Joy in the invisible Christ
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2010 · 31 January 2010
“8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
The question I want to start with is this: why does Peter tell the Christians what they are experiencing? He tells them: "You are loving Christ; you are believing in Christ; you are rejoicing in Christ with inexpressible and glorified joy; all of that even though you do not now see him." Why? Why tell them what their own experience is?
The reason is that he wants to describe for them what true Christianity really is. And to do it in such a way that, if they ever drift away from it, they will have a fixed standard to show them what's happening, so they can wake up and return to what they've lost.
I picture it like this (it's not a perfect picture, but it helped me get a handle on why Peter would tell them about their own experience): true Christianity is like swimming upstream in a river of godlessness and for us, secular American and Indonesian godlessness.
We swim with movements of love to Christ, and movements of faith in Christ, and the movements of joy in Christ. And while we swim, we do not get swept away with the godless toward the terrible waterfalls of judgment down river.
God keeps us, as verse 5 said, through faith. He enables us to keep on swimming against the stream with the strokes of faith, love, and joy, so that we don't get carried away in the heavy current of Christlessness in our society.
Our swimming coach, the apostle Peter, is on the shore watching us and following us. When we are swimming well, he calls out to us, "Look here, you're doing well, I'm planting a flag here in the same position with where you are in the river. Now mark this. This is where you are." That's what he's doing with us in verses 8 and 9.
The reason is so that if we stop using the swimming strokes of love for Jesus, and faith in Jesus, and joy in Jesus, and begin to just float downstream in the river of godlessness, we will be able to wake up and notice and realize that the flag is upstream. We will have a fixed point of reference to call us back to what real Christianity is.
So that's what I want to do this evening. Peter did it for the Christians then, and I am going to try to do it with his words for you now—to plant a flag on the side of the river of American godlessness and call you to look at it to see where you are in your Christian swimming.
Peter says five things (in verses 8–9) about these Christians: 1) they love Christ; 2) they believe in Christ; 3) they rejoice in Christ; 4) through all this they are receiving the salvation of their souls; and 5) they are experiencing this even though, like us, without ever seeing Christ in person.
This is true Christianity: God is saving our souls by working in our hearts a love and confidence and a joy that is against the stream of godlessness and worldliness in our society. In other words, Christianity is first and foremost a matter of the heart (love, trust, and joy), not a matter of external performances.
Let's see if we can understand these three experiences and see how they relate and whether we are in fact experiencing them or not. What do we really mean when we speak of loving Christ and trusting Christ and enjoying Christ? Let us start with three definitions:
1. Loving Christ. Loving Christ means regarding Christ as extremely valuable based on His character and virtue (cf. 2:7). 2. Trusting Christ. Trusting Christ means believing that Christ is reliable in all his promises and all his counsel. In other words: Love is being attracted to Christ for who He is. Faith is trusting Christ for what He will do.
3. Enjoying Christ. Now what about joy? Peter says (v. 8), "We are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” The more I consider biblical texts (like Philippians 1:25 and Romans 15:13 and 2 Corinthians 1:24), the more we should conceive of joy as being united to love and faith.
Joy in Christ represents the good feelings of loving him and believing him. It's the echo in our hearts of experiencing Christ as precious and reliable. It's the deep feelings of being attracted to Him for who He is and of being confident in Him for what He will do.
So joy is part of love and part of faith. Because it would be a contradiction to say, "I am attracted to the fact that Christ is preciousness, but I have no good feelings in this attraction." What is attraction without good feelings for something?
There may be also some fear in the attraction (as if going to a scary movie) but if there were no deep good feelings in it, it would not be experienced as an attraction, but only as a rejection.
It is the same with faith: it would be a contradiction to say, "I am confidently trusting in what Christ will do for me, but I have no good feelings in this confidence." What is confidence without good feelings of hope and assurance in the One you trust?
There may be some expectation of pain and suffering on the way, but if there were no deep good feeling that it's going to turn out well, it would not be called trust or confidence.
So this holy joy that Peter refers to in verse 8 is a component part of love and faith, and together they make up true Christianity. This goes a long way to explaining why Peter calls this joy "inexpressible and full of glory [or glorified]."
Do you know that joy has a quality? I don't mean merely its intensity, but a moral character. Is it possible to have joy that is ugly or beautiful, depraved or noble, dirty or clean? The answer is yes: what we enjoy gives joy its character.
If you enjoy dirty jokes and foul language and lewd pictures, then your heart is dirty and your joy is also dirty. If you enjoy cruelty and arrogance and revenge, then your heart and your joy also have that character. Or the more you get your joy simply from material things, the more your heart and your joy shrivel up like a mere material thing.
Peter says (in v. 8) that Christian joy is inexpressible and glorified. So how does it become that like that? It becomes like that because Christian joy is the joy of craving the preciousness of Jesus and the reliability of Jesus. And what we enjoy gives joy its character.
Christians desire to be with Christ and they are learning to become like Christ. And Christ has in him all the glory of the universe and of God, and so our joy in Him is a glorified joy. That is a joy that continues to grow the more we are attracted by His preciousness and as we are confident in His faithfulness.
