Robert Dean in the Homan Illustrated Bible Dictionary defines joy as
A State of delight and well being that results from knowing and serving God.
A number of Greek and Hebrew words are used to convey the ideas of joy and rejoicing. We have the same situation in English with such nearly synonymous words as joy, happiness, pleasure, delight, gladness, merriment, felicity, and enjoyment.
The words “joy” and “rejoice” are the words used most often to translate the Hebrew and Greek words into English. Joy is found over 150 times in the Bible. If such words as “joyous” and “joyful” are included, the number comes to over 200. The verb “rejoice” appears well over 200 times.
Robert J. Dean, “Joy,” ed. Chad Brand et al., Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 956.
That is more than 400 times that joy is mentioned in the Bible…
No wonder as humans we are constantly focused on Joy or our lack of it…
“Joy is not a season, it’s a way of living.”
Romans 14:17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,
Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”
One easy way to feel miserable on your walk with Christ is to allow your joy to come from your performance.
There have been seasons when my joy was coming from my performance as a believer and I felt awful and defeated.
I was hard on myself for everything. When your joy is coming from anything other than Christ that is idolatry.
One moment you think you are saved, the next moment you question your salvation. One day you think you are deeply loved by God and the next day you feel that God loves you less because you didn’t read your Bible or pray.
Philippians 3:1-3 Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you. 2 Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. 3 For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh
“Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God.”
Often we find ourselves blaming God for our suffering and therefore it robs us of our Joy.
Margaret Sangster Phippen wrote that in the mid-1950’s her father, British minister W.E. Sangster, began to notice some uneasiness in his throat and a dragging in his leg. When he went to the doctor, he found that he had an incurable disease that cased progressive muscular atrophy. His muscles would gradually waste away, his voice would fail, and his throat would soon become unable to swallow.
Sangster threw himself into his work in the British home missions, figuring he could still write and he would have even more time for prayer.
"Let me stay in the struggle Lord," he pleaded. "I don’t mind if I can no longer be a general, but give me just a regiment to lead." He wrote articles and books, and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. "I’m only in the kindergarten of suffering," he told people who pitied him. Gradually Sangsters’s legs became useless. His voice went completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily.
On Easter morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In it, he said, "It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice to shout, "He is risen!" -- but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout."
Suffering is not a pleasant event in our lives but it is something that ALL people face at different times and in different degrees.
Where is your joy coming from?
Where do you seek to get your joy from? If you can be honest, what do you run to the most? How are you feeding your mind?
From personal experience I can tell you that when my devotional life is healthy I experience more joy.
When I get too consumed by TV or secular music I begin to feel empty.
We were made for Christ and while some things are not inherently bad, too much of those things can take our heart away from Christ.
Pic Think of it like Styrofoam Cup that is made to put liquid in like the ones we put coffee in…
If we fill it up with good stuff it works great and we can even go back and refill it over and over…
Pic But if we mix in some acetone like ladies use to clean their paint off their fingernails…the cup begins to break and soon it is leaking the liquids everywhere…then we have a broken cup.
The same is true of the stuff we allow to put in our lives that cause the real joy of being a Christian to leak out..
We have to remove these broken cups in our lives to drink the water that Christ has to offer.
Joy is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
However, if we quench the Spirit we can miss out on all that the Holy Spirit has to offer. Most of us are missing the beauty of Christ because our hearts are in other places.
John 7:37-38 “On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”
But the devil in in his hatred for God and for you because you are a child of God…he wants to rob you of the Joy that you so much want more and more of…
John 10:10 “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”
Satan wants to steal your Joy!!!
However,
“If you have no joy, there’s a leak in your Christianity somewhere.”
Billy Sunday said, "To see some people today you would think that the essential of Christianity is to have a face so long you could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe."
William Barclay said that "A gloomy Christian is a contradiction in terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces."
There is nowhere in God’s word… where it says we are to live without joy…
I say it all the time that Christians should be happier and more joyful than anyone on earth…because this world and all its troubles are only a precursor for the eternal peace and joy of Heaven…
Where there will be no more suffering or no more sickness and certainly no COVID 19!!!
“The Lord gives his people perpetual joy when they walk in obedience to him.” Dwight L. Moody
You cannot walk with a Lord that you do not spend time with and if during this time when everything that we thought was normal has changes it is time to rethink the way we spend our time and what we are allowing to leak out of our cups and rob us of our joy…
C.S. Lewis wrote, "It is not so much the joy of the Lord we are seeking as the Lord of joy Himself."
We all want more Joy…even those that seem to stuck in a perpetual maddening depression that can be (not always as some have clinical depression and that is a different story) but some of us find ourselves driven by our own habit of self pity or we are filling our cups with sinful b behaviors that prevent the Joy of the Lord from being present…
If that is you then as CS Lewis wrote we need to seek the Lord of Joy to find true Joy that will last beyond
