You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City, Whitehorse, UConn. Here's this week's message. It's almost Christmas, and for many of us, we'll be surrounded this season with all sorts of different Christmassy things, like family and friends, and there's presents and lots of good food and sweaters and joy, right? Let me paint a picture for you. It's Christmas morning. A family emerges from sleep. Well, the parents do anyways. The kids have been up for more or less all night. And they all make their way down to the living room for the annual chaos of Christmas morning presents. The parents clutching their cups of coffee like their lives depend on them, while wishing somehow they could magically turn the contents of their cup into a few hours sleep.
The kids, three of them, meanwhile, are dancing with excitement and almost manic with the anticipation of what comes next. One kid, the oldest, who's been around for this Christmas morning thing a few times now, manages to get a grip on himself and tries to wrangle the other two younger ones into some sort of arrangement, bellowing orders regarding where to sit and who gets to go first, a logical order of events and an efficient system for the great unwrapping formed clearly in his head. But any attempt at creating order is lost when coming up against the gleeful mood that has utterly captured the other two. They are borderline lunatics at this point. The vibe is intense. Not unlike a pack of wild things about to devour their prey, the children gaze upon the great mystery of unknowns that lies before them. This pack, however, is more hilarious and much less coherent than any found in the wild. One kid has put their shirt on backwards and has already spilled his juice twice. The other has only one sock and is squeezing her poor teddy bear so hard the poor thing will be misshapen forever going forward. Both completely forgot to pee, which coupled with the heightened energy of the moment makes for a potential disaster. Smiling an exhausted smile at each other, the two parents share a knowing look, and then the frenzy begins.
Amid the hoots of excitement, the shouts of laughter, and probably a few tears at some point, and for sure more spilled juice, there is what most people would refer to as joy. However, it's very temporary, very fragile, and very conditional. The kids are unaware of the tenuousness of this so-called joy, for they're completely lost in a sea of dopamine and emotion. The parents, however, know that although there's great beauty in this moment, it won't last forever. It won't even last a day.
The previous may or may not have been based loosely on my memories of Christmas, but let's move forward. My name's Aaron, and I'm an associate pastor at Mountain View Church. We are well into our Advent preaching series, and today's sermon is looking at joy. Not just any kind of joy, however. Here's Ben with our scripture reading and candle lighting. I'm Ben. This week we celebrate the third Sunday of Advent. Today we light the candle representing the joy of salvation.
Today's scripture reading is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 12, verses 1 to 6. Shout and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel. This year for Advent, we're focusing on the prophecies found in the Old Testament book of Isaiah. And there's one of Isaiah's prophetic writings we find a very specific joy being mentioned. If you've struggled during the Christmas season to find this magical joy that all the ads for stores promise comes with buying their products, or you don't feel the joy that so many top 40 musical artists at some point in their career will sing about when their record label makes them do a Christmas song, you're not alone.
Perhaps the reason you're struggling to find this joy is because the stars and the stars cannot offer you or even tell you what real joy is. Today, I want to move from commercial Christmas and artificial joy to something real and something that won't fade by Boxing Day. I want to look and see what we see in the prophecy found in Isaiah chapter 12. I want to look at the joy of salvation. So let's read the first three verses of that passage again that Ben just read for us earlier. And then together, we'll try and understand what is being spoken of by this man of God so very long ago. So Isaiah 12, one through three says, you will say in that day, I will give thanks to you, O Lord. For though you were angry with me, your anger turned away that you might comfort me. Behold, God is my salvation. I will trust and will not be afraid. For the Lord God is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. With joy, you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
Broadly speaking, this passage illustrates the joy that in the future, the remnant of God's people will feel when they are delivered from exile and they are restored. Their nation will be all but destroyed, and before the restoration, the people will be utterly hopeless to redeem themselves before God, due to their own actions and their rejection of him. But Isaiah is looking ahead. They are a family, together under God, known to be God's own people. But they have lost their way, which is essentially the story of the Old Testament up until this point.
But Isaiah is giving them something to hang on to in this prophecy. He's letting them know that God has a future for his people planned and all is not lost. Now, the way Isaiah, or more accurately, the Holy Spirit through Isaiah has composed this song of praise is very interesting and very intentional. So let's begin there. He begins with the individual comprehending and rejoicing in his own salvation. The first you is singular. So addressing each individual hearer, he is saying you, yes, you personally will give thanks to the Lord for his anger will be turned away from you personally.
Then in verses three and four, he moves to the plural or a corporate embracing of grace. This is a picture of salvation, not only for the individual, but for God's people as a whole as well. The you in verse three and four is plural. God makes his glory known to every heart, but then gives that heart others to rejoice with. God is personal and relationship with him is personal and individual, but he surrounds his person with family and we worship God together.
