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[00:00:00] Romans 13 Romans 1613 now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that ye may abound in hope in the power of the Holy Spirit.
[00:00:20] Now the God of hope fills you with all joy and peace in believing that he may abound in hope in the power of the holy fellow.
[00:00:38] And then, if you will, look at chapter 14 and verse 17, for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
[00:00:59] And then in one peter, chapter one, verse eight, one Peter, first letter of Peter, chapter one, verse eight.
[00:01:18] Whom that is the Lord Jesus, not having seen ye love, on whom, though now ye see him not yet believing, ye rejoiced greatly with joy, unspeakable and full of glory.
[00:01:38] Believing yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy, unspeakable and full of glory. And then lastly, in Galatians letter to the Galatians, chapter five, verse 22, the fruit of the spirit is joy, peace.
[00:02:16] The fruit of the spirit is joy, peace.
[00:02:23] We turn back to romans 15 and to this little verse. I want us to primarily consider in the light of these other parts of the word.
[00:02:33] 1513 read this now the God of hope fills you with all joy and peace in believing that ye may abound in hope.
[00:02:47] Ye may abound in hope in the power of the Holy Spirit. Now it is a fact, if we are honest with ourselves, that there are very few christians who really know joy and peace.
[00:03:03] And yet it is also just as true that joy and peace are the heritage of the child of God.
[00:03:16] Everywhere we look in the New Testament, and indeed even in the Old Testament, we shall discover that the thing that characterizes the child of God walking in the light of God is joy and peace. These two are twins.
[00:03:32] They always are found together, peace and joy, joy and peace.
[00:03:40] They are always found together, and they can never be divorced.
[00:03:45] Peace always produces joy, and joy nearly always produces peace. The two are always together.
[00:03:58] Now, if it is true that joy and peace are the heritage of the child of God, why is it that so many children of God have neither joy nor peace?
[00:04:18] We are living in days of tremendous strength and strain.
[00:04:25] An absence of real joy is apparent everywhere, and an absence of real peace is apparent everywhere. The thing that the world calls joy, we know from our experience, is not joy.
[00:04:41] It neither lasts, nor does it have any really fruitful effect within. It only leaves one, in the end, more miserable and more empty than ever when it is gone. It is the same with the peace of this world, the kind of peace you know that we often speak about the birds twizzling and sunshine filtering through and all the rest of it. That kind of peace that people talk about. It's all right when we have it. But, of course, we all have to live in very different circumstances. We can't live in such an atmosphere. And anyway, you can at times, and most of you, if not all of you, must have experienced it, being in places where the birds have been twittering and the sun has been filtering through the trees and have been anything but peaceful inside. The thing has been wrecked and ruined by the fact that the real peace that we should have said is not inside.
[00:05:40] So you see, we all as christians, to ask ourselves, if I am not enjoying joy and peace, which are my heritage, then why? What is the reason? Why?
[00:05:56] There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever. Now I know I shall be plied with all kinds of excuses.
[00:06:05] If we go out and hear what everyone's thinking, the whole room is buzzing with excuses. Some will be saying, well, what about the bad times we have to go through?
[00:06:19] After all, you can't join peace. Then other people will say, what about the trial of our faith? You can't have joy and peace in the trial of your faith. Or it's dark, then terrible, then it's all a storm, everything is desolate, and so on. But the strange thing is this, that we have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the scripture reveals this amazing paradox that when things are darker and things that they're most stormy, and when we're having our worst time and the fieriest trial of our faith, then it is that Peter says that we, because we believe, yet believing at that point, we rejoice greatly with joy, unspeakable and full of glory. So we are absolutely without excuse.
[00:07:20] In other words, the scripture reveals that this joy and this peace, which are the fruit of the Holy Spirit, blossoms at times when everything is to the conquerors.
[00:07:35] The other kind of joy of this world, of course, does not. In this world, when you're in a difficult time, you're not joyful. When you're having a hard time, you're not joyful.
