Man, we are so excited. I don't know about you guys, but y'all, the, you guys have been popping this morning. This, it's really good. Like worship just felt different, you know what I'm saying? Like, it, it was amazing.

And so I, I, I'm just excited, uh, to be diving into the word with you. If you haven't met yet, my name's Blake. I'm part of the team here, and I'd be a little bit remiss if I didn't take just a second before we dive into the word today, uh, to talk about Turning Point weekend. Turning Point weekend is one of the most incredible experiences for our students. Sixth through 12th grade, anybody in the room at our campus has been to TPW.

Show of hands. Lemme see. We've got some TPW alumni here. That's awesome. This is our 25th year y'all of Turning Point weekend.

I think that's something we're celebrating is celebrate it everywhere. Yeah. I just think it's incredible because this is years 25 of pouring into our students, investing in them. Because here's the deal, we don't just believe that our students are the generation of tomorrow. We're believing they're leading people to know love and follow Jesus today.

Come on, somebody, like, we're believing that today is the day for our students. And so sixth through 12th graders, if you're, you're probably not gonna listen to the rest of this message. That's okay. I understand. I was, I was you at one point, but listen to this, but is the last week that you get the early bird prize, everybody knows, mama, you're in the room right now.

You want the early bird price for TPW? Go ahead. Make that commitment. Yes, there's gonna be 1,001 things that pop up that particular weekend. It happens every weekend.

Get the ticket. Anyway, 25 years, we are going to be celebrating this. And here's what I'm believing, that there is going to be salvation as a result of Turning Point weekend this year. That God is going to bring people, he's gonna bring students to himself. And my prayer is that somebody listening to this, you make the decision to go today.

And I guarantee you, it'll make you happy. It'll make you happy to be a part of that experience. Speaking of happiness though, there was something really funny. I saw, uh, the other day I was looking at news. You know, when you look at news, uh, y'all laughed at news and happy those two words just don't go together, do they?

No. When you, when I was actually, I was looking at the place where you get the best news, Facebook, and I was looking on Facebook and scrolling through, and I saw something the other day, uh, that had Yale University and Yale University made this big post. And they said, we are celebrating that 3.7 million people have accessed our digital class online called The Art of Wellbeing. The Art of Wellbeing. This is, they've affectionately dubbed it their happiness course.

This is a, the course that you can take, y'all listen to this, this, this just blew my mind for 15 sessions and the easy price of $49, you can get a certificate through Yale University that tells you that you're happy. I think that's astounding because 3.7 million people in this world thought that that was a good idea. Maybe somebody in the room thought about it. I thought about taking it. You can take it for free, but in order to get the certificate, you gotta pay $49.

And you know who I, I think is the happiest out of this course. Yale University, Kyle texted me earlier and he said, there is $185 million in the bank account of Yale University because of those 3.7 million people that wanted to be happy. Happiness is big business, y'all. And here's the deal. I've, I've noticed that when you think about happiness, when you think about, oh man, this is what it's gonna take to truly make me happy.

I'm gonna have everything that I need, or I'm gonna take this course and it's gonna gimme 15 small steps to my best life. Now those all kinds of things, they fall apart. There was a reporter that came through a little bit later. He, he kind of thought the same thing I did about the Yale University Art of Happiness or Art of Wellbeing stuff. And he, he started interviewing people that took the course and he said, Hey, you know, it's been a couple months.

You've lived some life. How has the happiness course helped you? Like, has it helped you? Are you still happy? And they said, you know, it's the funniest thing most people responded with.

Well, I was, I was happy for a couple of weeks and then the grocery bill came due and I had to pay the mortgage. Or then I went back on Facebook and then I went and do you see like people can promise happiness, but it just kind of is a decline, especially in our culture nowadays. Culture is not, is not big on happiness, especially because we are less than a month away from a presidential election. Hello. It is not at all happiness in the news or in the buzz or what you wanna be talking about.

