Joyful in hope - long-suffering in tribulation (Romans 12:11) Part 7

Little by little we have been breaking down this biblical text that has turned out to be extremely rich for our edification. We go to verse 9 and from there then we will continue. Let me say a short word of prayer to gather the mind again and focus it on what God has for us this morning.

Father, now focus our spirit on your word and remove all distractions from our minds and emotions. It is beautiful to be able to meditate on your teaching. We want to do it with an understood heart, Father, with a mind enlightened by you, always giving you glory and honor and knowing that what we process is not a neutral word but rather the very life of God manifested through his revelation and thus the We receive with open, humble, simple hearts, subject to your truth. We guide Lord and focus on you now and give us rest so we can be in the spirit when listening to your teaching. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Verse 9, Romans 12. “...love be without hypocrisy, without pretense”, love without pretense, “...hate what is bad, hold fast to what is good”, that is, hate what is bad and hold on to tooth and nail to good, is the most appropriate translation "... love one another with brotherly love", in other words brotherly love be affectionate, what we were saying, express affection, express affection, treat each other affectionately others, express warmth to each other. We have to be a loving congregation, an affectionate congregation, a warm congregation where the stranger feels comfortable, the visitor feels welcomed, who does not feel like a foreigner who has no place, but who feels loved and received, where the sick have someone to pray for him or her, the person in material need to know that they are not alone in their struggle, that the person who needs moral support and encouragement receive a hand on the back that blesses them and tells them to keep going . That is, love each other with brotherly love, with affection. In honor put each other ahead, in other words give preference to each other.

I seem to have taken this very seriously because I've been to a couple of lunches lately and the brothers are very careful not to go ahead when there's a buffet to be served first, it seems they heard what I said about putting the other one in front , instead of you go at once to take your first, the first plate, and I thank God because it seems that it is having an effect. There are two or three who hear me at least. How good, how good! ".... Preferring, that is, giving preference, one to the other." In what requires diligence, don't be lazy, ok, in what requires effort, don't be slow, be diligent. We talked about the diligent servant last Sunday, in spirit be fiery. Where the word fiery, of fire, fervent comes from, there is the word fever, there is the word to boil, fervor, fire, and in the original Greek in which this passage was written the idea is that, to the point of fiery, of fervor, of fire God does not want lukewarm people, God wants passionate people in the spirit, God wants the passion of one.... in terms of the Lord's causes, that are clear, the person determined in what he is in matters of the spirit, that are courageous, that they be delivered to the Lord, that they are red hot, that they have a passion for praise, for the word of God, for the values of the Kingdom of God, for the cause of the Kingdom of God, for the values of the church, it's that fervor in all those areas. Passionate people bring joy to the heart of God, in spiritual things let us be fervent, never lukewarm or indecisive.

So we were talking about that expression that is serving the Lord, which is very problematic, in the original Greek it lends itself to the interpretation that in every opportunity serving, when the opportunity is offered we serve the Lord, when there is an occasion to your being useful to the Kingdom of God, be useful, do not let an opportunity to serve God pass you by, to serve the Kingdom of God, to serve a brother, when there is an opportunity, cairos, when any opportunity arises of your being of service say present. Say amen to that, ok. Wherever you see a need, fill it yourself. Wherever you see the opportunity to have mercy on someone or give someone a word of encouragement or bless someone in some way, or put a peso in the pocket of someone in need, or give a plate of food to a hungry person , do it. When there is an opportunity for something, take it in the name of Jesus, do not be indifferent, do not let the opportunity pass you by, also in the positive aspect, we were saying, right? Because God wants people who dare to do things in his name, that also means an opportunity to study, to improve oneself, to invest in something, dare and do it and God will help you out. "At every opportunity serving the Lord."

Now we get into verse 12 on the matter that concerns us. There are two very nice concepts here for us as Christians. What are those two concepts? The Apostle Paul says: "..... joyful in hope, it says here, suffered in tribulation." I'm going to leave it there just on those two and if I don't have time for the third, it says “....steadfast in prayer”.

