Our joy is not to be restricted to our own circumstances or to our own achievements, but that we are to be able to find an occasion of joy for other people, for their achievements, for their successes, and for their bounty. The Apostle Paul commands us to rejoice with those who rejoice. Yet often we only rejoice when we rejoice when something good has happened to us. That is not the Christian way. This is renewing your mind on your host, Nathan W. Bingo. Cultivating joy in the midst of hardship or in the midst of others you might be prospering while you're not isn't easy, but that is what we as Christians are called to pursue. So that's why in addition to featuring messages earlier this week on anger, we'll be spending two days considering joy. You can go deeper on this topic when you respond today, renewingyourmind.org with a donation. And to thank you for your support, you'll receive access to that series on anger and this series on joy, plus we'll place two books in the mail for you. Is anger always a sin and can I have joy in my life? But respond now, is this offer ends tomorrow? Well here's Dr. Sproul to ask a simple question that has a profound answer. How do you spell joy? I think all of us can think back in our lives to particular moments or occasions or episodes in which we experienced an extraordinary measure of elation or of joy, not only individually, but also in terms of our communities or even our nations. I can think of a couple of episodes that I think I'll never forget as long as I live. One of them took place when I was six years old and I was in the street in Chicago. And I was playing stick ball. I'll never forget it because home plate was a sewer cover, an old cover right in the middle of the street. And in the center of that metal cover was a little hole just about an inch and a half in diameter. I remember that because my dad had purchased me a real skinny slender little bat that we used to play stick ball in the streets. And one day when it was my turn to bat, I dropped my bat and it just went right down that hole and I lost it for forever. And that was not the occasion of my joy. But I had another bat. And this one day we were playing stick ball in the street and right in the middle of the game, right when I was at bat. It just seemed like all heaven broke loose around me because people start running out of their apartments and out of the buildings around the street. And they were beating on dishpans and they had spoons and they were screaming and yelling and acting in a crazy manner. And they were screaming all over the place. It's over, it's over. It was V E day. After the long and and arduous national struggle with World War II, the war finally ended. And there was this pent up anxiety and pain that suddenly gave way to unspeakable joy and people acted crazy the way they were celebrating. And I had very little understanding of what that was all about. But I could certainly tell that a lot of people were very happy even though they were interrupting my game. A similar episode, not quite as dramatic, took place when I was a little older. In fact, I think I was 21 years old. The year was 1960. I grew up in the city of Pittsburgh. And the city of Pittsburgh boasted a couple of major league sporting teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Steelers. And from the time the Steelers opened as a major league national football league team, they went 40 years. Not before they won a world championship, but before they even won a conference championship, they went 40 years. They were the perennial losers of the national football league. But their record was not as dismal as that of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I followed every part game in the 1940s and 1950s. I practically lived at force field. And when I wasn't at the game, I was listening to the radio. So even back in the days of the ticker tape way in which the baseball games were being broadcast. And I would live and die with the Pittsburgh Pirates. And more often I'd die than I live. In the 50s, for example, it was a great achievement for the Pirates to finish in seventh place rather than eighth place. They were the perennial seller dwellers. We used to say of the Pirates that the Pittsburgh Pirates were in first place if you turned the newspaper upside down. So we went through a lot of years of frustration. Until 1960. I never forget 1960 when the Pittsburgh Pirates actually won the national league pennant. And the city went crazy. Then of course we had to go to the World Series. And that was sort of anti-climactic because nobody expected the Pirates to win the World Series. We were going up against the mighty New York Yankees. In fact, in the 1960 World Series, some of you will remember, the New York Yankees set the all-time record for the most runs scored in a seven-game World Series. But most people don't remember that. What they do remember was even though they set the record for scoring the most runs, they lost the 1960 World Series in one of the most dramatic moments in baseball history. The seventh game of the World Series. The game is tied in the last of the ninth. And the Pirates are up and I am there at Ford's Field sitting along the third baseline. Bill Masorowski, number nine, not that great of a power hitter or even a great average hitter, stands to the plate and hits a home run right over the 410 mark in left center field over the head of a dejected yogi barra. And when that happened, Pandemonium broke loose in Pittsburgh. I jumped up when I saw that ball go to the left center field of wall. I jumped up and I knocked a little 75-year-old lady right on the ground right in front of me and I stood there and said, oh man, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. She