The Birth Pangs of Glory Text: John 16:16-22
Introduction: The Christian Economy of Emotion
We live in a sentimental age, an age that prizes feeling above all else. Our culture is a frantic, desperate pursuit of happiness, and a frantic, desperate flight from any form of sorrow. The world believes that joy and sorrow are opposites, that they are mortal enemies. The presence of one must mean the absence of the other. If you are sorrowful, you cannot be joyful. If you are joyful, you cannot be sorrowful. This is the flat, simplistic, and ultimately despairing emotional economy of the world.
But the Christian faith introduces a calculus of the heart that is utterly foreign to the natural man. It is a divine economy where sorrow and joy are not mutually exclusive, but can, in the strange wisdom of God, coexist, and more than that, where one can actually give birth to the other. The world pursues a joy that is shallow, circumstantial, and fragile. It is a joy that can be stolen in a moment by a bad diagnosis, a pink slip, or a betraying friend. The world’s joy is a balloon, easily popped. Christian joy is a deep artesian well, fed by underground springs that the world knows nothing of.
In this passage, Jesus is preparing His disciples for the most jarring emotional whiplash in human history. They are about to descend into the blackest sorrow imaginable, the brutal execution and death of their Lord, the one they believed was the Messiah. And then, just a short time later, they will be rocketed into an ecstatic joy that will turn the world upside down. Jesus does not just predict this sequence of events; He explains the spiritual principle behind it. He teaches them that godly sorrow is not a dead end, but a doorway. It is not the grave of joy, but the womb of it.
This principle is not just for the eleven disciples in the upper room. It is a foundational truth for the entire Christian life. If we do not understand the relationship between sorrow and joy that Jesus lays out here, we will be perpetually bewildered by our own experience. We will think something has gone wrong when we suffer. We will think God has abandoned us when we grieve. We will be tempted to despair when the world around us seems to be throwing a party while our hearts are breaking. But Jesus is teaching us here that the path to indestructible joy, the kind of joy that no one can take from you, leads directly through the valley of sorrow.
The Text
“A little while, and you will no longer see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me.” Some of His disciples then said to one another, “What is this He is telling us, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me’; and, ‘because I go to the Father’?” So they were saying, “What is this that He says, ‘A little while’? We do not know what He is talking about.” Jesus knew that they were wishing to question Him, and He said to them, “Are you deliberating together about this, that I said, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me, and again a little while, and you will see Me’? Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will cry and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. Whenever a woman is in labor she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the suffering because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. Therefore you too have sorrow now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.
(John 16:16-22 LSB)
The Perplexing Prophecy (vv. 16-19)
We begin with the disciples' confusion.
“A little while, and you will no longer see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me.” Some of His disciples then said to one another, “What is this He is telling us...?” (John 16:16-18)
Jesus gives them a cryptic, almost riddle-like prophecy. It is a statement of compressed eschatology. On one level, the most immediate level, He is speaking of His impending death and resurrection. In just a few hours, a “little while,” they will see Him arrested, tried, and crucified. They will see Him no more among the living. And then, after another “little while,” three days in the tomb, they will see Him again, gloriously resurrected. This is the first fulfillment, the historical anchor for the whole promise.
But like all good prophecy, it has layers of fulfillment. The "little while" also encompasses His ascension and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. He would depart, they would not see Him physically, but then they would "see" Him in a new and more powerful way through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He would be with them and in them. And on a grander scale, this "little while" stretches across the entire church age, from His ascension to His final, glorious return. We live in that "little while" now. We do not see Him with our physical eyes, but we await the day when we shall see Him face to face.
The disciples, however, are stuck on the first level, and they cannot make sense of it. They are batting the phrase "a little while" back and forth like a shuttlecock, full of confusion. Their confusion is understandable. They are still thinking in terms of an earthly, political kingdom. They cannot yet conceive of a Messiah who must suffer and die. Their bewilderment is a mercy to us, because it shows they did not invent this story. If they were making it up, they would have made themselves look far more clever. Their honest, recorded confusion is a mark of the text's authenticity.
Jesus, in His omniscience, perceives their questioning hearts. He knows they want to ask but are hesitant. He doesn't rebuke their slowness; He gently takes up their question and prepares to answer it, not with a direct timeline, but with a theological principle that will sustain them through the coming ordeal and beyond.
The Great Reversal (v. 20)
Jesus now explains the emotional content of the coming "little while."
"Truly, truly, I say to you, that you will cry and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy." (John 16:20 LSB)
Here we have the great reversal. Jesus sets up a stark contrast between the emotional state of the disciples and that of the world. When He is crucified, the disciples will weep and lament. This is not just sadness; these are the strong words of funeral mourning. Their hopes will be dashed, their world turned to blackness. At the very same time, the world, meaning the unbelieving system, the Sanhedrin, the Romans, the mob, will rejoice. They will celebrate their victory. They will have eliminated the troublemaker from Nazareth. Their party and the disciples' funeral will be happening at the same time.