Joyful in hope, long-suffering in tribulation. Let's take the first concept: joy in hope, in the original Greek it says "te elpidi jairontes" in other words in hope, joyful, is the idea. Do you know someone called Elpidio? It is a name that is one of those old names, in the Dominican Republic sometimes poor boys were snapped at the name Elpidio. Do you know someone named Elpido? Raise your hand if you ever know someone. Do you know where the word elpidio comes from? Hence, elpidi, which means joyful. Elpidio comes from the idea of joy, then our ancestors, there was a logic, their madness had logic. When a person was called Elpidio he was a person who has joy, it is not simply that they wanted to give the boy an ugly name. "Jairontes asked you", in hope let us be joyful. How cute is that idea! God calls us to have hope and to have joy, it is more to what refers to hope that we be joyful, that we be joyful. The first thing I can tell you brothers is the following: the origin of hope in the believer.

Let me go back a bit, every Christian should be a person, a man, a woman of hope. In Christianity there is no room for despair, rebuke despair. When despair and discouragement and pessimism want to take over your life, chase it away like a mangy dog. Get him out of your life. Reprimand him, do not give him lodging, lodging in his mind to despair, to discouragement, to depression, to negativism. Brothers, the children of God, we have every reason in the world to be people of hope and joy and when you have the depression on Monday morning, rebuke it in the name of Jesus. Have an extra cup of coffee, put Marcos... on the radio, do something but don't add yourself to despair, don't stay mired in despair because that's not from God. And when despair comes into your life tell it: in the name of Jesus, get out of my mind. I do not receive you, this is not a place for you, devil. Because God calls us to joy and hope. Now you know where it comes from... for me the root of joy... Angela, God bless you. Ángela Santos who is visiting us from Ocala, God bless you, Ángela. This sister blessed us very much, her husband also, Miguel, there in Ocala and they hosted us and treated us so well, and he is here visiting this morning.

Brothers, what is the root of the believer's joy? In the last case when we go very deep, what is the root of the joy of the believer? You know which one is? This is what they have called the blessed hope, it is the hope in the second coming of Jesus Christ. Because? Because brothers, there is something that keeps me happy and that is that suffering is not forever. The agony of this world is not forever. There is coming a day, says the word, in which God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, in which all illness will disappear, that there will be no more bills to pay from the IRS and taxes. Praise God for that. We won't have to worry about the VISA card bill coming to the end of the month, or that we have to pay for gas, or that the price of petroleum oil is going to go up, this winter. All that, one day will end. And God will bring a new order to the universe and to the world and that we know that this world is not forever and that the sufferings are not forever, that God has better things for us one day. And that although life does not go well for us, but that at the end of the day a glorious reward awaits us if we stand firm in the Lord. And that, brothers, that relativizes the world, takes its edge off the fallen life in which we live and allows us to conceive of a better place, a better time that God has for us. That is why the Bible tells us "do not lose your hope, do not stop longing and waiting for the second coming of the Lord."

In First Thessalonians, Chapter 4, the Apostle Paul tells the Thessalonians in verse 13: he says “.... neither do we want brothers that you be ignorant about those who sleep, that is, those who are dead, so that do not be sad like the others who have no hope”. In other words, when the Christian cries or laments, he does not lament like one who has no hope. We have hope even in our dead, when a loved one disappears we know that we will see him again if he died in Christ Jesus. And that takes the edge off our pain and that is why we do not despair when we mourn the loss of a loved one or even the sadness of this world, because we know that we have a faithful God. It says ".... because if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, God will also bring with Jesus those who slept in Him. For this reason we say this in the word of the Lord that we who live will remain until the coming of the Lord , we will not precede those who died because the Lord himself with the voice of command, with the voice of the archangel and with trumpets of God will descend from heaven and the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive and who are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to receive the Lord in the air and thus we will always be with the Lord.” And look at what it says “...therefore encourage one another with these words”.

