Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Shabbat Shalom.
[00:00:07] So this morning has been had me in a tailspin, but we are going to make it through it. Bless God, as Travis would say. Where's Travis? Bless God. Right. Okay. So last week we were in a series, two part series. I'm going to wrap it up this week. Rabbi will be back, God willing, next week. And called the Hidden Joy of Adar. And this is part two.
[00:00:31] And last week we talked about a Hebrew phrase that I introduced you to. Does anybody remember that phrase? It's sort of difficult.
[00:00:41] I don't expect anyone to remember it. Okay, I'm going to give it an opportunity.
[00:00:51] Marbin b'simcha, It's a mouthful, I know, but does anybody remember the English?
[00:00:59] English.
[00:01:02] When Adar comes, joy increases. Okay. When Adar comes, joy increases. We're in the middle of the month of Adar and so, and we talked about last Shabbat being a special Shabbat that sort of led us into this topic. What was last Shabbat? Shabbat Zachor, Shabbat Zakor, which means the Shabbat of remembrance. Very good. You guys are starting to wake up and get tracking with me. And so, and how we were supposed to do something specific, what we're supposed to remember and do blot out the memory of Amalek. Okay, this is from the passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy. And so what did we say? That Amalek, or who is Amalek in our day? Because it, you know, it doesn't have a necessarily a literal application in our day, since God willing, Amalek is pretty much taken care of. But we said that Amalek is anything that keeps us from serving Hashem in order to fulfill our capacity, namely a lack of joy. Okay, so we're saying Amalek, we're going to destroy Amalek by defeating that lack of joy. We're going to have joy today. And so we read from Deuteronomy 28 that says that God will bring curses upon Israel if they do not serve him with joy. Man, that's a little harsh, huh?
[00:02:33] Like, think about that. Because a lot of us, we go around serving Hashem, but maybe not with joy.
[00:02:41] Unless, like, your wife's name is Joy or something, I don't know.
[00:02:46] But I also shared my personal struggle to serve the Lord with joy and how my life radically was transformed once I committed to change that. Okay, if you didn't hear that or don't remember that, you can go back and catch last week's message. But joy is a critical component of serving Hashem. And so if it's hidden, we need to find it. So last week I built up to, you know, the problem and what we're supposed to be doing. This week we're actually going to be talking about how to accomplish. If you look up in that little graphic, we're starting to find it, we can see that little smiley face hiding in the midst of all those blocks.
[00:03:31] And so we also mentioned that followers of Yeshua should be the happiest people on earth.
[00:03:40] And so we are going to figure out how to do that. Let's dig in. Okay, so what, just so we're clear, what are we looking for?
[00:03:49] Joy, specifically hidden joy. Why is it hidden? That's the question. What do we mean by hidden? Because joy isn't like non existent.
[00:04:00] It's not like been, you know, thrown away. Joy is just hiding. It's hiding in plain sight as we talked about. And this task of ours, it's one of our biggest responsibilities in this life to find joy for a specific reason, because our joy is connected to how we view God.
[00:04:25] And when Adar begins, what happens?
[00:04:29] Joy increases. Say it with me, Joy increases. Let's do the whole phrase. When Adar begins, joy increases. But you might be saying, what if I'm struggling to find joy? I mean, I know we're supposed to be doing this, but man, I'm really struggling. Well, guess what, you're in luck.
[00:04:48] Adar is also the month of reversals. Now I'm going to teach another Hebrew phrase here. This one's just as hard. Okay, so who Vanaha who? Can you say that three times fast, which means and it was turned over. If we were. Did you guys who was here for Thursday night reading the book of Esther? Okay, we read in the book of Esther, chapter nine, that once the king found out, King Ahashoveros found out about what was going on behind the scenes and they petitioned him. There's nothing he could do to actually like repeal the decree, the evil decree. But he was able to reverse it and overturn it by doing something even better. He let something happen beforehand that would take care of it. Okay, and so this is what this phrase means. And it was turned over. Chapter nine, verse one, if you want to go check it out in Esther, chapter nine, verse one. And it was turned over. Now this has become a phrase within Judaism that means things get reversed. Things get turned around. And it's used to say, you know, things aren't as they appear. And that's another connection to the costumes that we do on Purim okay? Because they're not.
[00:06:16] The people behind the costumes are not as they appear.
[00:06:20] But the opportunity that we have here is that no matter where we are in life, we. We have an opportunity for things to turn around.
