Audio Transcript

We seem to be hardwired to root our happiness in our circumstances. It comes naturally to us. We are happiest when things are going well; we are saddest when things are going badly. Our mood is determined by the up-and-down roller-coaster of life’s ever-changing circumstances. We do it at age 4. We do it at age 24. We do it at age 44. And we do it at age 14. Today I want you to meet Tessa. She is a 14-year-old listener to the podcast who writes us today. “Dear Pastor John, hello! Thank you so much for this podcast and for the ministry of Desiring God. All of it has been a huge blessing in my life. Recently, I have been feeling more and more that my happiness depends on the circumstances around me. Will you please offer me biblical guidance on how I can root my joy in Jesus instead?”

Well, I feel so thankful for this from a 14-year-old. When I think back on the things that I struggled with when I was 14, I don’t think I posed the question the way I should have. So let me just encourage you that your very way of asking this question is a sign of significant, growing spiritual life and maturity, for your age especially. So take heart: from where I sit, it looks to me like God is at work in your life, and that is always a wonderful miracle.

Lifelong Labor

Before I give you some suggestions from the Bible for how you can shift your circumstance-dependent happiness onto Jesus-dependent happiness, let me also say that this battle that you feel right now, you will be fighting sixty years from now if you’re still alive and Jesus hasn’t come back. Because that’s how old I am.

“God is much more committed to building godly joy into his children than we are committed to finding it.”

Actually, I’m one year older than that — 75, not 74. And I have to address this issue of where my joy is rooted every day — every morning in battle against the devil and the world and the flesh — rather than letting the old nature, which the Bible calls “the flesh,” lure me away from Jesus to earthly things as more valuable. Every stage in life — a 14-year-old stage and a 75-year-old stage — has its unique allurements away from Jesus-dependent happiness to world-dependent happiness. It does. So, you’re going to have to fight this all the way to the end, so it’s good to get a good start now and learn your battle strategy.

Four Ways to Root Your Joy in God

So, let me make four suggestions for how to root your joy in Jesus and not in circumstances.

1. Get to know God’s purpose for the troubles in your life.

God is much more committed to building godly joy, happiness, into his children than we are committed to finding it. And one of his ways of doing this is by seeing to it that we walk through enough trouble to make us give up on finding our joy in a trouble-free life. Get to know the passages in the Bible that teach this. For example, Romans 5:3–5:

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

In other words, the joy of hope is intensified when our faith endures through trouble. Or in 2 Corinthians 1:8–9, Paul says,

We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

In other words, the joy of complete reliance upon Jesus is God’s purpose when he brings us to the very brink of death. So, suggestion number one: Get to know this biblical teaching for the rest of your life. It will serve you very well.

2. Form the habit of finding God everywhere.

It’s a little unusual. Think it through with me. I suggest that you take all the natural pleasures that God gives you, which are not sinful, and make the conscious effort to see and to savor, or taste, God himself in and behind those pleasures. In other words, the best way to keep a God-given pleasure from becoming your God is to push into the pleasure and through the pleasure to the Giver of the pleasure, who is trying to show you something about himself and how satisfying he is.

So for example, the Bible says that God’s word is sweeter than honey (Psalm 19:10). And the Bible says that Jesus is the light of the world (John 8:12). And the Bible says that he’s like living water (John 4:10–14). So when you taste anything that is really delicious, or when you pass out of a scary darkness into some beautiful light and brightness, or when you really, really, really are thirsty and you drink a glass of cold water, at every one of those points, say to yourself that Jesus is sweeter than honey, and he wants me to taste him in the gift of honey. Say to yourself that Jesus is brighter than this beautiful light, and he wants me to enjoy him in his brightness. And say to yourself that Jesus is more satisfying than this great thirst-quenching water, and he wants me to be satisfied in him like I feel right now with this water — only better.

In other words, form the habit of finding God everywhere that there is goodness in this world. This will keep you from treating the goodness as God, and it will keep you from scorning the goodness of God by rejecting the gifts. All God’s good gifts are meant not for idolatry; they are meant to give us a taste of the one who created them and to show us something of himself.

“Form the habit of finding God everywhere that there is goodness in this world.”

And I find it helpful to add this: since I’m a sinner and deserve nothing from God but judgment, therefore, every good thing that comes to me as a child of God was purchased for me by the blood of Jesus, without which I would only be condemned. I would base all that on Romans 8:32. Therefore, every good thing not only points me to the goodness of the Giver, but it points me to the infinite price that was paid by Jesus so that I could have the gift and the Giver. This helps me love him as I ought. I hope it does you too.

