If you got a Bible, go and get that open to the book of Job in
the Old Testament, specifically Job chapter 3.
As you're turning there, a couple notes are sermon series
for Advent. We're titling it stubborn
gladness. So Advent is the celebration of
the light coming into the darkness, right?
This symbolic analogy for God himself coming in the flesh of
Jesus into our broken world. So what we've been doing is
we've been exploring the traditional topics of Advent,
hope, peace, joy, next week, love.
But we've been exploring them in light of their opposites.
And so hope in light of hopelessness, peace in light of
anxiety, and joy in light of depression.
That's why you're turning to Job Chapter 3 this morning.
So it is about joy this morning. Well, but don't get too excited
because I think my goal is to preach the saddest sermon on joy
possible because I'm a monster. So let me pray and then we'll
jump into that. Heavenly Father, I, I do, I do
try, I, I honestly do try to be mindful because I love the, I
love the Advent season. I love the, I love the Christmas
season. I, I love everything about it.
And so I, Lord, I do try to be mindful that, as I said to our
volunteers this morning, not everybody is Clark Griswold
during the season. But for some people, the bright
sparkling lights and the the presents under the Christmas
tree and the ornaments on the tree, for some people that
represents loss, loss of hope, loss of the people, a nostalgic
depression of Christmas expectations that went on that I
don't, I don't know, Lord, whatever.
I just know people can tend to experience the the Christmas
Blues in this season. And my hope this morning, and
this is, this is a hope, Lord, that can it can only be
fulfilled if you show up in a profound and miraculous way this
morning. My, my hope is that for those
who experience deep and unrelenting sorrow or sadness or
even in even depression during the season, my hope is that you
would show up this morning and help them taste joy in the midst
of it. Maybe not even joy in spite of
it, but joy in the midst of that all.
I'm always profoundly amazed when I read the New Testament
and I read the Apostle Paul describe his life as sorrowful,
yet always rejoicing. Sorrowful, like full of sorrow,
yet always rejoicing as in joy always.
And so there has to be in the Spirit this possibility that joy
and sorrow can coexist in the Christian who has both her feet
in a broken world and in the person of Christ.
So yeah, do that. In the precious name of Jesus,
all God's people prayed, Amen. We 3 Joy.
One of the biggest challenges of the Christian life, I think
potentially the biggest challenge of the Christian life
is when our experiences don't line up with God's promises.
You know what I mean? Like when our felt experiences
don't line up with God's promises.
I know God promises me this. I don't feel that.
I feel this. What do you do when your felt
experiences don't line up with God's promises?
And I I didn't think there's any bigger area of struggle on this
topic than with God's promise of joy and our regular experiences
of depression, sorrow, and sadness.
So take the Old Testament for example.
God in the Old Testament, he distinguishes his people.
He distinguishes Israel from all the nations of the world,
specifically by declaring them a happy people.
That's not coal. That's the Bible.
This is Deuteronomy chapter 33. I just want you to see this
Deuteronomy chapter 33. God says Happy are you, O
Israel, who is like you? They're different from the
nations. He's saying When I compare the
people of God in Israel to all the other nations, no one's like
you. What makes them distinct?
Happy are you, O Israel, who is like you, a people saved by the
Lord. And so Israel is God's people is
to be distinct and different from the rest of the world,
particularly by their happiness that they experience in their
salvation. And the big question then, of
course, is what do you do when you don't feel that way?
Like if you know your Bible, like what do you do?
For instance, if you're Job, do you pretend?
Do you act? Do you put on a face?
What do you do? And if you're able, let's go
ahead and stand together for the reading of God's Word and see
what he does. All of chapter 3.
I won't have time to expose it every single verse.
That would take a long time, but let's blast through this
together. Job chapter 3 after this, I'll
explain what happened leading up to this.
After this, Job opened his mouth and he cursed the day of his
birth. And Job said, this is ugly
stuff. Let the day perish on which I
was born, and the night that said a man is conceived.
Let that day be darkness. May God above not seek it, nor
light shine upon it. Let gloom and deep darkness
claim it. Let clouds dwell upon it.
Let the blackness of the day terrify it.
That night where I was born, let thick darkness seize it.
Let it not rejoice among the days of the year.
Let it not come into the number of the months.
Yeesh. Behold, let that night be
barren, let no joyful cry enter it.