[00:07:47] If you're in a place of terrible strain and activity and pressure and busyness, then you don't know any peace. The world understands. Of course you don't understand. You won't experience peace there. You must get away into the countryside. You must get away somewhere absolutely quiet if you would have peace. Well, we all need such a kind of peace at times. But the real peace we need is inside.
[00:08:10] And the peace that the New Testament reveals to us the scriptures. The word of God reveals to us is the joy and the peace which are as much present in times of trial and difficulty as in times of outward peace and happiness.
[00:08:32] Now that means, and I'm speaking much to myself as well, I know that many will feel that this is a bit of a cheat to be speaking like this, but we are facing the scriptures. I'm only seeking to be honest. We are left, all of us, without any excuse whatsoever.
[00:08:54] If we are not the processors of peace and joy, then we must inquire why.
[00:09:03] It is not anything to do with the trial of your faith.
[00:09:08] It has not anything to do with the afflictions that you may be.
[00:09:13] It has not anything to do with the circumstances that you might be in. For Paul himself said that he gloried in this, that he found his greatest joy and peace when he was in tribulation and in necessity and in persecution and so on. And any of you who are prepared to be real, who would like to look, for instance, at the books we have upstairs on the martyrs, and those little suffer, you will be amazed that people as they die by burning, had such a joyous that it brought their own persecutors and tormentors to the Lord.
[00:09:56] It is that kind of joyous peace which is the undoubted testimony to this world.
[00:10:03] The Paul said, you see, the kingdom of God is not in the and of joy and of peace in the hope. Most Christians are perfectly prepared to say righteousness.
[00:10:25] But very few of us are prepared to go on and say the kingdom of God is a question of righteousness, joy and peace. The Holy Spirit. Therefore, you see, we owe it to the Lord if we are born of God and if we know him to be the possessor not only of righteousness by faith, but of joy and of peace.
[00:10:48] Now, you and I, we must understand this, that joy and peace are necessary to our well being.
[00:10:55] We all know that righteousness.
[00:10:58] Now, I'm not being wounded, I'm not being critical or untimely when I say that meaning two times of the nervous and mental troubles that are troubling people today are due to the question of unrighteousness.
[00:11:16] They've only got to go and ask in psychiatrist psychology, what do they spend their time probing to find out whether there was anything in your life when you did something which has troubled you ever so.
[00:11:30] You see, righteousness is absolutely necessary to our well being, and we shall never have a righteousness until we know the righteousness of God. It's not a righteousness of our own. The more we try to wake up our own righteousness. The less we find of it, the less satisfactory it is, the less contented we are. We know there is something within us that unfailingly witnesses within. That's not the righteousness that passes with God. That is not the righteousness which is acceptable with God. All your morality, everything else. It is not with the righteousness of what God wants. But when we receive the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ thy faith, we receive a righteousness which immediately fills our hearts with a sense of heart. All of us knew that when we were first saved. Do you remember the day when you were saved? That sense of harmony, that sense of right relationship, that sense of somehow a war being over, somehow something, a divorce being finished with, something had happened? Righteousness. But you see, in the same way that we need righteousness basically for our well being, spiritually and physically, we need also joy and peace.
[00:12:50] It is perfectly true to say that when people have no joy, they usually, people that are, their unhappiness begins to affect them in every way.
[00:13:02] Time goes on. You get all kinds of aches and pains and everything else that people say that you go to the doctor, the doctor will say somewhere or other, there's an unhappiness, there's an emptiness, there's a frustration.
[00:13:16] Joy and peace are necessary to our well being. Now that's one point to see first that God has given us joy and peace, and we've seen what it is.
[00:13:30] But the second thing is that it is absolutely necessary to our well being. The third thing is this, God has provided it for us.
[00:13:40] He is absolutely providing righteousness, joy and peace.
[00:13:46] It is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We don't have to work it out. We don't have to try and put it down. We don't have to smile and try and be joyful before everyone. It is something that we can take from Christ within us, living within us. It is the fruit of the Holy Spirit, love, joyous peace, something in fact which will be produced by the Holy Spirit.
