Do you know what you're good at? You know where your strengths are. This last month, that was in North Carolina for a week. Part of that 10-month training that I'm going through to help other pastors, especially new church pastors, in those first couple of years.
And one of the things that we're being trained in is, and if you might have encountered this, some of you all have to be a conversation about it, but just do business or whatever, with Gallup's strength finders. We took the staff through it a couple of years ago. I did it the first time several years back. It's something I love doing, and one of those parts of this training is becoming even more aware of using strength finders as a tool for people, both vocationally, in life, but also just in life.
And if you've never done it to test, you take some of these personality tests. But it takes 45 minutes, and there's 34 strengths. And you take the test, and it tells you what your strengths are. And the whole idea is great, so you pay them $20 for the book, or for the first test, and they tell you your first five strengths.
And then because they have a really good idea for business, you pay them $10 more. And they give you your top 10 strengths. And then if you pay them $85, they're smart. They give you all of your strengths.
So if you're really great at it, and they tell you what you're really credit yet across the board. And it's something I did for the first time a few years ago, and I found it to be incredibly helpful. And one of the reasons it's helpful is because we know what we're good at, we're able to focus on what we're good at. But the downside of it, and I've realized this slightly, the downside of it is, especially when you're one of those chumps like me who pay the $85 to get the full strength report, when you see what you're bad at, you tend to neglect it.
And in some ways, it's good to say, I don't have to pay attention to that. But in other ways, it's actually, OK, I'm just going to forget about those sorts of things. I don't feel like those are going to matter that much in my life. And when we think about the fruits of the spirit on this search, our second week talking about it, all week long as I was preparing for this, I realized, no joy and peace are two things that may or may not be easy for everybody.
It might be the thing that you realize you're not that good at and you're willing to neglect it. When I was a kid, I remember I was going away to a Boy Scout camp for the first time. I just finished Biscuit, I crossed over from Cub Scouts, the Boy Scouts, going away for a week. And I remember the last thing my dad told me before he left and before we got in the bus to go to Boy Scout camp, he bent over and he said, Chad, nobody likes the the complainer, remember that.
Now my dad back then was professionally worked with middle school and high school kids for a living. And so I imagine he had seen what happened to the kid who's branded as a complainer. And second, this is the sad part of it, he probably told me this because I was a complainer, especially back then. You know what we think about those things that are tough.
You know, some of us being joyful is not natural. It's not a natural attribute of who we are. It's not an easy thing for us being a peaceful person. It might not be natural.
It might not be the way that we go. And the danger is when we look at these fruits, the spirits, there's nine of them. That we see a couple of them that we're willing to kind of forget about. We're willing to say, you know what?
I'm just going to overcompensate on the ones that are easier. So I'm not going to focus on this one. And the whole joyful thing, it got me because I'm naturally a sarcastic person. Does anybody else hear sarcastic?
OK. It's really easy. The bad thing about it is it's easy to come across as a negative when you're doing that. And so what does it look like for us to look at all of these and make a conscious choice that every one of these is something that I need to have in my life, but something that might not be necessarily the easiest thing for me.
So we start off today in Romans 14. I've said that this morning too as well. What Paul says about the kingdom of God and what Paul says about the fruits of the spirit. So for the kingdom of God is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
The kingdom is not a matter of what we eat or drink, but of living a life of goodness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Paul is pretty much kind of right there telling us that this is not about what you define as the good life, but about what brings in the good life in other people. He listens to these fruits, the spirit, not for our own personal benefit. These fruits are for the benefit of other people.
It's not something we can hold in as a private action. This has to be about what's public. That's what we jump off in. Our conversation about the first one is joy.
I'll talk about this just for a moment, but John 1511. And this is what these are the words of Jesus into the last conversation that he had with his disciples. It's something that he was taking away to be crucified. And so John 14 through John 17 are just these final words.
It's like the best way to describe it is this is the icing on the cake of what Jesus is trying to make sure they understand and remember. John 15, 9, 11 says this, I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love just as I obey my Father's commandments and remain in his love.
I've told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow. The New Testament we find is joy is about the experience of gladness. It's not something that we personally have or that we manifest on our own.
It's not something that we can self create, it's experience of gladness. Both joy and moment we'll talk about peace. These necessitate the involvement of two different parties. We can't have joy if we're being just by ourselves.
The joy is the result of the relationship and the interaction with someone else, with something else. What Jesus is showing us here is that our joy is a direct relationship to his joy, that he has given us his joy. And that that is there for a C.S. Lewis, the writer of so many awesome works.
He says this about joy. The joy is an unsatisfied desire, which in itself is more desirable than any other satisfaction. And it must be sharply distinguished from both happiness and pleasure. And we only find God as the source of joy.