No, no, no. It is about discord. It is about strife. It is about hatred and vitriol and how much can we hate the other person? And how can we get every single person worked up so that you're looking for happiness, but it's nowhere to be found.

Oh, and hella, there is an answer over here. And if you will just do this thing, you can be happy. Exhausts me. When I think about it over and over and over again, there's not freedom in that. Happiness is not something that we can just get inside of us.

What if friends, as we've been in this series called Taste and see what if there is more to this life than trying to make myself happy? What if instead the Lord wants to give me joy? What if instead the Lord wants to create in me through walking in His spirit, this taste and see that we've been a part of that, we've been experiencing together? What if instead He wants to place joy inside my heart so that as I go out into the world, as I lean in on my conversations with people, the thing that comes up out of me isn't hatred, isn't vitriol isn't strife. It is the deep seated joy of the Lord.

That is my strength. That's what Paul would say, that as we walk in the spirit, we receive the gift of joy. Today, that's what I wants to talk about for just a few minutes. It's kind of unpacking this idea between happiness and joy. We're, we're continuing on in the fruit of the Spirit.

Dr. Santos, who was the one that started the happiness course at Yale, you know, they have 15 modules. I'm gonna give us 28 minutes to experiencing deep seated joy. But since she gave a course, I think it's only fitting that we also kind of have a course in joy that we go to Scripture and see what Paul says. So we've been in this series called Taste and see, and didn't Kyle do an amazing job last week of unpacking love and just the fruit of the spirit as in general?

I thought it was an astounding message. And in fact, there was so much that I took away that's kind of built in to the first part of our time together today. And so what I want us to do is go back into that. We're gonna unpack that second fruit, the fruit of joy. So let's go to Galatians chapter five, verses 19 through 25.

And it says this. It says, the acts of the flesh are obvious, sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions factions and envy. Sounds like a Facebook newsfeed, drunkenness, orgies and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But then he kind of turns everything.

And he says, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, what we would call patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control against such things. There is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its desires. And so since we live by the Spirit, y'all need to circle this. Let us keep in step with the Spirit today.

We're gonna work on keeping in step. Y'all. Can we pray together towards that end that his word would take root in our hearts? Let's pray. Father, we do pray that, that nothing else out of this time together would come out of this, but your word, father, would you speak to us?

Would you give us a fresh understanding of your word here? That it would, it would plant deeply that we would abide in it and that out of that outgrowth, that we would experience the fruit in a way that we've never experienced before. Father, we pray that for every single person listening today that our campus isn't online, father, would you move in our hearts. We love you. We praise you in Christ and we pray and everybody said amen.

Amen. So the way I wanna start off today, one thing we need to know about the fruit of the spirit is that it's a gift. The fruit of the spirit are a gift to the world through us. Do you, do you understand this? Do you see this, that as we abide, Kyle talked about this last week as we abide in him that fruit starts to grow up.

And so I want us to dive into the word. I've actually got a, a really cool little tool that the production team got me going with today. They're gonna help us unpack in real time the, the word of God. This is something that I love to do. We do this with our lead team all the time.

And so if you want like a heavier duty session of this, then join lead team. It's really simple. Just do that. And then, uh, but it's, it's always a lot of fun. So let's unpack this together.

'Cause there's something I want us to see before we go to joy in general. Do you see how in verses 19 through 21 watch this, we do this right here, verses 19 through 21, that there's so much happening in these verses. It just feels like Paul has just given one quick hit after another one, another one, another one. It's like the acts of the flesh then are, are self propagating. They're building on each other.

They are sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy fits of rage. Just feels like he's going on and on and on. Selfish ambition, dissensions factions and envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like. It's almost like Paul is scribbling out all of the things that as we live in the flesh, as we live in the way we want our lives to go, this is the end result. This is the fruit of what we get living for ourselves.