[00:14:08] So we need to see, therefore, that not one of us has any excuse whatsoever to be living outside of joy or peace.
[00:14:17] We have no excuse on this question of righteousness. The Lord Jesus has given us a complete righteousness. We can come into his presence taking the Lord Jesus Christ as our righteousness. Not only is it a righteousness which is legal and covers us before God, but it is a righteousness which has now been planted within us by the Holy Spirit and which, if we will only obey the law of it, we shall find that right. We shall become righteous. Understand? A holiness will develop within. We shall be truly sanctified. Not by trying, but because we have a certain kind of life that we receive at righteousness. But in the same way the Lord has provided us not only with righteousness, but with joy. If we had not we no experience of this joy, it is our fault, not God's. He has completely provided us with this joy. And this joy knows no bounds. It's unspeakable.
[00:15:16] Unspeakable joy. Unspeakable full glory. What does it mean to be unspeakable? It just means that you can't put the thing into words. Why can't you put it into words? Because it blossomed when you wouldn't expect it to blossom. That's right.
[00:15:31] When someone gives you a thousand pounds and a new car, the new house and a lot of other things, you might well be had. The joy unspeakable and full of glory. But when you're being battered and knocked about all over the place and everything's falling to bits all around you and everything's going wrong and you've got a joy inside which is just a contradiction to the whole thing, then it's unspeakable.
[00:15:55] And you can't, you can't put that kind of thing into words. It's heavenly. It doesn't belong to this earth. You won't ever find it in this world.
[00:16:02] You just won't find it now. You see, people will. I know how we all do. We sit back and always knees and it's lovely to talk like that to. But when we come down to that, how did it work out? The point is, have you ever tried?
[00:16:17] Have you ever taken the Lord Jesus in the way that he's given to you and me?
[00:16:23] How did you come to the Lord Jesus Christ? Oh, before you came to the Lord Jesus Christ, you said, it'll never work. Oh, look at them all. They're kidding. They're deceiving themselves. And then there came a day when you took the Lord Jesus Christ bye as your salvation. And it worked. Something happened inside of you. You knew it. It happened. Now why don't we go on in the way that we started?
[00:16:49] Why, having started in that way, do we stop short and meditate the Lord Jesus for all the rest of our needs, why have we taken him as our salvation? Don't we begin to work out our salvation and discover that it works out in terms of righteousness, joy and peace?
[00:17:05] Then we should take the Lord Jesus now. Joy. And we should find our joy. If we took the Lord Jesus our peace. We should find our peace in yourselves. You won't have peace. The Lord Jesus said it. He said, in the world, ye shall not have peace but tribulation.
[00:17:22] So expect it.
[00:17:24] Through much tribulation we enter into the kingdom. But the wonderful thing is he says, peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, not as the world giveth. Give, I give you. The world gives a certain kind of peace by certain ways. The Lord Jesus doesn't give it like that at all. It's an awful bit of it.
[00:17:48] In other words, this question of joy and peace are not only necessary to our well being, but they're provided for us. So if we want to live as we know, some certain lady who has a lot of money but wishes to live in poverty as though she had no money, many of us are like that. We have so much, but we live in poverty. We're just living in a little hovel and eeking out a sort of existence and so on, showering affection upon little creatures, when we should be living like royal people, living on all that the Lord Jesus has provided for us. If the Lord Jesus has given us these things, why are we exploiting them? Why are we living upon them? They're there for us.
[00:18:38] Well, now, I said rather a lot, and I want to finish on another very important point. I want you to see from this verse in verse 13 that there are three things about joy and peace which are very important. The first is this, there will be no joy and peace until we have a go.
[00:18:58] Now, that is true. Why did Paul always talk about what you think of? He always said, think on these things. He was always talking about thinking. Do you remember how in Philippians he said, now look, you must think on these things. And he gave a list of the things that they ought to think on. Now, why?
[00:19:21] Because we shall never have joy and peace if we haven't got the right goal. Do you think? Now, here is hope, the God of hope, that ye may abound in hope.
