Joy No One Can Take Away

Jesus is speaking here to His disciples about the sorrow they would feel at His death, but how that sorrow would turn to joy upon His resurrection. They weren’t quite on His wavelength, but all would become clear soon enough—the horrors of the cross were imminent. It’s hardly a joyful thing to discuss death in any fashion, let alone one’s own. Jesus knew everything that was coming, and He certainly knew the despair that would fill the hearts of His followers when they were faced with His death.

Jesus was the one who had to endure one of the cruelest ways to die imaginable, yet here He is encouraging His followers and assuring them that there would be great joy ahead. There’s a famous sermon titled “It’s Friday but Sunday’s Coming.” Imagine if you were one of those present on that awful Friday. Jesus is on the cross, and as He died, all the disciples’ hopes and dreams died with Him. Yes, He said He’d rise after three days, and yes they’d even seen Him raise others from the dead, but as they watched His brutalized body and He took His last breath, there was only profound sorrow, indescribable heartbreak.

But Sunday did come, and the resurrected Christ defeated death itself, and if He can defeat death, there’s nothing else He can’t defeat! Jesus gave the analogy of a woman giving birth, how, despite the pain of childbirth, her joy at the sight of her newborn child is all that matters to her. Only on Resurrection Sunday, does the pain of Friday make any sense.

And it’s not just babies that get born. Sometimes, God gives us something we have to get started, to give birth to, if you will. And if it’s difficult to get that thing started, if birthing that vision from God brings us incredible challenges, that’s not time to give up, that’s time to remember that joy is just ahead!

Jesus purchased that joy with His own blood and there is absolutely nothing that has the power to take it from you! If Sunday seems impossible to get to, it just seems that way—it will come! Will there be pain to battle through on the way to what God has planned for you? I can guarantee it. But on the way, and as those God-given dreams become reality, you’ve been promised joy—joy that no one can take away!