I was preaching in a church where I knew no one, not even members of the ministerial staff. No one had contacted me prior to the service to inquire as to my subject or scripture. It so happened that I was preaching on \u201cThe Fullness of Joy\u201d from Psalm 16:11 – \u201cIn Your presence is fullness of joy.\u201d To my shock, just prior to my sermon, a soloist sang, \u201cCome, Ye Disconsolate.\u201d That is a wonderful old hymn, with lyrics by Thomas Moore, with powerful lines like, \u201cEarth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.\u201d It was sung beautifully by the soloist, but the overall message of the song did nothing to prepare the audience for the sermon on \u201cJoy,\u201d nor did the sermon do anything to follow-up the message of the solo. While I was not sure how much joy was felt by the audience, I got a real joy out of the experience. Swiss author Victor Cherbuliez wrote, \u201cHalf the joy of life is in little things taken on the run.\u201d So, when things don\u2019t seem to fit together in sync, discover the joyful side. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was preaching in a church where I knew no one, not even members of the ministerial staff. No one had contacted me prior to the service to inquire as to my subject or scripture. It so happened that I was preaching on \u201cThe Fullness of Joy\u201d from Psalm 16:11 – \u201cIn Your presence is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}