702 Rejoice Always - 1 Thessalonians 5:16

When you think about things happening in the world today, do you rejoice or are you tempted to be discouraged? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast., Today, we're doing one of my favorite verses and it's only two words. It's one of the easiest verses on the planet to memorize. It's 1st Thessalonians 5:16 "Rejoice, always."
 
I wonder sometimes where Paul gets off telling us that we should rejoice all the time. It's possible that he was in prison when he wrote this, or, he, certainly spent a lot of time in prison in his missionary journies. How is it that Paul can encourage us to rejoice always? I looked at this Greek word in Vine's dictionary, which is a book that kind of breaks down the Greek and Hebrew words used in the Bible. And it was interesting that we're reminded several times to rejoice or to have joy or to experience joy. And many of those actions many of those are in response to something that God has done. I think about the passage in Hebrews 12:2, where it says that "for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross." I tend to think that what we've done is we've substituted something simpler for joy. We've let the world kind of downgrade joy.
 
I believe joy is something that almost requires God to be involved. We exercise joy when we experience and take pleasure in the things that God does. Whether it's through another believer or through friends, we can experience temporal joys. We can also experience joy when we see God working in the lives of others or in our own life. I experienced great joy just thinking about what God's doing in and among the people who take part in Follower of One and what I believe he's doing in the faith at work world and in the business world in general. I experienced great joy thinking about those things.
 
The joy is this happiness, but it's happiness based on what God's doing. It's happiness based on what I can see of God, and what he seems to be doing. And I think our world has substituted plain happiness for that. We have words like enjoy and you can enjoy a candy bar. You can enjoy time at the pool. In some regard, in the grand scheme of God, he has given us the simpler joys, these easy joys that come from his common grace, the things that he gives to everyone.
 
But Paul is telling us in spite of our circumstances, in spite of the world around us, in spite of everything happening. In spite of maybe negative health situations or challenges that are going on in our world, we have this freestanding command right here to rejoice always. And I hear that as choosing to focus on what God's doing instead of focusing on the circumstances, or what I see.
 
When I look at the political world, when I look at the way we interact with each other, when I look at things like the gun violence going on in our world right now, or the media, the back and forth about all the political things, it's hard to rejoice. But when I focus on what God's doing and how he's working, his plan, That's where I get the ability to rejoice always.
 
And it's at that point that I believe that Paul is making this command because this is a universal command to people who believe in Jesus and the people who follow Jesus. As followers of Jesus, our object in our command today is this verse. Let's rejoice always. You may face some negative work situation or whatever, but as we participate in the joy that God that we get because God is in control. Then we're a little different than the people around us. And we can bring that joy to the people that we interact with every day.
 
Hopefully, your joy and mine will help other people move one notch closer to Jesus. And that way we get to be ministers of Jesus Christ. Thanks for being a marker minister. And thank you for considering this idea today. Let's rejoice always. We have an obligation to bring the one we follow to the world. He's here and he's running everything and he's driving, but we help other people see him when we obey him and do what he says.
 
Thanks for being a marketplace minister. And thanks for listening to this podcast. I appreciate it.