You Can Be Full of Joy Every Day

Welcome back to Ignite. I want to talk to you on the subject of happiness versus joy. It's a big subject. In fact, I covered in my new book Ignite Your Life. It's that big of a subject. And I can't go into all that right now. But on the surface, you know, happiest joy, you know, have a joyful Christmas, have a happy Christmas. It sounds like the same thing, but they are decidedly different. Happiness is, it's fleeting. Yeah. It comes and goes. You know, you and I will both experience happiness and probably unhappy as several times today. You know, I made the sale. I lost the sale. I had a great conversation. I had a great meal. The meal wasn't so great. I was late for this. I was early for that. There's a million things that bring us happiness. But then it's followed up by something else that doesn't bring happiness. You get some bad news and you're happy to close. As opposed to joy, joy is not affected by circumstances. It's just not. You have joy. The question is, how do you get it? You know, I'm going to talk to you about sharing your faith. That's the whole point of our ministry. But you wouldn't think that sharing your faith is connected to joy, would you? I mean, you just wouldn't. It surprised us back in 1973. Karen and I, from the get-go of our marriage, we were married. I gave me our row age. We were married in 63, okay? So we're working on 60 years of marriage. But in our early years, we were in church. We were serving. We volunteered for everything, whether we had the time or not. We gave sack officially. We were doing everything right, but we had no joy. In fact, we were biting at each other a little bit and we talked about it. Where's the joy? How come we're doing all this for God? And there's no joy. And so we started praying. We just said, let's pray for joy. We need joy. How do we get to joy? We had no idea. We never heard a sermon telling us, this is how you get joy. Am I going to give you that message right now? So I went to lunch. We went to lunch and lunch at our church. It was sent at a first of some of God's 50th anniversary. And the pastor, God, put me right beside the speaker for the day who was herb-ellingwood. And herb at that time was the legal affairs secretary for Governor Reagan. Really give my age, okay? And I had an hour of energize. I can't really see conversations. He talked nonstop. I didn't enter into it very much, but God knew what I needed to hear. And I wanted to hear about Reagan. I wouldn't do you really pray in Reagan's office and sacrament. I had all kinds of questions, but he never mentioned Reagan. And I never thought about Reagan, because he talked nonstop for an hour about his faith-sharing experiences. And he would on and on. And he'd be laughing and be crying. And guess what? Last night, he was going off. I'd never seen such joy. I've just never seen that. And I walked away and I broke his tears. I said, God, I want what he has. I want what herb has. I want that. The Karen I talked about a lot, we said, well, we're going to go away. We did. And we've been sharing our faith up to that time a little bit, you know, kind of traditionally, not having a lot of success, but having success. And we started doing it and doing it more regularly. And you know, it's like anything. It's like, you know, you know, you start shooting baskets after a while and start sick of some of those baskets. And you start sharing your faith and all of a sudden it starts to get a little bit easier like anything else. It was only about two or three weeks later. And Karen, I were laughing about something. And I turned her, I said, Karen, we have joy. What? We have joy. We're to come from hey, that sharing faith thing seems to work. It does. And it was after that. It was two or three weeks after that. They became across John 1511. That's the last pair that Jesus gave in the in the garden. And he talks about the fig tree, the bear with a fig tree. And he talks about how, you know, the dry branches of the throne will be thrown into the fire or whatever. Oh, but when you bear fruit, ah, they're in your by disciple. And my joy remain with you and your joy will remain full. Wow. Look it up. John 1511, one of the great verses of the entire Bible. He tells you how to have joy. When you bear fruit, when you bear Christians, when you live for God's purpose, his joy remain with you and your joy or remain full. Wow. Especially when things go wrong. Yeah. Especially. I mean, stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. It's happened to us. It's happened to you. Nobody knows the troubles I've seen. You have all these problems. And a doctor Christians all the time that's so beaten down by their problems. And they're so focused on their problems. Where's God? What was me? Bill gothard gave a concept back in the 70s. I've never lost it. Thank you. Bill gothard. He said, you know, God is far less concerned about what you go through than he is and how you respond to what you go through. But by what standard do you measure good? What is good? All things work together for good. What is good? It doesn't matter what your standard is. It's a matter of what is God standard. All right. The threshold verse in this podcast and every podcast. I'm sorry. I got to go back to Romans 8, 28. All things work together for good. Okay. Good. When you live for his purpose, the seek and say the loss and lead everybody every day closer to Jesus. God's version of good is souls. Okay. It's souls. And you know, when you have joy in the midst of your problems, it's powerful. One of the things I get so often, oh, sure. Barry's got a beautiful wife and a business and car. Of course, he's smiling. Of course, he has joy. If you read my book Ignite to your life, you're going to find out that Karen, I have been through hell several times. But we never lost her joy. Don't let anything. Don't let anything rob you of your joy. Nothing. And you do that by sharing your faith. It's so simple. It's profound. And yet we're not doing it. Only one percent of us are doing it. In order to understand this message. So for most of you, this is profound news. Let me tell you about Mrs. DiMotto. And she, of course, is in my book as well Ignite your life. Precious lady ended up dying pain from cancer that they could not stop. And she ended up the last two or three weeks of her life in the hospital. They couldn't stop the pain. I kept getting daily reports for the DiMotto family. It was tearing me up. And I went to her funeral, mad at God. You know, God puts up with this. You put up with me, God. I have a way of talking to God. I've yelled at God. You know, God, I don't think