We develop a joy for what we crave and what Christians should crave for above all else is the glory of Christ. So our joy will become "inexpressible and glorified" because it is a joy in loving Christ and trusting Christ.
But how do you love Him and believe in Him, if you can't see him? The answer to that question is that even though we don't see him face to face with our physical eyes, we do see him in another way that is even more valuable.
For example, in Romans 15:20–21, Paul described his mission to unreached peoples (who could never see Christ physically) like this: "I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named . . . but as it is written, 'They who had no news of him shall see, and they who have not heard shall understand.'"
In the preaching of the gospel Christ can be seen in a way that is more important than seeing him physically. Hundreds of people in Jesus' lifetime saw him physically and never really saw him.
"Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand," Jesus said in Matthew 13:13. There is a seeing that is infinitely more important than seeing with the eyes.
In 2 Corinthians 4:6 Paul describes it like this: "The God, who said, 'Light shall shine out of darkness,' is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."
There is a spiritual seeing in the heart of the glory of God in the face of Christ, and without it no one is saved. Michael Card expressed the paradox of seeing yet not seeing in one of his songs like this: “To hear with my heart, to see with my soul, to be guided by a hand I cannot hold, to trust in a way that I cannot see, that's what faith must be.”
How does it happen? How is this kind of seeing happen? It happens through the Word of God. When the gospel of Christ is preached, we can see Christ more clearly for who he really is than many could see in Christ’ own lifetime.
If you read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with openness to Christ, you can see the true glory of Christ far more clearly than most of the people who knew him on earth could see him, like Nicodemus, the Syrophoenician woman, the Centurion, the widow of Nain, Zacchaeus, the thief on the cross and the thronging crowds.
They saw a brief glimpse here and a portion of a speech there. But in the gospels you get four complementary portraits of Christ inspired by God and covering the whole range of his teaching and his ministry. The gospels are better than being there.
You are taken into the inner circle of the apostles where you never could have gone. You go with Him through Gethsemane and the trial and the crucifixion and the resurrection and the meetings after His resurrection.
You hear whole sermons and long discourses—not in isolated snatches on hillsides but in rich God- inspired contexts that take you deeper than you ever could have gone as a perplexed peasant in Galilee at that time.
You see the whole range of his character and power which nobody saw as fully then as you can now see in the gospels. You see his freedom from anxiety with no place to lay his head, his courage in the face of opposition, his unanswerable wisdom, his honoring women and his tenderness with children.
You see his compassion toward lepers, his meekness in suffering, his patience with Peter, his tears over Jerusalem, his blessing those who cursed him, his heart for the nations, his love for the glory of God, his simplicity and devotion, his power to still storms and heal the sick and multiply bread and cast out demons.
Though you do not now see him, yet in another sense you do see him far better than thousands who saw him face to face. You see the glory of God shining in Jesus' face at every turn in the gospels. And because you see him now with the eyes of the heart, you can love him and trust him and rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory. This is true Christianity.
Recently I saw on my computer pastor Dieter Zander speak at a conference about reaching people in the age of relativism. He cited a Barna study that asked people to use single words to describe Jesus. They responded, "wise, accepting, compassionate, gracious and humble."
Then he asked them to use single words to describe Christians, they said, "critical, exclusive, self righteous, narrow and repressive." There is a difference between knowing the good news and being the good news, Zander said, "We are the evidence! How we live our lives are the evidence we are Christ followers. Everything counts--all the time."
The famous preacher D.L. Moody told about a Christian woman who was always bright, cheerful, and optimistic, even though she was confined to her room because of illness. She lived in an attic apartment on the fifth floor of an old, rundown building. A friend decided to visit her one day and brought along another woman -- a person of great wealth.
Since there was no elevator, the two ladies began the long climb upward. When they reached the second floor, the well-to-do woman commented, "What a dark and filthy place" Her friend replied, "It’s better higher up." When they arrived at the third landing, the remark was made, "Things look even worse here." Again the reply, "It’s better higher up." The two women finally reached the attic level, where they found the bedridden saint.
A smile on her face radiated the joy that filled her heart. Although the room was clean and flowers were on the window sill, the wealthy visitor could not get over the stark surroundings in which this woman lived. She blurted out, "It must be very difficult for you to be here like this" Without a moment’s hesitation the shut-in responded, "It’s better higher up." She was not looking at temporal things. With the eye of faith fixed on the eternal, she had found the secret of true contentment.
That is the flag waving on the side of the river of godlessness. I pray that if you are looking at it this evening to prevent you from floating comfortably downstream toward destruction. I pray that God will wake you up and open the eyes of your heart and set you to stroking—not with legal works to earn anything from God, but with the stroke of love and faith and joy. That is true Christianity.
God is speaking to you right now and asking you to examine your heart. Do you really have that love for God and your fellow man? Do you really have that faith that takes away fear and gives you courage to become a doer of God’s Word? And do you really have that joy under all circumstances because you know that you are a child of God?
Let us tonight remember again how we arrived here and now at this point. Let us worship Him who sacrificed Himself for our sins so it is possible for God to cause us to be born again and make us His children. Let us celebrate the Lord’s Supper tonight.