This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome back for day two of week three of our look to the book of Isaiah. We're
going to look at Isaiah chapter 12 today. Yesterday we talked about the fact
that if you're going to change you need hope.

You can't change without hope. Today we look at the truth that you need joy if
you're going to change. You can't change without joy.

And Isaiah 12 in many ways is God's recipe for joy. It seems like we know all
the wrong recipes sometimes. We know the recipe for worry.

You take a pound of problems and you season it well with fear and you let it
bake overnight and you got worry. We know the recipe for anger. You take a rough
day and you whip in a little irritation with an ounce of temper.

Let it simmer slowly and you got anger. We know the recipe for sin. A bowl of
Satan's lies smothered in a rich sauce of human pride.

You mix and you serve it immediately. In Isaiah 12 we get a different kind of
recipe. God's recipe for joy in our lives.

Verse three of Isaiah 12 says, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of
salvation. " How does this happen in our lives? This is one of my favorite
chapters in Isaiah, Isaiah 12, because it gives us the three ingredients in
God's recipe for joy.

There's a lot of depth to what he has to say, but there's also a lot of
simplicity that he has to say. I love it when those two things meet together in
scripture. Here are the ingredients in this recipe for joy.

Number one, you have to have a fresh relationship with God. Isaiah 12. 1, "In
that day you will say, 'I will praise you, Lord, although you were angry with
me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me.

'" Joy can be absent in our lives because our relationship with God has grown
stale. You're trying to live today on yesterday's devotional life. It's not that
you've turned your back on God.

You've just stopped working at the relationship. You're just not checking in.
You're just not talking to him.

I mean, if you did talk to him, you would love him, but you just haven't had
time recently in any relationship. When you stop working at it, when you stop
giving time to it, the relationship will grow stale and you'll lose your joy.
This is true with people.

This is true with God. You will lose your joy because the relationship grows
stale. It could be that the relationship has grown sour.

That's what happened to Israel on Isaiah's day. The relationship had soured to
the point where God was just a tradition in Israel. They didn't even think about
their love for the Lord.

They just thought about doing traditional things that had to do with the Lord.
And God would judge the nation in anger for these sour hearts. In the midst of
this, Isaiah speaks of a renewed joy that God wants to give through a refreshed
relationship with God.

He says your anger has turned away. Their relationship was refreshed when a
barrier was removed. The anger was turned away.

As a follower of Jesus Christ, that barrier between you and God was removed once
and for all at the cross of Jesus Christ when you trusted Jesus for salvation,
for forgiveness. There is no barrier. There is no barrier.

Does your relationship with God need to be refreshed? The greatest reason for
joyless Christians is that we allow sin into our lives. And then we have to deal
with the guilt and the shame that come from that.

We feel like God has turned his back on us, but really we've turned our back on
God. And so we're living without joy. That's the greatest reason allowing sin
into our lives.

The second greatest reason for a joyless Christian is not accepting the
forgiveness of Christ for the sin that we've allowed into our lives. Maybe you
need to do that right now. Accept his forgiveness.

Your anger has turned away and then Isaiah says you have comforted me. When you
go to God with a humble heart asking forgiveness, he does not blame you or shame
you. He comforts you.

So for joy to become real in my everyday life, I have to have this fresh
relationship with God. The second ingredient is a full dependence on God. Verse
2, "Surely God is my salvation.

I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord is my strength and my song. He has
become my salvation.

" In this very short praise song, Isaiah reveals one of the clearest insights
that you'll ever see of what it means to fully, to completely depend upon God.
To depend upon God fully means you depend on him for every aspect of your life.
You'd be surprised at how often we're only leaning upon him slightly, all the
while we're telling ourselves that we're depending on him fully.

To be fully depending on God, you have to be able to say the three things that
Isaiah says in this verse. "God is my strength. God is my song.

God is my salvation. " First, God is my strength. That means I depend upon God.

I lean on God for my effectiveness. He's my strength. Who gives you the ability
to do what you do?

Who gives you the strength to face what you face? Who gives you the direction
that you need for every day of your life? This is depending on God for the
working side of me.

And if I think I depend on God for my spiritual side, but all the work, I've got
to do that myself, I'm not depending on God. I'm depending on myself with the
most of my life. So of course I'm going to be pressured in the working side of
me.

Of course I'm going to live without joy, have joy leaking out in the working
side of me. God is my strength. Depend on him fully.

Depend on him for the working side, the effectiveness side of you. And then God
is my song. That means I depend on God not just for my effectiveness, but also
for my happiness.

Dependence is more than just who you look to when you need to get something
done. It's also a matter of your heart, of your emotions. Who do you look to for
happiness?

What do you look to for happiness? God and God alone can bring true happiness
into our lives. Many, many people, many, many Christians who seemingly are
trying to do everything that God asks them to do, they nevertheless actually
depend on some leisure activity, some emotional outlet for their happiness.

And it can be a gaping hole in our dependence on God. God might want to be with
you in your leisure activities. He might want to be with you in that emotional
outlet that brings you happiness.