[00:06:29] It may not be what we expect or what we think, but they can turn around, okay? And they can be good. And we can see them as good. Because the decree of destruction for Esther and the Jews in Babylon was bad, but Hashem reversed it. And he can reverse it for you as well, and he can turn your sorrow into joy.
[00:06:52] But we have to be willing to uncover it in places that joy may be hiding. And that's a big commitment. Like my 3000 piece puzzle I told you about last week that I've been working on since July of last year, But I'm getting close to being done.
[00:07:16] It's the same way you eat an elephant, right? A kosher elephant that is one bite at a time. In my case, it's almost literally one piece at a time a day or whatever, like two, three pieces a day. Because I just don't have the bandwidth for it. But I really enjoy it. It's relaxing and finally seeing it pay off. Okay, so this is what we have to do with joy, too. We have to search diligently. We have to seek. We have to knuckle down, bear down. We have to hold on tight, move forward.
[00:07:47] So let's begin by talking about looking at a few. And I don't have any slides for you today, I'm so sorry. But look at a few things the Scriptures have to say about joy. Psalm 16. We'll read this part for you. It says, I have set the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand. I shall not be shaken, therefore my heart is glad and my whole being rejoices. My flesh also dwells secure, for you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let the whole your Holy One see corruption. And here's a key part of this passage here. You make known to me the path of life. In your presence, there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Now Yeshua teaches his disciples. He says this in the Gospel of John. He says, you guys are familiar with this. You know this. I'm preaching to the choir. This is reminders, okay? He said, abide in me, and I in you and the branch. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you, unless you abide in me. I'm the vine, you're the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in Him.
[00:09:02] He it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers. And the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. What's the proof? Bearing much fruit? Right. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide my love, just as I've kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy. What's the famous line? May be full.
[00:09:54] Right, that your joy may be full. How many of you guys want your joy to be full? This morning he also taught his disciples. That was John 15. He also taught his disciples, a little while and you'll see me no longer. And again in a little while, you will see me. So some of his disciples said another, what is this he's saying to us? They were confused. They don't know what's going on.
[00:10:20] Little while and you will not see me. And again, a little while, you will see me. And because I am going to the Father. So they were saying, what does this mean by a little while? We do not know what he's talking about. This is just like we don't understand what's going on. Yeshua knew that they wanted to ask him. So he said to them, is this why you're asking yourselves what I meant? Is this what you're asking yourselves, what I meant by saying, a little while and you will not see me? And again, a little while and you will see me. Truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful. But I like that word. But you know, it just fits in there. And that's the reversal here. But your sorrow will be turned to joy.
[00:11:04] And then he gives analogy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come. And when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish for that joy that a human being is born into the world. So also you have sorrow now. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice. And no one, everybody say, no one, no one will take your joy from you.
[00:11:34] That's pretty Powerful statement, right? No one will take your joy from you.
[00:11:41] And he continues on. Ask and ask and seek and knock. And he said, I'm just going to fast forward here. He said, and you will receive that your joy may be full. This is John 16, next chapter over. But the question is, how do we tap into these truths? We got all these promises and got all these scriptures and stuff like that, but we need some way to grasp a hold of it, something to really make it pull it down as sort of the mystical side of things. Pull it down from the spiritual state into a tangible reality of what we can do. Okay, so who has heard, probably most everybody heard of Pavlov's conditioning. Okay. You guys familiar with that? Right? Okay, I'll just go over it again just to make sure. So Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, is best known for his experiments on dogs that led to the discovery of classical conditioning. You guys heard that, too? Also known as Pavlonian conditioning. He demonstrated how a neutral stimulus like a bell in his instance, could become associated with a natural stimulus like food, in his example, leading to an involuntary, involuntary response. In this case, the dog's experiment, they began salivating. Okay? So if you're not familiar with what this experiment was, he put food out for dogs or got the, you know, food ready. I don't know exactly how it worked, but basically, when the dogs were introduced to food, they immediately begin salivating and desiring the food, Right? I mean, you think about certain foods and your mouth automatically, certain things salivated. My dad, it's so funny because we can just really get him because he at one point had a extremely sour kiwi fruit, okay. And it just like puckered him up, turned his mouth inside out, okay? And so that was probably 20, 30 years ago. Even to this day, you can just say, hey, dad, Kiwi. And he just goes, oh. And his jaws lock up and start salivating and everything like that. Just that one word, right? There are probably certain things that you respond to as well, but this is the conditioned response. This is a classical conditioning. We've been conditioned by certain instances and certain things. These dogs introduce food, they began salivating. So he's like, what happens if I see if I can sort of change the association? And so what he would do was he would ring a bell right before he introduced the food. And he did that over a period of time, and eventually he could just ring the bell and the dogs began salivating without even seeing food. Right. Because they associated that now with food.
