I heard a preacher say many years ago that the best place to get a message is from the Bible. And you go, well, duh. But sometimes ministers don't always get there. their sermons from scripture. And yet in your own reading and study of God's word, sometimes something really affects you and impacts you deeply and you want to share it with others. And a couple of months ago, the joy of knowing God through Jesus Christ was just given to me again and again and again. I was reminded of what a privilege it is to know Christ, to be a Christian. I was 21, just about 21, when I was saved by God's grace. And having lived on the other side of the street, I can remember what it was like not to be a Christian, to be a growing adult and not know the Lord. And then coming to know Christ was so fantastic, so amazing, so revolutionary. I can remember some of my fraternity brothers Didn't like the change in my life. And even after we'd gone on for several years and I was now living in Atlanta, several years later, the fraternity newsletter came out and someone asked, what's Steve Martin doing? And someone said, well, he's parting the waters of the Chattahoochee down in Atlanta, which was their snide way of saying I was probably still a Christian and I was a minister in the Atlanta area. It is an extraordinary privilege, it is the most fantastic privilege in the world, to know God through Jesus Christ, to be indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. And our passage we're going to look at this morning is in 1 Peter, so if you turn to 1 Peter, this is a passage that I think will be a good one to remind us of what's true. If you're here today and you came because your spouse came and kind of dragged you, or your parents came and dragged you, or maybe your kids came and dragged you, who knows? But anyway, I would pray for you that, pray for an open mind and an open heart. I get the fact, I know what it's like going to church as a non-Christian. Not the most fun thing in the world, singing draggy hymns when that wasn't the music I was hearing on the radio, and talking about things I wasn't interested in at all. But pray that for yourself that if this stuff is real, that God the Holy Spirit would open your heart and your mind to receive it as it is, and that it would just blow you away. Let's read 1 Peter 1. There's an introduction. Peter's writing to people who are scattered abroad because of persecution. He names the provinces in the eastern end of the Roman Empire where they're scattered. He reminds them of how they've been saved by Trinitarian working. And verse 3, he says, blessed praise be to God. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope." Chuck read and talked about hope, and I would be tempted to write the Bible publishers and say, in future translations of your New Testaments especially, would you not translate the word as hope? Because the word hope in our culture doesn't mean what the Bible word hope means. I hope the Sox win this year. Well, good luck with that. Anyway, whatever your hope is, but there's no certainty. But hope in the Bible is an augmented form of faith. It's expectation. It's expectation. So if you translate it as expectation, you go, oh, that makes it seem different. Well, yeah. Hope is, who knows? But expectation is a certainty. You're looking forward to it. to a living hope, to a living expectation through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, Undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. In this, meaning in this expectation, you rejoice, though now for a little while, it is if necessary, you've been grieved by various trials. so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, You believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. I forgot to mention I brought my ESV. I forgot that you guys use the new King James, and so I'm reading from the ESV, but it's just the same stuff. It's just slightly different synonyms at times, but anyway, joy unspeakable and full of glory. That's what Peter says. And why this is so important to me is, again, if you've struggled in the world at all, if you've been lost for, you know, I wasn't a drug addict, I wasn't a drunk, I wasn't this or that, I was worse than all these things. I was just lost. And, you know, you're supposed to go to college to find the truth, but it looks bad if you're still clueless and you're about to graduate and you go, what in the world am I going to do with my life? Who am I? What's my purpose in life? Why am I here? I don't know. And then the Lord saves you in the midst of all that and you know God. You know God personally. God is your God. You can say, my Lord and my God, and mean it, and it's true. And I can remember for, oh, let's see, I was saved in January of 69. That was a long time ago, right? I was only two. I was very mature for a junior in college. But anyway, it was 1969. And up and through certainly the fall of that year, it was just like I was living on a different planet. joy and peace and love and knowing God personally. I wanted to take you there today. I wanted to revisit this whole question of joy and knowing God. Now, God is not a giant joy dispenser. He's not my bellhop. There are some aspects of Christianity, some types of Christianity that say God's sole purpose is to make you happy. He's a giant bellhop. He's a giant concierge and all his job is to make you happy. And if you think about it, that's not true. God doesn't exist to make me happy. But you cannot know God really and truly without having a joy in knowing him. I mean, there are people in history, you go, wow, I wish I could have known them. I wish I could have known them, and it probably would have blown you away. Well, imagine, you can say, I know God personally. Sinclair Ferguson shared this story at a Banner of Truth conference one time