Nehemiah 8:9-12 – The Joy Solution – 1/19/20

Written by Dave Urbanski

Listen to the sermon here:

“Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength “, now if you want to exercise this Joy in your life, Nehemiah is going to go on in the passage and tell us how to do that. How do we maximize this joy, how do we exercise this joy solution when our hearts are heavy?

This what Nehemiah told the people they needed to do:
1) Go and celebrate God’s grace by enjoying a meal together, allowing God to bring joy into their hearts to deal with the mourning, regrets and the grieving that’s going on.
2) Share God’s grace with others, by sharing their food with others and shifting their focus from their pain to others who can be blessed.
3) Finally they’re going to understand God’s word by listening intently and seeing that He is at work in their past, present and futures. Joy at its depth is understanding God and what He’s done for us.

Today is the day we’re going to embrace the joy of the Lord in our hearts. Today is the day we’re going to be different people. We’re going to think about the future, we’re going to allow God to forgive us for the past, and when the grief and the loss and the pain that we experience in our hearts reveals itself, we are going to rely on the joy of the Lord as our strength.

And that joy’s going to grow to be so strong that we may not forget the regrets and the mourning, but the perspective of having the joy of the Lord as our strength allows us to be able to have compassion on others, to be able to give a testimony about the things we’ve done in the past that we regret, and bless others in the midst of that.