In the Tyndale Old Testament commentary on Isaiah, J. Alec Montier captures this beautifully when he says, There cannot be a transformed community without saved individuals, nor can there be a saved individual who is not incorporated into the community. The way God works on the individual and then corporate level is awesome, and it's the same way he works today. If you're a Christian, look around you. You will see a family, a community created by God and made up of individuals whose eyes he has opened and revealed himself to. Each of us has our own story of salvation.
but we are saved to the church or assembly of God, where we exist as many parts of one body. So the flow of the song or the passage in Isaiah is pointing forward to a time when God's people will join together in worshiping their Savior. But if we look specifically at verse 2, we can see a look back to the past as well. There's a phrasing used here that calls to mind a song of praise that Moses penned when Israel was just in its infancy as a nation and had been saved by God from the shackles of bondage in Egypt. Isaiah 2, 12 says, Behold, God is my salvation.
I will trust and will not be afraid for the Lord God is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. Hundreds of years before this, Moses says this regarding the people's reaction to God's deliverance in Exodus 15 to the Lord is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation. This is my God and I will praise him. This is my father's God and I will exalt him. Doesn't that sound similar?
Man's reaction to his restoration and salvation by God didn't change much. And I suspect this was on purpose. Isaiah wanted to remind the people who would have been very familiar with their history and having been saved from Egypt, as well as the song of Moses, that the same God who did the miracles to save his people way back then would do it again. By so closely paraphrasing the song from their history, Isaiah would have been telling the people hearing him that their salvation would be just as profound and their deliverance and restoration just as amazing. Spoiler alert, this does not stop with the restoration in Isaiah's time.
This is something we all know as Christians in our own lives as well. Now, before we move forward from the passage to how these concepts play out in our lives, I want to dig into one more specific word to use. There's one more thing I want to pull from our Isaiah passage and inspect a little more closely. This is really the focus of the passage for us, and it is the place where we find the subject of today, today's Advent-focused joy, being discussed. It's in verse 3. Verse 3 says, With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.
This probably doesn't ring in our ears as profoundly as it should. We here in North America in the 21st century, being very used to turning on a tap and water just appearing whenever we want, we've lost perspective of how precious water really is. However, the people in the ancient Middle East, even the modern Middle East, know exactly how important water is and how significant this passage would have been to those hearing it so long ago. Water is life. Without it, even for a short time, the things that are alive die. Water hydrates, replenishes, refreshes, lubricates, and sustains the body. Nothing can replace it.
It is absolutely necessary for us, and in the Middle East, it is and was in short supply. Everything was built considering the availability of water. Trade routes were established to run from one source of water to the next. Towns and cities thrived or withered, depending on their continued access to enough clean water. Crops and flocks were impossible to maintain without nearby water, and armies could only march as far as the water they could carry would last, unless they found more. And as there's not a lot of rivers and streams conveniently located everywhere in that part of the world, the well was central to everything.
Even here, if you live out of town and aren't situated right on a creek, you have a better idea of the importance of water and its value. Either you haul it constantly and hoard it until the next haul, or you do what they did in Isaiah's day, you dig a well. The underground water table here is quite plentiful, but in the arid and desert conditions of the Middle East, digging a hole does not mean you're going to find water. Water is precious, and without it, there was no life. A well was a continuous, reliable, and community-sustaining source of life, and the joy Isaiah speaks about God's people having in verse 3 is their reaction to exactly that.
a continuous, reliable, and community-sustaining source of life. Salvation by God is like water in the desert. It is life brought to those condemned to die without it. Isaiah uses the metaphor of a well because it's such a great way to illustrate what salvation of the Lord will be like to those who receive it. The well is a communal place of life-giving water. Salvation in the Lord is a communal place of life. Jameson, Fawcett, and Brown, in their Bible commentary, say this regarding Isaiah's use of the metaphor. The well illustrates not merely streams, which may run dry, but ever-flowing fountains.
