Hello this is Graham Cook. Welcome to the Brilliant Perspective's podcast.

Rejoicing is where we match God's purpose and intention with our own.

It's where we say yes and amen to who you are and what you want to be for us. It's agreement, it's engagement.

Rejoicing is not event driven. It's a lifestyle that's being cultivated through all our circumstances, using all our

life situations and in particular using the people who are most oppositional to us right now.

It's the nature of God to turn everything around and make it work for good.

It's the nature of God to use things that are against us in order to

bring us into things he wants us to enjoy and receive. He wants us to understand who he is for us and how he's making us in his image.

So rejoicing is our way of delighting in who God is for us and it's the precursor to trust. If you're

finding it difficult to trust God about something, you need to step back into a place of rejoicing.

Practice being thankful, and you'll find that trust and faith rise up from the inside of you.

When we rejoice, we turn our weakness into a joyful vulnerability to God's nature and to his

intention. So I think rejoicing is a weapon.

It's like gentleness is a weapon.

Gentleness is brilliant because it stops you from becoming hard and stupid.

All the fruits of the spirit are weapons in our hand.

Rejoicing is an outward manifestation of an inward presence of joy.

Sometimes in life, pain seems inevitable,

but misery is always a choice.

And you always get to choose your place of engagement with the father.

We have permission to count everything as joy.

And there is a place we can live from where joy just bubbles up on the inside of us. In his letter, James in chapter 1 verses 2 to 4, he writes this, consider it all joy my brethren when you

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