In other words, when we start to meditate that Christ is coming one day and that he is going to redeem this fallen world from all its madness and all its distortion, that should give us encouragement to continue forward because we know that we are not here.. We are like slaves who know that one day we are going to receive our liberation, and we long for that day and we wait for that day and we say; come Lord Jesus, as the Apostle John says in the Book of Revelation, and I believe that it is like a subconscious root, it is the subconscious foundation of that attitude of daily hope that we have. The hope of the coming of the Lord is a cosmic, sublime, immense, encompassing hope, but within that, that foundation, there is a daily, daily hope. When we get up in the morning and look outside and the winter mist is over our window, and we feel that cold because we don't like it, but hope is born in us because we know that in God all things are possible and we have hope and joy in the Lord, we are encouraged.

Brothers, the love of God in us gives us that emotional vitality to move forward in life. The words of the Apostle Paul came to my mind in First Corinthians Chapter 13, verse 7 where he says ".... love suffers everything", that is, everything endures is the idea, everything endures, "... He believes everything, he hopes everything, he supports everything. When you have the love of God in your heart, when love has nested in your chest, you believe that everything is possible.

Brothers, there are people who are cynical by nature and always see the glass as half empty, they don't see it as half full, they see it as half empty and they are always seeing the speck in the eye of others and they are always seeing the defect in the person, in activity, or preaching, or whatever, and they don't see the good. They are so full of the bad that they don't see the good, and sometimes in life we can be like that. God has given us so many good things in our family, in our marriage, in our health or in something and we are so caught up in what we don't have that we can't see the good things. But the person who has the goodness of God, the love of God believes everything, expects everything, puts up with everything, bears everything, believes that everything is possible and that something good can come out of that situation that seems to be totally negative. . The person who has the spirit of God is a hopeful person, he believes that there is a possibility that he can get ahead, that there is in that person that it seems that he has nothing good, yes, there is something of God there. I am going to pray for that to come to light and I am going to bless the good that is in an individual in a situation.

The believer never despairs, brothers, the son of God must never despair, there must always be a seed of hope. I always remember my dad's words that he said: I don't get off the floor. Meaning: look, even if whatever happens to me happens to me, I'm not going to get off the ground, if I fall there my fall ended. And the idea was that, it was a word that challenged life, that no matter what happens in your life, look, there is always the possibility of moving forward. Get that word this morning, my brother. God never leaves you alone. And you have to be joyful in things that have to do with hope, be joyful.

Look there in Second Corinthians, Chapter 4 verses 8 and 9, even verse 7 says the Apostle Paul that he was a man of hope, if anyone was a man of hope it was the Apostle Paul, he says "... but We have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the excellence of power belongs to God and not to us who are troubled in everything more than, but not anguished, in trouble but not desperate, persecuted but not helpless, knocked down but not destroyed.” You see, the Apostle Paul was not like the ostrich that sticks its head in the sand and says there is no danger. No, he acknowledges, in life there are problems, there are difficulties, there are struggles, there are burdens, there are challenges, yes Lord, there are failures, but you know what? That the believer is never without options, never without hope, never without an exit door.

The word says that God along with the temptation, with the test also gives the way out. And that should encourage us to keep going. When he said for example here ".... we are troubled but not anguished" the idea is that we are in trouble but we are not without options. That is the idea of the original language. We may be in trouble, yes, says the Apostle Paul, but you know what? That we are not without some exit option. I always believe that, I always say that in any crisis in life, in any difficult situation there is always a chance to get ahead, never throw your gloves on the floor, never tell yourself there is no hope for me anymore, I can't do anything anymore , and all the doors are closed. Find that even through a little crack you can escape and sometimes God makes water gush out of a rock, and from a blind alley, when God comes a huge crane comes out and breaks everything and you can go out to the other side. Because the believer has the value, the power of God with him or her, there are always options, there is always a way out.

