Joy

 You may not know this, but my name is William Trey Lamar, VanCamp ii. Actually, my first name is William Trey. My middle name’s Lamar. So, because my first name’s William, Trey, the William is silent, so just call me Trey.

Never use William. Um, I used to be so embarrassed of my name in school, you know, first, second, third grade. A substitute teacher would say, William and I would never raise my hand that I, so there was days where I was like, absent from school, and my mom’s like, where did you go? They’re like, they never said my name.

I never heard Trey. So I never said present. That’s a true story. Uh, when we took Ames test, you know, the test in order to like graduate from high school and go to college, I was, you know, usually everybody at least gets their name right? I was sweating bullets to start. Do they know my name’s William? Is it William, Trey, or just William?

Do I put L or do I put Lamar? There’s not enough bubbles to put in my whole name. What about the third? I mean, I was stressed just to start and that’s my life. But I actually blame my name, which I’ve grown to love by the way. I blame my name as the source behind a genuine disorder I have called Arimo Mania.

Has any of you have you of you heard Arimo mania before? Oh, you just wait. Spencer raised his hand ’cause he’s the one who diagnosed me. He told me what this was called. So Arimo mania is a type of OCD that’s characterized by compulsive knee to count or do things in a very specific numerical pattern. So since I am the third, and my name’s Trey, I must do everything possible by three when I’m on the road traveling and you know, like the solid yellow line, but then the dash I count to make sure it’s divisible by three.

If I end on two and then it’s double line, I keep. I wait till I see the next line. Now that’s three. Then I go 1, 2, 3. That’s the whole road to Disneyland. I am counting all of the lines. Uh, my wife and I, we honestly have some fights when she has the remote control and she turns up the volume to 26. I’m like, who are you, you trying to destroy my life?

24. Amazing. 27. Perfect. 30. Why not go to 33 to just make me happy? 26. It’s a genuine problem. Yesterday I ran a half marathon and survived, obviously, and I was so discouraged because I got last place among the passion, cre curse until I realized I got third place. So praise God, this was actually on purpose.

I needed Daniel and Joshua to be a Joshua. I’ve never called you that Josh, to be ahead of me in the race so that I can place. Third. I have problems. Pray for me. It’s exhausting. You’ll even notice Passion Creek Church count the letters. It’s all divisible by three. That was actually really important when we were thinking of our church name.

I bring up my disorder for you to have compassion for me, but also for us to point out that Advent also has a lot to do with three. So I love this time of year. Advent. Most don’t know this. Advent is actually in the church calendar, celebrating the three comings of Christ. Write this down. First of all, 📍 at Advent we celebrate the first coming of Jesus.

This is what most of us think of when we talk about advent as Christians. It’s imperative. We’re always celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. But what I love about this time of year is we cannot forget his incarnation. We cannot forget that the word became flesh and dwelt among us, or as Eugene Peterson puts it in John one, he entered into the neighborhood.

All Christians throughout all history are called to meditate on the incarnation. There are profound implications that God, that Jesus is fully God and fully man. One of my favorite quotes, I tend to bring it up every single advent, is by Dorothy Sayers. She’s one of the great Christian thinkers of the last century and a brilliant storyteller.

She puts it this way. Quote, 📍 the incarnation means that for whatever reason, God chose to let us fall, to suffer, to be subject to sorrows and death. He has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. He can exact nothing from man, that he has not exacted from himself. 📍 He himself has gone through the whole of human experience from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death.

Jesus was born in poverty and suffered infinite pain all for us and thought it was well worth his while. What a joy. Let’s not just quickly go back past this beautiful. Reality that God has come down in the flesh at his first coming. But that should also, at advent, we’re supposed to, number two. 📍 At Advent we anticipate the second coming of Jesus.

So this Jesus who first came to strip sin of its power over believers at his second coming, he will strip sin of its presence among believers. We will be glorified. Sin will no longer be a part of our lives at all. We will be in full harmony with God. We so long we say, Maranatha come Lord Jesus, come the same God who came is the same God who will come again and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

And hopefully if you’re doing an advent study. You have been encouraged to think about and meditate on his second coming. But number three, and this is the one that’s mostly ignored 📍 at Advent, we pray for a third coming of Christ. You don’t see, let me be quick here. You don’t see third coming in scripture, but it’s a common phrase in church history.