It's like you're just scribbling around, oh, it's this and it's this and it's this and it's this, and it's this. It's all of these things built up. But you notice they have no rhyme or reason. Yes, they are sins against God himself. There's sins against people, other people, and they are sins against our own bodies as well.

But it's like a hurricane of 120 mile an hour of winds of sin coming at you and just bombarding you again and again and again and again. This is the downward spiral of trying to live life on our own accord. Friends constantly going lower and lower and lower and lower. And Paul says, and the like, what he's saying is there's really no end to the amount of creative ways that we can be as humans to royally screwing this up. There's no end in sight.

But then he says, but verse 22, he says, there's a different way to live. There's a different way to experience this. Look at this right here, the fruit of the spirit. And then his tone shifts. It kind of moves into a a different way.

It's not so all, all over the place. It's not so this and this and this and this. No, no, no, it's next. And next. This is, this is what something that blew me away when I was thinking about it.

The fruit of the spirit is love. Kyle did an amazing job with this last week, unpacking love as the fruit of the spirit. One thing that we need to recognize about the fruit friends is that every fruit, every rest of this series that we're gonna talk about is founded on this one word love. When we have a proper view of the love of God and we experience him, we experience that love, then the rest of the fruit begin to flesh out and we get to experience it. But this is something I thought was so cool.

Do you notice how each one of these fruit they build on one another? This is what blew my mind, is love and joy. Well, what happens when we experience the love of God, when we like, we truthfully take it in? This is what we're gonna talk about today. It leads to joy, right?

Yeah. We see joy as a result of finding love in who God is and the love that he has for us. Man, I, I don't know about you, but the rest of this message is gonna be talking about the connection between experiencing the love of God and receiving the joy that comes with that love. But then it keeps going. Joy leads to what?

Peace. Do you see this when I'm, when I'm filled with the joy of the Lord, when the joy is so active in my life, I can't help but to be peaceful in every circumstance. I can't help but to say that I am confident in who God is. Now I'm preaching the rest of the message before we even get there. But this, let's keep going.

So what does peace lead to forbearance? What we would know to be patience. When I'm peaceful in a situation, when I have peace, that everything is gonna work out to the way that he has called it to work out. Man, that allows me to be patient, right? I don't have to push for things.

I don't have to. I don't strive for things. I don't have to earn things. No, no. I can be patient in receiving what the Lord brings.

And if I'm patient, Lord knows if I got my patience working, I'm kind. Because I'm not trying to force anybody to do anything. I'm not trying to use the power to dominate someone else's life. You see how they just build on each other and kindness leads to goodness, what we would call generosity. If I'm kind with someone, it allows me to be generous towards them to build my life and goodness.

And that leads to a faithfulness, to them. Faithfulness is a strong word in Scripture. But when I'm generous towards a person, that means I'm gonna steadfast for their life. I'm going to give towards them and be faithful. And so that leads to a gentleness with people when I'm giving of my life to someone else, well, doesn't it make sense that I become gentle with them?

I don't force my hand upon them. And then look what it leads to at the very end. I love this self-control. Self-control. What is self-control?

But the God-given ability to remove all of this, Everything that Paul had set up at the top, when we receive the fruit, starting with love building all the way over to self-control, all of this goes away. We get to live a life of self-control that is rooted in the love of God. Now for us, we need to work on this piece right here together. I hit the eraser. We need to work on that.

The love to joy connection. How do we describe joy? Because I'm gonna be honest with you guys, friends, joy, to me, is one of those words that you know what it looks like, right? But you don't know how to define it. You really don't know how to describe it or explain it.

It's just like, no, it's a, it's a feeling, right? You know, it's, it's, I feel that way sometimes. I'm joyful. I really can't stand it when people say No, you just gotta be more joyful, man. Well, how, how this is, it reminds me of like trying to get a picture of my son.

He's two. Has anybody ever tried to take a picture of their kid? And you say, and you work for four minutes saying, you gotta smile for me, buddy. Come on. I need you to smile.