To the person hearing Isaiah speak, the joy brought by the well of salvation was physical and tangible life for them as a people. It was a picture of the joy they would experience in their freedom from the shackles that other earthly kingdoms would place on them. To you and I, and to Christians as a whole, life-giving water from the well of salvation means even more. It goes beyond physical circumstance on earth. Because of Jesus, salvation and the resulting life is not so much about freedom from earthly kingdoms. To us, it has a more full, eternal implication. Because God took it upon himself to condescend to us.
just over 2,000 years ago and came to live amongst us, coming in the form of a little baby born in a Bethlehem manger. And because of what he would do for us on the cross and in the resurrection from the grave, we can know the joy of salvation. We have life-giving water from an eternal well that will never run dry. In John 4, 14, Jesus speaks of this. He says, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
If we can grasp that, the truth of that statement, we can begin to know the joy of salvation. If we can understand that as sinning human beings separated from God and condemned to an eternity without him in hell, we are hopeless without a divine intervention. We need to recognize that this is the default position of every human being who has sin on their ledger, and that no amount of good works buys us exemption from the price to be paid for our sin. If we recognize that. in the hopeless state that we have Savior, who is Jesus Christ. And he offers us life that is eternal. And that through the salvation of us, we will never be thirsty again, never condemned and never lost. If we can grasp all this and know it is true, then we can glimpse joy, real joy that eludes all who are not partakers in this salvation. When we're looking at ourselves, our lives, and we're not able to find or feel joy, I suspect it's because we're forgetting the big picture. We're not seeing that we were once dead. And now because of our Savior, we have life.
There's nothing more awesome and amazing than that. Jesus is the good shepherd and we are his sheep. And he will not just forget about his sheep when they're lost. He knows his own and he goes and finds them. He found me, he found you. Now, when speaking about himself as being the good shepherd, Jesus tells us what the bond between shepherd and sheep is like in John 10. During the night, a village's sheep would be kept in a sheepfold, a big corral basically. And this is all the village shepherd's sheep, unless they had their own fancy sheepfold. They'd all be mixed up together in this sort of giant pen and it would be very hard for anyone to tell the difference between them.
Knowing which sheep belonged to which flock when glancing at this mass of woolly creatures would have been almost impossible. But for the relationship that was established between the shepherd and his own sheep, when the shepherd shows up in the morning to take his flock out to feed them and care for them, he doesn't rely on a superficial recognition. They know who their master is and they know who they're to follow. He knows each of them individually. In John 10 verses 3b, which is just the second half of verse 3 and verse 4, Jesus says, the sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought all his own.
He goes before them and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Did you catch how he calls them? He calls them each by name. This is the same way that we've been called intentionally as beloved individuals, with our Savior knowing each of us intimately and calling us specifically. He didn't just plant a flag in the ground and say, okay, random people, come this way and see what I have to offer. He spoke to each of our hearts and established himself as our Savior and our Master and the one that we know we should follow. He called us each by name, and it is on the subject of a name that I'll close today.
Are you aware of what the name Jesus means? Ben Meyer in the Yale Bible Dictionary explains it this way. He says, Jesus is a late form of the Hebrew Yahoshua, the meaning of which is Yahweh is salvation, or Yahweh saves or has saved. God saves. That's Jesus' name's meaning. The name given to that little baby boy born in Bethlehem so long ago tells us exactly why we follow him and who he is to us. He is Yahweh, he is God, and he has saved us from our sins and from condemnation and from an eternity lost.
If we want to know what joy is or find the joy that the Bible speaks of, the kind of joy that Isaiah speaks of, it is found in Jesus and the knowing of who we are and who he is. And this is not something that we should just cling to for ourselves. No, we are to share this joyful knowledge with others so that they may know him too. In the Tyndale Old Testament commentary, J. Alec Montier again says this of the name of Jesus. His name is shorthand for all that he has revealed about himself. Those to whom he has thus made himself known enter into worshiping intimacy with him, but their secrets must be shared openly.
They alone know what he has done for them in salvation and they ceaselessly thank him. They alone know the name of the Lord and enter the privacy of worship. They also have a duty. They must tell others what he has done, share with others the revelation of the name which they have received. We've received much from Jesus, but I think that we can get lethargic. In fact, I know we can. I know I can. We can lose perspective. We can lose focus and we can slump into inaction very easily.
Not just the inaction of not sharing our faith, but in exercising our faith as well. The Christian can find themselves mired in a pattern of inaction that can lead to feeling stuck and joyless and even lost in apathy and indifference. We can lose all sense of joy and even forget what it really is. So if you find yourself in this place, here's something I want you to think about. Action motivated by care can change things for the better. Apathy and indifference never change anything. If you're lacking joy, consider what else you may be lacking in your spiritual life. Are you apathetic and indifferent? Are you feeding your spiritual hunger?
Are you focused on him? Are you in the word? Are you preaching the gospel to yourself? Joy is something we can know anytime, even when we feel like we don't see it or can't seem to find it. If we can't, and we feel like there's no joy to be had in our lives, perhaps we aren't looking in the right place or in the right way. It's not the manic sort of high that we often confuse with joy that we feel like when we buy something or when we use substances or when we win a competition. It's not the constant euphoria that we seem to think that other people have because that's what they choose to show us on their social media.
