A Reason For Joy

 

Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20

Focus: Joy, advent 3

Function:

¹⁴Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
    shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
    O daughter Jerusalem!
¹⁵The Lord has taken away the judgments against you,
    he has turned away your enemies.
The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst;
    you shall fear disaster no more.
¹⁶On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:
Do not fear, O Zion;
    do not let your hands grow weak.
¹⁷The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
    a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
    he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
¹⁸    as on a day of festival.
I will remove disaster from you,
    so that you will not bear reproach for it.
¹⁹I will deal with all your oppressors
    at that time.
And I will save the lame
    and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
    and renown in all the earth.
²⁰At that time I will bring you home,
    at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
    among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
    before your eyes, says the Lord.

I love this scripture! The minor prophets just seem to get it and the Spirit of Jesus Christ inside of them helps them see the importance of these simple things in our lives.

Simple things like the advent themes, Hope, love, Joy and Peace. Today we focus on joy and the scripture that we have before us speaks of rejoicing in both our hope and the realization of our hope when the promises come to pass.

Sing! Shout! Rejoice! Exult! All of these are given to us as expressions of our reaction to the emotions we feel when we experience the blessings of God in our lives.

And he gives to us a spiritual principle, when God brings blessings into our lives, it is a sign that God is not angry with us and the God loves us. We remember, according to scripture that God is Love. And, as we see in verse 15 when He says that the Lord takes away the judgments against you. It reiterates this: God loves us and forgives us of our sins, brokenness, failures.

I love verse 17. The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives (you) the victory. HE WILL REJOICE OVER YOU WITH GLADNESS and renew you in his love.

This is a different sort of prophecy about the coming of Jesus. Jesus is described as the warrior in our midst who fights our enemies. Our enemies, the verse before tell us, is our sins, which His love has removed from us.

So, as a result of this cleansing from Him we see His reaction to us.

I put the next line, “He will rejoice…” in all caps in my notes to remind me to emphasize the meaning. He will dance upon our problems with His love and renew us with His love.

We are renewed by the love of God.

There have been some times in my life where I have had a very strong sense of the love of God. I can describe it almost as if I felt the hand of God resting in the middle of my back to support me and give me courage. I feel God’s presence. And, I don’t like to talk about it much because I don’t want to brag, or to say that my experience is the only normal experience and if you don’t sense it, there is nothing wrong with you or your faith.

But those are the times when I know the prophecies about the coming of the Spirit of God into the life of the believer are true. And here is the thing, those experiences have always come at the behest of either two events in my life. One, is a deep recognition of the sacrifice of Christ for me on the cross. And the other is when I am confronted with the need to express love through forgiveness of a person who has harmed me.

Forgiveness is a sacrifice of love. Forgiveness is an act of faith because we say to God that we do not want God to judge the person on our behalf since God has forgiven us.

It is a sacrifice because we lay down our rights in favor of the right that God has to forgive that person. We place our trust in the justice of God.

And when I get upset about what seems to be an injustice to me, I go back to the cross of Christ and remember that Jesus forgave the men who tortured Him to death. And Jesus was innocent. He died to show us how to live a sacrificial life for the good of humanity.

Living a sacrificial life for the good of humanity is a great way to express our witness for Jesus Christ in a hostile world.

My friend from High School, asked me for advice on how to talk to his niece who has a genuine religious objection to vaccines. His brother is immune compromised and shouldn’t take the risk of exposure to her. And because he loves her, he wants to see her. Yet she believes that her faith will keep them safe. My friend believes that she is being selfish and imposing her religious beliefs on his brother. Her refusal doesn’t sit well with my friend as a Christian testimony.

I wished I had an answer for my friend. I wanted to tell him to tell her that Christians are called to seek for the good for others and live this sacrificial life that I am preaching about right now. But, he already knows that about me, and I didn’t want to sound pedantic.

I will email him that I am frustrated that people misrepresent the faith in such extreme ways. Extreme positions like this damage the witness that we have. I believe, that if people want an extreme position, let it be one of love for our neighbors.

If we want to be like Jesus, then we too will live a sacrificial life for the good of others.

Living a sacrificial life will be a witness to those around us.

That leads us back to the text. In the rest of the passage. He describes two reasons for calamity. 1). Oppressors who treat us unfairly and 2). natural disasters. And He promises to remove the shame of tragedies in our lives.

I see a lot of people begging in the streets while I am driving for Uber in Dayton. When one looks at them, one is conditioned to see dirt and disgust. One is conditioned to wonder how a person can fall so low in a land of so much plenty? One can easily judge the poor as responsible for their own plight.

But the prophet says that God sees two legitimate reasons for poverty, disaster and oppression. And human nature is to shame the poor. And Yet, Jesus said, blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of God. How can we judge the poor when after all, when we look into their face, we see the face of God? Now, I am not going to preach at you about this, I am going to preach at me. It is too easy for me to ignore the gaze of the beggar on the street corner because I am afraid that showing them kindness will give them some hope that I might be generous with them. And so, I ignore them telling myself that giving to them would cost me too much time and money because there are so many of them. I pray that God will deliver me from the way that society has conditioned me to look down on the poor. God loves them.

So, let me get back to the promise of God here listed in this passage. The promise of God is that even though I or others may shame them for their condition, even though they may be filled with their own regrets, sorrow and shame, so much that they feel trapped, God has removed their shame and promises to set them free. The gospel is good news to the poor.

God is near to the poor, especially those who are victims of disaster or abuse. Most who are strung out on drugs began abusing drugs as a way to cope with the abuses and disasters they have suffered. They got there because they are victims. A car accident, prescription pain killers that lead to an addiction that destroyed a life. It happens to regular people. So who conditioned us to judge them so harshly? Satan himself?

The passage promises us that God has removed from us all the judgments against us.

And another promise in the passage is to that God has set us free from our shame.

And that, I believe, is a reason for joy.