Joy is a byproduct of the life with God. We can't self generate it. We can't find a way to make joy on our own and to produce it in a level that will satisfy us. Joy is a byproduct of our relationship with God.
It's given to us because of our salvation. The joy is given to us as the evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit in our life. But it's also given to us as a reaction to how we are seeing the Holy Spirit and interacting with the Holy Spirit. If we want to have joy, we need to be attuned to the presence of God.
When we attuned to the presence of God in our life, we'll find our joy then increases. When our joy then increases, we'll become even more attuned to the presence of God. You see how this cycle goes on and on and on. The foundations of joy is the presence of God that we have in our life.
When we're not feeling joyful, we need to look at what are we doing to be consistently in the presence of God because joy, absent from the presence of God, is a pretty hard thing to generate. We've all been at those points in time in our life where we don't want to be joyful. It's just not a simple thing. I know in my own life that when I feel that way, I've learned over time, over mistakes, over frustrations, typically at myself, that when I don't feel joyful, I need to look back and see how have I been intentionally putting myself in the presence of God lately.
When I find out more often than not is when I'm having a joy problem, I've not been dealing with the presence of God very well in my life. And I'm just a direct relationship with each other. What Jesus offers us with joy is that he makes in us what is unmade in him. His joy is complete.
He's offering that to us. And the way that we unlock that key is by how we engage and interact with his presence. And peace is not that far off either. And if we read about peace in John 1427, these two things that Jesus is talking about on his last line on his earth, he says, I'm leaving you with a gift.
Peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give you is a gift the world cannot give. So do not be troubled or afraid. He's talking about peace and saying, the only place you can get this is from me.
I'm offering this peace to you. And peace, what we find out in the scripture is that peace is about wholeness and completeness. It's about a job being done. How many of you all love to finish things?
How many of you have to start things and have problems finishing things? Yeah, yeah. I'm Jason Pueblo. We know this problem very well.
Peace is about when things are complete. When they're whole, when you know that they are done. And the whole test, when we read about peace, the words shalom. It might sound familiar to you just through cultural recognition.
But shalom peace is the peace that speaks to things being finished. For us, we think about peace in terms of conflict. But peace isn't about conflict. Peace isn't about being overcome or getting through conflict.
Biblical peace is a piece that assumes reconciliation and healing. Many times in our life, when we feel like things aren't peaceful, we want to bolt and run. And we're willing to ditch jobs, we're willing to ditch relationships, we're willing to ditch situations, we're willing abandonment does not give us peace. What we find throughout scripture is that Biblical peace is about reconciliation and it's about healing.
It's about us saying, let's travel through this conflict and find a life of rest. Rest is another word that we find in the scriptures to describe what peace looks like. An interesting thing about this, the whole on yards, this idea of peace, of rest, of what working through conflict looks like in the Bible is it assumes work. You know the differences between resting and being lazy?
We've rested, you've done something. Like you've done something to require rest. When you're lazy, you're just watching Netflix all day long. You know, peace assumes work.
Peace happens when we've worked through conflict. If we think of the story of Jesus, think of the story of God coming to us and our world and how that brings us peace, it's because we have caused all the conflict and he has done all the forgiveness. He's come in and rescued us from what we got ourselves into. He has come in and has restored and has healed and has brought reconciliation when he wasn't the person to break or destroy things in the first place.
Peace comes because peace has happened. That's a really different thing. In our world, we want to try to think about peace or cause peace. This is the way it normally works.
And I saw this this morning when I was watching videos on YouTube when I was trying to wake up drinking my coffee. You know you do it too. Has anybody else researched dashcams just to help pick on YouTube one day? Let's just be honest here.
You know, for us, we believe that peace comes because of strength. It's joking with Jeremy Thompson after the 830 service. You remember Roy D. Mercer on the radio?
You know what famous guy? How big a boy are you? Like when we think peace, we think peace happens because we're stronger than someone. We have more capabilities than someone.
We have more resources than someone. And we have the ability to force them into submission. That's how we think peace works. In scripture, what we find though is peace happens through restoration and reconciliation.
It assumes two parties working through something. In the book of James, the brother of Jesus, he writes this, that peace is the fertile soil where the fruits of righteousness grow. The power that peace brings. And this isn't something that just that God offers to us or that we expect to have it in fullness.
And in chapter 15, when he says, remain in my love, remain in me, is I remain in you. There's a personal responsibility to all of these fruits, but especially joy and especially peace. This has been offered to us. God has taken these attributes of who he is, and they're implanted in us and they're unlocked through our participation in the presence of God.
But we have our own responsibility in it. Jesus is remaining in us fully. But are we choosing to remain in him? Are we choosing to empower ourselves with love, to empower ourselves with the Holy Spirit?