God has a problem with our emotions. He has problems with their indifference when we just walk away. I don't care. When we have issues with God, he's big enough. He can take it. Where are you, God? Where are you? I don't get it. So I went to her funeral and, wow, I was so mad. I mean, steam was coming out. The smoke was coming out my ears. And everybody around me knew it. I don't get it. I did not keep it quiet. And then three different nurses got up and each told their own poignant story, kind of the same story, but in their own way, how each one of them had had had nothing to do with God. We're totally secular until they met Mrs. DiMotto. And they had rarely seen anybody who had suffered that much pain that they couldn't control. That was for a reason. That was for good. Mrs. DiMotto didn't know that at the time. That was for good. Her pain was excruciating, but her joy never ended. Her joy never ended. All three of those nurses determined that God is real because of her joy in her pain. One nurse said, as I was walking down the hallway of the day she died, I heard her singing hymns. Do you think when Mrs. DiMotto got to heaven that she told God off and gave her a piece of her mind? Why God did you do that to me? Of course not. Three more people, three more souls are in heaven because of that temporary pain. Don't you think Mrs. DiMotto was praising God? That's joy. I mean, nothing to do with circumstances at all. You're going down the road and you're getting to a meeting and you're running a little late and you've got to be at that meeting. You get a flat tire. Where are you, God? Well, thanks a lot, God. Where are you when I need you? Now, I got to get a trip away, guy. Or you can look at and say, okay, what are you up to, God? The guy that comes and does your tires, not in a good mood and hurting and you ask a few questions and you're following it out that his son just committed suicide the night before. And you have this opportunity to love on him. And if you did not have that flat tire, you never would have that opportunity. He brought you two together for this divine encounter. And later on, you find that meeting was canceled. That's the way God works. When, when things go south, look around. We were flying to Manchester, New Hampshire, Canada, you go on a car tour or some of your friends driving some old cars through the fall leaves. But we got hung up in Chicago, bad weather and by the time we got into Manchester, we were the last plane in. And then we got to the last turnabout for baggage and our bags were the last bags off. In fact, it stopped and then started to get our bags up. We walked outside and there's supposed to be a black car waiting for us out there and it was not there. And so I started calling and I found out that they have lost track of the driver. They don't know where he is. And it's now 1 o'clock in the morning and they need to find somebody for us and we're an hour away from our hotel. And they're in panic. My secretary, Kathy is in panic. She isn't what to do. She's trying to do everything she can. And we left. Also, they announced the airport is now closed. And the lights turned off and I checked the door. It was locked. And only then did we notice that there's not a soul in the airport, not one person, not one car, not one taxi, not one person. It is closed. It's probably a quarter mile loop there for that airport so we could look across. There wasn't one person. We're all by ourselves on the middle of nowhere. Hence, Karen, I have had so many surprises in our lives that we just don't pay much attention to it anymore. We don't have it to the point of being upset. We do pay attention and say, okay, God, you're up to something. If there were two benches there, I remember telling Karen, you know, there's unfortunately there's two benches so there's one for each of us. She said, okay, great. It was a warm evening. We wonder what was up and we just said, you know, there must be somebody God wants us to talk to you tonight. And Kathy ends up finding some guy who drove a client up to Boston was dead heading back and she got him. I don't know how that had gone. Thank you, God. Of course it's God. So he came by and picked us up as we're driving away. We had told it in the story. He says, what was going through your minds? Really? You really want to know? We decided that there was somebody God wants to talk to tonight about him. And he yells, oh my God, I can't believe this is incredible. What? Is my life is a wreck? Everything, everything is going wrong in my life. I remember saying, I need God. I need to get out of church. I need to talk to a Christian and also a year in my car. And we drove that X hour, sharing with him and the Scripture just floated. He's and God puts you in my car. Yeah, he did. And we got out. We sat there at three o'clock in the morning hugging each other and praying together. Wonderful time. When we got to our bed, to our bedroom and sat in the summer bed, we were so excited. We didn't want to go to sleep. Now take away the spiritual side of that. If we didn't have joy and we didn't have joy, tell you about Jesus that was just another night. We would say that was a night from hell. It's three o'clock of art. Why are we beat? Where were you, God? Complaining about it all the way and moving everybody further away from Jesus. But when you know that God is up to something that midsts of the bad stuff, it is just amazing. One last story. We get on the plane and also in Karenir divided. Okay, we're two different rows. Karen sat down first. I looked at her and said, okay, God's up to something. And he was. He sat me down next to a lady from India, executive lady, very put together, very professional. Has an office at a condominium in New York City. Turns out she's three blocks away from Times Square church, my home church in New York City. David Wilkinson's church, I helped found. And I started telling her about she got so excited. I gave her one of my books like Night Your Life and our website Ignite America. I gave her all that she was just taking. She couldn't wait. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you all because God divided us up now. I could have been all unhappy. And you know, where are you, God, and not had any joy in taking that in an entirely different direction. But when you're living for God, you realize God's always up to something. When he wants everything to be good and it doesn't go good, it is good. You just got to look for it in the midst of it all, no matter what. In the on your worst days, I go far worse stories than this, dying in the hospital, whatever. Never lose your joy. See you next time.