No One Will Take Your Joy From You (Easter 2022)

Sermon Transcript from Easter 2022

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Happy Easter! Maybe, I should say, Happy Easter 2022, because that’s different than normal Easter, right? This is Post-pandemic Easter. There’s nothing different about Easter itself, but for us…we’ve been through some stuff, you know?

Two years ago today, we celebrated Easter online, because we didn’t know what Covid was going to become. And that was hard… “Jesus rose from the dead, hallelujah! Please don’t hate me.” One year ago today, we were back together in person of course, feeling a little lighter, celebrated Easter, “Jesus rose from the dead, Hallelujah! Where is everybody? Why can’t I make this work?”

I’ve had a lot of inadequacy revealed in the past two years. I had to get a pastoral coach, someone to help me figure things out, you could just call him a counselor. He had me think hard about a lot of things in my past that I wished I didn’t have to think about ever again. Turns out, I’ve got relational trauma in my past, go figure. 

Things that happened, either to me, or because of me, that leave me feeling like, “Why did I have to go through that?” 

You guys ever feel like the people who were supposed to be there for you, whether they were your friends or your parents or your community, the people who should have protected you and accepted you, just... Didn’t?”

You ever feel abandoned by people? Do you ever feel abandoned by God?

Our church has been studying the book of John and we’re in a place where Jesus just told His disciples that He’s leaving them. And He just drops a truckload of bad news on them all of a sudden.

He said in verse john 16, verse 4:

4b“I did not say these things to you from the beginning, 

What things?  That He’s leaving them. That He’s always known that He came to die. And that after He dies, things aren’t going to simmer down, they’re going to get much worse for them. The world will hate the disciples just like they hated Jesus.

He’s leaving, and life is gonna get real hard.

Jesus is saying that He kept this knowledge to Himself, the disciples didn’t need to know this yet, but why?

because I was with you. 

For the past 3 and a half years, Jesus has taken all of the opposition Himself. He’s protected them from the slander, the anger, and even the current plot of the religious leaders on his life. And He will continue to take the pain Himself until He’s arrested, tortured, and crucified. 

And then that animosity will pass to the disciples. Bad things are about to happen.

It looks like Jesus has just dropped a truck load of bad news on these guys. “I’m going away. I’m going to die. Love one another, because the world is going to hate you.” That sounds like really bad news, and honestly it kind of looks like a bait-and-switch on Jesus’ part, right?

Wait a minute, Jesus! You promised life! “I have come that you would have life and have it to the full,” you said! You said if anyone’s soul thirsts, let Him come to me and drink, If anyone’s soul is hungry, let Him come to me and eat; You said you’re the Good Shepherd! What do you mean you’re going away, the world is going to hate us?! What is this? 

Have you ever been there? “Jesus, you promised life… why did you bring me here? Why did you let this happen to me? Why did you feel so far away?”

Like God just drops a truck load of pain in your life, and you feel completely alone. 

So, I don’t know why you’re here today. It’s Easter, and it might be my only chance this year to convince you that you’re not alone. That you’re not too good to be here, and you’re not too broken to be here either. All year long, we study this Bible which continues to convince us that Good News isn’t for pretend people. It’s for real people. People like you, people like me. 

It’s good news for people with issues. It’s good news for people who don’t feel like they fit. It’s good news for the drug addict, the alcoholic, the loner, the survivor, the abused and the abuser, the crippled, the porn addict, the sinner, and the abandoned.

There is life here in Jesus and His promises. And no one is disqualified from receiving it if they’ll trust Him. 

Now, whether God does a work in your heart today to make you believe that, is up to Him. But it’s true. 

The disciples are feeling abandoned, they’re becoming full of fear and worry and anxiety. Their Lord and Master is leaving them. Right now, they can’t imagine anything good coming from this. 

Jesus continues:

5 But now I am going to him who sent me, 

and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’

In this moment, understandably, the disciples are thinking about themselves. They’re doing what we do with our pain and our fears, they’re getting all up in their heads about it. They’re not thinking about what Jesus is doing, where He’s going, and what He’s about to go through for them. They’re completely unaware of what Jesus has planned for them through this. And Jesus knows it.

6 But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. 

it’s important for us to know: Jesus doesn’t discount or overlook our pain. “sorrow has filled your heart.” He knows. He knows exactly what kind of pain, and how much pain, He has allowed into our lives. He knows what He holds back and He knows what it feels like when it comes crashing down. 

He wants them to understand what they’re about to go through, but He does not want them to feel alone in it. Your pain and your past does not mean that God has abandoned you. 

Jesus has something in store for them that will eradicate their fears, but first He’s going to address their sense of abandonment. 

7 Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, 

Now, I know what He’s about to say, and I still find that hard to read. Sometimes when I feel alone, I wish God would just show up in person and fix my problems. How can it be that it’s better that Jesus isn’t physically with us? Maybe you’re the person who said, “If God would come down from heaven, and I could see Him physically, then I’d believe. But not until then.”

