Contemporary Christian worship trades in joy. Americans expect to enjoy life. To get people to attend church, successful ministers find, we need to provide the experience of joy.

I tend to agree with this. When people leave church feeling worse than when they entered, they usually will not return. Church experiences have to be uplifting. They have to offer something special, that "heart strangely warmed" that John Wesley felt at the pietist service that changed his life. Ever since the 1700s, the successful churches have been those that brought people a skin-touch experience with the living God.

I daresay that everyone who ever joined the Unification Church did so as the result of such an experience. But the life of faith after joining a church tends in a different direction. That different direction is one of sacrifice. It was a bit different, I daresay, for Jesus’ followers, between the days when he had thousands of followers, and the day of his trial and crucifixion.

So last week as I prepared my Sunday sermon, I wanted to talk about the value of sacrifice. But I stopped in mid-thought with a red flag: wait a minute, I thought, I’ve got to give the people a feeling of joy. So the question arose: how do we turn sacrifice into joy?

I turned to a passage in which Jesus talked about joy, and lo and behold, he connected joy with some pretty serious matters. The passage is John 15:9-14. "9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command."

There it is: "my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete." Sounds pretty joyful. But what is Jesus saying? He is giving some hard words. First, Jesus’ love is conditional. Verse 10 states that IF you obey my commands, you will remain in my love. Verse 14 likewise: IF you do what I command, you are my friends. Jesus is telling us that he has expectations of us. We must fulfill his expectations in order to merit his love and friendship.

Wait a minute, hold on there! What about free grace? What about Jesus loving me, even me, despite my sin? We see there is more to the New Testament message than salvation by grace alone.

Second, remaining in Jesus’ love depends upon obedience to commands. Not very seeker-friendly! Verse 10: "obey my commands." Commands? I thought Jesus’ just made friendly suggestions! But Jesus goes on to say that he has obeyed his Father’s commands, and he expects the same from us toward him. His friendship, in verse 14, is also based upon our doing what he commands.

Third, what does he command? He commands that we love each other as he has loved us. And, dare we ask, how might that be? That, he answers, is love to the degree that one is willing to DIE for the other. Jesus, poor Jesus, was the only one, during his brief tenure in this world, to really believe this and act upon it. He died for our sake; no one rose up to die for his sake.

And the result? It’s what we all have been waiting for: JOY! Jesus’ JOY will be IN us, and our JOY will be complete (v. 11). There you have it: sacrifice and joy. Now, I’d like to unpack these words of Jesus, as the theologians say, so that we might see more clearly what Jesus was talking about.

Our culture exalts joy. Usually the arbiters of taste interpret joy as the satisfaction of physical desires: skiing vacations, a private beach with a beautiful member of the opposite sex, a fast and sleek car, fine clothes and chic restaurants, fine chips—computer and potato—and fine sneakers. Sometimes the appeal is to higher values, such as personal independence, being a geek and loving it, spending seven days on a bike on the back roads of Italy (from which all Italian teenagers are trying desperately to escape). Sometimes the culture interprets joy in the higher reaches, such as friendship (sitting around a campfire ingesting intoxicants) or marriage (sharp wife, klutzy husband, resourceful children, sanitary dog).

But are these the makings of true and deep joy? Are these what Jesus was talking about? In fact, all these things fade away. The campfire goes out, it rains at the beach, the car has a flat, the marriage goes stale, the kids rebel, the dog poops, the neighborhood declines. All these things are good … BUT. As Augustine wrote 1,600 years ago, they are good … but they have to enter into the proper relationship with God.

To do that, we need to understand something about God. God is loving, kind, principled, just, etc. That’s not what I want to stress here. What I want to stress is that God has adversaries and His adversaries also trade in joy. When the adversary proffers joy, what do we call it? We call it temptation.

We don’t hear the word, temptation, much these days. If we do, it is usually in connection with a big, rich, fatty, calorie-ridden piece of chocolate cake. Sometimes temptation is associated with illicit sex. But, hey, according to the Democrats, Hustler is a news-magazine and Ken Starr is the pornographer. They fete Larry Flynt while arguing against witnesses in Clinton’s trial in the name of protecting America from pornography. In other words, our culture has evacuated the concept of temptation.

Do you think, in the Garden of Eden, God appeared as a loveable father and Satan appeared as a hideous monster? Not at all. God appeared as a stern rule-giver and Satan appeared as a beautiful angel offering all the blessings for free!!!! That, my friends, is God’s adversary. Jesus, on the other hand, said that there is a cost: obedience to God’s commands.

Now, cars, clothes, freedom, friendship, marriage—these things are from God. How does the adversary misuse them? It all has to do with timing—he offers them to us before we are ready for them, and he persuades us to cling to them after they have fulfilled their purpose. The timing here stands in relation to the process of human spiritual growth.

For example, I want my daughter to have a car, but NOT YET. She’s 15 years old. But she wants a car, and I have to tell her to sacrifice that desire for the time being. So who is the rogue who comes along and gives her a car before she knows how to drive? That guy is my adversary (and her adversary, if she only knew).

