I recently had the privilege of doing some teaching on joy.  Since we had some audio recording difficulties that day, I wanted to share some of my thoughts here on the blog for those who didn’t get to be there or who’d like to review.  To start, I think that joy, like humility, is difficult to distill into a dictionary definition (I don’t usually feel to bubbly after reading the joy entry on dictionary.com).  If we said that to see humility you should look at Jesus, then I think we could say something similar about joy.  But instead of or in addition to saying to see joy look at Jesus, I would like to say to truly understand joy (that is, experience it) then get near Jesus…be around Him, share life with Him.  Like two sides of one coin, someone who’s been with Jesus will be a joyful person and someone who is truly joyful you can be sure has been with Jesus.

If I were venturing in the direction of defining joy, I’d say that joy seems to be the happy result of our being plunged into the abundant life of God in Christ.  It is the sustained spark deep within that the friction of our life and God’s life creates.  It is the name we give to this deep experience of well-being, wholeness, put-togetherness.  It that state we happily land in when we discover that we have arrived in the homeland for which we’d always longed, but had never seen.  It is the deep satisfaction that is both a present reality and a sustaining hope for the future.  It is the bursting of the life that knows it has somehow been made part of the avalanche of grace that is gaining momentum and will eventually transform and renew all of creation.  It is life in God which is life as it was meant to be.

But Paul doesn’t just talk about joy, he shows it and even more he commands it: “Rejoice in the Lord always.  Again I will say, Rejoice.”  Joy is something we have, but it is also something we do.  So it seems to me that rejoicing is joy that has been verbified, that is, put into action and given some kind of expression.  To rejoice in the Lord, then would seem to be the dipping into and the stirring up of the wonder of the life we have in Christ.  That means that joy is not necessarily by its very nature “bubbly.”  Sometimes it is, but often we are asked to practice it as a discipline, to stir it up and act.

And the very fact that we are to rejoice (stir up joy) in all circumstances means that rejoicing will take on many diverse and often unexpected guises.  It may be the familiar laugh, dance and song we so often associated with joy and rejoicing as well as the quiet determination of hope in the midst of uncertainty or even suffering.  Rejoicing in the Lord may be steadily fixing our attention on who He is and the good things we have in Him; rehearsing them in our hearts (i.e. forgiveness, healing, peace, acceptance, righteousness, hope, etc.).  It may be pouring out our grief and sorrow before Him as a sacrificial lament; a voice for the ache of the longing of the kingdom in an age still largely hostile to it.  Rejoicing may simply be quiet, steady acts of humble obedience to the life-giving King.

Rejoicing may be loud.  It may be soft.  It may simply overflow, taking us by surprise.  It may be very deliberate, a result of our conscious choosing to stir, draw and spill out the life of God within us.  However it surfaces, it is certain that the life of the Christ follower is to be one marked by joy.