looked at me and she had a grin from your air and she's on the ground and she says, I don't care, sonny, she said you could throw me all over the place. The Pirates have won the World Series. And I'll never forget driving home from Ford's Field that day that it was unceasing honking of car horns all over the city. Great, great joy because of a baseball game. The other side, if in our national psyche, we want to communicate the misery of sorrow. So, we go to one of the most famous folk lore items in our history, a little ballad called Kasey at the bat. You remember the story of Kasey at the bat? Strike one, strike two, and everybody's waiting for Kasey to hit the home run. He's the bay brooth of mythology. But what happens? You know what happens. Kasey, the mighty Kasey, goes down swinging. And so, what is the refrain? What is the conclusion of the story? There is no joy in Mudville for mighty Kasey has struck out. I've often wondered about how a game can make people so happy or make people so sad when the Pittsburgh Steelers finally began to win super bowls and all of that. I remember living and dying then and when the Steelers of the 70s would lose a football game, I would go into depression. I would feel it for a week and I would have to struggle with my conscience to say, well, it's just a game. But it was more than a game. These sports teams that we root for and identify with somehow have some kind of vicarious representation for us. They represent not just our city or our nation. They represent us. They represent us in conflict, in competition, in striving for achievement. And isn't it interesting that when our team wins, we say we won. And when they lose, they lose. We love to identify with a winner, but we are not happy to identify with a loser. But so much of the aspirations and the hopes of human beings are directed to things like that, which are only really representations of the human struggle. And when it comes to rejoicing in adversity, I always found it difficult to rejoice when my team lost. When I was in high school, I played baseball myself in two years in a row. We were brought to the place where we were playing for the city championship. And one year, we won the championship. And we won it in the last inning of the last game of the playoffs. And I will never forget that. I mean, my feet were up in the air. I was on cloud nine and I was so thrilled. The next year, we made it to the last very last game again. Only that time we lost. And it was a terrible, terrible feeling. And you watch what happens now. When you watch a basketball game or a football game or a baseball game and a championship is on the line. And you see what happens when one team prevails and they experience victory, how the enthusiasm, people kiss them and hug them and all the rest. And then the camera will shift to the loser side. And you will see tears and ejection and disappointment and frustration and a sense of failure. I have to say to you that it's taken a long time in my life and I'm certainly not all the way there yet. But I have discovered that it's possible for my spirit to be able to rejoice when my team loses. How can that happen? What I've done is what you know what used to just drive me crazy when I would see the winning team when it was the other team going through all their celebrations after the victory. And I would be miserable until I began to see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Those people are thrilled because they've achieved something. They've worked so hard to accomplish. And this is an occasion of great joy that they're experiencing. It's not like this is a national disaster where everybody loses. There is somebody who's happy and why can't we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep? You see, that's one of the principles of joy that is taught us in the Scripture, that our joy is not to be restricted to our own circumstances or to our own achievements, but that we are to be able to find an occasion of joy for other people, for their achievements, for their successes, and for their bounty. That's a liberating thing, isn't it? We have a saying in the game of golf that every shot in golf makes somebody happy. If you hit it and it's a good shot, it makes you happy, but it makes you repone it unhappy. And if you're a opponent, it's a bad shot, it makes him unhappy, but it makes you happy. But what does it say about us? It says that so often our joy and our happiness is so self-centered, so restricted to our own circumstances that unless things go the way we want them to go, the way in which they will directly benefit us, we can't be happy about it. And so what a strange ethic it is that the New Testament speaks of the virtue of being able to rejoice with those who are rejoicing. It doesn't say rejoice with those who are rejoicing, except when they are rejoicing because they have beaten you. The point is that we should not be jealous, that we should not be covetous, that we should not be envious, but that we should be able to enter into other people's joy. And by the same token, we are supposed to be able to enter into other people's sorrow. This is what we call empathy, which is a little bit stronger than the word sympathy. When we use the word sympathy, though, originally the word meant very much like the word empathy means to us today, to be empathetic is to be able to feel what somebody else feels. In the concept of sympathy, the prefix sim comes from the Greek word soon, which means with, together with, and the pathi comes from the concept of pathos or of feeling from which we get the English word passion. And to have sympathy means to feel with other people. How else can we explain some of the actions of Jesus himself? How else can we explain the shortest