Spiritual Discipline: Celebration
February 3, 2008
There was a farmer who had a neighbor who was a chronic complainer, he would always find something wrong with anything. He was a cold, wet blanket on a cold, wet night. The man had absolutely no joy within him. So the farmer decided he would find a way to make this man smile and see the good in life. So the farmer went out and bought the world’s greatest hunting dog, and trained it to do everything a person could imagine; then he invited his joyless neighbor to go hunting with him.
When they were hunting the farmer showed his neighbor how his dog could stand motionless for one hour, how his dog could pick up a scent from one mile away. There was no response by the neighbor. Finally, the farmer shot a duck, which landed in the middle of the lake. The farmer spoke to the dog, commanding the dog in a foreign language, then the dog ran to the edge of the water, stopped, then the dog walked on the surface of the water, picked up the duck, and brought the duck back to the farmer and dropped it at the farmers feet. The farmer asked and challenged his neighbor, “so, what do you think of that?” To which his neighbor replied, “Your dog can’t swim, can he?”
We all know people like that, don’t we? People who without even knowing it, or even understanding it, suck the life and joy right out of us. They’re kind of like black holes in outer space, once we enter their atmosphere, they suck us in and the joy out of us. We need to be careful to keep these people at as safe a distance as possible, so they don’t shape us into themselves.
This morning we are going to look at the 4th of the Spiritual Disciplines. The discipline of Celebration. For many people, celebration is an unknown as a Spiritual Discipline. It escapes our thinking and reasoning that we need to discipline ourselves to celebrate. I mean, shouldn’t that just be a natural part of life. Yet, we realize it is not. There are many people like that farmers neighbor who just don’t enjoy life. So, as we dig into the Spiritual Discipline of celebration the expectation is that we will use celebration as a means to help us draw closer to Christ and for us to become more like Christ.
So, what does it mean to celebrate? Is celebration, really something spiritual, which makes it a spiritual discipline?
Richard Foster tells us,
Celebration is central to all the Spiritual Disciplines. Without a joyful spirit of festivity the Disciplines become dull, death-breathing tools in the hands of modern Pharisees. Every Discipline should be characterized by carefree gaiety and a sense of thanksgiving.
Foster then adds, “Without joyous celebration to infuse the other disciplines, we will sooner or later abandon them. Joy produces energy. Joy makes us strong.”
I want to pick up on that theme for a moment. Have you ever tried to do something you really didn’t want to do? You go at it using your willpower, using all of your strength and energy, and whatever you are trying to do, it saps you of everything.
Foster’s point and I agree with him, is that without a spirit of joy, everything we try to do becomes a dull and boring means to an end. If you don’t like school or work, how much fun it is to wake up on Monday morning? And how about worship, which we will talk about at a later date, because that is also a Spiritual Discipline. How about coming to this building as a grump, with no joy, how much of yourself will you give to God.
As I work on my doctorate and spend late nights at the church, reading and writing, I find that I may come here feeling exhausted from the day, yet, once I arrive, I actually gain energy because this is something I believe in and really enjoy. I may tell you to pray for me and my family, and joke about this, but I believe in this and have found wonderful renewal in my own spiritual and preaching life.
With that in mind, we need to know that the Bible is filled with numerous passages in which God calls the people to celebrate. It seems strange that we should be commanded to celebrate, yet, maybe that is one of our issues in this life, we forget, and need to be reminded to celebrate.
In Nehemiah 8, we hear the vivid call to celebrate, as we read,
9 Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, "This day is sacred to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep." For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.
10 Nehemiah said, "Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength."
11 The Levites calmed all the people, saying, "Be still, for this is a sacred day. Do not grieve."
12 Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them.
Nehemiah had led the nation of Israel in rebuilding the broken walls of Jerusalem. There was a great deal of opposition from within their own country, but Nehemiah led the people to complete this great building project. The work was finally completed and the people gathered together to worship God within the newly completed city walls.
The priest Ezra began to read the Word of God, which they called the Law. When they heard the Word, the people began to weep and were convicted in their hearts, and they fell to their knees in repentance. They began to worship and praise God
Yet, through this time, Nehemiah didn’t tell the people, “You should be weeping and throwing yourself on the ground, fasting in repentance, you are a bunch of slugs!”
Instead, Nehemiah told the people to go and have a party. That’s right! Go party!! Go celebrate! They were told there is to be no weeping and grief, in its place there was to be joy, food, drink and a huge party. And for the people who had plenty, they were to share their food with those who didn’t have enough. So, the people went off and celebrated, because now they understood the Word of God.
