John 16:16–22
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
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. 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.