Joy to the
World, the Lord is come!
Let earth
receive her King;
Let every
heart prepare Him room
And Heaven
and nature sing,
And Heaven
and nature sing,
And Heaven,
and Heaven and nature sing.
Ah, yes,
joy! That wonderful, giddy feeling everyone gets this time of year. (Well, not
everyone, unfortunately. This winter holiday finds some people in the throes of
severe depression. But more on that later.)
Joy. The third candle lit on the third
Sunday in Advent. Joy in a Savior sent to Earth. A happy, joyful event, the
birth of this special baby. The earth’s King.
Unfortunately,
not everyone receives Him as King. So, for them, the first sentence in the song
has absolutely no meaning, and really, no signficance.
Certainly the atheists don’t receive Him as King.
They think believing in God and recognizing Jesus as God incarnate is a big
joke, a ridiculous observance reserved for dunces who believe in hocus pocus
and are missing some discriminating brain cells. The agnostics aren’t so sure,
so they remained poked on the fence, with one foot in the world and the other
on a spiritual banana peel, unable or unwilling to make a public commitment.
But I’m
here to proclaim that even though you might enjoy Christmas and have fun, and
extol its good virtues, you really are incapable of experiencing its true JOY if
you don’t know Jesus, this Savior we celebrate the birth of.
Why do I
say that? Because He is Joy. The source. Without Him there is no true joy. He gave joy when
He was born, He gives us on-going joy, and He will give us eternal joy upon His
return. Indeed, just knowing He will return in His Second Advent gives us
unending joy.
And why
else do I say that you are unable to experience true JOY without God? Because
it’s true. And the Old Atheists, like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Russell
understood that. Many of them actually mourned the death of God, because they
understood the ramifications of such belief, and it wasn’t just how their
beliefs would be received by society. As Sean McDowell writes in More Than a Carpenter, “Atheists of the
past were well aware of the consequences of denying God. They realized that
without God we inhabit a cold, dark, pointless universe. Many older atheists
mourned the death of God because they realized it undermined the foundations of
western culture. Existentialist Albert Camus admitted that the death of God
meant the loss of purpose, joy, and everything that makes life worth living.”
But, as
McDowell points out, the New Atheists actually celebrate God’s death and even
think that life can continue as normal or even improve without Him, and without
all of those nasty, evil religious nuts they believe have caused the world’s
problems and heartaches. (Which is contrary to historical proof, I might add.)
But
Professor John Haught of Georgetown University refers to that kind of atheism
as “soft” atheism that does not take atheism seriously. McDowell quotes Haught:
“The new
soft-core atheists assume that, by dint of Darwinism, we can
just drop
God like Santa Claus without having to witness the complete
collapse of
Western culture—including our sense of what is rational
and moral.
At least the hard-core atheists understood that if we are truly
sincere in
our atheism the whole web of meanings and values that had
clustered
around the idea of God in Western culture has
to go down the
drain along
with its organizing center.”
So there
you have it. Unless you’re being intellectually dishonest, you have to admit
that without the Judeo-Christian God, society’s foundation collapses and we’re
left floundering around wondering what we’re really here for and who cares
anyway since we’ll all just end up in the ground one day, and that will be it.
(And, no, saying that our memory living on in our children and the good things
we’ve done is a good equivalent doesn’t cut it. How many of your ancestors do you know by name, and can you recite what they've done?)
We end up
living without true joy. No matter how hard we try to muster it up by our own
efforts, we can’t have it. Without the Source, the “organizing center” it
simply cannot exist in our hearts or in the world.
But when
you believe in the Giver of that Joy, your soul is soaked in it. You have joy
for today, joy for tomorrow, overflowing joy to share with someone else—like
the hurting people who don’t have others to celebrate with this time of year,
or don’t think they have any reason
to celebrate.
But we all
have a reason. A very good one. That baby born in a stinky stable grew up to be
a humble man who sacrificed himself so that we may live, here and now and into
eternity. He came, he suffered and was murdered and resurrected so that we may have a full life
while on earth and an even fuller life into eternity. We have joy because we
know it doesn’t end here, we know there is life beyond the grave. Our joy will
be complete upon His Second Advent. New meaning will be given to the words: “O
come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant…”
So with that in mind, how
about if, for just one day, we tweak the words to the opening song a little and
sing:
Joy to the
World, the Lord will come!
May earth
receive her King;
May every
heart prepare for His return,
When Heaven
and nature will sing,
When Heaven
and nature will sing,
When Heaven,
and Heaven, and nature sing.
For it is
our hope and prayer that every heart
will receive Him as Lord and Savior. Every knee will end up bowing to Him; the
faithful pray that all will do it willingly.
How about
you? Is your heart overflowing with JOY? Have you already received your King,
and will you willingly receive Him at His Second Coming? Will you be one of the
triumphant faithful?
I pray it
is so. For if it is, The First Advent has a deeper meaning for you. It means joy in your heart for today, tomorrow, and eternity! May
you be able to sing with joy—because our King has already come. May you sing with joy because there is a
Second Advent on the calendar!
____________________________________
Until next Monday, may your week be
full of blessings that you receive and give, your heart be full of joy and
thankfulness, and your days be filled with laughter. Build a little heaven in
your life right now, and watch your heavenly garden grow!
Blessings,
Andrea
When
the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has
begun right here on earth. ~ A. W. Tozer
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