Will you please smile? And then you get this. This is the picture that you come with. It's just like a, Hey man, hang loose. We're doing the thing, right?

But then you take him to preschool and you've got the professional photographer. The professional photographer knows that you don't tell a kid to smile. You tell a kid to point at their belly button. That's what gets the smile. It's the same thing with joy.

You can't just tell somebody to be joyful. You get the fake smile. But when you are giving them a reason to be joyful, you start to experience that joy. Now, my problem is I'm like the kid that didn't sing the song. I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.

I was the one asking where, right? You know, you everybody knows the song. And I resonate with the person asking where it's like, I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, where? Down in my heart, where down in my heart, where, where I'm always asking that question like, where is the joy? How do we experience it?

How do we see it? So we've got to go back to verse 22. I want us to unpack this word joy real quickly. I gotta gotta clean up my, my, my stuff right here for a second. Let's go back to this word joy, because joy is an interesting word, right?

We think we know what it means. We think we have a good definition of it. But do we have Paul's definition of it? So what I wanna give you just right here real quickly is something to take away. What is the original word for joy?

As we see joy, right? We know that it's not a feeling. It's not just a feeling. It's something more than that. It's something more than something we just experience.

No biblical true joy. The word here is called rah. If you say it this way, you could spell it like this, rah. And this is what it means. And awareness of God's favor and grace.

If you want a definition for joy, friends, if you want to know what true biblical joy is, there it is. It's not just a feeling. It's not just the butterflies on the inside. It's not just having a good understanding of what, what life is all about or the circumstances of life. It's different than happiness.

No biblical joy. What Paul is talking about is rah, which means an awareness of God's grace and his favor in your life. If you want to experience joy, if you want to experience the fullness of God in your life, then you need to go back to love. You need to sit in that love, abide in that love when we, and then we become aware of God's grace and his favor in our life. The awareness leads to that understanding that man, there is something different about me.

Yes, maybe my life is not going the way I wanted it to. Maybe things aren't working out in the way that I wanted them to, but there is something in here that I cannot describe, but I am now made aware that there is something different. One Peter, he actually, he writes about this, Peter writes about this in one Peter 1, 8, 9. He says this. He says, though you haven't seen him talking about Jesus, you love him.

And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and you're filled within. Look, check this out, inexpressible and glorious joy, why? For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls, true joy. Friends, is found in the love of Jesus. Nothing else resting in his love.

And like one Peter said, there is an inexpressible, like I can't explain it. There's something happening to me. Y'all. I have experienced this. Has anybody else experienced this in your life where you're like, Hey, my life, maybe it's not going great.

Things aren't awesome, things aren't good. But let me tell you something. Jesus has saved me. He has given me new life. He's put breath in these lungs and I know that my future is gonna look a whole lot better than my past.

'Cause I know where I'm headed. I know where God is bringing me, and that's bringing something out of me that I can't explain, and it's joy. So I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where in the love of Jesus Christ, that's where I have it and my friends, nothing can take that away. Nothing.

No circumstance, no enemy, no problems. Nothing that you face can steal that joy from you because it is sure in him, he accomplished the work, not me. He did the work on the cross, not me. So we have a working definition of joy. Now we need kind of a description.

We need to see it in action, right? Where better place can we see joy in action than in Philippians, the book of Philippians. This is Paul. He's in the middle of probably the best place to write about joy, a prison cell. And he's writing to the church at Philippi, and so he's coming to this church, he's writing to him, and the word joy is used over and over and over in the midst of a prison cell.

He's locked and changed. He's surrounded by guards. He doesn't have anywhere to sleep, lay his head or do anything. The door stays closed. He can only have a visitor every now and then to retrieve his letters and take 'em to other churches.