about, he was at a golf tournament in Scotland. He's from Scotland, and they have some famous golf courses there. The British Open is played usually there. And he said Jack Nicklaus and a couple other men were playing at what's called an elevated green. It's high up. And as they got through playing, they came off the green and came down the backside. And Sinclair was standing there with his son. And Jack Nicklaus looked at him and walked up to him and stood about three feet away and just stared at him a minute like, do I know you? And then kind of shook his head no and then walked away. But Sinclair's son picked up on what happened. He goes, Dad, does Jack Nicklaus know you? He said, I wanted to say, Jack and me are just like this. But he said, no son, Jack Nichols doesn't know me, but God knows me. Infinitely greater than Jack Nichols, as much as any golf lover would have loved to have Jack Nichols maybe as a friend or an acquaintance or any other great person, man or woman in history, to be able to say, I know God personally. My retiring sermon that I preached in Atlanta was on Jesus Christ is the best friend a sinner could ever have. If you work through all the details of it, is there anybody greater that you want to have? It was so appropriate that we sang the John Newton hymn. One there is above all other. Could we treat anybody else the way we treat Jesus Christ and have him still be our friend? Really? But God loves us that much in Christ. Finding real and consistent joy is a byproduct from knowing this great God. You cannot know this great being, this great person, God the Father, or God the Son, or God the Holy Spirit, or the Triune God. You can't know them without just being amazed and overwhelmed. And so I'm titling this first part, Finding Consistent Joy in a World of Joy Stealers. Peter, again, Peter's writing to people who are persecuted, they're scattered, they're not living in their home area, they're living in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, excuse me, of the Roman Empire, what is now Turkey, and life's not easy for them. And so, 1 Peter is all about persecution and suffering. But he's going to begin in these verses I just read. We'll come back to them in a minute. But he's writing about joy. Joy unspeakable means you can't put it into words. It's so amazing. Not every millisecond of every day is joy unspeakable. But I think if you're a real Christian, you've had times in your life where it's been so sweet and so great and so amazingly wonderful. The average American today, not the elites they talk about on TV, the average American lives a more material blessed life than almost any king in history up until the 20th century. I mean, if you went back 300 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, guess what? There's a thing coming called indoor plumbing. Now, it's not a little pan you put under your bed. We're talking about a toilet, running water, hot and cold water. Really, there is more stuff in a Walmart than there are in many third world cities. I've visited a couple of third world cities in Africa and they just didn't have a lot of stuff. And my brother-in-law, who was a missionary in Africa, would come back to the States and he'd go in a Walmart and he would almost start crying. He goes, look at all this stuff. And these people aren't happy. We have everything that money can buy and more. But we've discovered, painfully, this stuff doesn't make you happy. The drug scene was just coming on when I was a freshman in college. The first people arrested in the state of Indiana for smoking dope were in my fraternity. There you go. And I go, wait, I thought drugs would just happen in New York or Chicago or LA, not in Crawfordsville, Indiana, really. But people were unhappy, and so as Timothy Leary, the drug philosopher, said, tune in, turn on. That was a different man, different story. Just get high. Who knows? Maybe in, if not LSD, at least weed or something else, you can find some real happiness. In other words, leave the world you really live in and live in la-la land, and you'll find happiness. Didn't seem to me to be a good strategy. Alcohol was more of the thing that most of my fraternity brothers chose to find their happiness in. They had access to a good college. They came from decent homes. But they were unhappy, and some of them got off into drugs and alcohol. We spend billions of dollars every year in mental health therapy. We are the most therapized, is that a word? Therapy-seeking people on the face of the planet. Yeah, we got all this stuff and we're not happy. We can descend into a haze of drugs and alcohol. We can lose ourselves in video games for hours. We can put on our earbuds and tune out the world and tune into ourselves and just be lost in our music and our inner mind. But we've, I think, discovered during the COVID lockdown that that's a dead end too. Because the pandemic in the last few years have shown us that turning inward, turning into yourself, my interior castle has proven to be an empty promise. It's like if you sat down and opened your shirt buttons and said, I'm going to see what's really inside my navel. What? I said, if you imagine you sat down and said, I'm going to see what's in my navel. Well, you don't have to go very far to find out. Not a lot of good stuff dwells down there, and you probably wouldn't want to give that up. But the idea is like, you do you. Be true to yourself. That's a recipe for disaster that's hollow, it's mocking, it can be scary. If you really followed that as a philosophy of life, your life would be miserable. The pandemic took away our jobs, our hobbies, our distractions, our idols, our toys, and we were left with ourselves. And that was awful. And so many Americans were miserable. They couldn't mess with their idols. They couldn't go to the store and buy stuff. They were shut up at home with themselves. And as it took away all these things, opioid addiction skyrocketed, suicide skyrocketed, domestic abuse skyrocketed, because people were stuck with each other. I've heard that 25% of divorces happen among couples when they start to retire, and they go, I don't want you home all day. I liked it when you used to leave for eight or 10 hours, and now you're home all the time. We were left with ourselves, and so many people discovered that the God of me, myself, and I is an unholy trinity that doesn't lead to happiness, doesn't lead to a better world. False gods lead to misery and long-term unhappiness. The pandemic only brought to light what has been known and then lost over and over since the beginning of time. It has proven to be true over and over and over and over again. 