St. Bernard of Clavet, for example, popularized this, this, this term in the 12th century and all this arguing is all month long. Advent is about encountering the person of Jesus in your life. You have the first coming, he came to Earth. Second coming, he’s coming in. But the third coming is when you encounter him.

So many of us have been praying for loved ones to have a third coming. If you want to use that kind of language. ’cause what we’ve been saying all month long, we are built and designed to experience hope and peace and joy and love. But we believe the scriptures in that true hope. True peace, true joy is impossible without the personal work of King Jesus.

Amen. And so this third coming isn’t powerful until it gets personal Advent. This is what I love about Christmas gifts. The point is to actually consent to the truth of the gospel. See that Jesus himself is a gift, but we must receive it. We must open it. We must engage with him ourselves, your father, your mother, your uncle.

Those people cannot do it for you. You also need a third coming With that in mind, that’s now camp out in First Thessalonians. First Thessalonians is the passage, the book I want us to look at today. Uh, open your Bibles there. We’re gonna start in chapter one, and we’re gonna really camp out in chapter five.

This also. Uh, Thessalonians is one of my favorite letters from the Apostle par. Paul, do you know why it has a lot to do with threes? It opens with a triad and it closes with a triad. A triad is just a simple grouping of three, which is how all of life should be organized. Church, if you disagree, I submit to you the father, son, and Holy Spirit.

I’m just saying. Tough crowd. Tough crowd. All right, but Paul, here, he opens his letters to the Thessalonians with the big picture triad. That’s honestly beautiful. Look at verse three. Should be on the screen. We recall in the presence of our God and Father, your work produced by faith, your labor, motivated by love, and your endurance, inspired by hope.

In our Lord Jesus. Most of you’re familiar with one of those triads, faith, hope, and love. What’s fascinating in this book, Paul pairs it with another triad. Your work. Produced by faith. Work here is doing good works for the community. It’s bringing the gospel to those in bondage produced by faith. We’re not working to earn our salvation.

We’re doing all of this because it’s animated by a deep sense of God’s goodness, confidence in him and him alone. Labor, motivated by love labor. We as Christians are called to work and to work hard for the sake of others. We do this because we love others. We want the good of others, even at sometimes ahead of our own.

And then it says, endurance, inspired by hope. Endurance, where we keep sowing even when nothing seems to be growing. Why we have a hope that the same God who came 2000 years ago is the God who will come again. So Paul begins this letter with this beautiful triad. So honestly, a wonderful commendation of the church in Thessalonica, but now he ends with another triad.

And you likely have heard this before and it’s honestly one of the best. There is chapter five, verse 16 says, rejoice always, thanks brother. Pray constantly. I’m gonna find my place again and give thanks in everything for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. For our purposes today, all I want us to do is to zero in on verse 16.

Rejoice always. This is actually one of the shortest verses of the Bible. It’s not the shortest verses. Anybody know what the shortest verse is? Jesus swept. Count up those letters. It’s divisible by three. Praise God. All right, so rejoice. Always rejoice in the Greek is ate. Can you say that with me? Ate?

Anybody think karate, right? It’s very similar. It’s actually, it’s just simply joy it. The verb tense, so to rejoice is literally to joy. Paul, in light of the coming of Jesus Christ. Looking to the next one, which is all what First Thessalonians is about. He is saying, in light of these gospel truths, we must always joy.

Also, this is written in present active imperative, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a command to keep on rejoicing over and over and over again. So as Christians, if we have encountered the person of Jesus, we must, it’s not a, not a suggestion, it’s a command. We must joy. So what is therefore the biblical definition of joy?

To start, if you look at translations, some synonyms for this word are things like cheerful, glad, merry, and happy. A lot of words you’ll hear this Christmas season, and that is actually by design, because this should be all about joy. It’s common, by the way, and I’ve talked about this at length before. I’m so sorry, I’ve been sick all week.