3. Make Bible reading personal.

Make your Bible reading every day very personal. Don’t just think about learning how to live from guidelines in the Bible, which are important, but every day, think about what you can know of Jesus, the Son of God, and God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit — what you can know about them as persons. In other words, read the Bible to get to know the person of God. Always think: I love a person. I love a person. God is admirable. God is strong. God is wise. God is kind. God is patient. God is just. God is merciful. And as you see these traits in God, love him because of them. Find the person himself to be your treasure. Make Bible reading personal.

4. Remember your coming death.

And finally, even though you’re only 14, keep death regularly in your mind — not all the time; just regularly return to the thought that you’re going to die. And the point of this is not to make you scared. It’s not to make you sad. It’s not to make you morose. Just the opposite. Everybody is going to die unless Jesus comes back first. It might happen when you’re 15, it might happen when you’re 95, but it is going to happen.

And when that time comes, everything but Jesus will lose its comforting power. All our possessions, all our accomplishments, all our personal looks and intellect, all our family and friends, all of them will fail as a foundation for hope and joy in our dying. But if you know Jesus personally, the day of your death will not be a day of just leaving things behind that you’re familiar with, but it will be a day of stepping into the presence of the one that we care about most.

So thank you for asking such a very good question at age 14. I’m really excited about what God is going to do in your life between now and when you’re 24.

When suffering comes, we often stop and ask God to give us what we need to suffer well. Sometimes, the suffering itself unexpectedly becomes his answer to that prayer.

One experience of suffering — with the presence and help of God — can prepare us for some future experience of suffering. Scripture actually goes even further and says that when we receive and experience suffering in a certain way, we can actually begin to rejoice in our suffering. I haven’t suffered as much as many have, but I’ve suffered enough to want to know how that happens, how we can rejoice even while still in the midst of our sufferings. What miraculous filter could I put on my hardest days to make me respond like that? How could joy possibly take root and bloom in the dark and dry ground of suffering?

One of the clearest texts along these lines is Romans 5:3–4. If you’ve heard these words over and over before (like some of us have), read them again, but slow down enough to hear just how startling they are.

We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. (Romans 5:3–4)

Who in your life talks about suffering like that? We don’t merely receive and tolerate suffering when it comes; we rejoice in it. Our hope doesn’t merely survive suffering; suffering strangely makes our hope stronger. Suffering produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope. Has your experience of heartache and loss felt like that?

Before Suffering Comes

Now, suffering in itself does not produce hope from scratch. Suffering will not create hope where there is none. But it can serve to strengthen and refine an already living hope. No matter what we suffer and for however long we suffer, no one suffers well without a real and abiding hope in God. Look at the verses immediately before:

We have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings. . . . (Romans 5:2–3)

“No one suffers well without a real and abiding hope in God.”

Before suffering can strengthen our hope, we first need to put our deepest, strongest hope in God. Those who can rejoice in the hope-building experience of suffering can only do so because they have some hope to build upon. They already rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

That means the first step to suffering well is to die to all our confidence in self and learn to rely instead on God. If suffering turns you inward (as it tends to do), you’re likely to fall into downward spirals of despair, like so many do. If, however, suffering lifts your eyes to someone above and beyond this pain or problem, then it can become a staircase into greater courage and joy. The staircase may be arduous and harrowing, but it can carry you onto firmer ground and into fairer fields — if you are not own your hope in suffering. Suffering will not stoop to serve you if you will not bend your knee before God.

Suffering Produces Endurance

We all can see how hope might help someone embrace and endure suffering, but the apostle Paul doesn’t settle for mere survival. He demands that suffering strengthen hope and serve joy. So how does that happen? First, by showing us how much God can do when we come to the end of what we can do.

Part of the suffering of suffering is the creeping suspicion that we won’t make it, that this will cost us more than we have to give, that tomorrow will be the last straw. If you’ve felt like that, Paul knows what you feel: “We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death” (2 Corinthians 1:8). That doesn’t sound like hope rising. That doesn’t sound like rejoicing. How could God rewrite a death sentence and make it give life? Next line: “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9).

We find hope at, and beyond, the end of ourselves — at the end of all we can do and say and feel — if we find God there. Suffering produces hope because it shows us, like nothing else can, that we can handle more than we think — with God. In other words, suffering produces endurance. As we lean on God, he strengthens us with all power, “according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11).

