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Transcript 238C — The Tempered Joy of a Believer
CALLER: I'd like for you to comment on something I experience. I don't know if it's all that common or not. But I call it an emotional bubble. Since I found myself living in God, I have a tendency to be excited about everything. And I feel like crying a lot, not sad but joyful crying. I'll take my answer on the air. Thank you.
HC: Our caller mentioned an emotional bubble that you live on after you are born again, after you are saved. First of all, there is this fact in the life of the born again believer, in the true child of God. He lives in the constant realization that his sins have been forgiven, that he is no longer threatened by hell, that he is no longer a slave of Satan, that instead he has become a child of God. He has been given the promise that God would never leave him nor forsake him. He knows that already he has eternal life and that at death he will immediately be able to go into God's holy presence, and to continue forever in the presence of God.
He knows that he is an inheritor of the New Heaven and the New Earth, which will come into existence after Judgment Day, when God destroys this whole universe by fire. In other words, he has all kinds of promises and blessings to rest upon – all good, all wonderful blessings. And this ought to bring a great joy, a great happiness within this person's life. And this can certainly affect him emotionally.
Now of course he is still a human being. He still has an old nature, and he's still affected by the "blues" on a grey day, and so on. But through it all, there is always this joy. In spite of the fact that it's a grey day, in spite of the fact that things did not go well in so many ways today, I know that I belong to Christ.
And this will carry him through the most difficult kind of an experience. Now it doesn't mean that he's going to be living giddily, or in some kind of a hilarious joy being expressed in his life, because it is tempered by two things essentially. First of all, it is tempered by his sadness when he sees sin in his own life. Every time we see sin in our own life, we realize that we have not measured up to God's standard of holiness. We have not really shown our love to God the way we ought to. And this will bring unhappiness into our life, even though we know that sin has been covered by the Lord Jesus Christ.
An even greater source of sadness in the life of the believer is that as we bring the Gospel, we will see that again and again it is repudiated. It is rejected by those whom we earnestly desire that they might become saved. And this will bring great sadness to us, because we empathize, as fellow human beings, with other human beings. And we know that as long as a person rejects the Gospel, they're under the wrath of God and they're subject to hell. And so the Bible speaks about believers as sowing with weeping. The Bible spoke of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, when He recognized that they constantly rejected the Gospel.
And so the joy of the believer, which is real and certain and marvelous, is tempered by the fact that he's living in a sin-cursed world. And that sin affects his own life as well as terribly affecting the lives of those who remain unsaved. And I believe that this is really the life of the believer.
Now if we are having other emotional experiences, they can be reflection of these particular essential conditions that exist in the life of the believer, or they can also be a part of the fact that we're just human beings, and that we relate to other things emotionally that do not necessarily relate to our salvation, per se.
Well, thank you for sharing that.