Look at the statement from Nehemiah in verse 10, “for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” Notice whose joy it is? It is the Lord’s joy, and the joy of the Lord becomes our strength. This lets us in on God’s character a little more. God is a God of joy. He loves to see His people having a party, celebrating, because the people are worshiping and rejoicing over Him.
You see, when it comes to the word discipline we think of it as a negative word,
Discipline means we’re going to have to do lots of work; or we are going to be punished; or corrected, trained, or have to give something up.
However, the people of Israel were commanded to celebrate as a means of drawing closer to God. In fact, in verse 10, the people were told to go and eat choice foods, which literally translates to eat the FAT!
When we think of disciplines, we may think we are to eat locusts and all the gross stuff, or maybe even nothing at all, but here we see Nehemiah telling the people to go and eat your favorite desserts, meats and beverage.
Even Jesus commands us to have joy in our lives, and in fact, the joy He calls us to have is the same joy He had. In John 15, Jesus had proclaimed to the disciples that He is the vine and we are the branches. If we, the branches, remain or abide in Jesus, who is the true vine, then we will bear much fruit in our lives.
Jesus continued talking and He began to talk about love, saying, 9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.”
Immediately, Jesus tells the disciples 11 I have told you this so that MY joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.
Jesus ends this section of scripture by telling the disciples 17 This is my command: Love each other.
Do you hear those words from Jesus? He wants us to experience but His joy, so that our joy may be complete.
God wants us to experience joy. He wants our joy to overflow. God is not a grumpy or mean spirited or tired old God, it’s the opposite, God is filled with joy and love.
You see, we remain connected to the vine out of obedience to Christ’s calling in our lives, the result is joy. Because we are bearing fruit, we are filled with joy and satisfaction because we are doing and becoming the very people God calls us to be. Jesus’ desire is that our lives should be spontaneous and joy-filled, not burdensome and boring.
One of my favorite oil paintings is one that my good friend Becky Millburg painted for me. I told her I never see paintings of Jesus smiling, and lo and behold, Becky painted a picture of Jesus bending over, smiling as He holds a child’s hand. That is one image of Jesus I really love. Think about how often we picture Jesus smiling.
I love this quote from G.K. Chesterton,
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again;” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but He has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
That’s a pretty powerful statement from Chesterton. Can it be that we have become so caught up in our everydayness of life that we have lost the ability to celebrate, to respond to life with joy? You see, joy is really another word for celebration.
But we’re so busy. The day starts out way too early, we run behind schedule, we get the kids to school and get to work, we run nonstop during the day. We come home exhausted, but there is homework to do, there is an event to attend, there are phone calls to return, bills to pay, meals to prepare . . . and our list could go on and on. And when the day ends, it ends too late at night, and we’re just too exhausted to care about being joyful. Celebrate . . . celebrate what?
Understand if we don’t celebrate, if we don’t have joy in our inmost being, we are going to be like that old curmudgeon neighbor who couldn’t find anything good in life. That’s not the image we want to portray, is it? Is that what the world thinks of Christians? That we are just a bunch of sourpusses who are angry over anything and everything.
Dan Kimball related the story about a group of people who were complaining about not wanting to work on Sundays. The reason ~ “there’s a church nearby and after worship the Christians would come into their coffeehouse and would complain more than other people do, have poor attitudes, make more of a fuss, are particular about things, and don’t tip.” This is how we are thought of by many in our culture. Why is that?
We are to be joy bearers, and celebrate the life God has given us. John Piper wrote a book he entitled, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Many don’t like the title, because a hedonist is someone who only wants pleasure for themselves. However, Piper’s premise is the pleasure we seek is in God Himself. God is the end of our search, not the means to some further end. Our exceeding joy is the Lord our God. Christian hedonism seeks to transform the heart so that Almighty God will be our first and only choice, above all other choices.
The closer we draw to God and abide in him in a love relationship the more joy we are filled with. This happens despite the difficult moments of life. Paul reminds us in Romans 5 that we all suffer, and he makes the amazing statement in verse 3, “that we rejoice in our sufferings!” Say what!? You heard me, Paul tells us to rejoice in our sufferings. Understand that we are not to be joyful that we are suffering, but in spite of our sufferings, we can rejoice, because we know that we have God on our side, and maybe we are even suffering on His behalf. But Paul does not end with this ‘joyful suffering.’
