We talked last week about joy and a believer’s struggle to maintain it. How do we maintain our joy when troubles and trials come and began to strangle our joy? David describes this joy in Psalm 119:32 as an enlarging of our heart. Many of us can attest to feeling this joy the fullest at the moment of salvation when the Holy Spirit floods our hearts and God creates this new creation within us. So often though, that initial moment of joy in our salvation begins to dim and fade as we face life and trials come into our life. But God tells us through Christ that he desires our joy to be full (John 15:11), and this desire for our joy to be full comes right after Jesus’ command for us to abide in him (John 15:1-11). More often than not when we find joy to be lacking in our lives it’s because we fail to abide in Christ. We begin to make a transition from worshipping God to worshipping ourselves and then we find our joy to be lacking as we navigate the treacherous waters of life. So in the midst of these treacherous waters of life we need a safe place to anchor our joy and the word picture we began to develop last week were these moorings of joy that we have. A place to lay anchor so our ship isn’t damaged and we can stay safe from the storm and the trials around us. These moorings are an anchor for our soul, a place where we can regroup and remember our salvation. It is essential that we understand how to maintain our joy because joy is crucial for the Christian life. Joy is what motivates us in our ministry and helps us to serve others, joy is what energizes us to obey God even when it’s difficult and we don’t want to, joy is what keeps us focused on the cross and gives us endurance in our sufferings.

This passage speaks to three moorings for our joy:

1. Know the Truth
2. Faith in the Truth
3. Resting in grace

We discussed knowing the truth last week. John 8:32 says “and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” To know the truth is really to know truth about ourselves, that sin has corrupted every part of our nature, and through sin death came into the world. After the fall the entirety of the human race, past present and future, was cursed with sin and inherited this nature of sin. We transitioned from worship of God to worship of self and through that our joy was no longer full. And knowing this truth means understanding how seriously God takes our sin. He hates sin so much that one sin of one man immediately charged the sin to the entire human race, separated us from God, ushered in death, and changed our nature. So often we don’t take our sin as seriously as we should. We give degrees to sin and excuse sins that we see as not as bad. Our sin affects how we view our sin, but to truly find joy in our lives we need to understand the truth of how God sees our sin. Sin is a lie and it robs us of joy.

So how do we maintain this joy in the midst of the storm? First we have to know the truth, then Paul’s second point in this passage is we have to have faith in the truth.

2. Faith in the Truth (v. 15-19)

The second mooring that we find in this passage is faith in the truth. We understand this truth of sin and of our nature, but we also see in this passage that God didn’t leave us there. He provides for us a means of reconciliation through Christ. So Adam in his sin becomes this type of Christ, as we talked about last week. In Adam all die but in Christ we are made alive. Our faith in this truth is what helps us maintain and restore our joy.

There are two components of this faith that we find in this passage. The first is the truth about God’s gift, and next week we’ll discuss the second component, the truth about obedience.

• The truth about God’s gift

Paul uses the term gift in verse 15 to help us understand that we come with empty hands before God. We hold nothing before him and yet we receive salvation as a gift without merit of our own. And Paul begins to explain in this passage that in this salvation we receive as a gift, we gain much more than we lose. He begins to draw a contrast between the death we inherited through Adam, and the salvation we receive through Christ, and he begins to show us that there is so much more in grace than we lost through our death. Paul explains Adam as a type of Christ but he highlights how the free gift is not like the trespass.

• The free gift is not like the trespass

In verse 14 Paul explains that “death reigned from Adam to Moses,” but he contrasts this in verse 15 by beginning to explain that God did something greater and didn’t leave us entrenched in the result of this trespass. He gave us a free gift which we understand to be our Salvation (Rom 6:23). Our salvation is set apart from this trespass. And when Paul speaks of this trespass he has this image is his head of going beyond the limit and stumbling. When he uses the word trespass here he’s talking about falling. When Adam ate of the fruit he stumbled off the path off righteousness and into death. So Paul draws our attention to the fact that this free gift can’t even be compared to the fall.

When Adam fell all of humanity fell with him. Adam’s sin opened the door for death to enter the world. But death was never God’s intention. This is why we recoil at death and especially when we see death touch the innocent. When we see miscarriages, or children with diseases or chronic illness our hearts understand that this is not right. We understand that this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, that this isn’t how the world is supposed to operate. We understand that somehow something changed and what changed is the fall. Through the fall death now reigns through sin. Whenever a couple or a family experiences the death of a child, or the diagnosis of a disease on one we would consider innocent, there’s great sorrow in that. There’s sorrow because there was hope in that new life, a hope that God calls good. So whenever we experience this kind of sorrow we begin to question God and to question each other, because we understand that this is not what God intended. But in the midst of this sorrow we need to run to this mooring of joy that we have and speak truth to our lives and to each other, understanding that we are living in the result of this trespass. We need to understand that Christ knows our sorrow in a deeper way than we can fathom because he sees his creation suffering in way that he had not intended.

