In the fall of 2012, Bethlehem Baptist Church hosted a very powerful and memorable conference on disability. It was titled "The Works of God Conference – God's Good Design in Disability." The entire event was God-centered and inspiring and faith-building. I encourage you to watch it all. But in that conference, there was one particular bit from John Piper's contribution that really stood out to a podcast listener who sent us the clip to feature here on APJ.

And here in this section, Pastor John is applying the testimony of the Apostle Paul when Paul says of his life that he was "sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." 2 Corinthians 6.10. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. It's a paradox and a miracle and a mystery, and it needs to be applied to our lives as Pastor John does here.

I've got a concluding statement and five brief applications. The conclusion goes like this. God is so sovereign over the disasters and the disappointments of our lives that he is able to make every one of them serve our everlasting joy. He is so sovereign over all the disasters, all the disappointments of our lives, that he is able to take all of them and make all of them serve our everlasting joy.

This sovereign grace is the ground of your joy in sorrows. Not after sorrows, but in the sorrows of deep disappointment. So the Christian hedonist does not merely pursue joy after sorrow. He pursues joy in sorrow, in disappointment. So the watchword of your life then becomes sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.

Here are five implications or applications of this. And it really is quite profound what happens in a church when this takes hold and what happens in you, your family. But I'll give you five. Here we go. Number one, if you experience this paradox of emotions, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, you will never have to pretend again.

Your sorrow will be real. Your joy will be real. You won't ever have to be ashamed of saying, "I am very sad," because your sadness will not contradict or exclude being very glad. That's number one. Number two, if you experience this paradox of emotions, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, you will be able to bear the weight of sorrow that is inevitable in this world of sin and brokenness.

The joy you know in the very moment of heavy sorrow will keep the sorrow from crushing you. It doesn't make the sorrow less weighty. By strength, it makes the sorrow less destructive. So the second one is, this experience, without minimizing the sorrow, prevents it from destroying you. Number three, if you experience this paradox of emotions, sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, your sorrow will not ruin the joy of others, and your joy will not offend the sorrow of others.

This is delicate. This is the way we want to be, right? You want to walk through life in and out of relationships that are either sorrowing or rejoicing, and you don't want to ruin them. You don't want to hurt anyone. You don't want to offend the sorrow. You don't want to rain on the party.

Your joy will be deep with its roots in the springs of God's grace, the very same grace that sorrowing souls need. Your joy will be rooted down in grace, and it will understand grace as what people need, and you'll have discernment as to how to bless them. Your sorrow will not be morose, gloomy, self-pitying.

I'm speaking to myself mainly here. This is my battle. I am defending sorrow in this message. I'm not defending moroseness. I'm not defending gloominess. I'm not defending self-pity. I'm hating those in myself. This sorrow that you have will have real love in it, and love cares for the good of others so that you don't ruin their party.

You may feel, see, I just think there's a huge amount of selfishness in sorrow that walks into a happy room and says, "You all wouldn't be happy if you knew what I knew about me." And you just ruin it. You just spread your gloominess everywhere. You're like, "What, you're the center of the universe here?

Get a life." They don't need to know you. You don't have to ruin this party. Jesus can sustain you for an hour tonight. He can put a smile on your face. He can have you play some of the games, and you can go home and cry some more. You think that's not hypocrisy?

That's love. Because it's different. The sorrow that is being sustained by interpenetrated, simultaneous joy is of a different kind than worldly sorrow. Worldly sorrow has so much self in it, so much selfishness in it. And godly sorrow is real sorrow, but it's just been changed, profoundly changed by this underpinning of peace and contentment and satisfaction and joy and a sovereign God, so that when you walk in each situation, you walk into a broken situation, and your sorrow enables you to sweetly empathize, and you walk into a happy situation, and your joy rises to enable you to be a part of it.

People will watch over the long haul. They won't miss your pain if you're real. If you're walking in a church's life, and you're just living a normal life, week in and week out, they'll know your situation, and they will love you for not raining on the party and not being glib and silly at the funeral.

Number four, if you experience this paradox of emotions, sorrowful yet always rejoicing, the ministries of your church, from the worship service to the youth group to the ministry of disability, will be free from silliness and trifling, and will have the aroma of Christ with his wonderful paradoxes, the aroma of Christ who wept over Jerusalem like this.

Would that you knew the day of peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes, Luke 19, verse 1, and yet rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children." He wept, and he rejoiced over the same city because of the same condition.