Let those who curse them, who curse the day, who are ready to
rouse up leviathan chaos. Let the stars of its dawn be
dark. Let it hope for light, but have
none nor see the eyelids of the morning, because it did not shut
the doors of my mother's womb, nor hide trouble from my eyes.
It gets worse. Why did I not die at birth, come
out from the womb and expire? Why did the knees of my mother
receive me, or why the breast that I should nurse for?
Then I would have lain down and been quiet.
I would have slept. Then I would have been at rest
with kings and counselors of the earth who rebuilt ruins for
themselves, or with Princess who had gold, who filled their
houses with silver. Why was I not as a hidden
stillborn child, as infants who never see the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary
are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease
together. They hear not the voice of the
taskmaster, the small and the greater.
There, and the slave is free from his master in the grave.
So why is light given to him who is in misery and life, to the
bitter and soul who long for death?
But it comes not, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave in
light. Why is light given to a man
whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?
For my sign comes instead of my bread, and my groanings are
poured out like the water. For the thing that I fear comes
upon me, and what I dread befalls me.
I am not at ease, nor am I quiet.
I have no rest. But trouble comes chapter 3 of
Job. You know that old classic Advent
text? If you're able, you can be
seated Week 1 of Advent. The first candle.
Tell yourself this. Tell your children this is for
hope, the hope of Jesus. Week 2 of Advent is for peace,
the peace of Jesus and week 3 of Advent.
Tell yourself this, this week as you light this candle.
If you have kids, tell them it's for joy.
But you read a text like this and I think the most natural
question is where? Where is that?
Where's the joy? Where's the joy?
God promises the distinguishes people from the nations by their
happiness in him. Job is a part of the people of
God. He's part of Israel.
That means he is by virtue of extension of that promise.
He is a recipient of that promise.
But where's the joy? Well, it would be helpful to
know what happened in chapters 1 and 2.
So here's what comes before Job Chapter 3.
Essentially, Job loses everything.
You should read chapters 1 and 2 this week.
It's essentially progressive overload of tragedy.
Every time you think that's got to be the worst thing that could
happen, another thing that's bad happens.
It starts with Job losing his oxen and his servants are struck
dead. That is financial insecurity.
Where's the joy? Then it gets worse.
He loses his children. Then it gets worse, his health
is taken from him. Then it gets worse.
Even his wife curses him. Where's the joy?
And the worst part is, if you read chapter 1, all that's
befalling Job, all these, these losses, these things are
happening to Job. It's all taking place based on a
cosmic bet between God and Satan that even if Satan takes
everything from Job, Job won't curse God.
That's the big question in in Job chapter 3 is, is he going to
do it? Is is Job going to raise his
first to the heavens and curse God?
There's a lot of cursing in this chapter, right?
A lot. It's uncomfortable to read,
parents. I bet if somebody made a song
out of Job 3 and you heard it on the radio, you'd be like this.
I don't want my kids to hear that right.
You would turn it off. So much cursing.
The question is, does Job curse God?
If you have a Bible open, look closely at chapter 3.
I'm not going to have this on the screen.
Let me just read it out loud. Job curse is the day where he
was born. He says let the day perish on
which I was born in the night that said a man is conceived.
Let that day be darkness like this.
He's like this close to cursing God.
Does he do it? He goes on by saying, May God
above not seek it, nor light shine upon it.
Let gloom and deep darkness claim it.
Let clouds dwell upon it. Let the blackness of the day
terrify it. What's Job doing?
This is poetic language. But essentially what what Job is
doing is he's cursing the day of his birth.
Notice this. He's cursing out loud.
This is an important textual observation, but not to God
about God. But he's not addressing God.
He's just cursing out loud. This is important.
So if you look at all the angry Psalms, and there's a lot of
angry Psalms, one thing you notice is that the psalmist,
they always address God. They, they pray to God.
You read a Psalm and it's like, how long, O Lord, until you do
this or God, what are you doing up there?
How long until this happens? They're addressing God.
That's not what's happening with Joe.
He mentions God, but he does not greet God in chapter 3.
That's why some theologians refer to chapter 3 as praying
into the void, which would make an awesome name for a metal
album. Praying into the void.
This is not Job praying to God, this is Job kicking and punching
in his bed sheets, screaming into his pillow.
