Hi, this is Victoria. Thank you so much for downloading this podcast. I believe God has amazing

things in your future. I hope you enjoy this message.

We love you so much. It's fun to be in the house of the Lord. It's fun to celebrate a God who is

good for us and not against us. Can you imagine coming to a God who you don't know what he thinks about you?

You don't know how he feels about you. You don't know, but we don't come to a God like that. We come to a good God who's

already told us that he loves us with an everlasting love, that he redeemed us for his good pleasure.

He is pleased with you today. He loves you. He gave you his very best and that is something to celebrate.

That's something to remind ourselves of, to stir up every single day of our life. Because life doesn't remind us of that.

Life tries to tell us something totally different. It tries to show its difficulties, heart aches, hardships.

But Jesus is saying, I've given you my joy. I've given you what you need to defeat the power of the enemy and stay strong in this life.

Amen? You've got what it takes to stand strong in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what I want to talk a little bit about today.

I want to talk about staying strong in God through joy.

The Bible says that the joy of the Lord is our strength. That's what Nehemiah told the people who were downcast.

He said, go eat, celebrate. The joy of the Lord is your strength. It is what is going to sustain you. It's going to fight off anxiety.

It's going to help balance your life. Jesus said the joy that he had, he gave it to us. He said, my joy, I give to you and I give it to the full.

Now the joy that Jesus gave us is not dependent on what is going around us. See the joy that Jesus gave us is on the inside of us.

You see God does His work on the inside of us. When you said yes to Jesus Christ, the outside didn't immediately change, but the inside did.

You see he put seeds on the inside of you. He gave you a new heart, a new start, the ability to take what he's put on the inside of you and make it come out of you.

God's blessings start on the inside, but they show up on the outside. You see I have a lemon tree and when I got it and planted it, it had no lemons on it.

It was a lemon tree, but it had no lemons. But I took care of it, I watered it, I fed it, I made sure that it was in the right soil.

I did everything I could to cultivate and develop the lemons and sure enough that lemon tree that had no lemons on the outside produced them from the inside.

So my lemon tree now has fruit that I can eat from. And do you know that's how joy works?

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