20 centuries before Christ, you read the book of Job and he talks about, you know, the unbeliever, he talks a mean game, but he doesn't really live that way. His life isn't happy. A thousand years later, David says in Psalm 16, that true happiness is found in your presence. In your presence is fullness of joy. Fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. He wrote in Psalm 7, or Asaph wrote in Psalm 73, the lives of the unbelievers They seem to be great until judgment day comes in. Oops. All their cockiness and all their boasting comes to an end and reality smacks them in the face. Nehemiah said in the fifth century before Christ, the joy of the Lord is your strength. As a believer, if you're a believer, your strength is in knowing Christ and just having the joy of knowing him and all that means. In the first century, our Lord Jesus Christ had four chapters, John 13, 14, 15, 16, oops, 17, five chapters. Five chapters in John's Gospel, and joy is a prominent theme in there, and the joy of knowing God, the joy of having, being indwelt by the Holy Spirit, of having your sins forgiven. By the time you get to the fourth century of the Christian era, you have Augustine writing, you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Peace, joy, stability, until they find their rest in you. You're not going to have happiness of heart. You're not going to have peace of soul. You're not going to have true and lasting joy. until you come into a real relationship with Jesus Christ. Not check the box. I would have checked the box at 21. Are you a living American? Check. Are you a Christian? Yeah, I'm a Protestant. Check. I would have been able to check certain boxes, but I didn't know Jesus Christ from a post. He wasn't real. I didn't believe in the resurrection. Never even thought about it. Mickey Mantle, he would have been important to me, and President Eisenhower maybe, and people who were of my era, but that's something that happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine, and it didn't really impact my daily life. But to really know God through Jesus Christ is amazing. It's true. You can know him. And Augustine was right. You read Augustine's life, read his confessions, everything he tried. He lived the life of a man who's kind of like Solomon. I'm going to try everything under the sun. And none of it's satisfied until he came to Christ. Fast forward a few centuries to the 17th century and a Frenchman by the name of Pascal, his famous quotation, there is a God-shaped vacuum in every person's heart. Since the fall of mankind, every person has a vacuum in their soul. And it's shaped like God. And he said, that vacuum is never going to be filled in your life. You can anesthetize it with drugs and alcohol. You can try to distract yourself and not think about that emptiness. But there's an emptiness in your life that will not ever be clear and be filled until it's made known through Jesus Christ. The 19th century authored Henry David Thoreau, who wrote On Walden Pond, how great it is to have your own little pond out in the woods and let nature Be your happiness. He said, most men live lives of quiet desperation. You know, there's a lot of people in our culture, and this is a culture that boastfulness and pride and hubris is just dripping from people in the culture. But many people try to cover up an inner insecurity and, man, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just trying to get by. I'm trying to figure out what life's all about. He said, most men live lives of quiet desperation. But one of my favorite insights was on a bumper sticker one time that said, no matter what label you put on an empty bottle, it's still empty. They can say Baptist, Mormon, agnostic, Jew, Catholic, it can be, that's your label on your bottle. But is there anything in the bottle? Is there anything to you, your profession of whatever? Do you know God through Jesus Christ? I want you to be happy because a happy Christian is a testimony to God. I want you to have joy, delight, contentment, peace of heart as a reality and an ongoing reality in your life. I'm not on a euphoric high 24-7, but before I was a Christian, my life was. Now my life is more, They're not seismic waves, they're not tsunamis, but they're to have a constant joy of knowing God through Christ. What does the Word of God actually teach about where you're going to find joy? What are the sources of joy? Well, the Bible says that God gives joy to unbelievers. Did you know that? God gives joy. It's called common grace. Grace that's common to all men. You don't have to be a Christian farmer to have it rain on your property. You don't have to be a Christian farmer to have sunshine be on your property. God gives common things to people because he loves. In fact, I've come to use a phrase more popularly, God loves to love. He's not a scrooge. Okay, I'll love you. Get out of my sight. He loves to love people. Now, that's not his only attribute. God forbid that you would think that. But he loves