October 7, 2021 – Click here to listen
I used to give my testimony somewhere nearly every weekend for many years, actually decades. During this time, I often spoke individually with some of the thousands of people in the audience and I almost always asked them what they wanted most in life. Most responded that they just wanted to be happy.
Webster defines happiness as an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. The problem with happiness as I see it is that emotions change as circumstances change. We can be happy as a lark to land that big fat contract only to have the vendor change their mind and give it to your number one competitor the next day. Emotional high to emotional low in one day?
No offense intended to Daniel Webster but there is a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness doesn’t bring joy, and joy isn’t the by-product of happiness. You might ask, how can we know joy when someone is dying an excruciating death?
On the surface we would likely reply that we cannot, but listen to Jesus’s slant on it: Hebrews 12:2 – Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross . . . Jesus could know joy through knowing He would defeat death and Satan once and for all and then return to the right hand of God on His throne having accomplished His purpose.
Was Jesus happy about what was going to happen to Him in the next hours? No, He was sweating blood from praying so hard and even asked God as recorded in Luke 22:42 if there was any other way to accomplish it: “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”
Joy is something far greater than happiness my friends. True joy is defined in the Bible as a fruit of the Spirit, and when we find joy, it’s infused with His comfort and wrapped in His peace. It’s an attitude of the heart and spirit, synonymous with following Christ Jesus and pursuing a Christian life.
I’ve been blessed in many ways; however, I found that blessings like money, material possessions, fame, power, and accomplishments could never yield happiness long-term. Most of the wealthiest people I have ever encountered, and there have been many, were the most miserable. It is due to the fact that the things of this world cannot fill the hole in our hearts. Only God can fill that hole with His Spirit. Our very nature cries out for God, and it is ingrained in our DNA.
It’s possible to experience joy in difficult times. It’s possible to know joy or feel joy in spite of grief or uncertainty. Joy doesn’t need a smile in order to exist. Although joy does feel better with a happy smile, joy can share space with other emotions – sadness, fear, anger . . . even unhappiness. Happiness can’t.
Happiness isn’t present in darkness and difficulty. It can’t be present when its antithesis rules. But once discovered, joy undergirds our spirits and brings to life peace and contentment, even in the face of unhappiness.
Famed Christian preacher Charles Spurgeon said: The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction . . . Even in those terrible times of affliction, joy is ever present in knowing that our affliction is only for an instant compared to an eternity of true joy and happiness that we will receive when our work here is done, and we join Jesus in heaven and abide with Him forever. It consoled Jesus and no one ever went through the affliction that He did.
Galatians 5:22
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”