Luke 1:42-45




Elizabeth gave a glad cry and exclaimed to Mary, “God has blessed you above all women, and your child is blessed. Why am I so honoured, that the mother of my Lord should visit me? When I heard your greeting, the baby in my womb jumped for joy. You are blessed because you believed that the Lord would do what he said.”
There’s lots of joy in the scriptures surrounding the birth of Jesus. But I love the fact that the first person to leap with joy was John the Baptist while he was still in his mother’s womb! He began his ministry early! John would be the one who paved the way for Jesus 30 years later and this was a beautiful recognition of the significance of his cousin.
Joy is consistently a sign of God being at work. When the Holy Spirit is at work in a person’s life, there will always be joy; it is one of the fruits of the Spirit. It naturally and inevitably flows from a life deliberately seeking to live in line with God’s will. Billy Sunday is the wonderful name of an American baseball player who became a famous evangelist in the early years of the 20th Century. He once said: “If you have no joy in your religion, there’s a leak in your Christianity somewhere.”
It's a matter of great sadness that very few people outside the Church would ever imagine the Christian faith had anything to do with joy. They see our buildings, hear about our squabbles, and get a picture of all the worst sides of the Church. The best way of turning the tide is not by lecturing people about the joy of Christian faith but by living it. And that means that we all need to listen hard to Billy Sunday’s words and check that we don’t have a leak.






Question: In what ways have you found joy in your Christian faith?
Prayer: Lord God, thank you for the joy that you have brought into my life. Help me to live so close to you that I will always be full of your joy. Amen

Released on 14 Dec 2022