“Joy to the world”—the title and refrain of a favorite Christmas carol—because “the Lord has come” is a profound invitation. Those who know Jesus celebrate him and call on others to receive the king!
Yet this isn’t a late-summer push for a premature holiday celebration—rather it’s a reflection on the fruit of the Spirit. The list in Galatians 5 starts with the triad of love, joy, and peace: the spontaneous delights of meeting and knowing God.
In this entry I’d like to focus on joy. And notice, too, how love is linked to the experience of joy.
God’s presence in us stirs a heart response. To know God is to respond to him with delight. He fills a place in us nothing and no one else can touch. We were made for him, and joy is his signature in the soul.
Joy, like love, is affective and transitive: heart-based and object-centered. So the quality of each term is found in its focus on God whom we love because he first loved us. Both joy and love are responses to his love poured out in our hearts by his Spirit. We hear this if we take Romans 5 and 1 John 4 together. So love and joy are two facets of one response. Love is our affective bond, and joy expresses the delight that comes with love.
Joy still has rhetorical power. Love is the weaker term. We might “love” a new phone or a photo, for instance, so that love is reduced to a soft pleasantry. Joy, on the other hand, has more life.
C.S. Lewis captured this in the account of his conversion in Surprised by Joy. He wrote of brief moments of joy that startled him from time to time. His instinct was to grab at joy—as if it was a commodity—but the joy evaporated as soon as he chased it. Finally he linked enduring joy to his meeting and trusting Jesus. It was a person and not a brief stir that brought lasting joy.
So what do we make of joy? Just this: we were made for it and our hearts chase it at every turn.
But apart from God’s presence in us we miss joy. We speak, for instance, of enjoyment—of moments that spark joy—as a goal in life. But enjoyments only point back to Adam’s fall—to his replacing the Creator with the creation—and to his efforts to find joy in his autonomy. But things—our toys, places, entertainments, and stimulants—are only devices that scratch at our itch for joy. Relationships, and nothing less, bring true joy.
On the other hand sin—self-love and pride—suffocates joy. Yet God grants glimpses of joy to all—even to sinners. Relational moments like a new friendship, a wedding, or the coming of a first-born child are lightning flashes. But even these fade as the friendships, the marriage, and the growing child are lost to the individual pursuits of lesser enjoyments.
Here’s a Trinitarian lesson, then. The joy of God’s eternal, mutual love is the source of our own ultimate joy. It represents God’s intrinsic delight spilling out to us as his beloved ones.
In John’s gospel, for instance, in his final discourse Jesus invited the disciples to step into his own sandals for a moment as his crucifixion and ascension to the Father drew near. “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father” (14:28). The Father—“greater” in his initiatives of love for the Son—was calling him back to share the glory of their mutual love. This vision also punctuated Christ’s prayer in John 17:24.
This was also the heart of Christ’s calling to his followers in the vine analogy of John 15. Notice verses 10-11: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
And we also recall joy as the motivation for both the incarnation and the atonement of the cross in Hebrews chapter 12: “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God….”
In sum we always have God’s invitation to “taste and see” his goodness. And for any who are still missing his love and joy—by chasing self-concerns and passing enjoyments instead—the joy of the Lord can become the strength in life. Just set your eyes on Jesus and see what comes of it.
Amen! Thank you Ron, you have touched on a subject which has been stirring me for the last couple of months (and which is the theme of my current sermon series!)
This week I am preparing a sermon on Luke 15 and God’s joy at sinners who repent. I have been struck again how joy, like love, originates with God and overflows to us from Him. (Wasn’t it Lewis who also said that God is the most joyful person in the universe?) How wide of the mark we are when we think of joy as optional or merely the icing on the cake of Christian experience…
Thanks again.
Good! Thanks, Huw. The mention in Luke – of the joy in heaven over a returned sinner – is one of many I reluctantly set aside (word limits!) as I wrote this blog … so this is a great addendum.
And since we’re adding ‘joy’ verses here, the verse that first stirred this reflection was actually John’s brief comment in 3 John, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”
So, as you say, it’s at the heart of a living faith and not an option!
“But enjoyments only point back to Adam’s fall—to his replacing the Creator with the creation—and to his efforts to find joy in his autonomy.”
I was searching for some coordinates or characteristics of joy and these words, just quoted, stirred in me some questions :
Wasn’t Adam and Eve’s world a perfect world? Were they unsatisfied with it? I admit the possibility you were referring to “his efforts to find joy in his autonomy” after the fall.
But still, admitting there is something misterious in evil, which goes beyond our understanding, what mechanisms were triggered in the actual sin: how was the desire for something else even possible? Weren’t they fully satisfied with God’s presence and fellowship in the garden?
And something I never solved: is there in God’s command for Adam to guard the garden a hint that something evil was already lurking in the shadow? What guarding is needed when all is good?
I know Romans 5:12 tells us that sin entered through Adam’s sin in the world so the presence of something else outside the garden, possibly harmful, puzzles me.
Any help would be deeply appreciated.
I’ll be honest here: I don’t know. We can raise questions of why God set up a “freedom to not love God” or, alternatively, why/how the Serpent emerged in a perfect creation and was able to seduce Adam/Eve so readily. But we don’t have clear answers available, only speculations. Yet I think it’s useful to probe possibilities that won’t violate our confidence in God’s goodness. One consideration, for instance, is that we’re “like” God in our creative capacities. Including our curiosity. So the question could be asked, “What would it be like if we loved something/someone else in place of God?” And it seems that’s what we have in the Fall. The question is framed within the range of options offered in the Bible narrative. And now that I’ve “repented” of my own exploration of spiritual independence – there was no joy to be found there – I’m satisfied to wait for heaven. I’ll have plenty of questions I’ll be asking then.
Thank you!