[00:14:49] How many of you Guys have seen the Office.
[00:14:53] Okay. There's a scene in the Office. I've only watched a couple episodes, but this just cracked me up, and I about lost it.
[00:15:02] So two characters, Jim and Dwight in the Office, they had their desks backed up against each other where they were facing each other.
[00:15:10] And you know how they have the little interviews. It's funny because when I was editing the Perham snippet, I was like, this sort of feels like the Office, the way it's arranged and anyway the way it did. And so you know how they had the goat sort of backstage and they. They talk about stuff, about what happened or what's going to happen or whatever. And Jim's like, yeah, Pavlov's conditioning. I'm going to try this experiment, whatever. And so you see them face to face, and Jim is at his computer working. Dwight's across from working, and Jim does something on his computer, and it goes, ding. And then he goes, hey, Dwight, you want an Altoid? And he goes, sure. And so he takes an Altoid. And then later on, you know, half an hour, hour later, whatever, Ding.
[00:15:59] He goes, hey, Dwight, you want an Altoid? He goes, sure. You know, it takes an Altoid. A little while later, Ding. Goes, you want an Altoid? Sure. You know, he's sort of excited. Happens three or four times more, whatever, and it goes ding. And then he just holds out his hand.
[00:16:19] And then Joe's like, what?
[00:16:25] He's like, I don't know.
[00:16:30] You know, it's just a automatic response right there, you know, And. But, you know, this is. It's hilarious. It's a. It's a humorous instance. But really, this is what I want to introduce us to. In a spiritual sense.
[00:16:49] We have been trained, so to speak. We've been conditioned in our lives to respond to certain things, certain ways.
[00:17:03] We have been trained. We think it's automatic. Some of it is, but some of it's actually been training. So I want to give some examples, and you tell me what kind of responses, what kind of emotions, feelings, whatever you come up with. Hearing. For those of you who have children, hearing your child say mama, Dada or papa or whatever for the first time, what kind of feelings? I mean, you can still feel it today, right? It's like, oh, man. Just that. Love that. Mmm.
[00:17:42] Getting your first car.
[00:17:44] My children don't know yet.
[00:17:47] I can't answer that.
[00:17:50] Passing your finals with good grades.
[00:17:57] Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:00] Paying off your vehicle, your student loan, your medical bills or your house. I don't know what any of those are having Your character attacked, or a car suddenly swerving into your lane on the interstate.
[00:18:22] I mean, those elicit emotions, right? You can feel those things, some more than others.
[00:18:31] But we do that all the time. We have experiences and then we. We have these responses to them. Emotional, physiological, mental, and we just accept it. But that's the way it is.
[00:18:53] That's the way we are, who we are, how we're going to respond. Right? He made me angry. She stole my joy.
[00:19:05] Guess what? No one controls you unless you allow them.
[00:19:10] It's all about how we respond, and it's about how we've been conditioned to respond.
[00:19:18] I mean, we've been conditioned by our parents, our environment, so forth, our spouses, our children, our work environment, whatever.
[00:19:29] There's a book, and this is. This is.
[00:19:34] I can just. I can just feel. As soon as I mentioned the title of this book, there's gonna be. A few people are just gonna go.
[00:19:41] But there's a book called Anger the Inner Teacher by Rabbi Plissken, and he gives this analogy of the alarm clock. He says anger is like an alarm clock. When an alarm clock goes off, do we. And I'm not talking about some of you people, but most people do. Most people go and beat up their alarm clock with a baseball bat. Dave, don't answer.
[00:20:11] No. What do you do?
[00:20:13] You turn it off. Okay. He says anger is like an alarm clock. You've been awakened to something, push the button, turn it off, and then deal with the situation.
[00:20:26] It's the alert mechanism, okay, of our body, of our feelings and so forth. And so here's the interlocutor that we introduced last week from rabbi's sermons. But I can't control my emotions.
[00:20:43] Feelings are just feelings.
[00:20:46] Well, yes and no. This is what this whole thing is about. Joy is a feeling. But guess what? We choose joy as well. Because our circumstances may not necessitate that we automatically feel joy, but sometimes we can choose joy.
[00:21:07] We have responses that are built in, but we also have the ability, what I'm trying to introduce, to change our response.
[00:21:16] Here's an example I heard, actually, this morning. And Eric, I'm going to put you on the spot for a minute. My friend Eric Lemon from Arkansas, he gave me this example, and he didn't know that really this was related or that I was going to use this, but he had a situation where his neighbor called him up and said, basically, hey, we need to have a talk. And those are usually not something you look forward to, right?