And it's in that place that he decides to write about joy. I think that that makes it even more potent as we experience what Paul says, because at the very beginning of the letter, Paul writes what I think is one of the most joyful texts in all of Scripture. Philippians chapter one, starting in verse three. I wanna go to it together. I want us to kind of unpack this as we see joy in action.

Philippians one, three through six says this. It says, I think my God, every time I remember you in all of my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now and being confident of this, that he who began a good work, come on. He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion. Until the day of Christ Jesus. Paul was in the middle of prison and he wrote this, he was confident.

There's four things that I want us to see very, very quickly as we experience joy through Paul's words. How? What do we see here? The first thing is that Paul says, I thank my God every time I remember you, joy, friends is found in Thanksgiving. I've never met someone who's joyful, who isn't also thankful.

I've never met someone who isn't filled with joy, that isn't also filled with gratitude in the midst of any season, in the midst of any scenario, it doesn't matter what is going on in their lives. They have gratitude. They are thankful, not just about their, their circumstances. Paul wasn't thankful about being prison, but he was thankful for the people he was writing to. He was thankful for their story.

He was thankful for God's grace. He was thankful that God had reminded him of them. Biblical joy is activated in our lives, friends, not when we say, look at me, but when we say, I see you, that's joy. When we look at another person, it's like, no, I see you. I'm thankful for you.

I'm thankful for the role that you play in my life. I'm thankful for how God has brought you into my life. Paul started out his journey saying, I thank, but also look at this. He said, I thank my God. He didn't just say, I thank God.

He said, no, I think my God, this is my God, my God, I'm in prison. I'm locked up in chains, but I'm thinking, my God, because beyond this prison cell is the creator of the universe. And he that human hands may have made this, but he made that. That's my God that I'm thinking and giving honor to. There is an, there is an intimate relationship between God and Paul and he's like, I thank my God every time I remember you.

And how does he do it? In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy. We experience joy through prayer. This is so overlooked. We think that we just gotta live life and we gotta go get it.

Go get our blessing, go do all these things. But what if the greatest source of joy in your life was sitting down in the morning taking five minutes and saying, God, I pray for the people in my life. It is a privilege to pray for people. There is no greater work that we can do. And to lean in and to pray for people in the situations in what they're going and praying with joy, praying for people is a privilege.

And then check this out, why does he pray with joy? Because of your partnership in the Gospel? I love this word partnership. It's a very personal word for us as a church, right? We don't have members of venture church.

We have partners because we don't, we believe that membership has its privileges, but partnership has its responsibilities that as we partner together, the church is made whole and we go forth into our communities, into South Mississippi and we see God do something greater with us together than we could ever do on our own. That's partnership. So this is just a personal one for me. The reason why I am personally filled with joy is because of your partnership in the Gospel here at this church, because of things like the Christmas store that we're gonna be doing in a couple of months because of the faces that we're gonna see light up because the church left the building and we got to see something powerful take place and God got to move through your partnership. And that just fills me with joy.

So can I just really quickly say thank you to all of our campuses, to all of our friends online. You are a source of my joy because of your partnership in the Gospel from the first day until now, and then he ends it where we started this whole journey in joy, being confident of this, being confident. What is this? What that he who began the good work will carry it on to completion. He ain't gonna leave something half done.

He's not gonna leave your story half empty. He's not gonna leave your jar half full. He's not gonna leave you where you are. He is not gonna take you where you are. He's going to bring you into the completeness of the journey that he has set out from you.

The moment that he was nailed to the cross, Jesus was, and the moment that he was raised from the dead, that was a statement in the history of the world saying, I'm not going to leave them where they are. I'm going to bring them where I am. There's confidence in that friends, and if you want to experience joy in your life, have confidence in the love of Christ Jesus. I was debating on whether I was gonna share this or not, but there was a a, there's a phrase that's kind of been coming back to me as an understanding of joy. Something that you can take away.