And the Apostle Paul says “...in hope let us be joyful”. There is a connection there between hope and joy, if you don't have hope you can't have joy. And the believer is called to be joyful, that is something else. Joy is the source of health and mental health and vitality. The word of the Lord says "...the joy of the Lord is our strength" and you know what? Many times when you look at your life and look around you will not find many reasons to be happy because you will see everything negative, you will have problems here, problems there, difficulties here, difficulties there, but you know what? You still have the possibility to decide how you are going to react to it.

Someone has said I can't control my circumstances but I can control how I react to them. Look at that, you know where the freedom of man is in that powerful fact that you cannot control whether or not they put you in a cage, but you can control how you are going to react to that cage where you are put. In the Nazi concentration camps in Germany during World War II and Hitler, there were many people who suffered terribly and were oppressed and abused in a terrible way, many succumbed and died or left the concentration camps bitter, depressed for life. . And yet there are stories of inconceivable greatness within those concentration camps, people who somehow found in that concentration camp something that encouraged them to reach another moral or spiritual level.

Victor Frank one of the great psychiatrists of the 20th century talks about that in his book, he was one of those victims of the Nazi holocaust and he talks about how he saw people who gave up and threw themselves to die in the concentration camps or they only lived for them, to eat the little piece of bread that was left and they did not share with anyone, and he saw others who rose to a very high level of nobility and who shared with others who cared for those who were sick, that their faith gave them strength and he says he noticed something interesting that those who only thought of themselves and focused on themselves succumbed very easily to illness and death. But those who cared for others and who acceded to their faith and held on survived more successfully. Because? Because when there is hope in man, when there is nobility of spirit, when you control how you react to the bad thing that has happened to you, God gives you strength. Many of us when we have problems, when they treat us badly, when we fail, when we have a defeat, what do we do? We lay down to die, we get depressed, we throw away our gloves, we go into a dark alley and say I'm never going to fight again, I'm never going to fight again. But you can at that moment when tragedy visits your life say: No, in the name of the Lord I am going to believe that my redeemer lives. I am going to go ahead, I am not going to drop the sword, I am going to confess the word of God and you say to the soul: soul, rejoice, my soul, bless the Lord. And you command your mind and your emotions to move beyond depression and beyond the moment. The Lord Jesus Christ said: the spirit is always ready, the flesh is weak, but the spirit is always ready. Make sure that your reaction is first in the spirit, and not in the flesh, when tragedy strikes your life.

In Philippians Chapter 4 verse 4, the Apostle Paul says: “...rejoice again I tell you, rejoice in the Lord”, and you know that Paul wrote that epistle from a prison, from a Roman dungeon and Paul did not know whether he would survive or not. There was a great possibility that they were going to cut off his head and yet Paul wrote one of the most joyous letters in the entire Bible right there in that Roman dungeon and he wrote that letter where over and over again he says rejoice, rejoice.

It's all in the perspective you take on life's problems. It's all in the way you interpret what happened to you. If you interpret what happened to you as ah, look at another example of the injustice of the world and that God does not love me and that I am useless and that people are all bad. You know that if you adopt that interpretation, you are going to become bitter and you are going to sink and you are going to weaken, but if you say: no, in the name of the Lord I am going to use this to be stronger, to grow more , to be more like Christ, to know my God better, to see how God is going to move me forward, and you force yourself to interpret that event of life in a different way, you are on your way. I tell you in the name of the Lord. Those are the victors, those are the winners, those are the people that when they reach 70 or 80 years old you see them as healthy and strong and so lucid. And you say why this old woman has reached that level, that is, she's so strong, that's why, you know, because she decided not to give up when she was 50, 40, 30 years old and she developed habits of struggle and resistance and force. And so that is why his mind remained collected when he reached old age and his body obeyed the dictates of his spirit, his emotions and also remained strong because the spirit dominates the body and the mind. I am already giving myself mental massage from now on, so that when I reach 80 years old, God allows me to be strong and vigorous in the Lord to serve Him, but I am beginning to train myself from now on, you know? To hell I'm telling you, you're not going to have an inch of my mind, or my emotions, or my body.