He goes on to tell us that while we rejoice in our suffering, we will persevere, and our perseverance will lead to a new found character, and this new character will lead to hope, and this hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
Joy doesn’t seem to come naturally for many people. It seems that many are gloomy and depressed in our world. We struggle to smile, to say hello, to even be civil; even when nobody has seemingly wronged us. And I am talking about Christians.
I believe the solution, and it is the premise of all we will ever do in life as Christ followers . . . and I want to let you in on the secret . . .
We must abide in Christ. That’s it. It’s that simple and it is that difficult, all at the same time. You see, we go through our daily lives doing our own thing, we live life as if all of life depended upon our mastery of life; as if life depended upon all of our monumental, momentous and magnificent decisions.
But life does not depend upon us. We go through our days, running on our own power, running on empty most of the time, because we are not being charged spiritually. We have the nutrition in our bellies to help us make it through the day, but we have disconnected ourselves from our life source. Remember we are the branches and Jesus is the vine. He gives us all of the life giving nutrients we need. In fact, He has the antidote, but to learn it, to discover it, we must be connected to Him. And this leads to our problem.
All week long we live life doing our own thing, then when Sunday comes, we do our very best to reconnect with God. We do our best to plug our proverbial branch back into the vine, but when you do it one time per week, it is difficult to get that perfect connection. So, some of that life giving spiritual nutrition does not get in us as it should, so when we leave church after worshiping, we feel good, but that good feeling does not last all too long . . . the reason, we were not fully connected to our life source, Jesus, the true vine.
This is why celebration and joy is so vital in our lives. This is why it is a Spiritual Discipline, because it is not something that just happens naturally, we must work at it, we must make it a decision to be connected to Jesus and to allow His joy to be made complete in us.
So, how do we celebrate?
Here are some practical ideas ~
Remember the words of Ecclesiastes 3:4, which reminds us there “is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.” I don’t care if you don’t know how to dance, you can dance in the privacy of your own home, you can skip in the parking lot, you can laugh out loud and be like a child and make lots and lots of fun noise.
Laugh! That’s right laugh. Find reasons to laugh. Watch my favorite actors, Moe, Larry and Curly and do the Curly shuffle. Watch your favorite comedies and just laugh. I love to watch Joshua and Zachary when they aer watching a program and they start laughing. When you see someone else laughing, just join them in their laughter. It’s contagious.
If you are fighting illness, I would also encourage you to laugh. Norman Cousins wrote a book Anatomy of an Illness about the time he was critically ill, and he began to watch Marx Brothers movies and Candid Camera reruns so that he would laugh. And when we laugh endorphines are released in our body, which brings healing. Laugh at yourself.
Make family events into times of celebrations. Make special occasions special because you plan for them. Don’t let birthdays, anniversaries, marriages, surprise you. Plan for them, and help that person feel special.
When you finish a project, receive a raise, get a new job, get accepted into college, get a great report card . . . celebrate. It does not have to be an expensive night out, just rejoice in the goodness and greatness of God.
At Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, even Halloween . . . make them special days for your family. Celebrate God’s presence and God’s love. Celebrate the fact that God is with you, and will never fail nor forsake you.
I’m glad we don’t take ourselves too seriously here. We need to laugh, we need to celebrate, we need to rejoice in God’s presence and God’s awesome blessings.
Remember Paul told the Philippians “Rejoice! I say it again, rejoice!” That is God’s command to you and I.
The funny thing with rejoicing is that the more we rejoice the more joy we receive. The Bible says, if you draw near to God, he will draw near to you.
EXTRA:
Instead of the typical organ music played during offering, this song from Delirious was played with the words on the screen.
THE HAPPY SONG
Oh I could sing unending songs
Of how you saved my soul
Well I could dance a thousand miles
Because of your great love.
My heart is bursting Lord
To tell of all you’ve done
Of how you changed my life
And wiped away the past
I wanna shout it out
From every roof top sing
For now I know that God
Is for me not against me
I could sing unending songs
Of how you saved my soul
Well I could dance a thousand miles
Because of your great love.
My heart is bursting Lord
To tell of all you’ve done
Of how you changed my life
And wiped away the past
I wanna shout it out
From every roof top sing
For now I know that God
Is for me not against me
I could sing unending songs
Of how you saved my soul
Well I could dance a thousand miles
Because of your great love.
Everybody’s singing now cause we’re so happy
Everybody’s dancing now cause we’re so happy
If only we could see your face
And see you smiling over us
And unseen angels celebrate
For joy is in this place!
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