So I’ll be taking random pauses to drink water so that I don’t choke up here too much, but, oh man, here we are. It’s common for, uh, Christians to pit joy against happiness, and I understand that the logic is happiness is temporary, joy is eternal. And I agree, but I actually think it’s really helpful for us to remember that it really much is, it is happiness.

Uh, the more I study joy in the Bible, I’m convinced and, and, and write this down, 📍 joy is happiness that isn’t held hostage by happenstance. So think of who you are when you’re happy, who is joy, but it’s just not stuck or it’s not, um, a victim to your circumstances. It’s this pervasive sense of pleasure and wellbeing.

Paul, when he talks about joy more, most of the time he’s in prison, he’s in circumstances that would do not naturally bring about joy, but he says, in light of the coming of Christ, you and I are to put on joy. But that’s not at all how the world sees joy, is it? Today, joy is kind of seen like the wind, it comes and goes.

You’re not quite sure when it’ll hit you. You better grab it. You can’t grab it, but you better enjoy it while it’s there. I think for us, many of us, we think the only way to attain joy is just to spend a lot of money on an expensive vacation, and it’s gone the second you are back home. But Paul here doesn’t describe, describe joy as something that just happens to you because God commands it from you.

So it’s not just occasional. It’s always this Greek word always. You know what that means? Always, each and every circumstance Paul is saying in light of the gospel message, there is never a time where you and I shouldn’t choose joy, which leads to the first of four points I wanna make today on joy. First of all, 📍 joy takes mastery.

It takes mastery. It takes us working at it, and over the decades we begin to get good at joying. In his book, happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Heet, he’s written a lot of great books to be honest. He argues that there’s this formula for happiness. He doesn’t use joy to be fair to him. He uses the phrase happiness, but he bases it off some psychological biological research, and he argues this formula that’s on the screen, 📍 H equals S plus V plus C.

So that’s it. So good luck. Have fun this week. Kidding. All right, what is h that equals happiness. So how do we get happiness? S is your biological set point. So the, I have some good news or bad news. Some of us, because we were born with good genes, we’re just happy. I, I’m not gonna lie, I, I, I don’t know, I’m kind of moody, but generally speaking, I can get pretty happy.

Like, uh, when we, uh, football practice growing up, we’d have to meet at 4:00 AM and I was the guy singing, I’m Man No Star. I’m singing right at four in the morning. Just all excited. People are like, I hate you. Like, it’s four in the morning. Why are you happy? I don’t know. I’m just happy to be alive. Right?

Some of you are like, I’ve never felt that impulse a day in my life. I just, every day I wake up and think, well, this sucks. Let’s try again. You know? And so some of us, your biological, like just in your body, it’s hard to choose joy. I’m sorry. I think we have to honestly just recognize some of us. It is easier, and some of us it is much harder.

So that’s a part of the equation. The second one is the VV equals voluntary activities that you do. Hear me? If you scroll social media all day and you never walk in the sun, of course you’re not happy. I remember when we did college ministry, so many of ’em were like, I don’t know why I’m depressed. I’m like, dude, you haven’t seen the sun in 18 days.

Like, you know, you need to not sleep in anymore. Maybe go out and work out. Like sometimes our decisions is what lead to our depression or our joy. C equals the circumstances of life or conditions of your life. He argues it’s no shock. You know, if you just receive the worst news ever or something really bad happened in your life, of course it’s hard to be happy in that moment.

I mentioned this formula because clinical psychologists agree that these three variables, another triad, come on, somebody. These three variables are keys to happiness, but. They are not even slices of the pie. In their research, they argue up to half of the equation. 50% is based off your s the set point, your biology.

Some of you’re like, well, what’s the point of Christmas now? Wow. That’s their argument, not mine, but that is kind of a part of the play. 40% they say is based off of the habits and choices you make. So your voluntary activities, only 10% of happiness is based off circumstance. In other words, even secular psychology agrees with scripture.

Happiness is not dependent on happenstance or on circumstance. It is something that you and I can cultivate. That’s why Paul commands it. I use this word mastery here because joy takes training. It takes effort, it takes practice. One of the worst lies of our cultural moment because of Rousseau and the romanticism is we think it just happens to us and there’s nothing we can do to put ourselves in a better position for joy.