Because we've been given access to all of this. There's some human responsibility that's here and these fruits of the Spirit. Are we remaining in him? We also have to think about our relationships, our relationships of peace and our relationships of conflict.
I think back to one of the most conflicting relationships I've ever had in my life was several years ago. It was before I was here at Foundry. And this was a tense, tense several months. And there's one person who I just kind of consistently just budding heads and budding heads and budding heads and budding said, I would not, I mean, to be completely honest, I would not sleep on Saturday nights because I knew I had to see this person on Sunday morning.
And I was praying about this so much. And so were they. And over the course of a year and a half, what I found out was a relationship that had possibly been one of the worst ones I'd ever had, that I'd never wanted to repeat, turned into one of the best relationships I've ever had. And I still see this person decently often now.
And about a year ago, we were a bunch of people together. And I said something that I kind of immediately realized might have been hurtful towards them. And as quick as I could, I went and apologized because that relationship was so valuable to me because I had to learn what it was like to move through conflict and love, to move through conflict because I knew Jesus wanted us to move through conflict, to move through conflict because we knew that what was on the other side was better than what was on the side that we currently saw. Now, if you've never had a relationship that has truly been reconciled, I encourage you to think about that.
I learned more about myself. I learned more about who God was about how much I was. It was one of the most impactful things in my life ever. To actually reconcile with someone.
Think about that. And from that point on, I began thinking, what would this look like for all of my relationships that are frustrating to be like this? How much better would my life be? It's a fruit of the spirit and a piece.
True, true peacefulness. So a couple of things to really just think about is how we look at bringing joy and how we look at bringing peace in our life, especially if it's not someplace that we naturally go to. I know there's folks in here that are naturally very joyful. And there's people like me that kind of struggle with joyfulness sometimes.
We love to find a good joke in the middle when there's real circumstance. But joy and peace is about us internally making decisions and saying, I'm going to choose to not, for this to not be a big deal. I'm going to intentionally choose for what's causing joy and what's stealing peace from my life and other people's life. I'm gonna choose for that to not be a big deal.
And this isn't on the world level. Like I think back to like pageant time. Like I want a world peace. No, I would have a world peace too, wouldn't you?
But also realize I want to not think bad about the person who drives through my neighborhood at 45 miles an hour. I know one of those is actually more powerful than the other one. I want to find out what's stealing joy and stealing peace from my life and my immediate world by saying this stuff just does not matter that much to me. If you're, I'm gonna give you a quick tip to find more joy and more peace in your life.
Do you know that you can defollow people on Facebook? Y'all, you can groom that newsfeed and the life's a lot better on the other side. It's us saying, you know what? This does not matter that much to me because what matters is the kingdom of God.
And scripture tells me that what matters in the kingdom of God is goodness and joy and peace. And I'm going to intentionally choose to make joy and peace matter a lot in my life. And if I realize that that that's in direct relationship with the presence of God, then I need to be looking at how am I putting myself in the presence of God to experience more joy and to experience more peace. So I was saying I want to participate in God's world because that's the one that matters.
I want to participate in the kingdom. I want to have ears to hear and eyes to see. I want to see what God is doing around me. And I realize I'm gonna go through times in my life where I need to hear stories from other people about what God is doing in them because that can lift me up for a while while.
I really need it. But I'm gonna make a decision about choosing what really matters in this world. And I'm gonna eliminate the clutter and the noise that steals joy and steals peace for me. That's what God wants for us.
It's the things that he's offered. That's what fruits to spirit are not for us, but they're for other people. What we find out is when we orient ourselves in that proper direction, we find out that these really, really, really are good for us when we're directing ourselves towards other people in these ways. We talked about love last week.
Today is joy and it's peace. We still have six more fruits to talk about. This is what it's like when we allow the Holy Spirit to run our lives and direct us. So we're gonna close in prayer, a little bit different today.
But this is what I want you to do. I want you to just hold your hands out and just place them upwards like this. God, we realize that we all have things that steal joy and peace from us. And Lord, we're asking, you take those from us.
We're offering them up to you. But God, we're also asking for you to give us joy and to give us peace. God, pour those things down on us. Lord, I'm praying for the things in this room that are causing us to not have joy.
They're causing us to doubt. They're causing us to think that things aren't really working out that well for us. God, we pray for a greater sense of your presence in everyone's life that has those feelings as well. God, we pray for peace.
We pray for a way through conflict. God, we pray for the relationships that we have with people. God, we wanna be people who are known for reconciliation. God, we should call us to that.
So God, please implant these things today in us just as we need them so that we can see you clearly. God, so we can follow you better. So that we can respond to you in a way that you're reaching out to us and so that we can be the visible example for your kingdom and your love and your son in the world that we live in. Thank you so much.