Joy is not something you can achieve by willpower. It is a gift from God that we all get to experience, but for those who love Jesus there is another kind of joy that God gives ... a better joy.

Four Truths that Lead to Joy
Monday, November 28, 2011
Christmas Theme
Welcome to HAVEN Today at Christmas Time, I’m CM sharing the Great Story that’s all about Jesus.
She noticed something was wrong when a pop-tart would disappear from her desk or a granola bar was half eaten. Judy Naeher teaches kindergarten in Oklahoma City and she had to decide whether to punish a hungry child for stealing food – like taking a bite out of an apple on her desk. Her solution was to let the culprit – a little girl – know that stealing was not OK, but it was OK to ask for help when you’re hungry. Judy Naeher helped the little girl sign up for a special program where kids receive a free backpack of food going into the weekend. The backpack is filled with healthy food provided by a regional food bank and for holidays … like Thanksgiving and Christmas … the child receives a double portion. Maybe it’s hard to imagine that hunger is prevalent where you live. But maybe it’s even harder to remember that Jesus offered himself to all of us as the bread of life. His portion is way more than double. Jesus said blessed are the hungry, for they will be satisfied. This is a program called “Four Truths that Lead to Joy”. That little girl I told you about in Oklahoma needed more than food. She needed joy in her life and all of us need joy in our lives today for a variety of reasons. We need the joy of the Lord. If you missed the last few days or maybe today – Monday – is the first time you’ve ever joined this program, I want to say thanks for everyone who over the past few days decided to Give Jesus. What do I mean by that? We last week we were praying at this ministry for God’s blessing on our finances as we head into Christmas and end our fiscal year. But we decided that was the wrong way to pray. We asked the Lord to show us how we could share or give Jesus and how listeners like you could partner with us this Christmas. The bottom line is not about how much we have or don’t have in the bank – even if we’re hurting. If you really believe like I do that life is all about Jesus, then giving Jesus to others is a major part of what life is all about. So, here’s how you can partner with us and give Jesus. Go online at haventoday.org. That’s haventoday.org. Or call us after the program at 1-800-654-2836. That’s 1-800-65-HAVEN. For your gift to Haven Ministries, we’ll send you the just released album by Keith and Kristyn called Joy – An Irish Christmas. But more than sending you a copy of what I believe is the Gettys best album yet, we will give one of the Joy CD’s to a family in need and along with the CD, we’ll include a card explaining how to receive Jesus this Christmas. Would you join me? Give Jesus by going on line or calling us after the program. HAVEN Today opens with the most joyous Christmas carol ever.

Open- Joy To The World- Shannon Wexelberg-From her Christmas album "Love Came For Me" released last year.
Four Truths that Lead to Joy heading into Christmas 2011 here on HAVEN Today, I’m CM.

From Psalm 51, now this was the psalm that David wrote, “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love. According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me.” David took another man’s wife, Bathsheba, and then that led to his committing murder. And then of course the prophet Nathan confronted him with his sins and reminded him that he needed to confess his sins, he needed to repent from his sins. And then later in the Psalm David prays, “Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean, wash me Lord, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones you’ve crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Well, those are powerful words from Psalm 51. I hope that you might have time to read and pray through that entire Psalm, even today. I was reading through prayer requests that come to Haven Ministries – we get a lot of them – and I was reading one that came in recently from a man in Ohio. He said, “I so desperately wish to be Christ-like. At 64 however, I’ve developed so many bad habits over the years that it’s difficult for me to be constant in the faith. I don’t read my Bible and this, of course, should be the very first thing that I should do.” He says, “I’m a fairly decent sort, but I do believe that time is running out.” He asks for help, he asks for prayer. Well, that’s what I want to do. I want to provide some help for all of us in the next few minutes from Psalm 51. I want to share with you “Four Truths that Lead to Joy”.