Now, make no mistake, that’s a messed up thing to say. It’s full of pride and arrogance and evil. But I hear you. Sometimes I wish He would be here physically, too. So let’s see what the alternative is:

it is to your advantage that I go away, for (because) if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. 

Jesus is saying to the disciples, you feel alone now, but very soon, you will never be alone again. 

You feel abandoned now, but I would never abandon you. 

You feel completely helpless now, but I will send you the Helper, who will be with you always. 

For those of us who are Christians, we have no biblical warrant to think we've been abandoned by God. Jesus sent the third person of the Trinity, God Himself, to be with us always. If Jesus goes up, the Holy Spirit comes down. 

But how is this better than Jesus being physically with us? Well there’s a number of reasons. But here’s just one: think about how often we hide. How often we try to isolate. If Jesus was with us physically, it would be really easy to live at the edges of the crowd around Him. And it’d be easy to run away. But if He gives us the Holy Spirit, He’s with us wherever we go. Even when that’s to incredibly hard places, Jesus will be with us there, saying, “I’m still here."

We need God with us and in us to guide us, to counsel us through the Bible, to push us forward when we would hesitate to do good, and to pull us back when we would rush into evil. We, and the disciples, are going to need The Helper, at all times. 

If you haven’t trusted Jesus yet, you have been without this your entire life; the help of God everywhere you go, to heal your sense of abandonment, and to give you peace, hope, and joy that cannot be taken away from you [we’ll come back to that last part]

Now, why is this better, and why do we need the Holy Spirit? What is He going to do?

8 And when he comes, he will convict the world (Declare the world is guilty) concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: 

Now, what in the world does that mean? Thankfully, Jesus elaborates:

9 concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; 

Why do we celebrate Easter? Why did Jesus come to die and resurrect? Because of Sin. Because we don't naturally trust God. Over and over and over, from stealing a candy bar to stealing a life, we as humans have shown: we don’t trust God. We’ve got to make life work out for ourselves.

The Helper is going to show us how broken that is. He’s gonna give us the grace of letting us see how messed up we are on our own, and that there’s a better way. He’s going to convict us of our sin, so that we see it, and run back to God for mercy. 

Apart from the Holy Spirit’s work, we would never see ourselves as sinners. But that’s the starting place for hope, for healing, and for joy. We need to be convicted of sin.

10 concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; 

So this is strange, right? How do you convict someone of righteousness? Well, in this book, and in our lives, we’ve seen over and over what human “righteousness” looks like. And it sucks. We actually call it “Self-righteousness” which chooses me over you, ego over empathy, lies over love, and sets us up as our own gods. 

We need to see that our “righteousness” is not righteous. It’s twisted. The helper will show us that.

Because, Jesus is going to the Father and we will see Him no longer. What does real righteousness look like? Jesus. They’re losing their living, breathing picture of perfection, and they will need to be reminded what God is like. 

Remember, the pharisees hated Jesus, because He constantly showed how broken their self-righteousness was. And we need that. We can’t trust in ourselves. We’re not the answer. We need to be convicted of our self-righteousness.

11 concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

There’s two ways to take the word judgment here. It could be judgment like the coming judgment upon the world because of sin and self-righteousness. OR, it could be judgment in the sense of assessment, like when Jesus said in chapter 7: 24 Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”

I think Jesus has the second option in view here. Here’s what I mean:

When we see that there’s evil and sin in my heart, and that my self-righteousness isn’t going to get me anywhere, I start to understand what’s wrong with the world: Me. and everyone like me. 

But, why? Why am I as messed up as I am? The answer: Because I’ve been believing lies all of my life. My judgment, my assessment of me, of you, of God, of everything in the world has been built on the lie that God cannot be trusted. 

Now, tell me, where did that lie originally come from? The Devil. How is that for a hard pill to swallow? It’s like we’ve  been sharing our brain and our heart with the lies of the devil all our lives. 

 I read an article this week about this woman’s boyfriend, who seemed like the perfect man, until it was discovered that he was making up everything about who he was and over time stealing money from his victims. He was a con-man, a professional liar. And this dude was good at it. The multiple women that he had lied to and stolen from afterwards didn’t want to come forward and turn him in because they felt so stupid. How could they have believed such lies for so long? 


I relate with that. How could I so often believe lies about me, about others, about whether God can be trusted or not? 

Well, Because the lies are super persuasive! They were created to make sense of what we see! The lies are powerful. For example: it’s often easier to believe that my life is hard because God has it out for me or because I’m just a major disappointment to Him, than it is to believe that because my life is hard I should run back to God because He loves me. 

That con-man isn’t 1/1,000th as good of a liar as the Devil or our broken hearts, which craft these broken narratives about who we are and who God is. We try to make perfect sense of this fallen world in a fallen way, and in God’s grace we find that we are profoundly wrong. 