In fact, to keep going down this rabbit hole of research, our bodies are biologically wired to pursue joy. As a Christian. Though, if our joy is not rooted in Christ, it will lead to a crash. Jim Wilder, my favorite author, who is a Christian neuroscientist, puts it this way. He says, quote, 📍 when our brain looks for joy and does not find it, we become vulnerable to pseudo joys.

These are substances and experiences that trick our brain to temporarily shut off the unpleasant emotions, but they are non-rational and ultimately unsatisfying. As I look around and think about my own, uh, kind of temptations to what to do for this Christmas to be joyful, so many things on offer today are just pseudo joys.

Here’s a, uh, he goes on to list some signs that maybe you are chasing Pseudo joys, especially this time of year 📍 one is I often try to keep my mistakes a secret. Another is my diet is too high on comfort foods, like, come on. That just feels like it’s an attack, right? Third one, I often keep doing things in secret that make me feel ashamed or maybe, and again, it feels like an attack.

This time of year I spend or shop way too much, or number five, this past week, I crave things that are not good for me. Many of us are stuck in this cycle where we know it’s wrong, but we don’t know how to get right. We don’t know how to actually experience joy. So yet again, we give into the pseudo joys that give us temporary pleasure, but lead to a tremendous crash if you don’t master joy.

Pseudo Joys will master you. But as followers of Jesus, we all know joy isn’t simply mastery. 📍 That’s because joy takes mastery and mystery. You can muster master all of the right habits and still not rejoice always because as much as it is a practice, the gospel of Jesus reminds us that joy is a gift.

Galatians chapter five, which animated a lot of our year, especially when we, when we went through the lint series, Paul says, joy is a fruit of the spirit. In other words, it’s a supernatural byproduct of just living life with God. John 15, Jesus tells his disciples to abide in him, to stay close to him, to commune with him.

’cause when we do that, we bear fruit. And look what he says in verse 11. He says, I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. Two phrases I love the most. He says, my joy’s not just anybody’s joy, Jesus had the most joy ever on this planet. His joy may be mine. And then he says, so he could be complete full to the brim.

There’s no more joy. You need. This again, is on offer because of the first coming of Christ, because of his virgin birth, his perfect life, his sacrificial death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension makes his joy possible for you and for me. His joy becomes a gift. It’s a practice we choose and it’s a gift we receive.

So if that’s the case, what are some practical ways you and I can do that? This is something I’ve been focusing on a lot. Uh, in my own life, just kind of maybe the last couple months or so, um, I’ve realized that I really need to hone in on this being a practice and a gift. Uh, since purchasing our property, we, we’ve been, you know, in our church, the, the, the phase of planning and a lot of hidden work, figuring out what the future will look like, and one day getting a permanent home.

And so I’ve been interviewing pastors, talking to them. What’s that process like? Those who have done it before and every single time there’s all sorts of tips. But the pastor finally gets to a moment, he looks me right in the eye and says, Trey, whatever you do, don’t lose your joy Along the way, there are sad stories of pastors, leaders doing things like a building campaign, and once the building is up, they just wanna quit because it took so much out of them.

And so I’ve been thinking about that a lot. A few months ago, pastor Caleb and I, we went to a cohort out in California and. I got to spend time with people we really admire and have learned a lot from. And one couple pulled me aside and spoke a word over my life. And, and I, I really feel like I shouldn’t share the details, but it, because it was just for me.

But, but the, the punchline was the couple came to me and says, I don’t know you. You don’t know me, but here’s what I feel like the Lord is telling me. You are at a critical moment, and I feel like you’ve been losing your joy. And we’re here to tell you, the Lord wants you to get your joy back. And that meant a lot to me.

So I, I took it, I tested it. First Thessalonians five says, actually just before the pray, always, it talks about receiving a prophecy and testing it to see what is good. And so I came home and asked my wife, I said, here’s what he said, blah, blah, blah. What do you think? And she said, Trey, I, I feel like this past whatever, we’re about to be 10 years old as a church this last decade.

