True joy, as we have seen in the New Testament, frees the soul from dependence on cultural approval and conformity. She’s freeing you. In other words, when your joy comes from God, through Christ, and is it absolutely unwavering when you go through pain, afflictions, weakness, poverty, shame, dishonor, persecution, loss?Culture loses the power to control you. You’re a free person.
If you take a position that culture hates, or if you utter a word that culture condemns, you’re embarrassed, harassed, let down and canceled!Your joy remains unwavering, and you are liberated, you are no longer controlled. When your citizenship comes from heaven, and all your inheritance is in heaven, and all your joy comes from Christ to heaven, you are a free person here on earth and very subversive!Very countercultural and no one can touch you. I want free people.
- If your joy comes from the world.
- With its benefits.
- With its comforts and praises.
- You are like a leaf in the wind.
- Your joy is not authentic.
- But a second-hand joy.
- You’re not free.
- You shake the news every day.
- By a phone call.
- By a serious email.
- By someone’s word.
- Your emotions shake everywhere.
- Because you are a leaf in the wind.
- Your joy is linked to people.
- Or to their approval.
- Money.
- House.
- Comfort.
- Car.
- Jewelry.
- Inheritance.
- Woman.
- This three-month-old son?It’s concentrated here and everything that’s going on here is the end for you.
- You’re not a free person.
- That’s not Christianity.
True joy frees people and makes them safer and more subversive in terms of cultural control, this has always been the case, for two thousand years there has been nothing new about it, the true joy in Christ of feeling pain has always been radically liberating from cultural control. By gaining joy from heaven, Christians are delivered to earth. That’s always been true. What’s new today is that social media has created an intensification of old cultural control tactics. Tactics are not new; the emotional dynamics of control and shame are not new. The media is new, predominant and powerful. You can be hated by 10, 000 people overnight. So, in our culture, and I guess you should know, is it called a culture of complaints or a culture of outrage, a culture of cancellation, a culture of the 1980s?
This last sentence is taken from a book entitled Jonathan Haidt’s Overprotection of the American Mind, and here’s a prayer I found very enlightening: “The current culture, in which young people have grown up over the past 20 years, may be teaching people to see words as violence and interpret ideas and speakers, like me, as safe or dangerous , rather than true or false. So, if you take your position and tell your truth, you may be subject to mass complaints, abuses or being “cancelled” or accused of not having pleased people who need to be licked. True joy is a wonderful liberator of this culture, as it was for any other culture.