Advent 2022 – Week 3
Welcome Home: Inviting Jesus to Make My Heart His Home!
A Home of Joy
Something interesting you may not know about my family is that years ago Kimberly and I named our home. This is the first house we have ever owned, having previously rented or lived in military housing. The naming of our house didn’t happen for years, but after the first five to six years of pastoral ministry here in New Castle, we decided to call it, “The Haven.” The definition of a haven is, “any place of safety and shelter.” Some synonyms for the word haven are “retreat, anchorage, cover, harbor, sanctum, or sanctuary.” We want our home to be a space for grace – a sanctuary where God is at work in and through us, a retreat to find rest for the soul, a safe harbor from the storms of life, a sanctum from the insanity of the world, a cover from the attacks of the enemy, a sacred place where we will love and disciple our children to walk in the ways of the Lord.
Additionally, years ago, we named our home school, “The Little House Discipleship Academy.” This merges our family’s heritage with my sixth (or seventh) Cousin Laura Ingalls Wilder and her famous series of books, The Little House on the Prairie, and our focus on raising our children in the Word to train them to walk in a manner worthy of their calling. As a family, we intentionally and diligently protect our home to be a home of hope, love, joy, and peace. To do this, we must very intentionally and diligently walk in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ so that our hearts and minds are a haven of God’s presence before we can work together as husband and wife to create a home that lives up to its own namesake, “The Haven.” Friends, nothing happens by accident nor happenstance; you must be diligent.
This Christmas, I am inviting you to surrender your heart to be Christ’s home so that your home may become a home of hope, love, joy, and peace – a place where the weary of mind and body, a place where the heavy-burdened of heart and soul, can come and find rest (Matthew 11:28-30). If you want to transform your home, you must start with your own heart – you must become a person of hope, love, joy, and peace.
In the first two weeks, we focused on transforming our hearts into homes of hope and love, today, the message will focus how our faith invites Jesus Christ to transform our hearts into havens of joy. There is great joy you receive through a relationship with Jesus Christ! This is not only the joy of our eternal salvation, secured through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but this is the work of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of God’s presence in and though our lives that gives us a joy that will empower us through the mountaintops and valleys of our emotions and life experiences.
To illustrate my emphasis on our hearts being havens of joy so that we can create homes of joy, I want to emphasize the famous passage from Nehemiah 8:10, “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” As most of you know, I am currently studying the book of Nehemiah for my daily devotional phone calls, which then is transformed into the material for my Seize the Moment devotional books with AGF Publishing. As I was studying this passage, I wrote this devotional for this coming week’s daily phone call:
Dry Tortugas National Park is one of the most remote parks in our national park system. It is seventy miles off the coast of Key West, and you can only get there by seaplane or boat. As part of its natural wonder and historic significance, Dry Tortugas is the only deep-water safe harbor in that vicinity, making it a strategic location when ships were the key to both commerce and security for our growing nation. For this reason, Fort Jefferson, a massive stronghold, was built on the island, to protect American ships and sailors.
Whether it’s from the storms of life or the dangers of enemies, we all need a safe harbor – a stronghold to find shelter or refuge. Inside the stronghold of Jerusalem, with its finished walls and restored gates, Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest taught the nation of Israel where they would find their safe harbor – not in a walled city, but in God’s Word. Nehemiah 8:9-10 captures the moment they first heard the Torah:
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people were weeping when they heard the words of the law. Then he said to them, “Go, eat of the fat, drink of the sweet, and send portions to him who has nothing prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
The Hebrew word translated “strength” means stronghold, refuge, or fortress. The joy of the Lord is both our safe harbor from storms and our stronghold from enemies. As Psalm 18:2 declares, “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”
Seize the moment and find shelter in the safe harbor of God’s joy – put your faith in Jesus Christ!
Your home becomes a space for grace when you have become a safe harbor of God’s joy. This happens by inviting Jesus Christ to make your heart His home. The Christmas story, in Luke 2:9-14, foretells the purpose for Christ’s coming into the world:
And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. “This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”
Christ came to bring us “great joy!” This is as applicable for your heart and your home, as it is for world peace. Let’s do a quick survey about what the Bible teaches about God’s joy:
- Psalm 16:11. “You will make known to me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever.”
- Psalm 118:24. “This is the day which the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
- Proverbs 15:13. “A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.”
- John 17:13. “But now I come to You; and these things I speak in the world so that they may have My joy made full in themselves.”
- Romans 15:13. “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
- Galatians 5:22-23. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
- Philippians 4:4. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!”
- Hebrews 12:2-3. “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
Joy is not a response to circumstances; joy is the rock of our well-being – a firm foundation from which we can experience all other emotions and respond in covenant faithfulness to God, according to His promises for our lives. When joy is the deep bedrock of our souls we can experience the human realities of anger, grief, and sadness without being displaced from the rock of God’s joy into the shifting sands of human emotions. You can experience the hardships and injustices of real life while finding the security of God’s stronghold, which has been strategically built in the only safe harbor to be found out in the open seas of life. The King has made a way for this to be done for you! You can respond authentically as a child of God, and authoritatively as a soldier for Jesus, because you are secure in the Father’s love and safe in His sovereign grace.
It takes diligence to make your home a haven of joy! It’s not a response to our circumstances, it is the stronghold of our lives, the haven of our sanity, the sanctum of our peace, the rock on which we build our lives – it is the victory of our faith in Jesus Christ! Always remember, joy is the fruit of the Spirit, not a manifestation of the flesh. It is so much more than an emotional response to our circumstances. I close with this prayerful exhortation from 1 Peter 1:3-9:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.