You have to fight brothers.

You have to fight, you have to resist, you have to take the sword in your hand and stay strong in the Lord because the spirit will always dominate the body and matter. You have the right to choose what you are going to do with the tragedy that life throws at you. If you are going to let them bring you down and bring you down and defeat you and weaken you or make you stronger and more vigorous and more noble and more capable of counseling others and encouraging others and telling you; look girl get up because I went through that and here I am still alive, so go ahead in the name of the Lord and when you speak you will speak with the voice of authority, because you will speak like the one who was there in the battlefield and emerged victorious and if I did it, you can do it too, says the Lord. He defeated on the cross everything that men and the devil threw at him. He emerged victorious from everything and He says: you can do it too with my help, with my presence in your life. Never let defeat embitter or weaken you. Use the struggle of life to become stronger and to go further and higher in the Lord. In hope as God wants us to be?, joyful, let's be aggressive, let's be abundant and then he also says here in tribulation, how do we have to be? Suffered, look, I have never liked the word suffered because what I see of that word is a person with a cloak over his head, whimpering on the floor, shedding tears, suffered, oh! She is such a long-suffering person, I don't like long-suffering people, because it's not what I see from the word of God. That is why it is so nice to be able to go back to the original and understand these passages.

The word used for suffered is upomenontes. Say everyone upomenontes. Say I am supreme. That is, you are rather the word is resisting. It says in tribulation, resisting. In tribulation, stand firm. That is the original idea. When you are in tribulation, be firm. That interpretation is much better than saying suffered, because suffered is a person who throws himself there simply to say, well, oh blessed, as the Puerto Ricans say. That resignation like this without bones, without backbone. No, God wants you to be firm in tribulation, to be resistant in tribulation. That is what the word of the Lord is saying. In all tribulation stand tall, stand strong in the Lord. There is an active sense of challenge there. When the struggle and the test visit your life, when the tribulation comes, affirm yourself in the Lord. Stand tall and stand up in the Lord, look there in Ephesians, Chapter 6 and you will see what I mean. There came to me the memory of what the word of the Lord says when the struggle in life comes. What is the position of the believer? It is a position of war, it is a position of resistance, brothers. In the Gospel there is no place for madmen, there is no place for microbes, there is no place for spiritual insects, there is room only for giants. The giants are the ones that survive in the Gospel because we have an enemy who is a giant and has no mercy.

Says Ephesians Chapter 6, verse 10: "... for the rest, my brothers, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might." That is why, brothers, we have to be continually strengthening ourselves in the Lord, feeding ourselves spiritually, reading the word, worshiping the Lord, eating spiritual proteins in order to stay strong. "....Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand firm against the wiles of the devil because we do not have a fight against blood and flesh but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this century, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenlies."

Brothers, the struggle that we have as children of God is not an easy thing. We have an enemy that is too powerful, it is the one that governs everything that is, it is the spiritual mafia of darkness. They are the ones who have full control of all the evil, all the crimes, all the violence, all the tragedy in the world, that demonic mafia controls it, and everything has to go through that gangster named Satan, may the Lord rebuke him , and all his demons that are under him, and that is our fight and that is why we have to be strong, that is why the Christian who falls asleep, as they say, shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current. The Christian who is not strong in the Lord, forget it, he is going to be weak and he is going to be open to all kinds of spiritual infection that come into his life and we have to be strong because when tragedy comes to your life, when tribulation comes to your life, what are you going to do? If you're weak, you're going to fall, you're going to fall flat. Then he says "...therefore take the whole armor of God so that you can resist on the bad day and having finished everything stand firm". When a bad day comes to your life, when tribulation comes to your life, when a cancer diagnosis comes or your daughter gets pregnant, or they tell you that the money you had for your retirement has just been done because the economy has changed and you lost all that money. When your marriage is entering a crisis or problems come to your flesh, what are you going to do? You have to resist, says the word of the Lord, you have to strengthen yourself in the Lord when the bad day comes, fill yourself with the holy spirit, or before the bad day comes, fill yourself with the power of God, fill yourself with the word of God to that you can resist when the tribulation comes, so that you can stand firm in the midst of the tribulation.

