“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It case you were living under a rock, the U.S. Men’s and Women’s Olympic hockey teams both won the gold medal in this year’s Olympic Games. The women’s team has literally always medaled, winning gold three times. The men’s team hasn’t won gold in 46 years. Their victory was particularly impressive, including one of the greatest performances by a goalie ever. On the news of their victory, the whole country rejoiced (well, most of the country rejoiced; politics got in the way of the whole country’s rejoicing). It feels good to rejoice. That’s part of why Paul called the Philippian believers to rejoice in the Lord always. Let’s talk about why else he did.

Think for a second about the last time you truly rejoiced. I’m not so concerned what it was about at the moment, but rather just the experience of it. How did it feel? Who were you with? Honestly many of the most memorable moments of rejoicing I can quickly recall involve sports in one form or fashion. Yet while some of those were times I was watching a game on TV by myself, the very best of them were with other people.

Rejoicing is typically a communal affair. And indeed, this is right and proper. When we are rejoicing over something, that experience is by definition going to involve a certain amount of joy. And while joy is certainly something we can experience on our own, the sweetest and best joys always happen in the context of a community as a shared experience. Even if you are rejoicing a bit in watching a game on TV by yourself for instance, you savor the victory most when you are talking about it with another fan. If I’m watching a big basketball game at home, I’m always texting with my dad or one of my boys.

More than being inherently communal, though, why is it that we rejoice? Because the outcome of some event in which we were highly invested turns out the way we wanted it to. Sticking with the sports illustration for another minute, you want your team to win and they do.

Paul didn’t tell us to rejoice generally, though. He said we should rejoice in the Lord. Part of this is simply rejoicing in who God is, in His goodness. He is worth celebrating simply because He is. That’s the kind of God we serve.

Part of our rejoicing in the Lord, though, has to do with outcomes. What outcomes? God’s outcomes. More specifically, the good outcomes of God’s kingdom. We rejoice because we have experienced these in the past, yes, but we also rejoice in that we are experiencing them in the present, and will experience them in the future. Yet how do we rejoice in positive future outcomes? Because of the character of the God in whom we are rejoicing (which, as we have already said, is a reason in and of itself for our rejoicing).

In this, rejoicing in the Lord is an act of faith. It is a display of our trust in Him. We are so confident that things are going to work out as He designs, and that those designs will always be for our good and for the good of all those who seek and serve Him, that we go ahead and rejoice now as if they have already happened.

This is why Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord always. We rejoice always, in all circumstances, because we know that when we are in Him, He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes. It may not seem that way not, but He is in the business of bringing incredible, kingdom good out of circumstances that seem irredeemably bad.

As a matter of fact, the whole of our faith hangs on His doing that. Jesus was put to death on a cross and it seemed that God had lost and that hope was gone. And it was…until He came walking back out of the tomb on the third day. Yet as much as it seems like the disciples had to wait on that turn of events to start rejoicing, thus they couldn’t have rejoiced in the Lord always, Jesus had long before told them just exactly what was going to happen. When they got to Jerusalem He was going to be betrayed, arrested, tried, and put to death, but it was all going to be okay because on the third day He was going to rise again. They could have indeed rejoiced in the Lord always. They simply didn’t have the faith to do it. Let’s not follow their example.

There is yet one more reason we rejoice in the Lord. This one flows out of the larger context of this whole section that we established last Thursday. Rejoice like this is how to stand firm in the Lord. If we are going to stand firm in the Lord in the face of various pressures to relent from that position, that standing firm is going to come by our rejoicing. It will come when we tenaciously cling to our faith in His character that has been exceedingly well established in historical record and story over thousands of years and rejoice in the Lord in spite of having little to no present evidence in our current circumstances that such an act makes any rational sense.

When and as we do that, we will yet experience the goodness of His kingdom. It may come in big and obvious ways. It may come much more subtly and in ways that only we notice. Experiences that take this latter form will potentially leave us looking irrational or even insane to a skeptical onlooker, but that’s okay. We’re not motivated or moved by their assessment in the first place. Right? If the unbelieving world’s determination of reason and rationality are what motivate our decision making we have drifted very far from the path we should be walking. And so we rejoice in the Lord.

We get more of what we celebrate. If we celebrate the goodness of God, we will naturally be inclined toward ways to experience more of it. So, let’s rejoice in the Lord always that His goodness may be a constant feature of our lives.