Joy Part 2

A couple of posts back I talked about how I feel God is beginning to lead my on a journey to discover what true joy really is and what that would look like in my life. It's a topic I'll probably be posting about a lot in the future. In my previous post I talked about how joy is different from both pleasure and happiness. What I want to do in this post is expand on that idea, specifically the differences between joy and happiness since I feel that is the more difficult of the two, and hopefully begin to get a better idea of what true joy is and how that can look in our lives.

Part of the difficulty in distinguishing happiness from joy is that we tend to use the words interchangeably. To an extent, I think that's fine. Human joy may actually look very similar to happiness in most cases. But at the same time, when the Bible talks about the joy of the Lord it clearly means something more than mere happiness. I used the example last time of Jesus being described both as a man of sorrows and as having joy. But it doesn't stop there. Philippians 4:4 tells us to "rejoice in the Lord always." Now the Bible has some tough commands but I don't believe it ever commands the impossible, and it certainly doesn't command us to do something that even Jesus was unable to do. Therefore, this verse must mean something more than be happy all the time.

As I've been working through these thoughts with God this week, I've found that one of the clearest ways for me to understand the difference between joy and happiness is to look at the difference between sadness and depression. I've struggled with depression throughout my life. God has brought me a lot of healing in this area but there was a time when I was depressed day in and day out. Now, I would not say that I never experienced happiness while I was depressed nor did I spend every moment feeling completely miserable. For me depression was a dark cloud that hung over every part of my life. It turned my sadness into despair and made my happiness muted and dull.

If we turn that view of depression on its head I believe we'll have a very good picture of what true joy, the joy of the Lord, looks like. When we live a life of joy, we do not spend every moment feeling happy or have lives devoid of sadness. But I believe it will make the happy moments better and allow us to feel sadness in a way that is far more authentic and sincere than the misery of depression. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus promises comfort to those who mourn. To me, that is a joyful view of sadness. To be joyful is to embrace mourning when it comes but to not be consumed by it. Joyful mourning recognizes that all sadness and pain leads directly to the arms of the Father. Therefore we can truly rejoice in suffering. It leads us to an intimacy with God we would not experience without it.

Joy also transforms the happy moments in a powerful way. If we are not joyful, not fully alive, then we will invariably look for joy and life elsewhere. I love how John Eldredge and Brent Curtis describe this in The Sacred Romance. They describe the process of looking for life in places other than God as chasing after "less wild lovers." We don't trust God to really bring us life and so we settle for second best. We all have a list of stuff we turn to when we decide not to trust God for life: TV, sex, money, adventure, books, food, and it goes on and on.

Most of the things on our lists are not bad in and of themselves. It's just that they can't bring us the joy and life we're really looking for. That's what's so neat about becoming truly alive and finding real joy. God doesn't want to deny us those things, He wants to redeem them. Once we start turning to Him, instead of the list, for life and joy He is then able to transform us so that we find true happiness in the things on the list. When we stop looking to TV for life we are then able to find more happiness in one half hour show than in an entire night spent zoning out flipping from channel to channel. One chapter in a good book brings more happiness than we would have before gotten from an entire library filled with stories. A little extra spending money to do something fun on the weekend brings more happiness than we would have had before as a multi-billionaire. We enter into one of the paradoxes of Christian happiness: less brings us more.

I believe joy is the assurance that we can trust God with our happiness and therefore do not need to worry about arranging for it ourselves. We can be sad because He is faithful to bring us back from the brink of despair and into His love. We can be happy because we know our happiness comes from God's provision and is therefore holy. Joy not only allows for all emotions in the range of sadness to happiness but redeems them and puts them in the place they were always meant to have in our lives.

I write all this at the beginning of my journey into joy knowing I have not even scratched the surface of what God has to show me here. As I mentioned in my first post, finding true joy will change every aspect of our lives. I'm excited to see where God will bring me in this and I'm looking forward to sharing at least some of that experience here.