to love people. Why did he send his son? For God so loved the world. What does the word so mean? God loved the world in this way, that he sent his only begotten son. I have a son I'm very close to. I wouldn't give him for any of you. but God would give the Lord Jesus Christ. Common grace, you know, what are some sources of this common grace love? The birth of a child or a grandchild, of course, a cause of great joy. A full harvest, if you're a farmer, or a job promotion, if you're a worker bee. Victory in battle or in a war. Seen pictures of the end of World War II and people just going berserk in the streets. Deliverance from disease or danger, your cure worked. The medicine worked. Being found innocent in a court of law when unjust comments were made about you. The coronation of a good man as a king. Passing a test if you're a student. These are examples of true joy. You get excited about it. But they're not lasting joy. You know, after you pass this test, you probably have another one later. But life on the fallen planet is not as bad as it could be. I commend a little book to you. I wish it was still in print, but you can find it on the internet. And, you know, people say, well, I could believe in God, but there's too many sources of unhappiness on this planet. Why is there all this evil? The problem of pain. But R.C. Sproul had a mentor. He had a professor who impacted his life profoundly named John Gerstner. And he wrote a little booklet called The Problem of Pleasure. If God is holy, holy, holy, and righteous, why in the world does any sinner ever have a good day? Because God is a God who's gracious and gives grace even to people who spit in his face and breathe his oxygen to curse his name. But if you want lasting joy, if you want joy that doesn't go away, that doesn't evaporate, that isn't once in a blue moon, but if you want lasting joy, it's only given to believers and only experienced by believers. Listen to a couple of verses that, speaking about this very issue that you may not have picked up on. Romans is a big book of doctrine. Romans is a heavy book. It's a great book. It's maybe my favorite book in the Bible. It's a heavy book. In Romans 15, Paul writes, May the God of hope, may the God of expectation, fill you with all joy, and peace, and believing. Is that something you'd expect to see in Romans? In Acts chapter 13, Paul's preaching in a certain city, and the Jews rejected it, but the Gentiles believed. And it says, and the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit. In John 14, verse 16, Jesus says, "...these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be full." God is not a miser. Okay, just a minute. Let me put the stop. Okay, that's all the joy you're going to get. Is God a miser? Does he keep things back from his people? Is he a scrooge? No. I've taught you these things here in the upper room, that my joy might be in you and as a result, your joy might be full. When God the Holy Spirit indwells us, the Lord Jesus Christ doesn't come to live in us. He's in heaven enthroned at the right hand of the Father. But he sends his stand-in, the third member of the Holy Trinity, the third person of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Spirit, and he lives inside us. I remind you what you already know, but if you're like me, you don't consciously think about it very much. God the Holy Spirit lives in me, in you if you're a believer. That's pretty startling. But it's true. Henry Schugle's The Life of God and the Soul of Man has blown a lot of people away who've read it because it's just saying what the scriptures say, that Christianity is about God changing a person's inner being and God the Holy Spirit residing in them and applying the work of Christ to them. I read from Psalm 16 earlier. In your presence is fullness of joy. When you're closest to the Lord, you're the happiest in your life. You have most joy. In your presence is fullness of joy at your right hand or pleasures forevermore. And I'm going to close the service with Jude 24 and 25. Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling and one day present you before his presence without any spot or wrinkle or blemish of sin, and with exceedingly great joy. To him be all honor and glory, power and dominion, now and forevermore. Amen. But some of you are inwardly already disagreeing with me. Yeah, but. That's one of the great layman's comments. Yeah, but. Yeah, but you don't know my circumstances. You don't know the trials I've been through. You don't know the terrible times. You know, the only apostle who wasn't killed and martyred was John, and they tried to boil him in oil one time. It didn't succeed. But everybody else was killed. So it's not like they were going around whistling victory in Jesus and watching Pollyanna movies. These were people who had to face real difficulties. Listen to what the New Testament says of people going through incredibly hard times. Paul writes to the Thessalonians, chapter one, verse six. He's so encouraged by the Thessalonians, he says, you became imitators of us and of the Lord, and you received the word in much affliction with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia, some of the regions around there. People heard about you guys. You were going through it and God the Holy Spirit was in your midst and you were going through it and you were joyful in the Lord at the same time. How can that happen? How can a person go through it and be joyful in the Lord at the same time? Later he writes to the Corinthians about these people in Thessalonica and he says, we want you to know brethren about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia. For in a severe test of affliction, Their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty. Wait, how can that be? Well, like some of the believers in Cuba. If