Joy

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. I'm a little new here, as you may have guessed. I'm Pastor Owen Duncan, and I'm the Associate Pastor down at Faith Lutheran Church in Naples on Goodlett Frank Road, if you know where that is. But I'm really excited to be here today filling in for Pastor Roth, because he's out this weekend doing a mission trip with some of the college students, as was mentioned earlier. So I'm really excited that while he gets to go out and bring the gospel to people in action, I get to be here to get to bring you the gospel in words. I'm also excited because you're doing this series, Emotional Jesus, and I really lucked out. I got the good one. I got joy. Last week, he had a talk about Jesus being sad. The week before that, he had a talk about Jesus being amazed. Compassion, that one's not too bad. But joy, well, that's an easy one, right? It's hard not to want to talk about joy. I remember we were at Oktoberfest at Faith Lutheran Church last week, and I remember a kid who was running around telling everyone they could find, they're about to bring out the ice cream! They're about to bring out the ice cream! That's joy. That excitement that you just can't keep it in, it changes how you look at everything. That's the kind of joy that we're talking about today. Not just happiness, but this sense of wholeness, of completeness. This sense that everything is right with the world. It's a feeling we get once in a while, and it's one Jesus has, too. And so we're going to talk about that. And especially we're going to talk about it in Luke chapter 15, where Jesus tells a story, a parable, that culminates with him talking about what gives him the greatest joy. Before we get into that, though, I want to look at the context of this parable. After all, whenever Jesus says something, it's always a good idea to start by looking at, well, why is he saying this? Because the context of someone saying something changes what that thing can mean. If I say to you, it's your last chance, well that means something very different if I'm at a bake sale than if I'm reporting the weather to you. It makes a big difference, the context. And so I want to start by looking at the context of this parable that Jesus tells. And we see that context in the first two verses of chapter 15. It says, Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, This man receives sinners and eats with them. And then in response, Jesus talks to the Pharisees, he tells them the story. So there's our context. The context is the Pharisees. They're one of the more familiar names in the Old Testament. In fact, even today, if I call someone a Pharisee, you all kind of know what that means. It's not a nice thing to say. The Pharisees are usually the bad guys in all these stories, right? I mean, the Pharisees, they're famous for their hypocrisy, their being stuck up. I mean, these are literally the guys who put Jesus on the cross. They're not the good guys. But I think sometimes there's some stories where we see the Pharisees do something and we go, Oh my goodness, how could you possibly do that? And there's some stories where we look at the Pharisees and go, Oh, well, that's actually kind of reasonable. Because in their day, most people did not think of the Pharisees as the bad guys. In their day, the Pharisees were the faithful religious leaders. Maybe the closest analogy to today would be to say that they were the pastors of their own time. And so sometimes we read stories about the Pharisees and we go, Oh my goodness, this is horrible. But sometimes we read a story about the Pharisees and we go, Well, I could see myself feeling the same way. I think this is one of those stories, actually. Because what the Pharisees really care about here, what's driving them is a sense of justice, of wanting things to be fair. And that's something we can all relate to. And in fact, since I'm talking about joy today, it's something we can sometimes find a little joy in. At least a little bit. On the Internet, there's this website called Reddit. And people post all sorts of things on it. There's one particular web page on Reddit where people post stories. It's called Malicious Compliance. And people post these stories and they read them because they're enjoyable to read. They're fun to read. They're satisfying stories. Here's an example of one of them. There's an individual who was working some job and she had a manager who was just a jerk. Just micromanaging everything. Thought she knew better than everyone. Wouldn't listen to a word anybody said. Bossed people around all the time. This individual had a bad manager. And so one day, the individual got an email from the manager. And the manager said, oh, could you print out that email? So they printed out the email, brought it to their manag...