This means that every blessing of God can become a tool in the hand of the adversary. The critical point is timing in relationship to human growth. That’s why parents universally do not want their children to have sex before marriage. Sex is like driving a car. It can take you a long way, but it can also kill you if you don’t know how to manage it.

The parent, like God, provides age-appropriate gifts to the child. I gave my 2-year old daughter a doll. She was ecstatic. She named the doll; she slept with the doll; she dressed the doll. In fact, for a while she forgot all about her father, she was so consumed in her love for the doll.

She learned things through the doll, so I was happy about it. Sometimes if I tried to get her attention, I had to take the doll away and she fought to keep it. She was upset with me, and spurned me for her doll. Well, that’s okay for a 2-year old. She has to have a sense of her territory over-against her dad’s territory. Okay, she’s defining herself. I can handle that. Maybe that’s why I gave her the doll; that’s what dolls are for.

And that’s what bikes are for. And that’s what baseball cards are for. And that’s what computers are for. And that’s what cars are for. Each is an age-appropriate gift from a parent to a child, to help them take the next step upon life’s path. But the term "age-appropriate" means that there comes a time when the child should go beyond the toy and see the parental love hidden behind it.

So there will come a day when my daughter puts aside her doll and comes to me. I might not expect a 3-year old to do so, but I surely would expect a 10-year old to do so. And if my 10-year old daughter is still clinging to a doll and rejecting her parents, what comes then? The parents say, sacrifice the doll.

What? She might say, sacrifice my DOLL!?! The parents know that what the child is going to receive is a million times more valuable than the doll. But for the child, it is a difficult sacrifice. The child is not really sure what is to be gained in return for the sacrifice. The child has to go on faith.

And here is a crucial point: we usually think of sacrifice as having to do with SIN. Under this scenario, sinful humankind must make offerings to an angry God in order to avoid the destruction we deserve as punishment for our sins. This may be true, but it is not the entire truth. Sacrifice also is a part of the process of growth.

The child sacrifices the doll as a part of the path of spiritual maturation. We sacrifice the lower good in order to be free to receive the higher good. So at some point, the parents have to issue a challenge to the child, for the child’s sake: is it me or the toy? This is an apparent sacrifice for the child: give up the toy!

"NO! I won’t give up my doll!" "I won’t give up my computer!" "I won’t give up my car!" "I won’t give up my house, family, country, … my life!" That is what human beings have been saying to God since time began. When the going got tough in the wilderness, the Israelites bemoaned their sacrifice of the flesh pots of Egypt. They had to sacrifice the miserable benefits they received as slaves, in order to gain the eternal blessings of freedom. For males, we have to sacrifice the miserable pleasures of pornography or prostitution, in order to gain the eternal blessings of marriage.

On the ultimate scale, the Messiah calls us to sacrifice everything of this world in order to gain eternal blessings in this world AND the next. Jesus said, "everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life." (Matt 19:29)

To give up my individual life for my family—that is filial piety. To sacrifice my family life for my country—that is patriotism. To sacrifice my commitment to my nation for the sake of the world—that is sainthood, and it occurs in the context of religion. To sacrifice my commitment to my religion for the sake of God—that is to become a divine being. The list of divine beings is short. Abraham is on it; he sacrificed the religion of Ur of the Chaldeans for God. Moses is on it; he sacrificed the religion of Egypt for God. Buddha is on it; he sacrificed devotion to Hinduism for God. Jesus is on it; he sacrificed his identity as a Jew for God. Mohammed is on it; he sacrificed obedience to paganism for God. Martin Luther is on it; he sacrificed salvation in the Catholic Church for God.

And where is the joy? The joy is in fulfilling our destiny as children of God. Where is that joy located? It is found in the original mind. The original mind knows what we are created to be. We will never find true joy until we find peace in our original mind. We are meant to be kings and queens of true love, lords and ladies of the cosmos.

A concept from Pascal helped me understand this. He pointed out that no one is unhappy about not having three eyes, because we know we are not created to have three eyes. But anyone who has only one eye is unhappy about it. No one but the rightful king of Spain is unhappy about not sitting on the Spanish throne. By the same token, no one other than a qualified astronaut is unhappy about not being aboard the next space shuttle. I’m not unhappy that I did not hit 70 homeruns last year, but Mark McGwire would be. I’m not unhappy if I don’t play in the Super Bowl, but the New York Jets would be.

Joy has to do with meeting expectations, with fulfilling potential. We all are born to be God’s true sons and daughters, to have perfect dominion over the physical and spiritual worlds, and to live a life of complete oneness with our parents, spouse, children and friends in the Kingdom of God. We may have dolls, computers, sweet dreams and flying machines, but if we don’t have what God created to have, and if we aren’t becoming what God created us to become, we will not have true joy, eternally. And to achieve what God planned for us takes sacrifice, not for sin, but for transcendence.

What did God plan for YOU? Each one of us needs to seek the answer to that question within our own original mind.

"Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls." (1 Peter 1:8-9)

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