The following resource is from desiring God.org.

Let's pray together.

My prayer, Father, is that you would come and on all three campuses do the miracle of removing the falsehood from the heart of any believer that they don't have anything to give.

I ask this in Jesus' name,

Amen.

As with every sermon that I preach, my aim in this one is to take you down paths that will deepen and strengthen and intensify and lengthen your joy.

And the biblical warrant for thinking about sermons that way is 2 Corinthians 124 where Paul says,

not that we lord it over your faith,

but we are workers with you for your joy.

So my apostolic model says I don't lord it over people's faith. I come

alongside and I work for their joy in every sermon. And then he calls it the joy of faith in Philippians chapter 1

25 where he says I don't know whether she should die or live I am persuaded that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress and joy of faith.

I'm staying on the planet for your joy. Amazing. So I have zero hesitancy to say every sermon should target the joy of God's people.

That's what this one does. I am going to take you down some paths that if you walked them would

intensify, strengthen, deepen, lengthen your joy.

And to do that, I direct you to the work of God

and to the word of God and to the ways of God.

When I say work of God, I mean mainly that central core work. He sends Jesus

into the world to die in the place of sinners and bear my guilt and my punishment and provide a perfect righteousness for me.

He rises triumph and defeats all my destructive enemies like hell and death and the devil. And then he pours out his holy spirit into me and he gives me all of this by faith alone.

So that's the core work and I direct you to this over and over again and I direct you to the word of God because Jesus said these things I have spoken to you, spoken to you, that your joy may be full.

So the core work is gospel, good news, and you didn't get good news to feel sad.

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