[00:21:45] And what it boils down to accused his family of doing Something that they didn't do.
[00:21:52] Okay. And so he, at first, you know, had those fight or flight, you know, feelings and stuff like that, but he chose to say to himself, tell himself the story, change the narrative, that this is for the good.
[00:22:13] Something good is going to come about because of this, and I need to step into that. And he did. And it did. He ended up getting to know his neighbor a lot better. They resolved the situation, realizing that they weren't at fault, and he got to know a little bit more about why he is the way he is because of his background and the situations that have happened to him before and be able to empathize with him and know him.
[00:22:41] I mean, that's a difficult situation. I mean, a lot of us would just would go in, you know, fisticuffs, you know, say, I need to have a fist to face talk with you, right?
[00:22:59] Instead of walking into something like that with humility and saying. And he even said. He said, you know, as far as I know, that's not the case, but I'm willing to listen and check into it. I mean, a lot of us, most of us probably wouldn't even be willing to do that, to say, we might be wrong, we might be at fault here.
[00:23:22] So when we go into a situation, when we have these feelings, we can choose to run with those feelings, or we can choose to say, hey, I'm gonna put those feelings right here. And then those emotions and those. Those.
[00:23:41] That mental train that's running, you know, I'm gonna put it off to the side. I'm gonna slow it down. I'm gonna stop it here, and I'm gonna deal with this.
[00:23:56] Finding joy can be a struggle, but like Eric did, we have to condition ourselves to view our situation differently.
[00:24:07] And when we do, we give God power to act on our behalf. Why? Because we are, number one, recognizing his sovereignty, that he's in charge of this situation, not us, not the other person. He's in charge. And number two, we are serving him with joy.
[00:24:33] Whatever situation you're struggling with, it has the potential to be engaged in a different manner than what we assume.
[00:24:47] And we have the potential to have the divine decree spoken over us.
[00:25:02] It's been reversed, okay. Just like it happened with Eric.
[00:25:08] So I don't know if you guys remember or been around or some of you guys may have not been around at that time or not, not gone back that far, but Rabbi Damien has a teaching series called for every descent, there is an ascent.
[00:25:24] This is really what I'm talking about. We have to Go through these low points to be able to get to the high points. And if we look at every negative situation, if we look at the confrontation, we look at the whatever that we struggle with as bad, then we're always going to be on a decline.
[00:25:45] Everything that happens, we're going to be going and just crashing and going down and down and down. Instead of saying, this dip is so I can get up speed to make the next hill, Right?
[00:26:02] So if you haven't checked that out, check that out. Every descent is for an ascent.
[00:26:07] We have to go down so that we can come up. You heard that expression, what goes up must come down, what goes down must come up. In this case, right? When we experience trials, rather than allowing them to bring us down into depression, we need to see them as a door we have to go through to experience a greater level of emunah. Who's familiar with that word, emunah? Faith.
[00:26:37] Yes, faith.
[00:26:39] The apostolic scriptures attest to this fact that the stimulus of trials should bring about the response of joy. James 1, your favorite passage, right? Verses 2 through 4. Favorite famous verse. Count it all.
[00:26:57] Count it all. Joy, my brothers, when you. When you get the. Win the lottery. Is that what he says when you, you know, get a promotion? No, says when you meet trials of various kinds.
[00:27:18] For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
[00:27:23] And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. So what's the goal?
[00:27:32] Perfection in us that God wants to do.
[00:27:35] But trials are the journey that take us there.
[00:27:42] Is Travis back in here? No, not yet. Oh, he's teaching class. That's what he's. Okay, so I like Travis. Travis's expression. I just pulled this off from what I picture how he responds to things. Okay. But several times I've heard him say something like this when something difficult he's going through, he says basically something like this. Bless God. Right now it's going terrible. I can't wait to see what Hashem is going to do.
[00:28:12] Have you heard him say something like that?
[00:28:16] That's the attitude we all need to have.
[00:28:18] You know, if you've seen Ush Bazin, what does Moshe Balanga say? How's it going, Moshe? Terrible. Bless God.
[00:28:32] So that should be our response.
[00:28:36] We make ourselves happy, joyous through how we interpret the trials in our life.
[00:28:47] It's not the trials, it's not the experience that determines it, how we interpret it and how we respond to it.
[00:28:59] And this is really how Jewish prayer works. We don't pray.
[00:29:04] Just when we're in the mood, we pray, and then the prayer starts affecting our mood.
