”    Sam Storms

This sentence is a weapon to wield when facing temptation.  Disobedience will never give you the joy it promises.  In fact, it kills the only joy that will truly fulfill your desires.

“I think I may say, without offence to God or man, that one reason why God made the world was that He might manifest Himself, not only by, but to the works which He made.”

~ John Bunyan, Works, 1:117

God is the first and best of beings.  And being the first and best means that His people not only proclaim to others how great our God is, but they themselves see, taste and experience His greatness.  God created so that we would bear His image AND encounter Him.

“The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice…” (Psalm 97:1)

“The Lord reigns; let the peoples tremble…” (Psalm 99:1)

The Lord is King of all creation.  Holiness is His character and righteousness defines His acts.  His people will both rejoice and tremble at His sovereignty and holiness.  It is not one or the other!  Joy and fear are constant companions in the lives of His saints.

“Oh! Rejoice in the richness of our salvation! When the Lord pardoned our sins, he did not pardon half of them, and leave some of them on the book— but with one stroke of the pen he gave a full receipt for all our debts.

When we went down into the fountain filled with blood, and washed, we did not come up half-clean, but there was no spot nor wrinkle upon us—we were white as snow.”

~ Charles Spurgeon, “The Joy of Salvation”

Don Whitney, professor at Southern Seminary and author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, has 10 good questions to ask at the start of the new year:

1. What’s one thing you could do this year to increase your enjoyment of God?

2. What’s the most humanly impossible thing you will ask God to do this year?

3. What’s the single most important thing you could do to improve the quality of your family life this year?

4. In which spiritual discipline do you most want to make progress this year, and what will you do about it?

5. What is the single biggest time-waster in your life, and what will you do about it this year?

6. What is the most helpful new way you could strengthen your church?

7. For whose salvation will you pray most fervently this year?

8. What’s the most important way you will, by God’s grace, try to make this year different from last year?

9. What one thing could you do to improve your prayer life this year?

10. What single thing that you plan to do this year will matter most in ten years? In eternity?