[00:19:36] What does hope speak of in the scripture? It doesn't mean a vague hope. It speaks of certainty, a certain hope. And if only you could look through, you would find everywhere the most remarkable thing, the hope of your calling, the hope of righteousness. You'll find that in Timothy, the hope of eternal life. In Timothy, the hope of salvation.
[00:19:59] You'll find another word, the. The blessed hope of his appearance, and then the hope of glory. Do you see? These things are our hope, a certain hope.
[00:20:14] Now you see, of course, if we are thinking upon, as so many of us are, the things we haven't got, we think, oh, oh, dear, if I had this. And so all day long we think, if I had that, then we become more and more miserable. And then we see someone who's got it, and then we become even more miserable.
[00:20:37] And then we hear of someone else who's getting it, and we become even more miserable all the time. You see, it's what we're thinking. We're dwelling all the time, dwelling on it, dwelling on it, dwelling on it. We can't get away from it. We're thinking, and because we're thinking, because it, because it's to go without thinking, the objects about thinking, we become more and more. And then, now, why do you think Paul said to the Philippians, I have none in whatsoever state. I am therewith to be content. I have learned how to be a base, and I have learned how to abound. Now, Paul knew what he was talking about. No one in this room has been down to the next. Paul, that man came right down to nothing. He couldn't, didn't know where the next meal was coming from. He was shackled to a roman guard in a filthy, rat infested dungeons.
[00:21:28] That's the kind of thing he knew how to rejoice. There, he proved what he was talking about. It wasn't just preaching. He was telling us something that he had learned. He had learned how to be a base and how to be, how to abound. Paul also knew what it was to move into the wealthiest, most noble, aristocratic circles and booth papers.
[00:21:51] He knew how to carry it all. He knew how to tell it. He got the secret.
[00:21:58] His goal, his object of thinking, was what was in Christ. Now, in the one Timothy, chapter one and verse one, it says, christ, our hope, the blessed hope of his appearance.
[00:22:15] So we see that our joy and peace is a question of what we're, what we're. The object of our teaching is, if you're always thinking about what you want and what you've not got, or if you're always thinking about your circumstances, or if you're always thinking about the difficult people you have to work with or live with, then you'll be miserable. And the more you look at them, the more miserable you'll become. The more you consider it, the more utterly unpeaceful and joyless you will become. You see?
[00:22:48] And, of course, who suffers? Well, tell me who suffers? You suffer. You are the people that suffer. I'm the person that suffers.
[00:22:56] And, of course, others suffer too.
[00:22:58] When. When we're joyless and peaceless. Of course, everyone else suffers because we get on everyone else's nerves all the time.
[00:23:07] And we're no use to the Lord either. Now, you see, joy and peace come through the object of our thinking. That's one thing. But second thing I want you to note, and it's very, very important, this is the thing that has so deeply impressed me. Joy and peace in the scripture are always linked everywhere with believing.
[00:23:29] Now, isn't that remarkable?
[00:23:31] In believing, the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace. In believing, yet believing, ye rejoice.
[00:23:44] You haven't seen him, but yet believing, ye rejoice greatly with joy. Unspeakable and full of glory.
[00:23:52] Now, it is remarkable, and this has been my own experience, and this I can speak truly from experience, that the moment one has admitted a doubt about the Lord or the Lord's way, one joy and peace have blessed, absolutely blessed. And the moment one has got back to faith, even though the situation hasn't changed, the circumstances haven't changed. One says, the Lord has said this, about this, I'm there. I believe him. My joy and my peace have come back.
[00:24:19] Now, why is that? Do you see the whole battle? It is the fight of faith. Or more literally, the contest of faith. Paul said, fight the good fight of faith. Lay hold of life to which you are grace.
[00:24:34] Contest the good contest. It's a contest. You've got to fight it out. What is this? What is this contest? It is the trial of your faith being much more precious than of gold that perishes. You see, it's the trial of your faith. So the devil knows full well where to strike christians. He strikes the at the very point which he knows will govern everything, righteousness, joy and peace.
