Day 21: Nehemiah 8:10
And Nehemiah continued, “Go and celebrate with a feast of rich foods and sweet drinks, and share gifts of food with people who have nothing prepared. This is a sacred day before our Lord. Don’t be dejected and sad, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” (NLT)
“For the joy of the Lord is your strength.” I love that line. Not ‘the rules,’ ‘the anger,’ ‘the judgement,’ but “the JOY of the Lord is your strength.” Nehemiah was talking about celebration. This is just after the Israelites returned from captivity in Babylon and had rebuilt the city walls, and Ezra read to them from the book of the Law of Moses. People were sad, but he instructed people to celebrate, to share with others this sacred day. “Don’t be dejected and sad, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
What things today are making us dejected and sad? Just about everything, I’d say. From small things like comparison on social media ‘wow, their lives look so much more interesting than mine’; the state of the economy ‘which bank is going to crash now? How much higher will interest rates go?’; world events like escalating worldwide tensions and war, famine, earthquakes, flooding and drought spread across the globe, like it's trying to balance out the chaos around the planet. So many of these things, or even only one of these things could make us sad. I’m sad just thinking about them. But that is because the focus is on the wrong spot. “The joy of the LORD is your strength.”
If we put our eyes and focus on God, keep him at the centre of all we do, the chaos of the world will still be there, but it will be on the outside. It will not be what we are thinking about day and night. That can be very hard to do. We’re bombarded with it from every side. So we need to be intentional about focusing on God. Not his power, omniscience and judgement, but his Joy. Think of it: he created the universe, and amongst all the planets in all the galaxies in all the star systems, here we are. Not only that, but he crafted every single thing in it, pulling a sprinkle of stardust from here, and a molecule of that over there – and setting systems in motion to watch everything grow and evolve. It’s like baking the most complicated dessert with the simplest ingredients.
… for the rest of the entry, read “30 Days of Joy: A Devotional”
