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Joy is a Person

I’ve been a joy seeker from an early age. As a child, before life’s troubles crusted my heart, I tasted joy: Christmas smells and lights, waking up to freshly fallen snow, strawberries from my grandfather’s garden, family vacations in Vermont.

These whiffs awakened desires for lasting joy built into me by my Creator. I went searching for more,  but  lost the scent along the way, traveling many wrong roads.

  • Lasting joy isn’t found in buying your first car or going on your first date in said car.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t happen when you leave home and go to college. Nor does it happen when you finally graduate.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t come from drugs, sex and rock and roll.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t come from pleasing people or accumulating possessions
  • Lasting joy doesn’t happen when you get married and have children of your own.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t come from trying to be a great  husband or father.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t happen when you’re successful in your career, when you pay downs debts and build up your 401K.
  • Lasting joy doesn’t come from trying to live a life free from troubles and striving after smooth circumstances.

God doesn’t want us settling for finite pleasures to fulfill our need for eternal joy. He made us for much more. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “It would seem that our Lord finds our desire not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday the sea. We are too far to easily pleased.”[1]

Joy isn’t automatically realized when you give your life to Christ and invite Him to indwell you by His Holy Spirit. But this is where the journey begins.

Wrong pursuits  of joy require painful redirection of passions, making room for more Jesus in our lives. He is Joy Personified.  “In Your Presence is Fullness of Joy;”[2]

On the night before He died, Jesus laid out in clear, unmistakable terms, our path to complete Joy:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.(John 15:9-12 NIV)

Verse 9 – A declaration of undeserved Love and a command to Remain

Verse 10 – A conditional for staying in the love of Jesus

Verse 12– A specific command, fulfilling the condition and becoming the true goal of every day

Verse 11– The astounding result of loving sacrificially – Complete Joy

Lord, help us receive Your love and give it away. How brilliant that the way we stay in Your love and experience Your Joy is by loving others the way you’ve loved us. This can only happen as we abide in You. Day by day guide us to those You want to love though us. Fill us with the Joy of Your presence as we love.

[1] The Weight of Glory, C.S.Lewis

[2] Psalm 16:11b NASB

Joy in the Journey is about the gladness of God’s nearness in the midst of life’s adventures. Subscribe below to get email notifications of new posts. We post once a week. Thank you for reading. 

 Novels by the Author:

Beyond Time

Hope Remains

God Shaped Hole in our Hearts

“Delight yourselves in God and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4 (NASB)

164202_10201560062862030_865156004_nThe God Shaped Hole in our Hearts

Bliase Pascal wrote the following in the 1600s:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” [1] 

Pascal is giving more description to Solomon’s conclusion that God has set eternity in the hearts of men. From this quote men began to describe our inner abyss as a “God shaped void”.

It was God’s great pleasure to create us. [2]  He made us with glory and honor [3] and he values our fellowship.[4] In short, God created us because it delights him to give us the pleasure of his presence.

In the garden, we had what our hearts desire, intimate communion with our Creator. But we weren’t satisfied. We wanted to be like God and were cut off from the tree of life. The place of God was ripped out of our hearts leaving a great eternal chasm.

The roads of history are flanked with hopeless souls who have lost their way trying to fill the God shaped hole in their hearts. They have made idols out of and become addicted to what God created, instead of God himself.

“Folly is joy to him who lacks sense,” Proverbs 15:21a

But God has made a way back to Him, though it cost Him His very life.

Lord, you are who I’ve been looking for all my life, though often my actions say otherwise. In self-effort and self-gratification, I have placed myself ahead of you in my heart. But you want my whole heart.   Amazingly, you actually want fellowship with me. Thank you for providing a way to rescue me from being lost and separated from you through the death of your Son. Teach me to pursue you above all else. I love you, Lord.

[1] Pensées, Blaise Pascal (Published in 1670 after his death)

[2] Genesis 1:31

[3] Psalm 8:5

[4] John 15:14-15