Job is the Old Testament figure who experiences the felt, not
the objective, the felt absence of God more than any other Old
Testament figure. You could even say that Job.
Many people do say that Job is the most God forsaken man in the
Old Testament in these chapters. But does he do it?
He curses. But does he curse God?
Not yet. But look at verse 11.
Job continues by saying why did I not die at birth, come out
from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me?
Why the breast that I should nurse for?
Then I would have lain down and been quiet.
I would have slept, he's saying. It would have been better to
just be dead with kings and Queens than to be alive, he
says. Then I would have been at rest
with kings and councillors of the earth who built ruins for
themselves or with Princess who had gold, who filled their
houses with silver. What a terrible thing to say.
Like imagine you're a small group, community group this week
and somebody says that, right? You would be like, you ever do
that? Like somebody asks who you how
you are and you're like, I'm good.
And they're like, no, how are you really?
And you're like, OK. And they're like, and then
you're like, OK, I feel worse now because not only do you know
how I'm doing, I still feel that way.
And now you're walking away from me.
But does he curse God? He curses life itself.
It's bad. It's a bad thing to say.
God says life is good, existence is good.
It was God's idea. Terrible thing to say.
But sometimes the interior life of a faithful Christian is ugly,
am I right? A faithful Christian can have an
ugly interior life. Sometimes I think Iowan
Christians struggle with this. And by Iowan Christians in
general, I mean me in specific. I'm talking about myself.
Sometimes when when people experience deep sadness and
sorrow or depression, it freaks us out and we say cliches to
them because it makes us uncomfortable.
And I think one of the reasons why we struggle with this is
because as Christians, something that we fail to reckon with is
the fact that God actually created us with the capacity for
sorrow. That was God's idea, and the
capacity for sorrow is intrinsically good.
You could try to make the theological argument that the
capacity for sorrow is a result of the fall.
If you made that argument, you would be stupid and you'd be
wrong. Why do I know that?
It's really simple. How do I know that?
Because God himself experiences and expresses sorrow.
And if it's part of the Nate, the fundamental nature of the
perfect and holy One, then it is objectively good to have that
capacity for sorrow. And so the implication there is
that if we are unable to experience appropriate sorrow in
life, then we actually fail to image God accurately to the
world. Did you hear that?
Like when Job freaks out in chapter 3.
My read on that is not oh, Job's spiritual health is in danger.
You know what would make me think that though?
If Job lost all of that and he felt nothing.
I think the older I get as a Christian, the more I believe
that the opposite of joy is not sadness.
The I don't think depression is the opposite of joy.
I think the opposite of joy is apathy.
Like I'm going to try to put something to words here that's
hard for me to explain. When you experience the
appropriate amount, appropriate amount of sorrow in relation to
the amount of loss, you experience that sorrow.
You experience it as though there were kind of a joy at the
bottom of it. Like there, there's a dark
pleasure in experiencing the appropriate amount of sadness
and sorrow. And so I think the problem is
that if our capacity for sadness is good, and Job's intense
sadness here is actually something of a bittersweet
consolation for him, then to try to tell him to just cheer up
would mean that you're not actually making his life better,
but actually just taking another thing away from him.
So not only would he lose his wife, his wife's love, his kids,
his health, his financial thing, but you would also make him lose
his heart. And so Job, caught up in this
furious tornado of depression, he starts to say some scary
things. Christians say scary things.
Job is saying some scary things. He's cursing life itself.
Yikes. But did he do it?
Did he curse God? And the answer, of course, is
no, close, but no. Look at verse 20.
Verse 20 says he goes after
light after going after his own life.
He says why is light given to him who was in misery and life
to the bitter and soul? Verse 23, why is light given to
a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in right this?
This is very close to cursing God.
When God creates light in Genesis, God says it's good.
Genesis saying, or what Job is saying is no, curse it.
God says it's good. Job says curse the light.
What a brutally atrocious thing to curse.
But did he curse God? No.
And this, this is the key observation in all of Job three.
I think this is the central point of chapter 3.
Job is consumed by depression, a never ending pit of sorrow in
fact, And Job raises a fist at everything and everyone and
curses everything besides God. So I'm going to say something
that is, I think it might, I'm going to quote something that I
think might make you nervous. I'm reading a book right now by
a Christian who experiences intense mental health issues,
bipolar and a lot of other things.