you're reading about what's going on in Cuba, Cuba, not a very easy time. No food to buy, no money to buy it. Hurricanes are wiping out everything. The government's power plants are way too old and they've failed. And no electricity, no air conditioning, nothing to cook with. Life is hard. Severe test of affliction. Their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty has overflowed and a wealth of generosity in their part. How can this be? Because there's aspects of Christianity that are supernatural. Not 24-7. Miracles aren't something that happens in every day and every bit of person's life, but God can give you grace in the midst of the most awful situation. When I pray for people in our church, like in your church, we have a sick list about this long, and like I said, a third of the congregation is over 65, so a lot of people are, what's your week like? Visit the doctor's office and take my pills. But there are people who are experiencing the joy of the Lord in the midst of their suffering. And finally, well, let me give one other instance here. Paul writes about his own experience. He wrote Philippians when he was in prison. And he's writing to the Corinthians, talking about his own life. He says, as sorrowful, I'm sorry for what's going on in your lives. I'm sorry for some of the things happening in the churches, but always rejoicing. I am filled with comfort in all our affliction. I am overflowing with joy. Well, Paul, are you taking drugs? I mean, how can you be filled with joy and going through hard times? Because God is real, because the Lord Jesus Christ, who is my Savior, gives the Holy Spirit to me in greater measure, and I can be very joyful, though my life is incredibly hard. In the midst of our heartaches and great trials and troubles, we can look to the Lord to make real to us what is real in time and eternity, and we can experience the joy of knowing God even in the midst of hard times. Example, I mentioned how Paul was in jail in Philippi, I assume he was in jail when he wrote the Philippians, but he was put in jail when he was in Philippi and he and Silas were up praying and singing hymns to God and praising God at midnight after being beaten and put in stocks. Normally we say, well, you know, I prefer not to be beaten and put in stocks and maybe just have some praise choruses. He says, no, we've been beaten and we're in stocks. You're sitting with your back against the wall, maybe in your feet out like this and you can't move. And our hearts are full of praise to the Lord. And we just read in this verse 8 and 9 here, Peter says, you've never seen the Lord. These were not people who lived in Palestine who saw the Lord physically. These were believers through the apostles' words. But he says, though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you do not see him now, you love him with a joy unspeakable and full of glory. Helen Rosevere, along with Elizabeth Elliot, used to be the number one and number two people listened to at Urbana conferences when they used to have them. And Helen Roosevelt was a Cambridge trained physician who ministered in the Congo in the early 1960s. And when many nations in Africa got their independence from colonial powers, sometimes the independence was accompanied by violence. And a group of people calling themselves the Simbas waged warfare all against Westerners in the Congo. And so their medical clinic, and she was a medical doctor, The local French-speaking people called her Mama Luca, because you're like Dr. Luca in the Bible, so they called her Mama Luca. And one night, her door was kicked in, and troops had piled out of the back of a truck, military truck, and they started attacking people. And she got out of bed, and the guy punched her in the face and knocked her down. And then he kicked her in the jaw and broke her jaw and knocked out some of her teeth. And then things got really bad. I won't tell you all the gruesome things that happened to her and some of the other ladies. But she wrote later, she said, I didn't know that you could have abject terror and peace and joy in the same heart at the same time. But I did. This is the most miserable, awful, terrible thing I've ever can imagine being through. And yet I also know I'm close to the Lord and he loves me. Many of us have heard in this church the Westminster Shorter Catechism. What's the first question? What's the chief end of man? And we all know the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. What does enjoy mean? It means you join Him today, and you join Him tomorrow, and you enjoy Him the rest of your life. Terry Bradshaw, the former professional football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, A commentator has talked about when he played football for Louisiana Tech, he says, I couldn't beat out the guy ahead of me until he graduated or actually quit school because he loved duck hunting more than he loved playing football. But I couldn't beat him out. His name was Phil Robertson. He's a Duck Dynasty guy. And I'm looking around. There's a couple of guys here with beards. Nothing like the Duck Dynasty beards, but they pass as beards. OK. What's Phil Robertson's testimony like? What's his book of his life story? Happy, happy, happy. He says, I was a drunk and I existed to drink and shoot ducks, and that was my life. He says, I came to know Jesus Christ and my whole life. You can go see the movie The Blind. It's about lessons learned in the duck blind, but he shares his testimony with one of the guys he used to hang out in the duck blind with. And it's a very moving movie about how bad his life was. And he's, it sounds fakey, but I'm happy, happy, happy, which is the way we normally say joy, joy, joy. One of my heroes is somebody most of us had never heard of. His name is Alan Gardner. He was a missionary on a ship