Real Joy

Last Saturday I showed up for a church service where there was a visiting speaker who has been a missionary overseas for years. He spent the entire sermon in a prayer for the congregation. It was a prayer for blessing through poverty, through suffering, through hunger, through unanswered prayers, and even through death. If we want to live like Jesus did, he said, we need to expect all of these things.

As I sat there listening, I realized how easy it was to pray that blessing over someone else, but how scary it was to admit that he was praying for me. Do I actually want to know God so badly that I am willing to give up having food to eat on a regular basis, a place to stay, a nice car, a job, my reputation, or even my life? Having to respond to these questions honestly, I found myself saying no. I am ready to give up the good things of life for Jesus, but I am not ready to embrace the difficult things of life for Him. I am scared of pain and suffering. I don’t know what to do about it. But I pray that God will show me more of who He is so that anything I might go through becomes insignificant compared to knowing Him.

I think this was one of the first times I sat through a message that so severely convicted me that I wanted to change and did not feel like I was a bad Christian. What I learned in Colorado has stayed with me. I will never be perfect and Jesus loves me exactly as I am. In fact, my focus was so drawn back to Jesus that I understood these ‘difficulties’ to be ‘blessings’ that I may not be prepared for now. It seems that truly following Jesus is a pretty radical and scary thing. I understand something of why the disciples had such difficulty being good followers of Jesus.

After the service I was so refreshed through prayer and worship that I want to meet with that church again. Leaving the building though, I began to feel a pressure inside that I could not understand. I wanted to shout. I wanted to run. I wanted to so something to express what I was feeling but did not know what it was. I was entirely discontent with reading, with praying, driving, thinking, or anything. I needed to share the love of God that I felt with someone.

In Acts 2, the disciples waited to be filled with the Holy Spirit and immediately thereafter were out in the streets proclaiming the work of God in a supernatural way. When they were filled with the Holy Spirit, their reaction was to share it with someone else. When I became filled up with the Holy Spirit, I wanted to burst because I had to find a way to share it with someone else. It was only through a conversation with another believer that I ‘let off some steam.’

Next time I want to be prepared for the power of God to overwhelm me by having some outlet to share His goodness with another person.

I began to understand the idea that God fills us up as we pour ourselves out last fall when I began to pray for other people and realized that God filled me up with love and joy as I shared it with others. Now, I wonder at my cupidity in requesting the power of God for my own enjoyment and marvel at the fact that He so often fills me fuller even when I am already satisfied. I think He is trying to get me to spill over into the lives of people around me so that they can know the joy that I have found.