You’ve grown so much. There’s been so many great things that have happened in the life of our church, but I have noticed you’re not having as much fun as you used to. Now sometimes, let’s be clear. Life and leadership isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s just hard. But we should always have joy along the way.

And so I’ve been thinking and processing and asking God, how do I receive joy as a gift, but also practice joy as a, as a training mechanism, something I’m supposed to have mastery over. And I’ve kind of come up with a few conclusions. One way is to realize that 📍 joy is found in moments. I think a lot of us, we assume joy is found on the mountaintops.

And when we do that, we set ourselves up for exhaustion and depression. ’cause most of life is not on the mountaintop. And so here’s how I wanna be helpful this week, this week for Advent. If you’re a a family, I want you to think this through. What does this look like for your family? Or if, if you live alone, I think there’s so many ways to practice this.

So first of all, I want you to 📍 practice finding joy in moments of common grace. Common grace. This is the theological phrase that references what God gives to all mankind. So we believe there are some gifts God just gives to believers, but God is gracious. The scripture says he causes the reign to fall on the just and the unjust.

And so what we’re called to do is to first and foremost think through what has God just given me? Just the small things. How can I have a spirit of gratitude and joy and give God thanks for those little things? And so that’s honestly, as a dad, I think that’s one of the major things I wanna teach my children to constantly have a heart of gratitude, an attitude of gratitude, but connect that gratitude to God.

We were just in Disney World, a a a couple weeks ago. Every morning, every, every midday, every night, we would say, okay, what has God done so far? How are we so grateful? What it, and that is so important to wire, it’s Jim Wilder. In that book, he says, there’s like five ways to do this. Make this daily. He says, first of all, this isn’t on your notes, but it should have been.

He says, first of all, think of a moment in your life that you’re grateful for. So this could be like birth of a child moment. Or like, man, I got a really good parking spot this morning on the way to target. Praise God, you know, joy in the little moments. So for me this week, I was thinking about the week before and our, all these little gifts that God gave us while we were at Disney World, he says, number two, relive that moment for a minute or two.

So just like sit in the glory of that memory. Thank God, like, replay it in your mind, how good that moment was. Number three, he says to feel the gratitude in your body. So like, honestly, as you’re thinking it through, just allow that sense of joy to, to animate yourself, to feel like those butterflies in your stomach.

Number four, he says, then connect that gratitude to God. Just say, God, this was from you. Thank you, God, thank you for that memory. He says, it’s backed by science. Do this for five minutes, three times a day. Let’s, let’s make this better. Do this for three minutes. This is a lie ’cause it’s, it’s five, let’s say six minutes.

Let’s do this. It’s my arimo mania kicking in six minutes, three times a day for 30 days. It literally rewires your brain and causes your operating system to run on joy. He says it has seen, he’s seen Christians like trans. Those in counseling transformed because they did this practice three times a day for 30 days.

And I’m not shocked ’cause it’s the best number that there has ever been. But also, don’t forget to 📍 practice finding joy in your moment of saving grace. Saving grace is a theological phrase that refers to the moment you were saved. The psalmist says, restore to me the joy of my salvation. Rejoice in the reality, brother, sister, your sins are forgiven.

Rejoice the reality. Your past is wiped clean. You are a child of God. Mercy and grace are yours in Christ Jesus. And we shouldn’t just run past that. It’s one thing we all, a lot of us in this room, we know that to be factually true, but how many admit we don’t feel like that’s true? That’s because we don’t spend enough time pausing and just practicing joy.

God, thank you for saving me. God, thank you. That sin you have wiped it away clean. God, thank you. My inheritance is found in you and you say this over and over and you find your joy in it. But it’s not just that. Write this down. 📍 Joy is found in moments and it’s forged through marathons. You knew I’d have a marathon point.

I mean, come on. After the week I’ve had, you know, all right, uh, in case you didn’t know, I finished a half marathon yesterday, got last place. But anyways, I, uh, I started to. Is it Daniel who clap? ’cause you got first anyways. I’m kidding. Um, I started, there it is. Um, I honestly, for me, I started to run because of my fight for joy.