with a bunch of other missionaries. And they were trying to go around the southern tip of South America. In the southern tip of South America, like the southern tip of Africa, you have the Arctic cold waters and the warmer waters and its violent seas. And his ship shipwrecked on a deserted island. And not only was it deserted, there was no food and there was no drinkable water. And before a rescue ship finally got to them, they all starved to death, which is a very painful way to die. But he kept a diary of what it was like to die on this island. And he wrote, oh, I am happy day and night, hour by hour. Sleep or awake, I'm happy beyond words. And the poor compass of language, the poor sphere of language that I'm able to talk about this. As I day by day and night by night lie here, What a world unknown to this world do I live in and have my thoughts and move my affections in. God is indeed about my bed. Let all my loved ones at home rest assured that I was happy beyond expression the night I wrote these lines. It would not have changed situations with any man that heaven and love and Christ, which mean one and the same thing, were in my heart. And the last legible words you could read in his diary were, I am amazed at the goodness of God to me. I had a couple more months to be 21. I could buy liquor legally. And God had other plans for my life. I watched 2020 happen. Well, 2020 reminded me of 1968. People were being killed. There were riots. The campuses were having demonstrations. I once went to demonstrations 10 days in a row. I could go to the library and listen to the fan drone, or I could go to a demonstration. Who wants not to go to a demonstration when you're a 20-year-old kid? So I would go to these demonstrations. I realized at a certain point the world is really messed up. You go, well, you were really a Sherlock, weren't you? I mean, yeah, this world is messed up. Way to go, buddy. But what was even more sobering was a couple months later is whatever's messed up out there with them, it's in me, too. I'm messed up. I didn't know I wasn't so miserable that I wanted to change, but I knew that I was messed up. It's like straddling a barbed wire fence. If you keep lifting the fence, eventually you're going to get off on one side or the other. The Lord had me be fixed up with a girl. My sister said, she's really nice. The rest of the girls in the sorority like her. You'll like her. Why don't you have a blind date with her? I did. She witnessed to me about Christ. I had no small talk to talk to a religious girl about Christ. I just go, OK, whatever. But she was a very attractive person. I don't mean just physically attractive, but I mean her character, her personality was very attractive. So I asked her out for a second date. And I had some handy dandy questions I was going to get her with. And they were crummy questions, and she could answer them in a second, and I could answer them probably myself. But I asked her out for a third date, and she goes, I don't do evangelistic dating. And I had no idea what she was even talking about. It's like you're in combat, and a bullet goes by your head, and you hear it whiz by, but you didn't see it. What was that? And she said, tell you what, they're going to have a conference at the O'Hare Airport at Emeria. There will be 1,000 college students there over Christmas vacation. Don't you want to go? And that beats having Christmas at home on the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana, and being just with my parents and my sisters. So yeah, I guess I'd like to go to this conference. And there was 1,000 college students there. And this is 1968. Guys had froze out to here, and you could put your pencil or your pick in there. And guys had long hair. Some guys had plastic pocket protectors with five pencils and pens in there. And every kind of subgroup you can think of was there. But so many of them had the same, indefinable something. There's something about them that was different. She was different, but I still wasn't smart enough to put two and two together. It was still five or 87, but it wasn't ever four yet. Then I took her home back to her home near Lake Michigan in Indiana. The next day, it got to 35 below zero. That wasn't what my car was antifreeze for. I couldn't leave and it was New Year's Eve 1968 and you're not going to get your car fixed on New Year's Eve and you're not going to get it fixed on New Year's Day either. Her parents said, well, you can stay here another night. She felt like she should do something with me and she played a gospel presentation on a record. That's how old the technology was, on a record. As the person explained the gospel, time stood still. I understood, yes, I am a sinner. Yes, the world's messed up. Man can't bridge the chasm between man and God. Only God can bridge the chasm by coming to earth in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. Only God can atone for your sins, the God-man. Only he can give you new life. It all suddenly made sense. And as they always do in those things, if this expresses the desire of your heart, don't you want to pray this prayer? I don't know if I wanted to pray that prayer, but I wanted to pray. And I prayed, and she was shocked that I did. And that night when I went to bed, I said, Lord, if I didn't mean it this afternoon, I mean it tonight. I need this. I must be saved. You must save me. And I went to sleep. Woke up the next morning. For the first time in my life, I woke up as a Christian. My eyes opened up. The world was different. I was different. Jesus had been raised from the dead. He was alive. He's in heaven right now. I'm not making it up. This isn't a fairy tale. This is the gospel. He's alive right now, and he can give life to any of you who put your trust in him. The world just looked different. I was a Christian. I