Endurance Proves Character

Second, suffering strengthens hope by revealing and refining who we really are. We may not like what suffering reveals, but it unveils us. We thought we were patient, until the car died for the third time this year. We thought we were kind and gentle, until our child pitched another fit at bedtime. We thought our faith was firm and unshakeable, until our spouse got sick, and then more sick, and then more sick. Suffering shakes our souls, bringing sin to the surface, revealing the worst in us.

And, if God has begun his work in us, suffering also reveals and nurtures the God-wrought best in us. The apostle Peter describes the beauty and worth of this painful process:

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:6–7)

The miracle of Spirit-filled patience shines brightest in moments that test patience. The miracle of kindness sparkles most where we expect to find irritation and rudeness. The miracle of love looks most miraculous when we have every painful reason to focus on self. Comfortable circumstances may draw a veil over these miracles, but suffering draws light to them, exposing the hidden work of God within us.

In other words, endurance produces proven character. Our patient perseverance through suffering, with joy, says we are real — that we are not the sin-enslaved soul we once were, but a new creation by God, one he promises to complete (Philippians 1:6).

Character Produces Hope

If we could see that we’re real in Christ, how would that make us feel about our future? If we’re real — if the King of heaven lives in us, and intercedes for us, and promises to come back for us — then our future is overwhelmingly bright and secure no matter how unbearable our present may feel for now. In other words, character produces hope.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. (James 1:2–4)

“Through suffering, we see that we are someone we could never have been without grace.”

Suffering demands endurance, allowing us to see what God can do when we come to the end of ourselves. Enduring hardship with God reveals what’s happening inside of us, as he conforms us degree by degree to the glory of his Son. As that happens, we get to see glimpses of the wonder of who we are in Christ. Through suffering, then, we see that we are someone we could never have been without grace.

Bigger Than Relief

So, instead of praying that God might preserve our hope through suffering, we might begin praying that God would build our hope through suffering — that this season of darkness actually might leave us nearer to and more confident in him. Instead of merely praying that God would heal us and restore us to where we were, we can pray that he would use suffering to grow us and lead us forward to where he wants us to be.

I’ve learned more about suffering well from Vaneetha Risner than from anyone else on earth. She’s suffered in more ways than most — diagnosed with post-polio (a painful and debilitating condition), lost an infant son because of a doctor’s mistake, and then in the midst of the hurricane of her pain and loss, was abandoned by her husband. And yet by God’s grace, she’s suffered more joyfully than most. When you meet her, you cannot explain her — but for God.

She says this about the transforming power of her trials:

I cried out asking God to help me to trust him, to reconnect, and to find hope in what seemed like impenetrable darkness. I needed peace and I couldn’t find it anywhere besides Christ. It was then that my faith radically changed. I found an inexplicable peace and hope that I had not experienced before — my easy trouble-free life had not yielded anything but an enjoyment of the present. But suffering was producing something unshakeable. Suffering is a catalyst that forces us to move in one direction or another. No one comes through suffering unchanged. (“Suffering Will Always Change You”)

Suffering will change us. The question is whether it will change us for the better, driving us nearer to Jesus and making us more like him. By all means, when suffering comes, pray that God would give what you need to receive it, to survive it, to endure it. But don’t stop there. Ask him to do what he has done again and again for Vaneetha. Ask him to make suffering a servant of your peace and hope and joy in him.

Leon Blosser, one of the founders of our church, Evangelical Christian Church of Dubai (ECCD), began evangelistic work in 1964 among Bedouin desert tribes in the Trucial States, later the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Blosser recalled the flight with his family from Baghdad to the city of Sharjah. Gulf Arabs from the ruling families got on the plane, “each one with a falcon on his wrist, with a leather sleeve.”

Blosser was a consummate missionary. He knew five of the seven sheikhs (rulers) of the Emirates. His Arabic was so good that he was often mistaken for a Palestinian. He wrote the orientation training manual for new missionaries coming onto the field.

To Blosser, being a missionary also meant being a churchman. He was critical of missionaries who remained aloof from the local church. In an address in 1974 called “The Missionary and Churches Abroad,” he questioned missionaries who “continue to exercise the privilege of oversight and guidance, while exempting themselves from membership because they could not become members of a ‘local church.’”

Almost fifty years later, Blosser’s words still ring true. One missionary wanted to join ECCD, but her mission agency forbade it. Some missionaries have attended church but have remained on the margins, refusing to join and associating mainly with other missionaries. On the other hand, others have deeply invested in the local church and have borne much fruit as a result. So why are some missionaries hesitant to join a church where they are?

