As described in my other blog, tonight I went to a church and I was not impressed with the sermon. At all. It started ok, as he opened with familiar statements like "Life is fine, until you talk about Jesus," and "Life is full of trouble." Then he started to talk about Joy. It was a very interactive sermon, and he had us repeat many phrases of his, like "Joy is important." That didn't bother me. What bothered me was that he had not opened his Bible and he was 20 minutes in. He began going through the scientific evidence that laughter is good for you. "1 minute of laughter is as refreshing as 45 minutes of relaxation." "Smiling alleviates infirmity faster than medicine." And his repeat-after-me take-aways were getting just as cheesy. "Tell your neighbor laughing is good for him." "A smile is cheaper than aspirin."
When he finally opened the Bible, he started reading out of Habakuk and Deuteronomy, out of Psalms and Proverbs. A lot of what he read he took out of context. Proverb 17:22 says "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones." Well, the preacher then started to talk about how he knew a depressed woman whose bones dried up so that she couldn't walk. He read out of Deuteronomy 28:47-48 saying something like "because you did not serve the Lord with gladness.... you will be destroyed." This passage was geared towards Israel at that point of time, but he applied it to everyone, and while it's true that you should serve the Lord with gladness, he was missing the point here.
What bothered me the most was that his whole sermon was how to use Joy to triumph over crises in life. There was virtually no talk of Jesus or the Gospel. Just Joy. And on top of that, he was really describing happiness rather than joy, with his statistics on smiling and laughing. It was frustrating to say the least.
The bottom line is, he was not delving into the Word, and because of that, he is misleading many people.
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