said, I don't know where this is going to lead, but I have to live for him. He's God. He's been raised from the dead. He's not a dead hero. He's a living savior. My final point, Chuck said I could go to 130, so I'm fine. Anyway, how does a person get this lasting joy? How do you get this joy unspeakable and full of glory, specifically? Well, what did Peter say in the verses leading up to this joy unspeakable? He said some things that God had done to these people that enabled them to have this joy unspeakable. So let's go back at 1 Peter, verses three through nine, and see what he says. And again, I apologize for using the ESV, but your version doesn't read differently. It's just slightly different synonyms. Blessed, praise be, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to his great mercy, because God is so amazingly merciful. He's caused us to be born again into a living hope, a living expectation through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. God caused me to be born again. I didn't do it to myself. I wasn't, you know, running around begging God to save me. I was just clueless and lost and living my life in college halfway through my junior year. And suddenly God intervenes in my life and he's caused me to be born again to a living expectation. Jesus Christ is God. He proved his claims to be God. He was raised from the dead. If I say I'm God and I've come to die for your sins and I'm not raised from the dead, then you have good reason to question whether or not it really works. Did God the Father accept his payment? Is he really God the Son? Well, he rose from the dead. There's a good start. We're pardoned and free because of the work of Christ. My sins were forgiven. They were all taken care of on Christ. Every last one of them. And because our salvation rests upon what God did, again, if it had rested on me, well, you know, I was just more sensitive than my fraternity brothers and more spiritually minded, more humble, more great. I was just out there lost and the Lord intervened in my life. But because my salvation rests upon what God did, not what I do, that gives me great security and great hope. Because if I didn't make myself a Christian, I can't screw it up and undo myself, so to speak. You know, in denominations that believe, you make the deciding, Jesus voted for you, the devil voted against you, you make the deciding vote. Well, if that's true, and it's not, but if it was true, then you can decide to leave Christianity. You're always looking over your shoulder, is this the day I screw it up? There's one pastor friend said, well, actually, the real deal is, God voted for you, the devil voted against you. You voted with the devil, but God saved you anyway. And that's my testimony in yours. Because our salvation rests on the finished work of what God has done for us in Christ, I can't lose it. God will see to it that it's completed. Look at verse four. To an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. What kind of a salvation is that? It's imperishable. What is imperishable means? Well, you can buy something at the store, go to Costco and say it's perishable. Probably need to get it in the refrigerator because it's going to go bad. It's going to perish if I don't take care of it. Well, you have an inheritance. You have this salvation that God's worked for you that's imperishable. He says it's undefiled. It can't be polluted. It can't be compromised. So many things in life can be polluted, not this salvation. Unfading. It's never going to diminish. It's not going to grow smaller. It's not going to grow less. It's kept in heaven for you out of reach of harm's way or theft. My salvation is secure. It's certain. It's not based upon my performance. It's based upon Christ's performance. And one of the things I try to emphasize over and over and over again, for my own benefit as well as yours, Christianity is not about you. And it's not about me. It's about what God has done in Christ. Christianity is Christ. He is my salvation. Human flesh sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. Jesus doesn't undo his incarnation. As a young Christian, I kind of imagined, I used to live in California on the beach, and you'd see surfers out there in the cold weather, and they'd be wearing wetsuits. But what's important in the Pacific Ocean, when the water temperature is very cold, as soon as you come on land wearing a wetsuit, you're real hot. So these guys would peel off their wetsuits and get back to just their swim trunks. In my baby Christian understanding, when Jesus got back to heaven, I'm sure he peeled off his humanity like, yuck, get rid of this. No, he is forever the God-man. You have human flesh at the right hand of the Father, whispering your name and mine in the Father's ear every day. Imperishable, unfading, kept in heaven for you. That's amazing. Christ is your salvation and mine if you're a believer. And that's so thrilling to me because I can't screw it up. Look at verse 5. Who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. You've entered into your salvation by faith. Now what does that mean? I think I can, I think I can, you know like the little engine that could, you play for kids. No, it's not about talking yourself into something. I'm putting my trust in Jesus Christ that he really is who he says he is, he really did what the Bible says he did, and that my standing before God is based upon all that Christ did. My faith, my trust, my confidence is in the person of Christ. It's not in my faith. But faith is in the person of Christ. Did Christ accomplish salvation? Did the Father's wrath get entirely executed upon Christ? Do I get to go free because of Christ? Yes, yes, and yes. I've entered into salvation by faith. I continue by faith. Okay, I've been a Christian since 1969. You crunch the numbers and