This is a permanent feature of our time between the times. The world rejoices in the very things that cause the saints to grieve. The world celebrates abortion, sexual perversion, and rebellion against God's created order. And we weep. We lament. We are sorrowful. And the world looks at us and thinks we are miserable, killjoy fanatics. They cannot understand our sorrow, and we cannot participate in their joy, because our definitions of what is good and worthy of celebration are diametrically opposed.
But notice the promise. Jesus does not say, "Your sorrow will be replaced by joy." He says your sorrow will be "turned into joy." This is not a substitution; it is a transformation. The very thing that is the cause of the sorrow will become the cause of the joy. The cross was the cause of their deepest grief. But after the resurrection, the cross itself became the source of their deepest joy. It was no longer a symbol of shame and defeat, but the symbol of triumphant, substitutionary atonement. Paul would later say, "But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Gal. 6:14). The instrument of sorrow was transformed into the instrument of glory.
The Analogy of Childbirth (v. 21)
To explain this mysterious transformation, Jesus uses an analogy that is as universal as it is profound.
"Whenever a woman is in labor she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the suffering because of the joy that a child has been born into the world." (John 16:21 LSB)
This is a perfect illustration. The pain of childbirth is not a meaningless, accidental suffering. It is a productive, purposeful pain. It is a pain that is leading somewhere. The sorrow and the anguish are intense, but they are the necessary prelude to the joy of a new life. And the joy that follows is not disconnected from the pain; it is the direct result of it. The baby is the fruit of the labor.
The joy is so overwhelming that it doesn't just outweigh the pain; it swallows it. It retroactively reframes the entire experience. The mother "no longer remembers the suffering." This is not amnesia. She can recall the events, but the emotional sting is gone, eclipsed by the greater reality of the child in her arms. The pain has been transfigured by the joy it produced.
This is precisely how we are to view our afflictions in this life. They are not random. They are not pointless. For the Christian, all suffering is sanctified. It is the labor pains of glory. Paul says, "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18). Our sorrows are the birth pangs of a new creation, both in us and in the world.
The Indestructible Joy (v. 22)
Jesus now brings the analogy home to the disciples' immediate situation and our ultimate hope.
"Therefore you too have sorrow now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you." (John 16:22 LSB)
He acknowledges their present reality: "you too have sorrow now." He does not minimize their grief or tell them to simply cheer up. The sorrow is real and it is necessary. But it is temporary. It has an expiration date. "But I will see you again." This is the promise that changes everything. The resurrection is the pivot point of all history and all emotion. His return to them will ignite a joy in their hearts that is of a completely different kind than any they have known before.
And the defining characteristic of this joy is its permanence. "No one will take your joy away from you." This is a direct contrast to the world's joy. The world's joy is constantly under threat. It can be taken by circumstances, by enemies, by sickness, by death. But the joy that Christ gives is rooted in the unshakable reality of His resurrection and His presence. It is an objective joy, based not on our feelings or our circumstances, but on Him. Because He lives, and because He is Lord, and because He has conquered sin and death, our joy is secure. It is beyond the reach of any thief, any tyrant, any disaster, or any demon. They can take our property, they can take our freedom, they can even take our lives, but they cannot take our joy, because they cannot take our Christ.
Conclusion: Living in the Labor Ward
So what does this mean for us? It means we must learn to live with the right perspective. We are living in the "little while." We are living in the labor ward of history. There is sorrow, there is pain, there is groaning. The whole creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth (Rom. 8:22). And we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan inwardly.
The world sees the groaning and concludes that the whole process is meaningless. They see the pain of history and declare that there is no God, or if there is, He is cruel or impotent. They are like someone observing the agony of a woman in labor and, having no knowledge of what birth is, concluding that it is just a pointless, horrific torture.
But we know what is happening. We know that the groaning is not the groaning of death, but the groaning of birth. We know that our King has already passed through His own labor of death and has been born again from the tomb, the firstborn of a new creation. And His victory is the guarantee of the final victory. The gospel is advancing. The kingdom is growing. And all the chaos and turmoil we see in the world are the contractions of an old age passing away and the birth pangs of the new heavens and the new earth.
Therefore, we do not lose heart. We can be sorrowful, yet always rejoicing (2 Cor. 6:10). Our sorrow is real, but it is temporary and productive. Our joy is real, and it is permanent and indestructible. The world rejoices now, but their party will end in a weeping and gnashing of teeth. We weep now, but our sorrow is being turned into a joy that no one will ever be able to take away.