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Amen. Well, tonight I'm so glad you're here because I get to talk to somebody about what I've been studying about and learning up on. And tonight I've called my message, I've titled my message tonight, Bring Back the Joy. Bring back the joy. And I want to share from some joy scriptures because sometimes I think our Christian walk isn't all easy. Every step we take isn't so wonderful sometimes. We have our struggles, we have our trials, we have our ups, we have the hills, we have the valleys. And I just want to share tonight about joy, his joy, his joy, and what it does for us. I want to share from a verse, it's a well-known scripture on ver on joy in the Old Testament. And I want to read from it tonight in Nehemiah chapter 8, verse 10. And I'm reading from the NIV version. I want to read this. Nehemiah said, Go and enjoy choice foods, sweet drinks, and send some of these to those who have nothing prepared. Because this day is holy to the Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. The joy of the Lord is your strength. This scripture, this joy scripture is one that we quote many times. I wanted to delve a little bit deeper into it tonight. You see, this joy of the Lord is your strength. Nehemiah had just finished building the wall. He'd just finished his assignment and he was gathering all the people with Ezra. And Ezra was reading out the Old Testament, the law, and he was reading. And as he was reading, people began to weep. People began to get condemned. They began to feel like they were struggling. They were starting to be filled with sadness. And Nehemiah stood up and he said to the people, don't be sad. Don't be unhappy, because today the joy of the Lord is just strength. They were celebrating the feast of the trumpets, known as Yom Turua. And in many times in the old calendar, the Jewish calendar, the festivals were really pointing people to Jesus. That's what the festivals were. Sorry. So when Nehemiah says said this verse, and he said this to the Jewish people, he was saying, the joy of the Lord is your strength. And when they were hearing that, fast forward to today, fast forward to today. When we think about joy, and it's connected to your faith, and it's connected to our belief in God, and directly from his presence. You see, joy in that verse, the is the Hebrew meaning was kedba. And it meant constant gladness, inner strength. But it was rooted in relationship with God. It was the joy of the Lord. It wasn't the joy of life. It wasn't the joy of just being alive. It was a different kind of joy. See, the modern meaning of joy in the Oxford Dictionary, joy is this. It defines joy as an emotion of keen pleasure, great delight, often tied directly to your current circumstances. In a sense, happiness is derived from happenings around you. Happiness is about happy happenings around you. So we have this meaning of joy that Nehemiah was talking about was actually utterly, solely connected to the Lord. Scripture doesn't say, this scripture doesn't say, joy alone is your strength. Joy of life is your strength. Joy of a new car, joy of a girlfriend, joy of a boyfriend, joy of a new baby. The joy of a good test score. But it says the joy of the Lord. It's a different kind of joy. It's a joy that only comes when you are connected to God. I love and I have a lot of friends, and maybe you're here tonight and you're a non-believer. You haven't invited Jesus into your heart. That's fine. You're always welcome to come to church. And you can experience joy in life, and you can experience happiness. But one thing you cannot experience is the joy of the Lord. You actually cannot experience it because the joy of the Lord comes from the Lord. The joy of the Lord comes from God. You can experience joy and happiness and good times and fun life, and that's all great. But the joy of the Lord can only come from the Lord. And when we become Christians, He in a sense stamps your life with joy. He pours in his Holy Spirit, and part of that spirit somehow is joy. So when you don't know God, you can't experience the joy of the Lord. Romans 15, 13 says it like this. So you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. You see, Christianity is very spiritual. It's all about the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God, when you become a Christian, pours His Spirit into us, and we have a part of Him in us. It's all Spirit. Galatians 5 22 says this, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness. So you see, when we're talking about the joy of the Lord, it's a different kind of spiritual experience. Peter 1.8.9 says it's this 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 what? Inexpressible and glorious joy. For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. So I want to tell you tonight, as Christians, we have access to joy. We have access to the joy of the Lord. But sometimes this joy gets blocked. Sometimes we can't see it anymore. Sometimes other things can get in the way, it can get polluted. We can't taste it. It seems to not be pure, or we don't have power anymore. At times sorrows can take over. And instead of living in joy, we're living in defeat. We're living in sorrow. We're living living in in heaviness. So tonight I want to look at three ways to bring back the joy of the Lord. Are you with me? Three ways to bring back the joy of the Lord tonight. Three ways to bring back the joy of the Lord. So the first, the first way I want to say here is to set your mind on his divine. He's a divine God. Think on good things. To think on good things, we need to train our brains, train our thoughts. Philippians 4, 3 puts it like this. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. You see, if you are continually surrounding yourself with the worst things in life, if you continually surround your thought life with the worst things in life, the updates on the worst crime, the worst violence, the worst news. If you're continually surrounding your life with these things, this is how you begin to see the world. You begin to see the worst part of the world all the time. There's a great Christian song called Grace on Repeat. If you ever call our Hillsong Office in Sydney, it will repeat continually, Grace on Repeat. But you know, sometimes we allow negative thinking in our minds and it seems to be on repeat. Thinking maybe you're always left out. Or think our thoughts start, I'm always overlooked. I'm the one who's always on the outside, never on the inside. When we our mind starts to take these thoughts or dramatic statements, when your mind starts thinking like this, well, that will never happen for me. It's always someone else with the good luck. You know, it's okay for Hamish. You know, everything happens for him, but never for me. You know, the dramatic statements. It's always someone else. It's always, oh, someone else getting the girlfriend, someone else getting the boyfriend, oh, someone else getting the marriage proposal. That kind of thinking will take you to a downward spiral, dark places, negative thought patterns, and hopelessness. I want to tell you tonight, we're living in the world where many, many people are struggling with these kind of thoughts, these kind of things. I was in a dark place once. I've been in quite a few in my life, if I was honest. But I was in this dark place once. I'd just lost a job I loved. And it was coming to the end, it was time for that season, it was time for that job to finish, the season was over, but I absolutely loved it. And I didn't realize at the time how much of my identity was based around that job. I didn't realize how much confidence I had in the job. I didn't realize that there was so much of me caught up in that job that when I lost the job, I started to have lack of confidence, lack of self-esteem. I felt lost. I started spiraling down. Now I love in our church and church community the best thing we can do is be a part of a church like this. Because when you are in those dark places, we have people around. And I love in our church that because we're a bigger church, a larger church, but we are a small community church. When you are in a dark place, there's plenty of people in a great place. When you are in a low place, there's plenty of people in a high place. And when you are the person lying on the stretcher being carried, I tell you, there's plenty of people that will pick up that stretcher and help carry you. And at the same token, you may be a person one time that's required to pick up the stretcher and carry someone else on the stretcher. So I love church community that can help us through the dark places. But I found simple things helped at that time. Keeping life simple. You know, I used to take my niece and nephew to the duck pond. We used to just go to the duck pond on a regular basis. I tell you, that winter, those ducks got so much bread. They were so well fed. We used to watch the ducks waddle and they'd eat all the bread and then we'd come home. It was very, very simple. But do you know what happened to my thought process? I started thinking about creation. I started to have thoughts on the bigness of God. I started to think about his divine. I started to not think about all the losses, lost the job, what am I gonna do? What's gonna happen to me now? And I started just focusing on those little ducks. And because I was focusing on his creation, something in my thought pattern started generating, started helping me, started looking bigger, started looking greater. Because when we start focusing on what is good, what is pure, what is admirable, what is uplifting, the divine, the nature of God, I tell you we begin to break those negative spirals. And I want to tell you tonight, set your mind on his divine. Train your brain. Don't get caught up in all those negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. As the world gets darker, focus on the brighter. Fill your mind with sweet things, beauty, nature. He's telling us to think of these things. He's not just telling us to think of these things for the good of it, he's telling us to think of this, these things, because the joy of the Lord is our strength. So the second thing tonight, after we put back, we're gonna set our mind on his divine. The second way tonight to start to bring back a bit of joy in your life, start to take it back, start to say, you know what? I'm not gonna wake up every day, I'm not gonna start to spiral down every day, I'm not gonna start to have these negative thoughts over and over, rinse and repeat. I'm gonna start to to think better, bigger, starting to get the word of God into me. Proverbs is such a fantastic book to start reading. Start getting filled with his word, with his purpose for the world. Set your heart on eternity. God has put eternity in your heart. There's so much more beyond what we see with our eyes. There's so much more than our present worries, our present concerns, our present circumstances. Ecclesiastes 3.11 puts it like this. