Lookahead: On that joyful note, I bring the Kingdom Series to a conclusion and pray that your Christmas Season is incredible in every way, as you let the Joy of Jesus permeate every part of your being. And, furthermore, I pray that you will find great success in your on-going search for His Kingdom…and Him.
And now we have arrived at the last element of the Kingdom of heaven-on-earth that the apostle Paul identified in Romans 14:17: For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and JOY in the Holy Ghost.
A lot has been written on the subject of joy. And in fact, I recently heard a teaching about joy on a Christian TV Show. The host was interviewing a man who was seeing a lot of joyful people in his evangelical services; when the people started experiencing joy, supernatural miracles started happening. The guest had written a book that was extremely useful in the sense that it contained many scriptures that described the joyful nature of God. I believe the evangelist’s solution for living a joyful life was to meditate on and confess these scriptures until we received the revelation/cause for celebration—that we serve a God who loves us and rejoices in us…extravagantly. The premise was that understanding just how joyful God is would give us joy/make us feel joyful also. This technique worked well for the guest—he had experienced emotional healing from depression.
I agree that it is extremely important to seek an understanding of the many aspects of God, as well as the key elements of the Kingdom of Heaven-on-earth including joy. However, in addition to meditating on scripture, I think that once we gain entrance into the Kingdom we will experience God’s joy firsthand, in person.
Joy is a multi-threaded concept. It is an emotion that we feel as a response to something that really pleases us. This can be a good thing that happens to us, or personal joy that results from pleasing someone else. Hence, joy is a response that a person can elicit from others. Finally, the person can actually impart the emotion to others by acting joyful, i.e., joy is contagious.
I remember that my father always had a really hearty, musical laugh. When he laughed, it would invariably brighten up the place. (I admired his laugh, and like to think that I inherited the laugh gene.) I remember that we used to play a game when we were children and lived north of a township that was called something like Happyland (three siblings can’t agree on the name 😊). If, while driving south, my father encountered the “Happyland” town sign, he would begin laughing exuberantly and uncontrollably. Because he had such a contagious laugh, we would all start laughing too—a wife and five small children (six year age spread). Eventually we all found ourselves laughing so hard that it overtook us and we couldn’t stop. So picture that video on YouTube today—I’ll bet that, if it had 10 million hits, every single one of them would be laughing by the time the video was over. 😊
In similar fashion, I believe that (1) when we enter the Kingdom of God and encounter a joyful Jesus Who is constantly manifesting this nature by His words, His actions and His body language, we catch the joy—and begin to feel joyful ourselves. Additionally, (2) Jesus inspires us to do things that give us joy. And (3), a third way of looking at this would be that the very act of being in the Kingdom gives us joy. More on that later, but first, I wanted to run down the joy/happiness dichotomy.
So what did the secular community have to say about the difference between joy and happiness? I found a NY Times article entitled, “The Difference Between Happiness and Joy: Staying Vulnerable In An Age Of Cruelty”. “On Monday I was honored to speak to the graduating students at Arizona State University…There are two kinds of emotion present at any graduation ceremony. For the graduating students there is happiness. They’ve achieved something. They’ve worked hard and are moving closer to their goals. There is a different emotion up in the stands among the families and friends. That emotion is joy. They are not thinking about themselves. Their delight is seeing the glow on the graduate’s face, the laughter in her voice, the progress of his journey, the blooming of a whole person…Happiness comes from accomplishments. Joy comes when your heart is in another…So people build (these heart-connections) by organizing activities that are repeated weekly, monthly or annually: picnics, fantasy leagues, book clubs, etc. Sometimes when you’re out with your friends, you taste a kind of effervescent joy.
(My Note—Here’s the joyful experience of Zadie Smith, a self-described sentimental humanist:)
“Several years ago, the writer Zadie Smith was dancing at a club with her friends when a song from A Tribe Called Quest came on. At that point, she wrote, “A rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that ‘Can I Kick It?’ should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.”1
I had to Google all these names and lyrics…and still wasn’t really getting it. However, I do feel that there may be a little compromise going on here, in the Joy Department. I believe that God’s joy is many orders of magnitude greater and grander.
So do we extrapolate this secular definition to the Christian experience? “Happiness Is Bliss, Joy Is Selfless…happiness tends to be achieved externally, while joy is something achieved internally. For example, we can feel happy when we receive something like a gift or achieve something like awards or honors…It is not something deeper but, rather, superficial. Joy, on the other hand, is something deeper. It is something we feel internally in our lives as human beings. For example, when we feel great joy when we worship God the Father and when we feel great joy when we remember our Lord Jesus Christ dying on the cross to save us from sins.”2
Taking this a step further, some believe that true joy comes from obeying God and from serving him. But I think about the times that I have laughed joyfully as I volunteered in a soup kitchen, or stood outside a liquor store in Boston handing out tracts (being dissed by store patrons), or tried to bless a gentleman who was asking for spare change (outside a Christian Book Store, after which I took flak from staff in the store when I tried to get change for a larger bill). No exuberant laughter there.
Maybe we should ask what causes Jesus to be joyful? Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Heb 12:2 It was the joy resulting from God’s restored relationship with the human race.
And, since we’re on the subject (and coincidentally, it just happens to be the right time of year for this blog post), what did the angels consider to be joy-inducing: news that the instrument of that restoration had come to save us—“Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.” Luke 2:10-12
And what gives the angels themselves joy? Luke 15:10 “In the same way, I tell you, the angels of God rejoice over one sinner who repents.”
My theory: I believe that, in the Kingdom of heaven-on-earth, God gives us reasons to be joyful. And I also believe that…He gives us joy…to overflowing. 😊 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy… Romans 15:13a
On that joyful note, I bring the Kingdom Series to a conclusion and pray that your Christmas Season is incredible in every way, as you let the Joy of Jesus permeate every part of your being. And, furthermore, I pray that you will find great success in your search for His Kingdom…and Him.
1https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/opinion/happiness-joy-emotion.html
Cross-Denominational Bible Study 