And it's not going to show up and completely overwhelm all other feelings and emotions, making us blind to and unaware of everything else, as the joy of love is portrayed in the movies. It's not ever going to be complete while we're still in this life with sin and death everywhere. It is, however, here and now. It looks like contentment, fellowship, worship, knowing you are pleasing to God, and knowledge of the gospel, specifically knowledge that you are saved. Joy is the result of knowing you have life.
In this world, we, especially in our part of the world, we have the illusion of life all around us. It's found in every ad telling you to buy things and every big sale promises joy. The movies make you think it's found in relationships with pretty people. There's always someone who will promise a joyful, fulfilled life if only you'll spend a little more money or take one more hit or improve yourself that much more. We walk through these illusions of the world searching for the promised joy and finding only temporary dopamine hits and conditional happiness that fades and withers. We find artificial joy. This is because this is the best that the world can do.
The world is not life-giving, but offers death in a pretty package. It will pass away. Life, true life, spiritual life, forever life, is only found in Jesus Christ. Those who truly know that they are alive in Christ can experience actual joy when looking at where they came from and then looking ahead to where they're going. Once we've reached the end of this part of our journey through the valley of the shadow of death, so to speak, and we've shed the cares of this world and moved beyond sin and temptation and are in the presence of the source of life himself, we will understand pure joy.
Until then, hints of it are found when we truly comprehend and behold how blessed we are. And in him, his joy becomes ours. Joy is a response to the grace of God. Joy is knowing it's going to be okay. Joy is finally realizing that for you, there is a happily ever after. Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, so much for all of the blessings that we have in our lives. Thank you for the glimpses of joy that we can find. And thank you for repeatedly showing us in your word that true joy is something within our grasp, Lord.
that we will know it, that we will lose all of the bad, all of the sin, all of the temptation, all of the death and disease and everything that comes with this broken world will one day be taken and gone and we will be in your presence and we will be whole and we will truly understand and comprehend the joy of salvation. In the meantime, Lord, please, this Christmas season, help us remember what it's really about and help us remember how to find joy and where to look for it. In Jesus' name, amen. Thank you so much for joining us at Mountain View Church. If you have a prayer request or are looking to connect with the faith community, connect with us. Go to mountainview.church slash connect or at Mountain View Whitehorse on your preferred social network. Now, before you go, we have a few important updates and I'll be back with our discussion and prayer focus.
Hi, Mountain View. My name is Haley. I'm the ministry leader for young adults, and I'm happy to invite all the young adults to our last event of 2025, which is going to be a lunch after church on Sunday, December 21st. So one last time to be together before the new year and spend some time in community. And if you've never been to an event, it's also a great time to come meet some people who doesn't love free lunch. We'll be ordering it and providing it. So if you can provide an RSVP, that'd be appreciated, just so we have a good idea of numbers for how much food to order. To RSVP, you can email me to haley at mountainview.church. So that's Sunday, December 21st. After the second service, we'll plan to eat around 1230.
So if you're an adult that day, you might want to go to the second service instead of the first or go to the first, run some errands and come back. And yeah, if you're between the ages of 18 to 35, this includes you. And if you have little ones there, welcome to join us as well. So hope to see you there. Have a great week.
Looking ahead, I would like to highlight a couple things. First of all, if you feel like you're willing to support what we do here financially, and you'd like to know what our year-end giving options are, then we would invite you to go to mountainview.church slash give for the ways that you can contribute. We operate solely on donations, and we appreciate any support. Secondly, regarding our Christmas Eve services on December 24th, we're having three services to choose from. There's 4 o'clock, 5.30, and 7 p.m. We would love to see you at one or all three of these, and we encourage you to invite friends and family as well. All are welcome here. That said, because of the amount of people we're expecting, we do ask that you go to our website, mountainview.church slash Christmas, to register you and your guests so you can insure your seats. Now...
We're not quite done at Christmas Eve yet. And next week is an important day in our Advent calendar. Join us next Sunday as Pastor Byron continues our Advent series by looking what Isaiah has to say about love. Last but not least, our discussion question for the week is where have you tried to find joy and found none? I think we've all got a little bit of that going on. And our prayer focus, we would ask that you would pray to remember the difference between the world's false joy and true joy found in Jesus. Thank you very much for tuning in. Merry Christmas and God bless you.
If you prayed to receive Jesus today or would like to connect with our church community, visit mountainview.church and click the connect link. If this podcast and radio ministry has been a blessing to you, please consider partnering with us or making a tax-deductible donation at mountainview.church. Thanks for listening to Mountain View Church Audio. Join us next week for more Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City of Whitehorse UConn.