There was a pastor friend of mine who I’ve quoted before and Steve Brown, who also has a radio program, has quoted many times, “Cheer up. You’re worse than you think.” Now, think about that for just a moment, but it relates to what I’m talking about in Psalm 51, because I want you to have joy this Christmas. And how do we live the Christian life? We live it through daily repentance. Let me give you these truths. Truth number 1 – repentance involves painful self discovery. Repentance, something that to live the Christian life effectively means is a daily experience, but it starts when blame-shifting and rationalizing ends. You take a long steady look at yourself and when you do, what do you see? Well, you see what David saw in Psalm 51:3 David acknowledges the results of his self discovery and he’s very much aware of his sin. The glamour of it, the excitement of it, the illicit thrill of it has worn off and what’s now left is a walking nightmare. When you repent like David did in this Psalm, the reality of what you’ve done is at the forefront of your mind. You’re not fooling yourself about it. You’re not burying it and trying to forget it. You become painfully conscious of it. And David goes on to make another important self-discovery. The problem isn’t solely what he did, the problem is also who he is. And that’s the point of verse 5 of Psalm 51, “surely I was sinful at birth. Sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” He’s not blaming his mom for his problem. What he’s doing is recognizing a truth that also applies to you and me and it applies to the man in Ohio. We have a bent in our very nature that makes us sin. It’s in our nature to have outbursts of anger. It’s part of our dark side that we take secret pleasure in the misfortune of others. It’s part of us to want to do what we’re told we cannot do. Now this is maybe very familiar to Christians, maybe to you. You know what sin is. You’ve seen it, you’ve confronted it. If you’re a Christian, you certainly don’t deny the reality of sin in your life however, you may not be prepared to accept that you’re a sinner who needs to repent. And listen. I’m not just speaking to unbelievers here. I’m talking to saints, who are born again and still need this daily confrontation. C.S. Lewis made an interesting observation about people who haven’t awakened to the reality of what the Bible calls sin in their life. Lewis said it this way, “No man knows how bad he is, till he’s tried very hard to be good.” And Lewis’ point is that people who don’t recognize the seriousness of sin in their lives have too easily given into it all their lives. Lewis said, “You don’t learn the strength of an army by surrendering to it. You learn its strength by trying to fight against it.” Lewis said that the people who deny the seriousness of sin in their lives have led sheltered lives by too quickly and too easily giving in to sinful impulses. My challenge to you if this describes you, is to try – really try – to live the life demanded by the Perfect and Holy Creator God and what you will discover is that you will fail. And the question then becomes for you, what are the consequences of that failure? How do you deal with the fact that you don’t really measure up? Only one answer and the answer that leads to joy is to repent. Truth number 2 – repentance is seeing your sin as cosmic treason. Now that may sound a little strong, I know, but that’s what David is effectively saying in this Psalm, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” That statement has confused a lot of people because David certainly sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah. David isn’t denying that, but what he’s affirming is that his sin against those people is at a deeper level, is a sin against God. He’s offended God by his offenses against Bathsheba, Uriah and the nation of Israel that he betrayed. And we do the very same thing. There isn’t any person listening to Haven Today who can say, “I haven’t done anything to God.” No, because the extent to which you’ve sinned against other people, you’ve sinned against God. In fact, our sin against God doesn’t even have to involve the mistreatment of others. Even to the extent we’ve lived our lives in passive ignorance of God, living our lives as if God weren’t there, as if he didn’t have a claim on our lives. We have offended a loving and a Holy God who’s reached out to us in a breathtaking way, and yet we’ve just brushed him off as if he weren’t real. Real repentance begins when you begin to experience sorrow and regret over offending a Holy and loving God, rather than regretting the pain and the inconvenience that your sin has caused you. What does that lead us to? It leads us to daily repentance. And where does daily repentance lead us to? It leads us to joy in the Lord and joy in living our Christian lives.

We need the Lord, don’t we, to change our hearts and set us free and lead us to joy, joy in this hurting, harsh life and joy in the Lord, joy in the salvation that we have. We’re sharing 4 truths that lead to joy from Psalm 51. Let me give you the third truth. Truth number 3 – repentance is not about doing more, it’s about becoming undone. Now let me explain what I mean by that. Many of us could be described as “can do” people aren’t we? At least I am and I know most of the people I meet are. Most people are innate problem solvers. Our instinctive reaction to the message that we need to repent is to ask a follow up question. “Ok, what do I need to do? Give me the list, give me the formula and I’ll repent.” Our instinctive reaction is to get religious and that’s exactly what David says God doesn’t want. Listen to verse 16 of Psalm 51, “You don’t delight in sacrifice or I would bring it. You don’t take pleasure in burnt offerings.” We think things go badly for us because we haven’t done enough yet, we haven’t prayed enough, or like that fellow in Ohio said, who listens to Haven Today, we haven’t read our Bible enough, so we think we’ve got to do more of the same. We’ve got to do it better. We’ve got to do it more often. You know, this is a ruthless treadmill which at its heart is fueled by our own pride and self-righteousness. We want to believe that we can do something about our own sins, that we can pay for our own sins and establish our standing before God. That is a false repentance. True repentance doesn’t center on what you do, it is becoming undone. And becoming undone is what’s implied by what David said in Psalm 51:17. The acceptable sacrifices to God are a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart. Is David saying we’ve got to be sad enough? No, he’s not saying that. That would just be turning repentance into more human effort. You’d be going through trying to gin up enough broken-heartedness for your sin so that God will accept you. To come to God with a broken heart and a broken spirit is to come to God in the realization that you’ve come totally empty handed. Spirit brokenness is spiritual poverty. It’s what Jesus referred to as being poor in spirit. It means that you bring absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to the table. Now I know that’s a little hard to swallow, but it’s true and it brings to the fourth truth which I want to share with you right now. True repentance involves the acceptance of God’s mercy. That’s how David opens this beautiful Psalm of repentance, appealing solely to God’s mercy in verse 1, “Have mercy on me, O God.” The only thing that David appeals to is God’s mercy. You see, that just flies in the face of what so many people think repentance is. We tend to think repentance is either passing some sort of exam and earning God’s favor that way or we might even think of it as a bargain. We perform our side of the deal and we thereby obligate God to perform his side. There’s not a single shred of any of that in Psalm 51. David doesn’t appeal to how well he’s done, he knows he hasn’t and neither have we. He doesn’t suggest that God somehow “owes him one”. He knows God doesn’t owe him anything and he doesn’t owe us anything. The only thing David can ground his appeal on, the only basis for our coming to God is his mercy alone, undeserved, unmerited divine favor. Here’s the deep truth though. How can David confidently appeal to God’s mercy? How does David have any confidence that God will grant him mercy? The answer is because David knows that God is God, as he says in verse 1, “a God of unfailing love and great compassion.” The Hebrew that’s translated “unfailing love” is a covenant word. It reminds us that God has bound himself to us, his people, and he sticks to his word. His love never fails. His multiplied compassions never fail. But where did David see God’s mercy, his unfailing love, his great compassion and where do you and I see it? How will it change our lives? Well, probably in a lot of places, but preeminently David saw it and you and I see it in God’s acceptance of the sacrifice of an innocent for the guilty. And you know who that was. It was sending his own son, Jesus Christ to die on the cross and that’s what we do daily when we repent. We cling to the cross and we find deliverance and then we find our joy.

Close- Joy Has Dawned/ Angels We Have Heard On High- The Gettys