Joy in the Gospel

I did the right thing and went to my Bible study last night. This is what happens to me. I get overwhelmed in life and I start to drop out of church. Right now, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed between work and my personal stuff so I start the inner whine about how tired I am and I just want to go home and I'd rather do something else with my precious spare time. I hope I'm not alone. Yesterday my friends at work gave me a gift certificate to a local yarn store. And I really wanted to go ahead and take care of that. What can I say? Money burns a hole in my pocket. And I had to have a verse memorized for that study. I've been working on memorizing something else. Excuses, excuses.

So this is what I did.
1. I left work on time.
2. I went home and found a nice, short verse to memorize. Psalm 71:14: "But as for me, I will always have hope; I will praise you more and more." And apparently I memorized it well enough to carry over to today.
3. I went to the Bible study. And I'm really happy I went. It was such a good reminder...joy in the gospel.

Why don't we have Paul's joy? He was in chains and facing serious things and he said, "For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." The "to die is gain" part is easy for me to understand. The first part is the challenge. I think that spreading the gospel has been given to Christians as a duty, an obligation. It's hard to take joy in an obligation. And the message that we have to give is such a reason for joy. How can giving someone else hope not be a reason to feel joy? I think this is just one more thing that we lose track of in life. And that's how we lose the joy that God wants us to have in this Christian life.

It's just a good thing that gift card wasn't to Barnes & Noble. It would have all been over for Bible study last night. I heart books. I'd have gotten some joy from running wild in a book store. No doubt about that. Of course, if I can just remember what I learned last night, I can have that joy every day.