verse in the Bible in the gospel of John Jesus wept? Here is the one who is the resurrection, who is the life, who comes to the funeral of Lazarus. He knows very well he's going to raise Lazarus from the dead. And yet everybody there is mourning. And Jesus comes and he weeps. He participates in the sorrow of his friends. He weeps with those who weep. And he rejoices with those who rejoice. Now that takes grace. It really does take grace to be able to find joy in our own hearts when people are experiencing joy in theirs at a gain they have received which means in some way our loss. It doesn't just involve baseball games. It involves job promotions. It involves business contracts. It involves so many of those things that touch us in our daily lives. And as Christians we are to be able to look at things not just from our own selfish perspective. I remember the first year I was a Christian. I learned this simple childlike acrostic with respect to the word joy. And I'm sure you've all heard it. How do you spell joy? J-O-Y. And what does joy stand for? This is a little children's lesson. J stands for Jesus. O stands for others. And Y stands for yourself. And the little lesson that we got as children was that the secret to joy is to put Jesus first, others second, and yourself third. Now obviously that's a very easy idea. So simple that you can take an acrostic like this and teach it to five year old kids but to learn it. And to get it in the bloodstream is a herculean task. But there really is a profound truth contained in this simple childlike illustration. That part of our loss of joy or the elusiveness of joy is because we spell it YODGE. Where the Y comes first and others come second and Jesus comes third. And when that happens there's a long way and a big difference between joy and YODGE. YODGE will not produce joy unless you rearrange the priorities and rearrange the focus of your attention. Jesus was called a man of sorrows and yes he was acquainted with grief. But he acquainted himself with our sorrow and with our grief. And Jesus is the only person in history who spelled the word joy without the letter J being at the front. Jesus put himself last in order to make it possible for us to participate in joy. And yet Jesus, though he is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, I believe was the most joyful human being who ever left. Why? Because he knew the Father better than any human being. He understood the goodness of God better than any human being. He was more in tune with the will of God than any human being. And he was utterly obedient. And obedience brings the fruit of joy to the soul. I believe that Jesus Christ was the happiest man that ever lived. And that even the sorrows and griefs and the pain and the torment that he had to endure. None of those things were able to rob him of the blessedness and of the felicity that characterized the very heart of his life as a man of joy. But his priorities were right. He cared about other people to such a degree that he was able to maintain this kind of virtue. And so I conclude this segment by saying to us, if you want to be happy, if you want to be joyful, then we need to learn how to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep. And we cannot do that unless we somehow are able to escape from a life where all we care about is ourself. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to have a somewhat lengthy conversation with a woman I know who has cancer. And she has been through all kinds of difficult treatments and surgeries and all the rest. And frankly, the outcome of these things are still in doubt. And yet this woman displays such a remarkable radiance. And every time I see her, she seems happy. She seems joyous. And I had this long conversation with her and I started the conversation by asking her, how are you doing? How are things going? Because I was genuinely concerned about her and I asked about her. And in about 15 seconds, she gave me a summary about how she was doing. And then she said to me, well, R.C., how are you doing? And I went on and answered the question. And then after the conversation was over, which took about a half an hour, and I was going home, it struck me. So I can't believe this. I went up to that woman to ask her how she was doing and to manifest my concern for her well-being. And that conversation took 30 minutes, 15 seconds of which was devoted to her situation. And the whole rest of the time, she was talking to me about my troubles and about my worries and about my anxieties. And she was comforting me. I couldn't believe it. I thought, what a tremendous woman. No wonder she can maintain her joy because she's not so wrapped up in herself. A convicting message today may the Lord help each of us to count others more significant than ourselves. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and this is the Wednesday edition of renewing your mind. Thanks for being with us. Do you know a Christian who is struggling to have joy? Perhaps respond today with a donation and support of renewing your mind so that you can give them R.C. Sproul's book, Can I Have Joy in My Life? You can call us at 800-435-4343 or give your gift at renewingyourmind.org. And when you do, we'll also unlock lifetime digital access to this series on Joy, Dr. Sproul's series on Anger, and send you his book, Is Anger Always a Sin. Respond today at renewingyourmind.org while we're using the link in the podcast show notes. There is also a digital edition of this extensive resource package for our global listening audience at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you. Do you rejoice that you're saved, that your name is written in heaven? That'll be Dr. Sproul's focus tomorrow here on renewing your mind.
