Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

The gifts that the babe in the manger represents are beyond price. Forgiveness. Atonement. Hope. Reconciliation. Eternal Life and other “wonders of His love”, as Isaac Watts put it in his hymn “Joy to the World”. All this not only because Jesus was born, but also because Jesus grew up to become the Savior of all mankind, and gave us the gospel that continues to bring joy to countless lives in countless ways.

The first source of joy and gift from God we experience is being born into a family. So wrote Folliott S. Pierpoint when from his heart, long ago, he poured forth the words “For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child… Lord of all, to Thee we raise, this our hymn of grateful praise.” Not many blessings are more precious than the joy that can be experienced in a Christ-centered home filled with the warmth of affection and peace. Life is truly about relationships, and the instructions God has revealed through His written word for sustaining and nourishing those relationships have proven timeless for many families. My wife and I married at the age of seventeen and twenty-one after knowing one another for a mere four months. We can testify after twenty-eight years of warm and joyful marriage, that the Creator of marriage knows and has revealed in His word how we can survive the storms of life together—even when it seems as if you are living in Hurricane Alley. By turning to Scripture for the answers we have endured much, including the loss of two children, and have come through on the other side battle worn, yet with an honest joy. With God, we can all beat the odds. With God all things are possible. Truly as the hymn “Joy to the world” states, “He comes to make His blessings flow”.

A second source of joy remains for those whose hearts “prepare Him room”. This joy too begins with a birth into a family. A spiritual birth. 1 John 5:4 promises “…everyone born of God overcomes the world.” Christianity is an opportunity to first “get over yourself” and then to conquer all the rest that would then hold us back in this world. Upon being born again in baptism (John 3:3-7, Colossians 2:12) this new life (Romans 6:4) is a fresh start, and opportunity to say good-bye not only to the guilt of the past, but to every unhealthy addiction as well as the incalculable consequences staying in those addictions would have cost us. What liberation. As Joy to the World sings, “No more let sins and sorrows grow”.

Joy to the world, the Lord is come, and joy to the world, the Lord has promised to come yet again. His return will be the greatest source of joy to those whose hearts have prepared Him room. To them there will be no greater joy than hearing the only true Source of all joy say to those who love and trust Him, "Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Matthew 25:34

“Let every heart prepare Him room” and let every heart on earth “receive her King”.

Cindy Dunagan
cindy@straightpathspress.com
Author of the Journaling Toward Moral Excellence series of journals for young writers, preteens, teenagers, and young adults.
www.straightpathspress.com.

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Cindy Dunagan's Articles

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