Five Reservations About Joining

Sadly, many missionaries who are hesitant to join a church were not exposed to a healthy one before they left for the mission field. As Blosser observed, “We’ve been treating symptoms on the field which have roots in a disease at home.”

Here are five reasons why missionaries shy away from the church overseas. (I’m contemplating situations where there is already an existing Christian congregation.)

“The church will just slow me down.” Some missionaries fear being sucked into the vortex of unending committee meetings and the pastoral demands of expatriates who are not their target audience.
“I’d rather keep a low profile for security reasons.” Some in Muslim contexts, for example, fear being marginalized or endangered by identifying with churches.
“My sending agency (or my team) is my church.” Some believe spiritual accountability happens best in small clusters of people who go out in common cause for the gospel, regardless of biblical elder qualification, church order, ordinances, or discipline.
“I don’t want to taint the local people with Western church culture.” When a national believes the gospel, there is a concern that he will be misshaped by foreign (expat) church practices, compromising a more relatable, indigenous expression of Christian worship.
“There are no healthy church options here.” When the word is not rightly preached, or the ordinances are not rightly administered, those are serious obstacles to membership. (But there is a difference between a weak church, which can be reformed, and a false one.)

“Many missionaries who are hesitant to join a church were not exposed to a healthy one before they left.”

These concerns are understandable. It’s true that church life can be messy and time-consuming. We do risk backlash for identifying with God’s people (see Hebrews 10:34), and wisdom is required to navigate security concerns, especially when local believers may be endangered by foreign presence. It is easier to associate with those who are just like us (on the same team). There may be cultural elements in our churches that are foreign to the host culture. And unhealthy churches may at times feel like a drag on one’s ministry.

Four Bigger Reasons to Join

As real as the hurdles and challenges may be, I agree with the Southgate Fellowship Affirmations and Denials Concerning World Mission:

We affirm that missionaries should seek vital connection with a visible church in their mission context.We deny that missionaries should deem it unnecessary to join with other believers in membership in a visible church.

There are at least four good reasons for why missionaries should not only attend overseas churches but also join them.

1. Missionaries Are Christians

Missionaries need God’s appointed means of grace like everybody else — for their own spiritual growth and for their marriages and families. They too need pastoral oversight, accountability and discipline, sound teaching, and the Lord’s Supper, through which the risen Christ grants perseverance and staying power in ministry. They can’t get that from their home church across the ocean.

During eighteen years in the UAE, I have noticed a trend: the most fruitful missionaries are the ones committed to a local church here, whether English- or Arabic-speaking. Those who remain apart from the church tend to leave sooner or spin their wheels without making a lasting impact evangelistically.

“I have noticed a trend: the most fruitful missionaries are the ones committed to a local church.”

The World Evangelical Alliance tried to identify why so many missionaries were returning home too early. The two-part study, “Worth Keeping: Global Perspectives on Good Practice in Missionary Retention” (1997, 2006), concluded that a “lack of pastoral care” was one of the leading factors in ministry attrition. True pastoral care is best expressed in meaningful local church membership on the field. Drawing on years of experience in Central Asia, Scott Logsdon observed, “Church membership under the ongoing and effective care of pastors is not only vital to the health and well-being of missionaries — it will result in a longer, healthier, more vibrant witness for the gospel” (“Why Is It Essential for Missionaries to Join a Church Where They Live?”).

2. Missionaries Model Love for the Church

For the sake of the people they’re trying to reach, missionaries should show a commitment to and an affection for their local church. After all, the church is Jesus’s discipleship program, where new believers learn to observe all that Jesus commanded through means of grace like the following:

regular assembly (Hebrews 10:24–25)
pastors and teachers equipping the saints (Ephesians 4:12)
observing the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–33)
submitting to leaders (Hebrews 13:17)
addressing one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19)
mutual exhortation (Hebrews 3:13)
fellowship (Acts 2:42)

How will new converts establish churches of their own if they cannot watch missionaries engage with the local body of Christ?

3. Missionaries Multiply Through the Church

Missionaries multiply themselves, and not just as a plus-one addition to the missions enterprise, but rather as a force multiplier. They enlarge the evangelistic footprint by joining the church, committing to the body of Christ, and influencing others for good. During my time in Dubai, I’ve already seen lots of missionaries come and go. Sometimes I say to missionaries, “In ten years you might be gone. Your missions team might be disbanded. But if you’ve been a fruitful member of a local congregation, then you will leave behind a brighter light than was there before you came.”