So what is Christ’s response to this? His response is to conquer death and sin and provide a free gift to us that is nothing like the trespass. This gift grants us a joy and blessings that supersede any kind of suffering we could experience in this life. So in the midst of this despair we abide in his love and we have joy. And we look to Christ’s life and see his joy even in the midst of his despair. Paul’s point in this passage is that this free gift is rising above the trespass. He says that there is much more grace available within this free gift than there is suffering within the death through the trespass. This gift that’s been freely given us brings us to a place above where we were even before the trespass. In salvation we are forgiven, our slates washed clean and brough to a place of rightness before God, but then “much more” than that, God justifies us and credits our account with Christ’s righteousness. So then this free gift not only bring us back to the place we were before the trespass but then brings us far above where we were even before the fall. So the first aspect of truth we need to cling to is that there is so much more to be gained in our relationship with God than we have lost in this trespass that we are feeling the effects of right now. This is the truth of the scripture that we must know and minister to others with.

• The free gift is not like the result of sin

The second aspect of this truth that we cling to is that this justification we receive is not like the result of the one man’s sin. The truth that we begin to see in this verse is that justification trumps judgment. Judgment arises as a result of Adam’s sin and we are brought under that same judgment through our sin nature and then we stand condemned before God. We are facing the same wrath described in Matthew 25:41 which says, “Then he will say to those on his left, Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” The bible speaks very vividly of this place of eternal punishment, but it also speaks in strong terms of heaven and creates this contrast between condemnation and justification. In God’s divine mind he had this plan to counteract condemnation with justification. And this justification goes beyond our created order. He created us to have a perfect relationship and standing with him, but now through our justification he no longer see us he sees Christ and his holy righteousness credited to our account. We are no longer just perfect relationally with God, now we are co heirs with Christ and destined for eternal glory with God and are able to share in this trinitarian love of the Godhead. Now we are risen above the created order because God has made this free gift so much more than the result of the trespass.

So often when life gets noisy and we begin to struggle, our temptation is to look inwards at ourselves. We look to our circumstances or our works for our comfort and as confirmation of our position before God. Then when our circumstances change, or we fall and fail we question our position before God, we question our salvation. But in those moments this is the truth we need to run too. We need to understand that there is nothing that can change our position before God if we are in Christ. This gift is not based on our performance, if it was we would have never received it in the first place. The truth is that our benefits are secure in Christ, and not only that but they far outweigh the death. So our prayer then becomes a cry for a greater understanding of this truth so we can live a life in light of these benefits. These benefits and blessing are what Paul is speaking of in Ephesians 1:3-23. These blessings are an important part of our mooring of joy.

• The free gift is not like the death

The last aspect of this truth that we cling to is that the free gift we receive is nothing like the death that comes through the trespass. If we desire our joy to be full we have to place our faith in the promise of God over the lie of the flesh. This death that came in to the world through Adam’s trespass touches every aspect of our lives. It produces anxiousness, worry, shame, fear. We are shackled to death and enslaved to death the scriptures say. But the truth we need to understand is that Adam didn’t intend for this when he disobeyed God and ate of the fruit. Sin is a lie and death is a lie, and when Adam ate of this fruit he intended to become more like God. He thought that his participation in this sin of disobedience would produce a desirable outcome and make him more like God. We need to understand that sin is a liar and when we begin to participate in sin thinking something good will come out of it what actually happens is it produces the opposite. We turn to sin thinking that somehow it will fulfill us. We walk down the path of temptation, telling ourselves a million lies before we reach the point of actually sinning and then immediately afterward it leaves us wanting and our joy is affected. So when we begin to feel ourselves being tempted we need to remind ourselves of the truth that sin is a lie! No matter how good it feels in the moment at the end of this is a lie that makes you more unlike God than like him. But the free gift is nothing like the lie of sin and death. In the end the lie of sin makes you more unlike God, but the free gift fulfills it’s promise and makes us more like God. It not only does what it says it’s going to do but it does so even more abundantly than we could ask or imagine.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” John 10:10

Unlike the thief, Christ comes into our lives for unselfish reasons. He comes to give life and to give it abundantly. Satan comes into our live not to give but to take; he wants us to be more unlike God. But Christ comes into our lives not to take but to give, desiring that we should be more like God. Christ comes to give us an abundance never before seen by human kind. Paul speaks to this abundance in 1 Corinthians.

“But, as it is written,

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him’”

1 Cor 2:9

In the midst of our clinging to the truth, we need to remind ourselves of this: That we can’t even imagine the glory God has prepared for us. All of the glimpses of glory in the bible that we see are not even a taste of what we will receive as our inheritance one day. Where sin promises life but produces death, this free gift promises life and produces it more abundantly than we could imagine. Where sin and death produce fear and anxiety, this gift produces peace. Where it produces shame, the gift produces reconciliation. The truth of this gift is the foundation for a believer’s joy.

Conclusion

So in the face of sin and death we place our faith in the reality that even in the midst of pain and deception, God is at work, and we remind ourselves of the truth of our security in our salvation and the blessings that are beyond what we can even imagine.

Selah

1. Are you resting in the free gift, or striving in your own power?
2. Is your joy affected by circumstances or do you stand firmly in the truth of Christ and your justification?
3. Where have you let the lie of sin take root in your life?