And he, he says his name is John Bryant.
And he says something that's almost alarming, but I think
it's worth your consideration. I wrote it down right when I
read it. He says I love Jesus.
And I'm still very much mentally ill and my love for Jesus has
not fixed that. How he goes on to say this, this
is so critical. He says, look, the saddest thing
in the world isn't to have bad thoughts or feelings.
Has anybody ever told you that the saddest thing in the world
is not to have bad thoughts or feelings?
What is it? He says The saddest thing in the
world is to believe things that are not true.
The saddest thing in the world is not to experience or have
depression. You need to hear me say that the
saddest thing in the world is to believe the lies that your
depression tells you. Those are two distinct things.
You can be in the midst of deep depression and still reject the
lies that your depression is telling you and still keep your
feet planted in the promises of God.
And if you can resist the lies that your depression tells you,
something amazing happens in this moment of Job, for
instance. What is happening, I think, is
that Job is simultaneously the happy one of Israel.
Deuteronomy 33. He has not forfeited that
identity. He is simultaneously the happy
one of Israel, the blessed one of Israel, and a man of great
sorrows. Not one or the other, both at
once. This is key.
Biblically, joy is not the absence of sorrow.
It can't be, the New Testament says sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing. Joy is not the absence of
suffering. Scripture, in fact, commands us
to count our suffering as all joy.
So it can't be that. And so if joy is not this toxic
positivity, if joy is not the absence of sorrow or the absence
of suffering, then what is it? And I'm convinced that what joy
is joy is a stubborn refusal to not worship our sorrow even when
we experience it, and instead a dogged determination to worship
God alone. I'm telling this is going to be
a hard pill to swallow. I think it's true, though.
I think, I think that it is better to be depressed in the
presence of God than to be chipper outside of the presence
of God. Which one's more joyful?
The person with deep sadness and sorrow that's in Christ or the
Super happy clappy person who doesn't know Jesus, the
depressed person in Christ has more joy.
It's wild. It's wild.
This is why we're using the phrase stubborn gladness for
this series. I'm actually ripping off from a
Jack Gilbert poem where he says something incredible.
Gilbert says. The first time I read this a
couple of years, I underlined it and highlighted it and I was
like, that's got to go on a sermon. 4 years later, here it
is baby Gilbert. In this poem.
He says we must have the stubbornness.
I like that Our mission statement is fight for joy.
It's not act happy or act joyful.
It's a stubborn fight, he says. Gilbert says we must have the
stubbornness to accept our gladness even in the ruthless
furnace of the world. Come on, does that hit dude?
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the
ruthless furnace of this world. And this is the turning point in
the sermon, right? This is where, this is where,
this is the moment where this sappy text in Job 3 actually
becomes an Advent story. Because what we recognize in the
Advent story is that God is not merely the God who stands above
sadness and sorrow as he does in Job chapter 3.
God is the God who descends into sadness and sorrow.
Because one of the things you got to reckon with is that when
Jesus comes, there is one who comes and fulfills the story of
Job better than Job. The first advent of Jesus is the
advent of a truer and better Job.
Jesus experiences everything that Job experiences.
Read the gospels in light of the book of Job.
Jesus experiences everything that Job experiences, but to the
10th degree, right? Like Job, Jesus loses his
friends. Like Job, Jesus loses everything
that belongs to him, which is not just a couple cattle and
oxen like Job, but all of creation turns against Jesus
like Job, his bride, his wife. The church curses him on the
cross. It's exactly parallel.
And ultimately, like Job, it's Jesus who screams into the void
on the cross. Jesus, the advent of God
himself. Jesus experiences a felt absence
of God. My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me? It's extraordinary.
Job is not the most God forsaken man in the Bible.
Jesus is the most God forsaken man in the Bible.
This is extraordinary fullness of divinity made to feel the
absence of divinity, right? The in the modern world we have
a word for that kind of experience.
When Jesus is in Gethsemane and he says my soul is sorrowful to
the point of death. That's poetic language for what
in the modern world we call depression.
Like you have to reckon with this, this, just think about
this. Jesus experienced a chemical
imbalance in his brain. If you could take an MRI of what
was going on in Jesus brain in Gethsemane, you would see a
chemical imbalance and he's perfect for God himself in the
flesh. God experienced a chemical
imbalance in his brain. What I mean, what God does that?