Strange Savior. We need people like that in the world who are inexplicable in worldly categories. We need church services that people walk into and there is joy here, but it's quite serious, but the serious is not heavy. It's that, "I can't figure this out here. This is different." And many, many thousands of our churches are throwing this away in the name of being cute or clever or slapstick or like the latest TV or show some movies or anything to make it feel something that the people already know.

You don't want them to know. You want them to be stunned. And so God had showed up from another world and created something new on planet earth, not the latest movie or the latest comedy or the latest talk show host. Why would you want to have the people feel at home with that?

You want them to taste something so stunningly strange. So that's what I'm trying to do is just talk about the strangeness of Christian life. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing. What does that feel like on Sunday morning? What's a youth ministry feel like? What does a disability ministry feel like? That paradox, that strange miracle has taken hold.

The spirit that will pervade your church will be joyful seriousness and serious joyfulness. It won't be morose. It won't be miserable. It won't be self-pitying. It will have a profound gladness about it. I don't do money welcomes anymore because my present transition, but I used to stand right here in downtown, welcome the people every Sunday.

I loved it. I love to have that little informal moment because I'm in the pulpit, I'm Mr. Authority. And down here, I'm daddy in the living room. And I was so profoundly aware I'm going to welcome these people in such a way that those who are coming out of the funeral and out of the wedding feel good about this moment.

That's impossible. Isn't that wonderful? To have an impossible job. You know what it makes you do? Pray. Makes you desperate. Makes you want miracles to happen. Let me have a demeanor down here so that the hurting can say he knows and the ecstatic can say he knows, he gets it.

And everybody has a daddy who gets it. It will affect, if you catch the paradox of these emotions, it will affect your whole church. And the last one is, if you experience this paradox of emotion, sorrowful yet always rejoicing, the beauty and the worth of Christ will be exalted because he is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him.

And if you're always rejoicing, there's always some flavor of his excellency in your life, some flavor of his worth and his value, his beauty. There's something about you that means you're loving Jesus. You're valuing Jesus. He's precious to you right now with all the tears flowing down. And on the other hand, the tears that are flowing and the genuineness and the authenticity of your sadness shows you're not out of touch with the ugliness of sin in this world and the horrors of its effects in human life.

You're not out of touch. You're not glib. You're not silly. You're not superficial. You're not blind. You're not naive. And when you get that in one person, the joy reflecting the infinite worth of Jesus and the sorrow reflecting the ugliness and the horrors of sin, you meet somebody more like Jesus and you want to be like him.

So we end, sorrowful yet always rejoicing. May the Lord work this paradox, this miracle. And I speak, please don't over read this man. I speak as one trying to understand and do this as a dad, as a husband, as a pastor right now, trying because I'm speaking over my head.

I'm saying words that I wish were more true here. Don't walk out of here saying, "Well, I guess some people got that wrapped up." Nobody's got this wrapped. I'm lifting up a possibility that we're all looking at and saying, "Really, Lord? Really?" Sorrowful yet always rejoicing. Oh, show me, show me what that would be like in my life.

Such a mystery and a bold point wrapped in an honest confession. That was from John Piper's conference message titled, "When Jesus Meets Disability, How a Christian Hedonist Handles Deep Disappointment," preached on November 8th, 2012. The clip was sent in to us by Hannah in Athens, Georgia. She writes in to say this, "This sermon encouraged and challenged me in a time of deep disappointment to realize the gospel's ability to make sorrowful but always rejoicing a reality in my life." Amen.

Hannah, thank you for sending it in. And thanks for listening to today's sermon clip. All of our clips are now crowdsourced. You tell us what bits of Piper sermons changed your life and met you in your need. We share that clip with the APJ audience. If you've got one, email me.

Give me your name, hometown, the sermon title, and the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio and tell me how it impacted you. Put the word "clip" in the subject line of an email and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. That's an email address, askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Next time we're going to talk about podcasting, particularly the six dangers of listening to podcasts, podcasts like this one.

There are dangers and we're going to talk about them. I'm your host Tony Renke and we are rejoined in studio with Pastor John when we return on Friday. We'll see you then. 1. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts? 2. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts?

3. How do I know if I'm listening? 4. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts? 5. How do I know if I'm listening? 6. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts? 7. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts? 8. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts?

9. What are the dangers of listening to podcasts?