One of the most beautiful values of the word of God is patience. God calls us to be patient, and patience can be said to be patient with others, but there is a type of patience that is very important, which is patience when we are in the midst of tribulation.

Look there, and I'm finishing, James Chapter 5, is one of the most beautiful passages about patience in verse 8, 5, James 5:8 says: "... you also have patience and, look here again this idea, affirm your hearts”. Be patient and firm your hearts because the coming of the Lord is drawing near. Look here at the mysterious connection of what I was saying before, between the coming of the Lord and strength, vigor, resistance, in the mind of the holy spirit there is a connection between those two things. As the coming of the Lord becomes a reality in our life, that will give us patience and strength. He says: "... brothers, do not complain against each other, well, that's it.... in verse 10 he says: ".... my brothers, take as an example of affliction and patience the prophets who spoke in the name of of the Lord. Behold, we have for blessed those who suffer, you have heard of the patience of Job and you have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is very merciful and compassionate. Praise the Lord." In the test, brothers, we must affirm our hearts, he says: affirm your hearts. When we have prayed, brethren, when we have anointed, when we have fasted, when we have rebuked all the demons of hell, and when we have declared all that we know of the power of God in our lives, and the test still remains, you know the only card that he has left to play, patience and firmness and enduring in the name of the Lord and not giving up. Do not give up as the Mexicans say, never give up. Just hang in there, stand firm, clench your knees, and let no one step over you, until the bad day is over. There will come times in life when all you can do is Lord, give me strength until the storm passes. Give me firmness until this streak of evil that is in my life passes because there will be situations in life that no matter how much you pray and do everything you know how to do, God will still tell you, look, for reasons that only He knows you have to put up with you I can't get you out of it. The Apostle Paul, three times says that he came before the Lord to remove a sting in his flesh, three times, and what did the Lord say to him: my grace is enough Paul, I am very sorry. I have answered many other prayers and have given you many answers to your prayers, but in this, forgive me but I cannot get you out, so may my grace be sufficient for you.

Brothers, there are times in life, there are tests in life that the only thing that will sustain us is the grace of the Lord. I don't like to give people easy answers, there are preachers who tell people: everything will be fine, don't worry, if you are in the Lord everything will be fine, you won't have problems, you will not have financial proof, everything will be health and prosperity and success. That is a lie from the devil, sometimes in the life of the believer you have tests and difficulties come, tribulations come, wounds come, failures come, financial failures come, discouragement and betrayals come, there will be moments, there will be times in the life of the believer that will be stormy and no matter how much you pray, God in his grace is going to say: no, I can't get you out, you need to get through, you need to have that cup. As our Lord Jesus Christ said: "if it is your will, pass this cup from me". And the father said, "You don't have to pass it on, you have to take it." And there are times when God in his sovereign and mysterious mercy will say: my son, my daughter, I'm very sorry but you have to go through this storm, I'm not going to get rid of it, and the only thing you're going to be able to do in that case it is to endure, to resist, to stand firm, not to give up, not to curse God, not to stop praying, not to stop fasting, not to stop reading the word, not to stop coming to church. Many people leave the church because things are going badly for them, and they return supposedly when they are doing well. Brothers, the place to be when there is trial and tribulation is in the church, in the house of God. Don't run away, because then the devil will hit you even harder. Do not turn your back on the devil, you have to look the devil in the face in the name of the Lord and tell him: you are not going to destroy me because he who is in me is more powerful than you... We must resist is the only solution to the problem.

