Where Did Your Joy Go?

John MacArthur once advised pastors, "when the joy is gone, the ministry is gone." The joy of the Lord is your strength. To be without joy is to be without strength. This sermon is taken mostly from I Peter beginning with 1:6--"In this you greatly rejoice, though nopw if needs be you are in heaviness through manifold temptations." The proposition of this sermon is simply this: "the saints tend to lose their joy because they under estimate the number of trials facing them and the degree of difficulty that those many trials entail." That is it. The reason Peter tells us, "think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you," is just because we do think it strange that we have this many trials of this degree of difficulty.