Um, when on the run yesterday, I think my favorite, there’s so many hilarious signs. One of ’em said, did, you did know therapy was an option too. I just thought that’s amazing, right? But honestly, there’s so many people who talk about like, running does bring about joy, like to your body and the serotonin and the dopamine and all of that.

But for me it’s like, it’s not a time to listen to music. It’s time just to thank and to, to talk to God. And, but what do I’ve learned through this marathon process? Let’s be real half. I have to keep saying the half part for now. The half marathon process as I’ve been learning from people is you like, all the runners say this all the time, 📍 that consistency is more important than intensity.

Like even on race day, they were saying, okay, you’re gonna be so tempted the first mile to go as fast as you can. Don’t. It’s about being consistent over the long haul. Find your pace and stay there. Don’t empty the tank right away, and that’s the quickest way to tell you’re a novice if you just try to do too much at once.

You don’t run a half marathon overnight or else you’ll quit if you, if you guys try. Trust me. You know, it takes training upon training slowly and consistently building yourself towards that moment. And the same principle goes for joy. When Paul says rejoice always, he’s saying, do this over and over again because it’s the consistency that matters.

We’re in a marketing moment where they say, no, it’s intensity. Buy this thing and you will receive the joy. But it’s, listen, the Christian life, it’s not about chasing after that high, it’s long obedience in the same direction. In the early 19 hundreds, there was two explorers, Robert Falcon Scott from England and Ro Wild Amunson Edmunson from Norway.

📍 And they set out to become the first people to reach the South Pole. Now as a Christmas message, this would’ve been so much better if I said the North Pole, but here we are. This is truth though. So it’s South Pole. Now both teams face a lot of the same circumstances. They both face the same brutal weather.

They both face the same icy terrain and they both had the same goal to be the first people to reach the South Pole. And they began around the same time. So it was a race to the South Pole Robert’s team. What they decided to do was to push themselves to exhaustion on good weather days and then it, when the storms hit, they just didn’t do anything.

They just stayed in. So some days they went 30 miles. Other days they didn’t move at all. And his journal, we have record of it. It’s filled with frustration and fatigue. And in musson though, the other, on the other hand, he made a simple rule. He said for his team, they would travel exactly 15 miles a day, no more, no less.

So when the sun was shining, 15 miles we’re calling it a day when there was no sun to be found, and the wind was howling 15 miles every single day. What he did is he built a rhythm that prioritized consistency over intensity. Turns out by keeping a steady, sustainable pace, a, a Munson’s team reached the South Pole first, and most importantly, they safely returned home.

Robert’s team, they raced and rested by emotion and circumstance. They actually arrived to the South Pole 34 days later, and tragically they all froze to death on their journey home. What was the difference? They had the same desire. They had the same goals. They had the same circumstance. The difference was consistency over intensity.

The same goes for joy. The same goes for every way. Jesus is forming us. Consistency over intensity. If I can just speak bluntly as we close as a church this Christmas season, but also the season our church is going to embark on in 2026, it is going to require the joy of the Lord to be our strength. We’re gonna encounter opposition.

We must face it with joy. We will grow tired. We must put on our joy, but my hope is together. We will consistently set our GA on King Jesus, who is our joy, who is our author and perfecter of our faith. So I just want us to end where we began by reading the first triad in First Thessalonians. My prayer is that our church, your families, us in the room embody what Paul says to this church.

In fact, can you stand? ’cause I wanna almost, I want this to almost be a benediction. I wanna, this doesn’t mean leave after, but I want to say this over you. So if you’re willing and able to open up your hands as a posture of receiving, and I’m praying this scripture over you, your home, your heart, and our church.

One Thessalonians one, starting in verse three. We recall in the presence of our God and Father, your work produced by faith, your are labor motivated by love. And your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. For we know brothers and sisters, loved by God that he has chosen you because our gospel did not come to you in Word only, but also in power in the Holy Spirit and with full assurance.

You know how we lived among you for your benefit, and you yourselves became imitators of us and of the Lord, when in spite of severe persecution, you welcomed the message with joy from the Holy Spirit, and as a result, you became an example to all.

The believers in Macedonia and Eiah ​