A Joy-Filled Life

There’s a new movie coming out this summer, highly anticipated after years of development and round the clock camerawork: it’s called “ME”, all directed, written, produced, acted, and filmed by yours truly. Is this a picture of what your life looks like?
Many times we can become so self consumed, that we have begun living life as if we are the axis around which the earth rotates and that everything that happens around us or to us is some way connected to something we did or reacted to. The problem is simple: we’re self-centered sinful beings. There are millions upon millions of occurrences in our daily lives, some direct and others indirect. If you start to think about it, it can be quite disturbing. Think of a recent sin: lying, cheating, thinking poorly of another, lusting… all of these acts tie back into one central fact: we were aiming to reach some sort of goal for ourselves. Lying to avoid getting in trouble, cheating to get an A, thinking poorly of another to feel better about one’s self, lusting for self-pleasure at the cost of another. There’s something backward about this way of thinking.
What does God to have to say in this matter? Let’s take a look at Phillipians 2.

“1If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. 3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
5Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6Who, being in very nature[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature[b] of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
9Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”

Let’s dissect this a bit. The first two verses are talking of our purpose, “making [His] joy complete” by being like-minded with Christ. It’s definitely a tall order, but where do we even begin to start? Verses 3-5 begin to detail how to do so, by renouncing our “selfish ambition” – did you catch that? – and “consider others better than yourselves”. It’s not exactly part of our sinful nature to do so, but with help from the spirit, we can drive ourselves to live outside the norm and follow the example of the most humble Man and greatest Servant that ever lived: Jesus Christ.
Going to Kanakuk for 7 years as a kid, and for anyone else who has been there, Joe White drilled into my head this concept of the I’m Third lifestyle, or as some of you may have heard it called living out JOY (an acronym for Jesus 1st, Others 2nd, Yourself 3rd). Living life in this way can and will produce greater joy and happiness than you could ever imagine attaining by following your selfish ambitions that Satan has tempted you with. Now let us not get confused by what it means when putting others second. Edward Welch describes the way to live beautifully in his book When People are Big and God is Small:
“Regarding other people, our problem is that we need them (for ourselves) more than we love them (for the glory of God). The task God sets for us is to need them less and love them more. Instead of looking for ways to manipulate others, we will ask God what our duty is toward them. This perspective does not come naturally to any of us, and many of us need to look at this truth from several angles before we can see it… This truth is another of Scripture’s divine paradoxes – the path of service is the road to freedom” (Welch 19).
It is a matter of loving others and not yourself. Living a joy-filled lifestyle is learning to love in the way God has commanded us to. John Piper does a good job of illustrating the joy-filled lifestyle in his book Don’t Waste Your Life:
“Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need most deeply. And to have all else without him is to perish in the end. The Bible says that you can give away all that you have and deliver your body to be burned and have not love (1 Corinthians 13:3). If you don’t point people to God for everlasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life…” (Piper 35).
This message should leave you disturbed and wanting to change, as I know it sure did me.
To finish, remember that to die for Christ is to live, and we must die to ourselves before we can truly live. I’ll leave you with a thought to ponder from Piper. “So here is the question to test whether you have been sucked into the world’s distortion of love: Would you feel more loved by God if he made much of you, or if he liberated you from the bondage of self-regard, at great cost to himself, so that you enjoy making much of him forever?” (Piper 36)