But to see it as something apart from him that brings you happiness, that's like
God's the taskmaster who tells me I have to do all these things and then I get
my happiness over here. That's not depending on God. God is the one we depend on
for our happiness in whatever way he wants to bring it into our lives.

What I'm saying is we don't just depend on God for what makes us successful. We
depend on him for what makes us smile, for what makes us joyful. This is
depending on God for the emotional side of me.

And full dependence on God has to depend on God there. He is my strength. He is
my song.

And then God is my salvation. This means that you depend on God for your
worthiness. What makes your life worthwhile?

What makes you worthy in the midst of that worthwhile life? Is it how much
you've done? Is that where your worthiness is found?

In the grand scheme of things, all that any of us could do is just a breath of
wind. So it's a bad place to look for our worthiness. Is it how good you are?

In God's perfect justice, we have to sadly admit that our negatives outweigh our
positives. So how can we find our worthiness there? God is my strength.

He's my song. And now he's my salvation. That means I depend on God for my
identity.

I depend on God for the spiritual side of me. I depend on him for my worthiness.
I don't try to buy my worthiness with what I do.

I recognize that he bought that worthiness long ago when Jesus paid the price
for my sins on the cross. That is what makes me worthy. And I don't try to earn
my worthiness with who I am.

I recognize that worthiness cannot be earned. It can't be learned. It has to be
returned to me by the only one who can declare me worthy.

God himself, my creator. I can't tell you how many Christians are living joyless
lives because they're still trying to earn their worthiness before God. Once he
has declared you worthy with the salvation of Christ, there is no human court
that can override him.

That's where your joy comes from. So you depend on God for your salvation, for
your worthiness. Depend on him fully.

That's the source of joy. When you are able to do that, realize that he is your
song. You're depending on him for the emotional side of you.

And you also trust him with the working side of you. You depend on him for your
strength in every day of life. But then there's a third thing that these verses
reveal that we have to do, and that is regularly practice.

The third thing, the third ingredient, is regularly practice three habits of
joy. Even if you do these first two things, you've got all your theology right,
you've got all your psychology right, you've got all your emotiveness right, and
all your intellectualism right on all of these things, If you don't do things
regularly as a part of your life that bring joy into your life, you're not going
to be experiencing joy. There have to be habits of joy that go along with these
truths about joy we've just looked at.

Verses three to five talk about the daily actions that joy springs from in our
lives. "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. And that day
you will say, 'Give praise to the Lord.

Proclaim his name. Make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim
that his name is exalted. Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things.

Let this be known to all the world. " So what are those habits? Very briefly,
first, praise.

You give thanks to the Lord. There's nothing that's so joy-inducing as this
regular habit of praise, and nothing saps our joy quite so quickly as the
failure to praise. Praise, in many ways, is like a spiritual vitamin.

Let's say your body is deficient in some vitamin, some letter, like A or D or Q
or L or whatever letter you want to come up with. You start taking a tablet in
order to make up for that deficiency. Now, the first time you take the tablet,
you don't always get an immediate boost.

You have to take it over time in order to build up your strength again. Praise
is often the same way. Sometimes you immediately get a boost when you praise,
but more often it's the regular praise in your life that just keeps you strong
in that area of life, keeps you joyful in all of your life.

Praise. The second regular habit is proclamation. That's making known what he's
done, telling other people what God's doing in your life.

The first place I always ask people to check when they say they've lost their
joy is, "Are you telling others? " Because I know there's a lot of reasons we
can lose joy in our lives as Christians. Some of them can even be physical.

If you're down physically, you're going to be down emotionally and spiritually.
You've got to ask God to carry you through that time. But the truth is, most
often when we've lost our joy, it's because we've stopped telling others.

We've stopped telling others about Christ and witnessing. We've also stopped
telling others about Christ and what he's doing in our lives, even in our small
group. Maybe we think we're mature enough now we don't have to tell.

We have to tell. Proclamation is one of the regular habits that need to be a
part of our lives in order for joy to be a part of our lives. And then the third
one he talks about here is singing.

Singing is not just for those with good voices. The Bible commands all of us as
followers of God, as followers of Christ, to sing. Many times it commands us to
sing.

There's something about singing that creates a connection with God and with
other believers on a level that nothing else can, that brings us a kind of joy
that nothing else can. So, do you want to have more joy in your life? I sure do.

I want to have regular joy in my life. Here's God's recipe. You take a fresh
relationship with God.

You add in a full dependence on God. And then you add three daily habits. And
you have God's recipe for joy.

Let's pray together. Lord, we want to live the joyful life that Jesus promised.
So help us to trust you for what you've said here.

And help us to begin with where we began, with our relationship with you, with
trusting you for strength instead of trusting ourselves. In the places where we
work, in the places where we give of ourselves, we know that you use our
abilities, you use our strength, but we also know that we depend on you. And so
we remind ourselves of that day, today.

We're not in it alone. We're depending on you. And so in that, we pray, God,
that right now you would lift our burden and you put us instead in a place of
joy.

And we ask that in Jesus' name. Amen. Tomorrow, we're going to look together at
the value of knowing your enemy.