At the cross, Satan and his demons and his lies were judged and defeated. The world’s judgment is wrong. It comes from the person who was a liar from the beginning. 

The same way Adam and Eve believed him in the garden of Eden: “God’s withholding things from you. If He really loved you, He’d do this or that thing. You can’t trust Him”

Jesus is saying: When the Holy Spirit comes, He will convict the world that their judgment about me and about themselves has been based on lies, and He will show that what Jesus is about to do will crush those lies and give us truth. 

Jesus really is looking out for, protecting, and healing us, and He won’t let us live in the lies of the Devil:

12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 

13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, 

for he will not speak on his own authority, 

but whatever he hears he will speak, 

and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 

14 He will glorify me, 

for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 

15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Maybe you have felt so alone in this life. So abandoned at times. Without guidance, with questions without answers. 

But to believe that the hard things, the loss, the grief, the struggle against addiction, the pain of this life, means God doesn’t care about you and can’t be trusted, is a lie from the Devil.

And this morning, He is using me to tell us that you’re not abandoned. Even when a truck load of pain and fear enters your heart, you are not alone. If we will trust Him, He gives us the Helper, the Holy Spirit–God Himself–to live in us forever. 

If you’re a believer, believe it. If you haven’t trusted Jesus yet, this is a major part of what you’ve been missing your entire life. 

And now that He’s settled that we’re not abandoned… It’s time for Jesus to go to the heart of our fears and eradicate our deepest anxieties. 

16 “A little while, and you will see me no longer; and again a little while, and you will see me.” 

What’s He hinting at here? The resurrection! Where does Jesus want our minds to go when we’re afraid? Easter! To the fact that not even death can stop Him from doing what He promised.

“This isn’t the end! This is the way to life! For just a little while, you won’t see me, but then you will!”

Now, you and I have the whole story, but the disciples are confused about this:

17 So some of his disciples said to one another, “What is this that he says to us, ‘A little while, and you will not see me, and again a little while, and you will see me’; and, ‘because I am going to the Father’?” 18 So they were saying, “What does he mean by ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” 

Remember, they’re thinking, how can any of this work out for our good? How in the world are we going to get through this?

19 Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Is this what you are asking yourselves, what I meant by saying, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’?

20 Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. 

The reason that the disciples will be afraid and sorrowful, the fact that Jesus is about to be murdered; is the same reason why they will be overwhelmningly joyful forever: Because His death will be for their sin, to give them His life. And He’ll prove it when He rises from the dead. 

21 When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. 

22 So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. 

When your joy and your happiness is built around Jesus, no one will take your joy from you. The foundation of what makes you happy changes. We call that being born again, being saved, becoming a Christian. The deepest ground of our hearts is joy in Jesus.

To contrast this, when we put our joy, our happiness, in other people, or places, or things that aren’t Jesus, our joy can be taken away from us. 

You put your joy in a new car, someone smashes into it, your joy is taken away from you.

You make a lot of money in the stock market, it crashes, your joy is taken away from you.

You put your joy in a new friend, they hurt you, your joy is taken away from you.

You find your joy in a healthy life, You get cancer, your joy is taken away from you.

I could go on with that list for hours.

But there is one person, and only one, who can guarantee that if you’ll put your joy in a relationship with Him, your joy can not be taken away from you. 

Jesus can turn death into life, He can turn darkness into light, He can turn sorrow into joy. 

Jesus is the reason that our sorrows have meaning and purpose, because they cause us to lean further into Jesus and the joy He has for us. 

He’s the reason our pain is worth it. He’s the reason healing and redemption can happen for us. He’s the reason good news isn’t just for good people. He’s the friend that sticks closer than a brother. He’s the God who showed up, and didn’t let us live in the lies we tell ourselves. He’s the savior who died to pay for our sins, and who rose from the dead so that we could have His joy. 

He’s present for the abandoned. He’s healing for the wounded. He’s redemption for the sinner. He’s access into sobriety for the addict. 

There’s no pain or past that you carry that Jesus won’t meet you in and bring you out of. A church, if we’re honest, is a testimony to Jesus’ healing and changing power. 

And we know He can overcome our metaphorical demons, because He judged the prince of demons, Satan Himself. And we know He can overcome what’s dead in our hearts, because He rose from the dead. 

Maybe you’ve never experienced the saving love of Jesus, or the power of the Holy Spirit, the Helper. And if that’s true, pray today that God would let you see Him as He is, and change your heart to make Him your ultimate joy that cannot be taken away from you. 

23 In that day (when I resurrect) you will ask nothing of me. 

Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. 

24 Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.

Trust that these things are true and pray, today, that God would show you who He is and that He would give you the Holy Spirit - This is what you’ve been missing your entire life; no one will take your joy from you. 

Christians, double down on your faith in Jesus. He will only ever lead us where it is good for us to go. And no one, not your enemies, not your past trauma, not even death, will take our joy from us. 



Jeremy BorowskiThe Gospel of John