Serious joy like we've just seen in the New Testament sets the soul free from
dependence upon cultural kudos and cultural conformity, sets you free. in
other words when when your joy comes from God through Christ and is
absolutely unshakable through grief, affliction, weakness, poverty, shame,
dishonor, persecution, loss, the culture loses its power to control you. You are a
free person. If you take a stand that the culture hates or speak a word that the
culture condemns and they shame you, they persecute you, they plunder you, they
cancel you. Your joy remains unshaken and you're free you're not controlled you're
not controlled. Free! When when your citizenship is in heaven and all your
inheritance is in heaven and all your joy is coming from Christ in heaven
you're a free person on planet earth and very subversive very counterculture
nobody can touch you. I want free people. If your joy comes from
the world with its benefits its comfort its praises you're like a leaf in the
wind. Yours is not a serious joy it's a secondhand joy
you're not free you're jerked around by the newscast every day by a phone call by a
critical email by a word from a friend you just your emotions our jury which
because you're just a leaf in the wind all your joy attached to that person that person
their approval their that money that house that comfort that car that those
jewels that inheritance that a wife that three-month-old child your joy is all
bound right here and anything that happens here you're done for you're not
a free person. That's just not the way Christianity is. Serious joy sets
people free and makes them the most secure and subversive people when it
comes to cultural control. It's always been true it's been true for 2,000 years
there's nothing new about this at all serious joy in Christ through pain has
always been radically liberating from cultural control. So in getting joy from
heaven Christians become free on earth has always been true the new thing today
is that social media has created an intensification of the old fashioned
cultural control tactics. The tactics aren't new the emotional dynamics of
control and shaming aren't new, the media are new, and ubiquitous, and powerful. You
can be ganged up on by 10,000 people overnight. So it's called in our culture
you all know this I suppose it's called call-out culture, outrage culture,
cancel culture, coddled culture that last phrase comes from a book called "The
Coddling of the American Mind" by Jonathan Haidt and here's a sentence that
I found very illuminating he said, "This culture today that young people have
been growing up in for maybe 20 years teaches people to see words as violence
and to interpret ideas and speakers" like me, "as safe versus dangerous safe or
dangerous rather than true versus false."
So if you take your stand and you speak your truth you may be subject to call
out or outrage or being canceled or accusation that you've not sufficiently
coddled the people that need to be coddled. Serious joy is a great liberator
from this culture as it has been for every culture.