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart. No one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. He has put eternity in our hearts. And the word eternity here in the Hebrew is Olam, which means everlasting, without end, hidden, beyond human understanding. What a God we serve! How incredible! He has put eternity in the hearts of mankind. He has put eternity in our hearts. We can't fully comprehend it. He has put the Holy Spirit in our hearts to help us, to guide us, to be set apart for himself. Sometimes we can't set our hearts on eternity. We want to set our hearts on eternity. I want to set my heart on eternity, but I can't quite set my heart on eternity because it's so filled with other stuff. It's overloaded, it's full up. I want to set my heart on eternity, but that's so filled with other things. We wouldn't let unwanted thieves and squatters come into our life and ravage our home. We wouldn't let people we don't know just come in and sit in our whole house. Come, squat, bring your friends, fill up my house. No, we wouldn't do that in reality. But many of us with our hearts allow these enemies of eternity to come and live in our hearts. Steal from us, cause us grief and sorrow. Instead of seeing eternity in a heart, it just gets overfilled. Sorrows and heartbreaks, disappointments, heartbreaks. Maybe there's heartbreaks from years ago that you're let still live in your heart. Ghosts of the past that haven't been dealt with. Sorrows. Maybe there's disappointments that you really thought something was gonna happen, but the expectation didn't happen. Disappointments can take up so much room in our heart that can weigh us down, pull us back. Sin and iniquity when we haven't repented of sin and iniquity pollutes how we see. Repeating condemnation and guilt on a round trip in our hearts, taking up a lot of space in our hearts. See, on my phone, I am forever deleting data. Messages come up all the time. You've got too much data, you need to clear some space. So I've got emails, apps, notes that I am forever delete to the trash can. Delete to the trash can. Oh wow, I've freed up gigs in my phone. I've got so much space now, I can add new things. You see, in our heart, God wants us to free up space. He's got the new things to add to us. He wants to add new things into your heart. He wants you to start to see some new things that he's got for you. But some of us, the data is so clogged up. We can't add any more new stuff. There's no more space. It's a little bit like the the the Tupperware or the plastic drawer in your kitchen. Out of everywhere in the kitchen, there's that one drawer that just seems to be overloaded. And no matter how many times you go through and chuck out lids, and you go through and you chug out the lunchboxes and you chug out the old plastic, you come back again, you get where did it all come from? You see, life does that to us when we live daily. The worries of the world, the interactions that we have. God wants us to regularly empty our hearts, ask Him for forgiveness, repent daily, get into the habit of saying, God, clear my heart. I want to set my heart on eternity. I want to set my heart on the eternal. Tonight I'm talking about bring back the joy of the Lord in your life. Bring back the joy of the Lord. I've talked about set your thoughts on his divine, set your hearts on his eternity. Thirdly, tonight, and I'll ask the guys to come back up the worship team, is to set our lives on him. As Christians, our foundation is in his salvation. As Christians, our foundation is found in his salvation, the cross. Our lives in Matthew are compared to builders. In 724, it says this the rain came down, the streams rose, the winds blew, beat against the house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose. The winds blew, beat against his house, and it fell with a crash. When we build our lives upon God, believing in Jesus Christ, trusting in his inspired, holy, holy word of God that is available for every man. Anyone can read it. There's nothing special about Christians. We just read the Bible and believe it. We just learn from it. We believe it's holy and inspired, and that the God of heaven and earth has given it to us. That we don't have to walk around blindly in life. We can get tips from it, we can learn from it, wisdom from it. There'll still be blowing winds, there'll still be rising tides, there will still be times of grief and sorrow, frustrations and disappointments. The rain will still come down, but we'll stand on the rock. He's deposited his spirit in our lives, he's deposited joy. And sometimes, as Christians, we live in the joy of life. And you know what? The joy of life is fun. I love the joy of life, and I love it when the joy of life is good. I love getting the new car, getting the house, getting the boyfriend. I love getting the high test score. I love getting all the nice clothes. I love the joy of life. But I tell you, when the rains come down and the winds blow, the joy of life is of no use to you. It's of no use. The only thing we can rely on at those times is the joy of the Lord. This is the joy of the Lord. Psalm 30 verse 5 says this. Let's everybody stand up. I want to read this psalm over us, and then I'm going to ask the guys to hit us with a worship or a praise. Psalm 30 verse 5 says this that weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. See, he's a great God. He's a very, very, very big God. He's put joy in us, a deposit of joy, so that we can live in his strength. And in those times, you will be able to say, the joy of the Lord is my strength. I just want to pray over your life tonight. And then we're going to just worship him. Father God, tonight I've talked about joy, the joy of the Lord. Not just happiness, not just the joy of life, but the joy of the Lord. I just pray tonight, Lord, we can walk away with a greater understanding of who you are. You have put a spiritual deposit in our lives. You have stamped us as your children. This deposit only comes from you. You can't receive it any other way. And I thank you, God, that we can say the joy of the Lord is my strength. In Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, church.