Wow! What a Sunday we had this week. It was all the elements of Protestant Christian worship in one service. We had a baptism. We partook of the Lord’s Supper together. We received new members into covenant membership. If we had only gathered for a potluck after, we might have felt that we had stumbled into a kind of Baptist utopia.
Lest we try again, but this time with a potluck, Isaiah wants us to look forward to something better. The sermon this Sunday did not end up focusing on this as much as I had hoped. Isaiah wants to focus our attention on the rapturous joy that is offered in reconciliation with God. The call of the gospel is not merely a call to live a better life than you are currently living. The call of the gospel is a call to everlasting joy. As Pastor Dale has pointed out in his sermons on Psalm 16, the promise of the gospel is not that we get some great gifts from God but that we get God himself. And God is, in himself, our only hope of everlasting joy.
But what does joy in God look like in our daily lives? How do I find my joy in God tomorrow? One part of the answer is in our anticipation. We live lives of anticipation. We are always anticipating our next weekend, our next project, our next vacation. When we anticipate, we begin a process of enjoying. We enjoy the anticipated good thing at first by anticipating. Then when we are in the midst of the good thing, we enjoy the good thing directly. And finally, when the good thing is over, we complete our enjoyment by praising the good thing. We tell someone about it.
This applies to God by creating what the Puritans called rightly ordered affections. When our anticipation of good is focused on a future existence with God that is fully and forever satisfying, it subjugates all of our temporal enjoyments as previews of our true hoped-for joy, God himself. We enjoy a good potluck as a preview of the great marriage supper of the Lamb that will inaugurate eternity with the Lord. We enjoy a beautiful sunset as a preview of the glory of the Lord experienced in full strength with resurrection eyes. We enjoy the embrace of a spouse as a preview of the enrapturing union with our Lord Jesus Christ that is promised to the Church. Anticipation turns our whole world into a foretaste. We experience both our challenges and our joys with radically new eyes.
My charge to you in this post is to lean into this. Lean into anticipation as a source of joy in your life. For those who trust in Christ, there will be fullness of joy in His presence and pleasures forevermore at his right hand. Let anticipation of the fullness of life and joy in his presence forever be a shield around your heart in the midst of every trial.
In Christ Alone,
Pastor Charles