I've been a Christian 25, 30 years. Okay. That's a little humor if you're following this. Okay. So what does that mean? That means I began my Christian life by faith. You began your Christian life by faith if you're a Christian. You middle, okay, 20 years later. What's going on? I'm still trusting in Christ because He's my salvation. Okay, I've been a Christian 55 years. I still trust Christ for my salvation. There's no one else to trust, but it's natural to trust Him because He is my salvation. I begin the Christian life by faith. I middle the Christian life by faith. I'm 76. I don't know how long the Lord has for me, but my constant prayer for many years has been, Lord, help me to finish well. Help me to trust in you to the very end. Help me to finish well. Salvation is by God's grace alone, through faith alone, because it's in Christ alone. God did it. I believe that he did it. I trust him. The Protestant Reformers were absolutely right. Salvation is of the Lord. Verse 6 and 7. So, what does Peter say? In this, what I've just told you, You rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you've been grieved by various trials. Okay. So that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. This God who loved you in eternity past, before there was time, because time didn't exist until God created everything outside of himself. So here's the eternal trinity, always loving the members of the trinity, love each other, and God decides to create. When he creates, time began. God doesn't live in time, he lives in eternity, but we live in time, he created time. Here is this place in which we live. And he wants us to grow in grace. So he says, is the faith that I think I've, well, that's misspoken, misspeaking. Is this faith implanted in them real? Is it growing? Let's test them. I've shed some hot tears since I've been a Christian. Sometimes for my own sins, sometimes for sins that other people against me, sometimes for just how things worked out. So I can remember one of the first time I'm laying on my bed telling the Lord what I think about providence. But I remember the verse from Job, even if you kill me, I'm still going to love you. And if you're a Christian, you've been there. It may feel like, you know, this is it. I bought the farm. This is the end. I'm totally miserable. Lord, even if you kill me, I'm still going to trust in you. I still love you. Who else can I flee to? As we pass the test and our faith proves genuine, it makes us a real Christian. It makes us a better Christian. If you're a real Christian, sometimes the devil goes, you're not a real Christian. Trust me, you're not. Well, no devil, I don't trust you. But he whispers in your ear, well, what about that sin you committed when you were 16? Well, what about when you thought that? What about when you said that? What about when you did that? What about that whole year of your life that was just a mess? The Lord says, I'll show you that you're a real Christian. I will see to it that you see that you're a real Christian, that my work in you is not in vain. It will result in praise and honor and glory when Christ is revealed. What joy will be ours. I told you I pray that I make it, and when I get to heaven, I made it. But you'll say, you made it, and you made it, and you made it, and you made it. You made it. Heaven is yours. All this stuff we've had to put up with for years is behind us. You made it by the grace of God. And he tested you along the way, and you go, I didn't really sign up for this. Lord goes, I know, but I signed you up for it because it's good for you. It will test the genuineness of your faith. So then in verse 8 and 9, despite never having seen Christ physically, what does he say? Though you have not seen him, you love him. And that's true of every believer in this room. You've never seen him. I've never seen him. But you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice. with joy inexpressible and full of glory. I can't put it into words, but it's true. I'm known by you. You knew me cold before I was even created. Before there was a moon or the sun or stellar space, you had a plan that included me. And you sent your son for me. And you and the son sent the spirit to make sure that I would get it and I would be kept by you by the power of God all my life. Wow. Joy inexpressible and full of glory. Why would you not want to be in church on the Lord's Day to be encouraged and reminded of the truth of these things? Why wouldn't I want to spend time during the week reading my Bible, equipping myself to fight the things I have to fight during the week? Why wouldn't I want to really soak up the sacraments? The Lord's Supper, what a privilege. Baptism, what a privilege. As the Holy Spirit illuminates the word to me, why wouldn't I want to obey him? Oh, I should grieve when I don't obey him. But joy unspeakable in knowing Christ. It's not a fairy tale. It's the gospel. Let's pray. Father God, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Some of us here are still, yeah, but in their hearts. And they think they know better, and they think just that I'm an old man who is too old to know any better. And they're smarter than everybody else in the room, and they're more clever and insightful. Would you disabuse them of their false ideas and their pride? Would you have pity upon them in their hardness of heart? Would you show them that this is all true? And they're the ones who are wrong. And would you give them grace to repent of their sins and trust in Christ. For those who are already believers and rejoicing in what we've been hearing today, may we go home today with joy in our hearts. And may our talk at the dinner table be about our great Savior who has loved us to the uttermost and given us such unspeakable joy in knowing him. We pray in his precious, precious name. Amen.