And it's this phrase that joy is holy optimism, holy optimism, confidence in walking no matter what we are experiencing in our lives, wasn't gonna share it, but four days from now, mark's one month since my mother, uh, went to be with the Lord after a battle with cancer. It has been the craziest time. Y'all, the four months went so quickly and in the midst of all that the Lord, he was so faithful and it's hard to express except for this understanding of joy as holy optimism because we did not lose my mother. No heaven gained a citizen, and in the midst of that whole journey over those four months, man, there was grief. There's still grief and my heart is, feels like it's outside of my chest most days.

But in the midst of that, my friends, in the midst of the pain, in the midst of the heartache, in the midst of the herd, of the midst of me missing my mom, there is an understanding that Jesus brought to completion, her assignment, and he brought her through the portals of glory, and I'm gonna see her again. If you want joy in your life, this isn't about me. This isn't even about my mom. I want you to know what I have. I want you to know that there is something greater than happiness in this world.

I want you to know that there is something better than going and trying to chase after going for the next thing, getting the next promotion, getting the next raise, having the next social status. There's something more than that, and his name is Jesus. Because with Jesus, all of it comes in. All of it is taken up, and he binds it together and he says, there is hope for you. There is joy for you.

There is a future for you. And no matter what you're facing, no matter what you experience, the moment that he was on the cross, it's proof enough of the love that the creator of this universe has for you, and you can live with confidence in that love. My invitation to you is simple today. Do you have that confidence? Do you have that joy, that holy optimism that no matter what you face in this life, no matter what happens in this world, the enemy cannot take your joy from you because he can't take God's love from you?

Holy optimism. I wanna read you this quote. It's from Dal Moody. I love it. It says, happiness is caused by things that happen around me, and circumstances will mar it, but joy flows right on through trouble.

Joy flows on through the dark joy flows in the night as well as in the day joy flows all through persecution and opposition. It is an unceasing fountain bubbling up in the heart, a secret spring that the world can't see and doesn't know anything about. They don't know about our joy. Yet My friends, as we live and keep in step with the spirit, let us walk in the joy of the Lord. Let us be more than the people that just pander to the hatred and the vitriol being more than just another people that just kind of bottles up and goes along with the flow.

Can we be the countercultural kingdom people of God that moves forward and says, no, there is a joy in me. It doesn't matter what happens a month from now. It doesn't matter what happens in my life. I stand firm in the confidence and I exude the joy of the Lord, and you can have it too. I invite you into that joy today at all of our campuses.

Have confidence in him. Trust him as your savior. Give your life fully to him. No one else, nothing else. Nothing else will do just Jesus.

I invite you to pray. Give me Jesus. He can have everything else. Just give me Jesus today. You have an opportunity to respond and here at this campus and at every campus, you can come down and receive prayer.

Maybe you need prayer today, somebody that's leaning in on your story with you. Maybe you wanna come and take communion to remind yourself of the goodness of God and the confidence that you can have in him. Maybe you wanna come right on the crosses and write down the thing that you've been chasing to try to bring you happiness and trade it out for Jesus today. Say, gimme Jesus so that I can receive joy. Maybe you wanna stand and sing at the top of your lungs, or maybe you just wanna sit and pray, but whatever you do, don't not respond.

The word of God, whenever it hits our hearts, demands a response. Love demands it. Don't cast him off to the side today. Let me pray for you. Father, we are so thankful for this time.

Father, thank you for your goodness. There's no way that we can express our gratitude and our thankfulness what you've done. But Father, we can so easily chase after other things that make us want to find the happiness in our own way, in our own flesh, the acts of the flesh that Paul talked about. But God, I pray that right here, right now, we would say, give me nothing but Jesus. You can have everything else.

You can have all of that. Just give me Jesus so that we can abide in His love and that love can produce a confident, holy optimism of joy that we share with the world. Thank you, Jesus, for what you're doing in this place and in our hearts. We love you, Lord. It's in Christ name that we pray.

Amen.