Only Jesus, Amen. Only Jesus, only the Christian
God, only Jesus can catch one of your tears in his hands and say,
I know what that feels like. I cried that exact same tear.
And this is so important to know because it helps you recognize
something so important, which is so simple, which is this God's
not afraid of your depression. Your friends, even some of your
Christian friends. When you go into deep seasons of
darkness and you say things like Job three, sometimes your
Christian friends will go, well, God's got a plan for your life,
so you just act happy. Even our Christian friends won't
do that sometimes. Does God No.
And you're God does not do this when you're in depression, when
you're in deep seasons of darkness and sorrow, God does
this. He knows it's felt it not afraid
of your depression, not afraid of your sorrow.
He knows what it feels like. And so when it's so life giving,
because when I experience sadness and sorrow, do you feel
this way ever? I don't know if I've ever been
through a season that I would call depression.
And so I don't. I have, I don't think I've
tasted that if you've experienced that or in that.
But I've been in seasons of sadness and sorrow.
And when I'm in those seasons, what I don't want people to do
is cheer me up. I don't.
What I want people to do in those seasons is I want people
to dignify my sorrow, to grant it dignity and worth and value.
And for Jesus to experience sorrow means that he has made
sorrow holy. By tasting sadness in the flesh,
Jesus has transfigured our sorrow and he has infused our
sorrow with a type of, and I mean this when I say it,
reverence. Do you find that beautiful?
Like, I don't even want, I don't even want a Jesus who's not the
Man of Sorrows. I don't want a Jesus who looks
at my sadness. And it's like, what's that like?
It's profound. Jesus, God in the flesh, the man
of sorrows. Job was just a man who felt
sorrow. Jesus was the Man of sorrows.
I mean, Job just cursed the day of his birth.
Jesus was cursed from the day of his birth.
There's a difference. Job just cursed his birthday.
Jesus was cursed from his birthday.
Galatians chapter 313. Argue with the wall if you don't
like that. Christ redeemed us from the
curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.
He took on the curse that we deserved.
That's what makes him the Man of Sorrows.
And so every year when we celebrate Advent, we are
celebrating the advent of the Man of Sorrows.
He is the Man of Sorrows and the happy one of Israel.
And there will be a second Advent, right?
He's coming back, Amen. And when he comes back in the
second Advent, that gap is going to be gone.
The one we talked about, that gap between your felt
experiences and the promises of God during the second advent of
Jesus, it it'll be gone. There will no longer be any gap
between his promises and our felt experiences.
That gap will be thrown into the lake of fire and our experiences
will finally be brought fully into complete union with his
promises. No gap, not even a millisecond
between God promises this and then we experience it there.
It'll just be 1. You won't have to wait for the
needle to drop the needle to drop.
I I don't struggle with a lot of devices of the world, but I do
have addictions. For instance, my addiction
currently is in the middle of the day.
Yesterday I ran out of my house in order to drive over to the Hy
Vee Wine and Spirits where Joseph works because I needed to
have some more. And what I needed to have more
of was they had a record pop up store and I'm addicted to
records. And so I got there and you know
what, like a like a typical, I just like it all.
I like the the shape of the records.
I like the heaviness of it. I like the artwork, design, all
of it. And like a typical addict, I'm
going to blame somebody else. It's not my fault.
It's Andrew Johnson's fault he's not here, right?
Good. I'm going to blame Andrew.
So the reason why I'm so addicted to records right now is
he you should go check it out. In my office after church, he
brought in this amazing record player that he had that he's
letting me borrow and these massive speakers.
And so I listened to like one of my favorite albums on it.
And I was like, I have to hear every one of my favorite records
on this. And so it was like the week
after Andrew brought his new fancy record player and put it
in my office. And I there one of my favorite
records this year was written by a punk band called Military Gun,
not a Christian band. I'm not recommending it to you
know that I know as a pastor, I'm only allowed to listen to
Hillsong on my spare time. Which if you, which if you
believe that, do not look at my Spotify rapped for the year.
But there's this band called Military Gun and they're like
profoundly this punk band, like you listen to it and they got
this punk sound, but they also infuse it with this
extraordinary sound of joy. And so I was like, man, I got to
hear that. I was kind of feeling down that
week. I was like, I got to put on this
this record. And so I turned it on, turn the
speaker on, press play. It started spinning and I
couldn't hear it. So I checked again.