Job, when he was in the throes of his greatest tribulation that had gone longer than he thought he had to, you know what he said? Even if he kills me, I will hope in him. That is the bottom line, as they say in English. Even if God kills me, I will continue to trust Him. The devil cannot enter that area. That is an inviolable zone, it is a zone of invincibility. The idea that even if things don't go well for me and even if everything apparently fails, I'm still going to continue trusting in the Lord because He is faithful and He knows what He is doing in my life.

I end with this word, from Abacuk Chapter 3, verses 17 and 18, it says “... even if the fig tree does not bloom, that is, even if the economy goes downhill, even if oil costs too much, even if the winter be it too cold or whatever, "...even though the fig tree does not flourish nor are there fruit on the vines, even though the produce of the olive tree is lacking and the farmers do not provide maintenance and the sheep are removed from the fold and there are no cows in the the corrals, yet I will rejoice in the Lord and be glad in the God of my salvation. Hallelujah! The Lord the Lord is my strength who makes my feet like servants and makes me walk on my heights. Glory in the name of the Lord." Even if everything goes wrong, even if a streak of evil and difficulty and problems comes into my life, even if everything seems negative and there is no sign of hope, with all of this I will rejoice and be glad in the Lord. Do you see the idea? It is that you have the option to decide what your attitude in life is going to be, if it is going to be a position of joy and aggressive hope or it is going to be a victim mentality that gets depressed because something is wrong with you, and you he gives up and immediately dies. What will be the philosophy that will animate your life, my brother, my sister? What is the life posture that will govern your reaction when difficult days come to your life, when tragedy comes, when tribulation comes to your life? Are you going to let the world pass you by or are you going to say no, the Lord is the most powerful in me. God is going to get me through, I know that my redeemer lives, I know that God is good and I know that God is faithful. Maybe I can't explain what has happened but I know that God knows and He is coherent and consistent in His ways. He doesn't contradict himself. The Lord give us the strength to go one step further, brothers and always be those people who are joyful in hope and firm in tribulation.

Let's lower our heads, let's receive that word from the Lord in this life. Let's embrace the ethics of joy. There is the title of this sermon: the ethics of joy, the ethics of joy. I choose joy. Tell yourself: I choose joy. I choose hope. I choose victory. I choose the warrior identity and not the victim identity. I choose praise and reject depression this morning. I am not going to let my past memories, my past negative experiences weaken me and distort me and twist me. No, I'm going to use the past as firewood for an even bigger fire. I am going to burn all the experiences of the past that have destroyed me. If I was raped as a child or my parents didn't affirm me and didn't encourage me to move on, that's going to be fuel for my fire. I'm not going to get depressed about it. If they betrayed me in the past, if I had a financial failure and had to declare bankruptcy, I will not stop longing for something and hope for something good that God has for me, I will not stop undertaking good things, I will not stop laughing, I will not stop enjoying life, but I choose joy. The ethics of joy, that is the ethics that will govern my life. When I reach old age and my bones creak when I move, I will still rejoice in the Lord. When I have to take 10 or 12 pills every morning but I'm going to say: thank you Lord because I'm alive, at least and because one day all that will stop being important because one day you will free me from this fallen condition. Glory in the name of the Lord, Thank you Father. We gather joy this morning, Lord, we receive your joy, we receive your hope, we affirm ourselves in you, thank you that there is always a reason to live, Father. As long as you are present, everything else is possible. Hallelujah! Bless my brothers and my sisters this morning.

Lord we choose hope and we choose joy and we choose victory over depression and defeat and hopelessness. Thank you because you are present in our life and therefore everything is well and we can know that good things are coming right around the corner because you are victorious in us, you are powerful in us.