0:00:00 - 0:00:26 So let's share a silly thought and a serious thought, silly thought, which is still kind of serious is um recently, uh the Lord told me, you know, you need to pull up dance, magic, dance, that silly song from David Bowie back from that equally silly movie Labyrinth that actually has some, some quite 0:00:25 - 0:00:47 serious themes in it. Um And you need to listen to it. I said, OK, cause I do what I'm told and uh I got up this morning, I was getting ready to do after my morning stuff. I um I was feeling super tired. I was, I was like writing random characters on the screen instead of the books that I was meant to 0:00:47 - 0:01:07 write. And so I thought I'm, I'm gonna just cut this short and go do some tiling because I have a lot of tile to do today as a kitchen project been working on. And so it's, it's Saturday and the kids were gonna help me, but I went in and I thought it was kind of late in the morning, but they're all not 0:01:07 - 0:01:23 even eating breakfast yet. And so I kind of putz around did a couple of things I needed to do. Sorry that I could do alone. That made sense to get started on. But that got exhausted really quickly. So I told my wife, well, I'm just gonna go lift weights. I wasn't gonna do that today, but I want to make 0:01:23 - 0:01:45 use of this time and I'm really tired. So if, if I don't keep up the pace, I'm not going to have the energy to do the tiling all day. So long story long, I went downstairs to lift weights and I said, OK, we'll put on dance, magic, dance and see what that's about. I started playing the song and um I just 0:01:45 - 0:02:08 felt really happy, just kind of carefree, happy and it was nice. It was so nice. I was, I played the long version, the extended version. It was a terrible remix, but it's extra goofy. Hey, lighthearted. Life is good. And I was dancing around like a fool and uh just happy, just praise, praise, praising 0:02:08 - 0:02:34 God in my heart for the goodness of the life he gives us. And um millions of thoughts were flowing across my mind, deep, deep, deep things about all sorts of things. And um it was, it was a good place to be. I was trying to channel that, take some notes while I was lifting. And uh getting through that 0:02:34 - 0:03:00 , I started to think about uh unwinding. This is impossible. I don't even know why I tried to tell the story but um joy and mourning. I was thinking about, um trying to recreate this burst of information that I could never do in less than 10 hours. Um In some kind of brief form, I was thinking about 0:03:00 - 0:03:19 the answer to the question. What did Jesus mean when he said greater things than these? And we will, the people, the people who believe in me will do greater things than these. And I, I was categorizing those things and then thinking about and this is what happens when usually when I'm lifting weights 0:03:19 - 0:03:44 or in the shower, some activity that doesn't really occupy my brain. Um I, I just get sermons coming across my mind in like high, high density information and I don't have any place to put it. I mean, I try to take notes, I capture the smallest part of it and to, to, to unpack any one of those things 0:03:44 - 0:04:08 that just take forever. So I just do my best to keep up and um with that, those three categories of what uh what the greater things are. And a lot of times these thoughts just rehash and then there's greater volume than before as far as the amount of information or the depth. Um I was thinking about 0:04:08 - 0:04:32 the greater sorrow and greater joy as two of those categories. And it was probably surprising to hear at least the sorrow. But in, in Ecclesiastes 34, we read that, you know, this is the bit every for everything. There's a season, there's a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time 0:04:32 - 0:00:00 to dance. And this morning and dancing is, is a theme in the scriptures. It turns out there's a few of them and you can go in through the one and come out the other or the reverse. And so there's kind of like a cycle going on, for example, in lamentations 515, it says the joy of our heart is ceased. 0:00:00 - 0:05:17 Our dance is turned into mourning. You'll find a bunch of scriptures with that theme in Isaiah, you'll find a few in Jeremiah and the cessation of dancing replaced by morning is something that's very much going to happen in the end times. For those who have not taken advantage of preparing as they have 0:05:17 - 0:05:40 been given the opportunity to before the thick of that unfolds, it's already begun, but you probably haven't noticed too much yet and it will get much worse. But for those who have prepared and those who have heeded the messages that God unfolds and is unfolding and has unfolded and will unfold, the 0:05:40 - 0:06:03 the direction is reversed and their morning turns into dancing. And so now it's very interesting to go back to Matthew um or Luke where Jesus says, this is the Luke version that the people he was teaching were like unto Children, sitting in the marketplace and calling one to another and saying, we have 0:06:03 - 0:06:27 piped unto you and ye have not danced. We have mourned to you and ye have not wept that the people he was teaching were the people who had been piped to by the Children, his servants, the Lord's servants and they didn't dance and they, they uh they were mourned to uh they, they were lamented to, they 0:06:27 - 0:06:49 were given reasons to mourn but they didn't weep and you can connect this to the scripture and revelation about being lukewarm and being spit out of the mouth of the Lord. So what's this all about? You know, John, the Baptist came morning and they didn't listen to him and Jesus came celebrating and they 0:06:49 - 0:07:19 said that he was a sinner because he was too celebratory. I think that's a word um celebratory. I don't know. He celebrated too much. So sometimes at an individual level, God is going to give you experiences that are intended to help you mourn more and sometimes he gives you circumstances that are intended 0:07:19 - 0:07:37 to help you dance more, to celebrate more, to feel more joy, sometimes to feel more sorrow. Sometimes it's to feel more joy and these things are coupled. These things are coupled because the amount of joy that you experience will be determined by the amount of sorrow you're willing to endure. And if 0:07:37 - 0:08:02 you cap that off and you say Lord no more, I'm done. You're also capping off the amount of joy that you can experience. These are hard things to hear, but they're very true. The gospel doesn't minimize our suffering. It actually increases it in the sense that it front loads what we would otherwise experience 0:08:01 - 0:08:25 later. And the greater your awareness, the greater your suffering will be and you can increase your awareness beyond the limits of what you can have pushed upon you. There's a question of consent as you do that as you dive deeper and deeper or more correctly, as you submit to God, as He takes you deeper 0:08:24 - 0:08:49 and deeper or leads you deeper and deeper. What you're doing is you're increasing the intensity of joy that you have the, the capacity to experience as well as the duration of that joy, what it can endure, it's very important. So um whether this is like a micro thing where he's just trying to give you 0:08:49 - 0:09:17 a little joy in your life real quick with whatever means work or whether it's a really, really big cycle, a really big cycle. It's, it's all the same in the sense of this is this is how he does it. He leads us through, he leads us through. So uh the one I want to leave you with is from Psalm 30 11. Well 0:09:16 - 0:09:34 , let's read Psalm 3012 1st. And this, this version of this verse is from the Tree of Life translation, which is pretty dang liberal in terms of what they choose to say. If you compare this to King James, I don't know where the heck they got this from. But I don't care either because it's a very true 0:09:34 - 0:09:57 thought even if it wasn't in the text. So take that for what it's worth. But it reads, you turned my mourning into dancing, you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy. I really like that. The, the previous verse in the King James, uh It says thou hast turned for me my morning into dancing. Thou 0:09:57 - 0:10:18 hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness. So I think there's an offset in the tree of life version or something, but that's the old English version. Thou hast turned for me my morning into dancing. Thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness. And I really like that thought 0:10:17 - 0:10:37 that is definitely something that God does. If you allow him to take you into unpleasant experiences, he will use those. It not arbitrarily that is the very vehicle for increasing your joy. And so you have to trust him and much more will be said about that later.