[00:25:02] Just get them to take in a doubt and the whole thing will be finished.
[00:25:07] They're static. They're turned in on themselves. They're at an end. Nothing can be done.
[00:25:13] That's true. It doesn't matter. Whatever realm of life you look, you'll find it's true. Can I take it a step further?
[00:25:22] You have a joyful and peaceful fellowship with another brother and sister.
[00:25:28] Then all of a sudden, one day, someone says something about their brother or sister or a little thought develops in your mind and you lose confidence.
[00:25:41] Something like that. You just can't trust them the same way. What happens?
[00:25:48] You no longer have the joy and the peace in their presence that you had.
[00:25:54] What is the root of it? What is the principle?
[00:25:59] You have lost your son because you have lost your son, your joy and your peace have gone. Intention.
[00:26:09] Now you can, you can, it doesn't matter where you go, you'll find that absolutely true. You lose your confidence or your trust and your joy in your peace skills. Now the devil's whole plan is just to get us absolutely pulverized on this question of our joy and our peace. How? By getting it out, our faith. If the Lord says, I've given you all this, you say, oh, it doesn't work out. It doesn't work out.
[00:26:35] What happens when you say it doesn't work out or when you, you, you're very. Of course, you feel clever. It's very, very clever to be able to look at everyone else and say, oh, so them doesn't work out in me, work out big. Hey, big.
[00:26:51] But the more you go on, the less joy and peace you have. And you know it.
[00:26:58] You know it. You become more and more miserable and more and more restless. And you see, that's not just a spiritual thing. It begins to take a terrible tolerance on your body, terrible toes.
[00:27:10] You could almost tell the christians that are walking with God and in the light of God, are there physical faces for something. There's a rest and a piece that you can see immediately in a person's face. You look at the back slider.
[00:27:26] You just look at the back slider.
[00:27:29] See, straight away something there that written there. Just written there. Don't have to ask anything more. It's written there if something's wrong.
[00:27:40] Now, you see this. It's a question of joy and peace.
[00:27:44] Joy and peace.
[00:27:46] And it's a question of faith in believing. Joy and peace in all joy and peace in believing. Well, we know it's an experience. I do. And I'm sure that I'm speaking to everyone who knows this when you hardly have to be told. But I think it's a good thing that we should have it out in the open because we all are so good at evasive action, things like this.
[00:28:11] We go away and we say, oh, well, the Lord says this, the Lord says that. Look at his word. He says this, he says that he can save in this, he can to the uttermost. He can do this, he can do that. Joy, peace given to me ability and so on, to witness and I shall be fruitful in the office and all that kind of business.
[00:28:36] Now, the whole point is, you see that until you believe and take it and say, I believe, my whole being is takes upon it. I take it when you do that your circumstances may not immediately change. Your situation may not immediately change. But you change.
[00:28:52] Something happens inside of you and there's a joy and a peace which you never had before.
[00:28:57] You must know that these people that say they can't pray, that they can't talk to the Lord, that they can't come into the presence of the law, they feel so terrible. What have they done? They've admitted a terrible accusation of the devil over the question of their complete righteousness and acceptance of goddess.
[00:29:15] And when they admit that it's the end and they sink into the mire of misery because of it, there it is. And, well, all the time is really gone. You will notice that there is a method. The method is the power of the Holy Spirit. So joy and peace are in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is joy and peace. Isn't that wonderful? Not only is it by faith, but there is a realm. We must walk in the Spirit. If we walk in the spirit that is in Christ. If we walk abide in Christ, we shall know joy and peace. Get outside of Christ. No joy and no peace keep inside Christ. Remain inside of Christ. Joy and peace, we believe. How do we abide inside of Christ? By trusting, believe. And you abide.
[00:30:14] You remain by faith. Where God has placed you in Christ, in that realm you will find joy and peace. You can take it. You will not know it by just sitting there. You will take it by faith. So shall we together seek that we might have such a joy and a peace. Shall we pray together?