[00:29:13] We speak the truth of scripture to ourselves about the nature of God and His character.
[00:29:21] That fills us with hope, joy, and enthusiasm toward our life mission.
[00:29:29] This is also why praying from the sedure on a consistent basis is so powerful, because it's 95% scripture. It's a constant reinforcement of God's character. God is good.
[00:29:46] God is kind.
[00:29:48] God is compassionate.
[00:29:51] God is loving.
[00:29:53] God is faithful.
[00:29:55] God is just, his merciful. We could go on all day long through praying these prayers, we are deprogramming our minds from the lies that the world has fed us throughout the day, every single day of the year, reprogramming our minds with the truth of God's word.
[00:30:26] But what if I'm not ready for this challenge?
[00:30:30] What if these are way too drastic of changes for me to do? I don't know. This just seems way too much.
[00:30:37] There's a mystical concept within Judaism that Chabad introduced in the Altar Rebbe that basically said when you're feeling things like this, it's like the analogy is like a log. You put a big, big log on a fire, and what happens doesn't really do much. Right? That log has to really be ready to take that heat and be able to burn. And so you don't just throw a huge log onto a fire. If that log is too big and it's not going to burn, what do you have to do to it?
[00:31:09] Chop it up. I make a good song. Chop it up. Okay, but.
[00:31:16] But that's what we have to do. And that's what we have to do with our flesh, too.
[00:31:20] If our flesh is too big to catch fire, we got to chop it up.
[00:31:30] And it's going to mean something different for you than it is for me and for the person next to you and so forth. You have to do whatever it takes to chop it up, break it down where it will catch a flame.
[00:31:48] Does your log need chopping up?
[00:31:53] If so, what will it take? Think about it.
[00:31:56] Our job is to see that God is in everything.
[00:32:02] If we can't see that we need to start chopping on that log, we will see life differently. When we do, we will see that everything is in his hands, that even the worst circumstances are in his control, that he is good, all is good because he is good.
[00:32:27] We have everything we need. The house, the job, the money, the spouse, the health, et cetera. Everything we have is perfect for us.
[00:32:38] Do we aspire for more? Sure.
[00:32:41] But our happiness should not depend on it.
[00:32:45] We should aspire for more so that we can be better stewards and serve God in a greater capacity. Right?
[00:32:58] We have to accept the fact that everything we have now is God's blessing and what he is using to draw us closer to him. Even our trials.
[00:33:11] Because that's where joy comes from.
[00:33:19] I bring this up again but recently Shalom Achan suffered an unexpected loss.
[00:33:30] We lost a precious soul.
[00:33:33] Our friend, good friend, Angel Goodwin.
[00:33:36] She departed this life beginning of February.
[00:33:42] The hole that she left us is palpable.
[00:33:47] We don't understand why.
[00:33:49] She was young and full of life.
[00:33:52] We all expected her to have many more years to come.
[00:33:56] Shem's ways are beyond our mortal minds, but we're still here today feeling that loss.
[00:34:07] But as painful as her passing has been, she taught us all invaluable life lessons we've learned from her. We'll continue learning from her absence.
[00:34:22] Many things that we could say that she taught us, but here are a couple of specific things that all of you guys know that I've mentioned before.
[00:34:32] Angel taught us to love everyone and to make them feel special.
[00:34:39] A more difficult lesson she taught us was how to have joy despite our circumstances.
[00:34:49] This is the lesson that angel taught us and the lesson that Adar is teaching us.
[00:34:58] Angel knew the secret of finding joy. She held on to a single truth and then interpreted her life through the lens of that truth.
[00:35:11] She didn't picture God with a giant club in his hand waiting to just beat me over the head when I do something wrong.
[00:35:20] She believed that God was good, that he was a loving father, and that all he does is for the good.
[00:35:31] And if you've been raised in a Pentecostal environment, you'll know the response to this. God is good all the time.
[00:35:40] God is good. And this single truth helped her to interpret difficult circumstances and respond to them accordingly. So this is our task to train ourselves to respond to all of his life's situations and see that Hashem is in control so that we can find the hidden joy in every single circumstance.
[00:36:10] If you enjoyed this teaching, I want to ask you to take the next step. Start by making sure you subscribe to our channel. Next. Make sure you hit the like button on this video so that others know it's worth their time to watch. Last, head over to our website to learn more about Shalom Macon, explore other teachings and events, and if you're so inclined, contribute to the work that we're doing to further the Kingdom. Thanks for watching and connecting with Shalom Macon.
[00:36:42] Sa.
