In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen. Today you hear a great deal about self fulfillment. It is one of the self evident absolutes in many instances, at least it's projected that way. That is not a word of frequent occurrence in the New Testament.
It's not a word that felt easily or frequently from our Lord's lips about self fulfillment. He talked a lot about love and peace and joy. Now I know it's very easy to to think of those terms and to forget other things that Christ said Because he never divorced those concepts from other concepts which are a little bit sour, such as carrying the cross, giving up everything for Christ. The whole business has to be held together. That's the problem of being a Christian, holding it all together and not hanging ourselves from one hook.
Now when you talk about love and peace and joy, as Christ used these words, what are you talking about? Are you talking about three different totally different things or what? Or is there a lowest common denominator among the three? These words are actually, you hear a great deal about peace today. That's one of our very commonly used words, peace.
Love, you hear a certain amount of that, but the way it's used is questionable. But you don't hear a very great deal about joy or being joyful. We hear a great deal about satisfaction. But how often do you do you meet the word joy and joyful and joyous? Christ used, at least in these translations, it's used very frequently.
In some way or other, Christ brings together joy, peace, and love. They hang together in our lives or should. So, what is the core? What is the secret of having these things according to the mind of Christ, let us hasten to that? Well, it is simply union with our Lord.
And that's what it amounts to. It's his peace, it's his love, and from those things come as a consequence of the joy which Christ himself said the world can't give you. Now this is not something that Christianity has has discovered, that the world that there is a kind of joy that the world cannot give. That's not specifically a Christian concept. But the core of joy, as our lord uses that word, as he uses the word love, as he uses the word peace, the core of that is absolutely, exclusively Christian because it's Christ.
Today, there is a tendency among some, I don't know how many, there may be more than we think, who have this I don't know what it's a feeling, it's an urge, it's a want, it's a need, it's a it's something that drives them to to rise above this world. There's a reaching out to the Orient now in a way that was unthought of twenty five or thirty years ago. We're trying to make more contact with the oriental's attitude towards life, towards religion, towards God. What are these people seeking? They're seeking something which they and many of them have have certainly experimented.
They have reproduced Francis Thompson's life more than once. These are not inexperienced little babes in the woods. They realize, but from their own lives, the truth of our Lord, that the world there's a joy that the world can't give and yet there seems to be something in us driving us towards that. Staple Lewis has a lot of it, Saint Augustine. The very first word of the confessions, it hasn't been improved upon.
Libraries have been written on it but he put it in a sentence. Thou hast made us for thyself, oh God, and our hearts will not be at rest till they rest in thee. The keyword there is that word heart. What did Augustine in the fourth century mean by the word heart? He's talking about the totality of man, not man's disembodied spirit, not an angelic soul, not some kind of a disembodied idea or ideal or an archetype.
He's talking about the totality of man and he sums it up in the word of heart. And there it is in a nutshell. If only we would take it to heart. As I said yesterday, to be a Christian is a joyful thing. We use the word celebration.
We use the word celebrant. We used to use it. Now we have the present, which is a big improvement. Everybody can knows that. But the whole idea of religion is joyfulness.
As I said, you give me one martyr who was not a joyful person. Even say, John of the Cross. He was a he wrote the dark night of the soul, remember. And so when we take Christ's cross or try to, and you can't accept Christ without it, He said, you've got to take it up and follow him. But when we do that, let's not divorce ourselves from the other aspects of being a Christian.
This joy, this peace, this love, it is all ours if we are with Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of spirit. Amen.