Youssef and Reem (not their real names) are faithful Egyptian members of our church in Dubai. They aren’t missionaries but are growing Christians who love Jesus and are zealous for evangelism. We gather regularly, sit under the same teaching, take the Lord’s Supper together, and encourage one another. A while back, they were sharing the gospel — in Arabic — with Syrian and Palestinian Muslims in their apartment building. They continue to do this type of ministry in Arabic and will still be doing it long after I’m gone.

4. Missionaries Strengthen Churches

Unhealthy churches are powerful anti-missionary forces. They smear Christ’s reputation, making everybody’s job harder in evangelism. Isn’t that a reason to invest time and energy into strengthening the body of Christ that’s already there on the mission field?

After years of pioneering ministry in Arabia, Samuel Zwemer (1867–1952) explained why he thought Muslims were so hard to reach. His main reason? Weak churches.

From the very beginning the examples of Christ’s way of life that they had before them were so repellent as to widen the breach rather than to bridge it. . . . Christ’s way of life in Muslim lands has never won multitudes because it has never been lived among them on a noble scale over a considerable period of time. (Islam and the Cross, 56)

In other words, bad churches malign the gospel we proclaim. In Zwemer’s experience, local churches were too often marked by lives that were inconsistent with their profession of faith. Instead of shining cities on a hill, too many churches were immature and worldly, projecting a confusing, even “repellent” vision of the Christian life.

What About the Sending Church?

The greatest work of the sending church happens before the missionary goes. As Andy Johnson, a pastor in Central Asia, put it, “Churches are where faithful missionaries are made” (Missions: How the Local Church Goes Global, 46). It is in the local church that character, fruitfulness, and Bible knowledge are properly assessed. No missions-application process can ever substitute for a missionary candidate’s proven involvement in the life of a local church. Therefore, it’s vital for missionaries to be members — before they go.

Thereafter, membership should follow the missionary. It’s not about a sentimental attachment to the church “back home.” Membership is a mutual promise (a covenant) between a local church and a real Christian. The New Testament’s “one another” commands require physical proximity to obey. If they are not in the same assembly, how can Christians “obey your leaders and submit to them” (Hebrews 13:17) and “not neglect to meet together” (Hebrews 10:25)?

None of this means that missionaries should sever their relationships with their home church. Those relationships remain intact, although they change when the missionary is sent out. Paul and Barnabas were released by the church at Antioch (Acts 13:3), but they regularly returned there and reestablished ministry relationships (Acts 14:27). Sending churches (and missions agencies) still have important roles to play, but biblical membership and accountability happen where the missionary lives.

Not all kinds of authority are the same. To generalize, the division of responsibility looks like this:

Sending churches affirm, send, and hold accountable the missionary in the task.
Local churches affirm and hold accountable the missionary in his walk and faith.

The local church is the final earthly court of appeal in matters of discipline and doctrine, exercising the exclusive responsibility of affirming or denying the validity of one’s profession of faith. Such binding-and-loosing authority (Matthew 18:18) makes sense only where the missionary actually lives. One cannot be in covenant with a church on another continent.

Sending churches should remain committed, supportive, and involved in the missionary’s ministry, without calling him or her a member. All of this shows the delicacy of the relationships involved (not to mention those with the sending agency). The missions enterprise can’t be carried out independently. The work is cooperative and interdependent. As the Southgate Fellowship put it, “We affirm that a visible church which sends a missionary, and the visible church which a missionary plants or ministers in, share a vital and mutually important relationship.”

What If There Is No Church?

Of course, in some places there is no church yet. There, we must do what we can. In some cases, a small team may need to covenant together, recognize elders, and commit to gathering, preaching, and administering the gospel ordinances, even as they continue laboring among the indigenous people. In the absence of any other church, some missionaries in Arabia have faithfully formed their own congregations for Christian community. But they did not just declare themselves a church; they intentionally adopted biblical church structure, purpose, and activity.

My focus here is on the global cities today where there are churches. People can do something as dramatic as cross an ocean, move to a foreign land, obtain a residence visa — and then forsake the local church already meeting there. There is a breed of missionary that sees the church as (at best) incidental or (at worst) an actual hindrance to the gospel. That’s shortsighted.

For missionaries, according to Blosser, “The New Testament pattern is clear: membership in a local expression of the body of Christ is not optional.” We should join a church not merely to feel blessed, or to get our batteries recharged, or because we get something out of it. Ultimately, we should join a church because of our allegiance to Christ and his body. Missionaries cannot say to non-missionaries, “I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, missionary and non-missionary — we all need each other.