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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

John Shin

Restoring the Joy

Heavenly Father, Lord, I thank you so much for giving us the chance to worship you, gather together like this on your beautiful Sabbath day.

Lord, as I now speak on this topic that is so important, Lord, I acutely feel my inadequacy.

Lord, I pray that you will put your words in my mouth.

And Lord, I pray that you will make me nothing and that you will point everyone's vision up to you so that they can leave this place with the message that they need to hear.

All these things I pray in your name, amen.

I have a very important question for all of you this morning.

Has your desire for spiritual things decreased?

Do spiritual truths not move your heart like they used to?

Especially here in Loma Linda, do you find yourself seeking out great speakers Sabbath after Sabbath only to be disappointed because they don't feel that void in your heart?

Do you find yourself thinking back to a time when you felt that you were close to God, when you had this childlike faith that brought so much joy, and you felt true communion with God?

Do you look back to a time like that in your life and miss it?

And do you sometimes find yourself looking back to that time and thinking that you were naive back then to feel the way you did?

Do you come away from them without having felt the presence of God?

Do you feel like you're just clocking in, clocking out?

Do you feel insincere when you pray because you find yourself asking for forgiveness for the same things over and over again, and the words are without power.

Because in the back of your mind, you know, nothing's going to change.

Do you find yourself getting irritated, insecure, or defensive when you see someone who's on fire for Christ?

Do you find that your ministry efforts are driven more by a desire to maintain an image than by a love for God?

If you can relate to any of these statements I just made, this message is for you.

I thought long and hard about what I should share with you guys here at Advent Hope.

And the Lord impressed upon me to share this message, because I think it's something we all go through.

You can be in the church, surrounded by people who are of great faith, and yet be in a desert of a spiritual experience.

You can come here to Advent Hope every Sabbath morning and walk away no different than when you came.

If you yearn for that joy of true communion with God, That's what we're going to address today.

And I just want to be completely honest with you and let you know that this is a struggle that we all have together.

You know, you see, I, in my life, when I went through patches of dry times in my faith, it would bother me that sermons that once moved me to tears didn't really touch me anymore.

Passages of scripture that used to be profound to me, so much so that I couldn't go beyond digesting just that 1 little portion of scripture.

When I read it again, I wonder what I had found so beautiful about it before.

It's not that I had forgotten the knowledge of any things that I learned, but I yearn for that childlike sense of wonder that made me delight in those truths back then.

Maybe some of you can relate to these statements.

In the end, What we're all yearning for in our Christian walk is joy.

It's not all about feelings, but feelings are a very good indicator of whether or not your religion is real.

Because in the end, if there is no experiential relevance to your religion?

If it doesn't give you that zest that makes you get up in the morning ready to take on another day, what use is religion in your life if it's only theoretical and not experiential?

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from thy presence and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation and uphold me with thy free spirit.

The title of my message this morning is called Restoring the Joy.

Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation.

For anyone who has ever lost their joy in religion, this message is for you.

The question we have to ask ourselves is, where is true joy found?

And I think we can look at our daily lives to give us clues.

There is 1 pastor who was talking to his congregation 1 day, after going away from a long trip where he visited multiple countries and preached multiple messages and saw many people come to Christ But he told his congregation that the greatest joy of that entire trip was when he finally got home and he saw his infant daughter come running up to him and grab his leg and he scooped her up in his arms and she just nestled in his neck and they stayed that way for about 15 minutes.

He said that was the most joy he felt in his entire trip.

You know, in the hospital, when I meet people who are struggling with terminal illnesses or really, really serious diseases, and they talk about all the things that are going wrong for them in life, I ask them, where do you find the strength to get through what you're going through?

And invariably, the ones who do say that they have something driving them, they say, it's my family, my kids.

You see, in our life, it doesn't matter what you do, what your background is, what your aspirations are, we all derive our most profound sense of meaning and joy from our relationships.

You can test this for yourself and look at your history.

Because if you went through a time when life was extremely difficult, but your relationships were solid, you look back at that time as a good time.

But conversely, if you look back to a time in your life where everything in life was working out for you, but you had disturbed relationships, that's a dark time in your life.

When relationships are going right, nothing else matters.

But when your relationships that matter most aren't going right, nothing else seems to matter.

Isn't this an interesting clue into what brings us true happiness in life.

We were programmed to yearn for relationship.

And the relationships that we value with 1 another is simply a shadow of the ultimate relationship that should bring us true happiness.

Psalm 16 verse 11, you will show me the path of life.

At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

You see friends, the most important relationship that we can have in life is the relationship that we have with God.

Note that it says fullness of joy is found only in God's presence.

We can experience joy in many other aspects of life, but the only way that we can experience full joy, complete joy, everlasting joy, is in our relationship with God.

And the relationships that we have here on Earth are designed to point us to that relationship.

For those of you who aren't, use your imagination.

For those of you who are, you should be able to relate to this very well.

For those of you who are married, how many of you have experienced a dry spell in your marriage?

There's a difference, would you say, between spending time with your spouse and spending quality time with your spouse.

There's a difference between connecting with 1 another and just being in the same room.

You know, I'm married, happily married, for a little over 2 years now, but I've already seen that there's a huge difference between spending time and spending quality time.

As a medical student, you know, I have to study a lot and so often I would come home and sit on the couch and open my iPad and start studying.

My wife would be home and she would finish what she has to do and she would sit on the other end of the couch and start checking her email and doing whatever and we're in the same room we're very close to each other but that's not really spending time and she would give me little hints that she wants my full attention you know she would scoot over a little closer, she would invite the dog to sit on my lap so she has to go over and pet the dog.

Sometimes she would place the dog on my shoulders.

Other times she would say, oh honey, don't mind me, I'm just going to walk back to my room alone and check on something.

And then I found that at times when I closed my iPad, turned around and looked at her and said, honey, how was your day?

That's when we start spending time together, regardless of how long we've been in the same room together prior to then.

See, friends, this is exactly how it is with God.

God isn't interested in having your time.

He doesn't want you to clock in and clock out.

You see, if I spent every waking moment of every day with my wife, but didn't have that kind of quality time, it wouldn't make a difference in our marriage.

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Restoring the Joy

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