The record player was on, the speakers were on, the record was
spinning. I couldn't hear the music.
You know what happened? Andrew has a really fancy record
player, mine at home. You just press a button when you
press start and the needle naturally lifts up and goes
right down on the record where it's supposed to.
That's not the way Andrew's works.
It's a fancy one. You've got to manually lift up
the needle and then put it to the right spot and drop it.
I didn't know that. And so the record player was on,
the speakers were on, the record was spinning.
I couldn't hear it. Why?
Because the needle hadn't dropped.
And this is where records get really interesting.
OK, This is, I think that this is fascinating when when they
make a record, what they do is they etch the music.
They etch the songs into little tiny grooves, and then they they
press it into plastic and they press those songs into the
plastic until the record eventually goes perfectly flat.
And what that means is that the music is objectively there when
it's spinning, because it's etched into the record, it's
objectively there. But if the needle isn't dropped,
can you hear the music? No, that doesn't mean the
music's not there. It is.
You just have seasons where you can't hear it.
And what record players teach us is that there can be a profound
gap between an objective reality, like a song etched into
the very record itself, and our subjective experience of hearing
that song. And that's helpful to know
because that's most of the Christian life.
You are declared. If you're a believer in Jesus,
you are declared sinless objectively, even though
subjectively you still struggle with sin.
You've been covered in the righteousness of God.
Even though sometimes you practice unrighteousness.
Your sins are forgiven. You're covered in Jesus right
righteousness. And in your union with God
through the work of the Spirit, a joyful song has objectively
been pressed into your heart and grooves.
And sometimes as a Christian, the speakers are on, you know,
your Bible, the record players on, you go to church and you
worship with people. The record is spinning like
you're practicing the spiritual disciplines and you're going
through the motions. You're doing all of that and you
can't hear the music. You can't feel the joy.
And the big question is, what do you do in those seasons?
And the biblical answer to that, the answer of Advent, is simple.
What do you do? You keep spinning the record and
you wait for God to drop the needle.
That's what you do. You keep spinning the record.
Read your Bible. You keep spinning the record.
Keep going to church, You keep spinning the record.
Fast, repent of sin, pray, get help, encourage other people,
and you wait for God to drop the needle.
You practice what theologians call holy discontentment.
You ever heard that holy discontentment?
It's it's this term where whenever God promises us
something that we don't experience, it's our job to
practice holy discontentment. Do not be cool with that gap.
It's like if you go through a season of, of, of joylessness of
sadness and sorrow, that's OK, but be discontent in a holy way
with it, right? Our, our job is to say, God, you
promised me joy. I don't feel it.
Would you give it to me? And then if you don't experience
it, you know what you should do? Keep asking.
Keep spinning the record. Keep reading your Bible, say
God, I still won't experience it.
I don't feel the joy. You promised me joy.
Would you do it? And if you don't, you know what
you do. You keep asking, you keep
spinning the record. You keep praying, you keep
worshipping, you keep reading your Bible, you fast, you get
help. You talk to other Christians,
you wait. You keep spinning the record.
You fast. And you say, God, I want the joy
of salvation. I don't feel it.
Would you give it to me? And if you still don't get it,
you keep doing that on a daily basis, even if you have to do it
every day until you die. You keep spinning the record.
Amen. Keep spinning it.
You keep asking. You don't quit.
You don't just quit. You don't just give up and curse
God and be done with it. No, you keep asking, you keep
fighting and you keep banging on the door and you keep saying,
God, I don't feel it. Would you help me experience it?
You keep stubbornly asking, God, where's the joy?
Where is it? Heavenly Father, would you help
us practice that holy discontentment?
Stir in US just the spirit given desire to continue to ask and
ask and ask and ask and fight and fight and fight and fight.
And if you don't give that to us in this lifetime, help us wait
for it because it is coming. Maybe some of us will experience
the lifting of the sadness and sorrow right now.
Pray for that if you haven't. Some of us will experience the
lifting of that sorrow next week.
Some of us will experience it next year.
But all of us will experience it in our next lifetime.
And so, Lord, stir in us a desire to taste the joy
subjectively that is objectively in us because of the person of
Jesus. So it's in his precious name
that all God's people prayed. Amen.