I like the word joy. It's not my favorite (my favorite is hope in case anyone was wondering), but I'd have to say it's pretty high up on the list. Just like hope, I like it because of what it means. If you look it up, you'll see that joy is "the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires." That's a nice definition, but I'm not sure it's right since that's basically saying it's how you would feel if you got everything you wanted. Maybe it's right in a world sense, but I don't think it's really Biblical. According to a song I learned at VBS when I was a kid (and also according to Galatians 5:22), joy is a fruit of the Spirit, which means it's not something I naturally have. It's not something my sinful flesh can really muster up, even if I had "well-being, success, or good fortune," because it doesn't come from me. If you grew up in church, you probably heard some form of the "happiness is dependent on your circumstances; joy isn't" thing. That's a nice thing, but not super helpful because then you're just left wondering what it is dependent on. Obviously, you're supposed to assume it comes from God, which it does, but I always found that definition lacking specificity, which as an English major I tend to enjoy.
In light of all that, I've always felt like the concept of joy was something I was always not quite getting. And recently (say the past year or so), I've felt like joy was something I didn't really have. If I'm being honest, I tend to go to the negative more than I'd care to admit, and it's very easy for me to let that determine my mood. Sure there's been plenty of times I would say I was happy, and I'm pretty good at pretending to be happy even if I don't feel like it, but if someone asked me if I thought I was experiencing joy, I would probably have had to answer not really. And that, I think, is kind of a problem. As a Christian, shouldn't I be able to say I'm experiencing joy all the time? So I decided to do what all nerdy people do when something seems to be eluding them. I decided to study it. And since that's what I'm working on, that's what I'll be blogging about for the foreseeable future. (Disclaimer: I know that studying about joy isn't going to give me joy. I know that it comes from the Lord. So I don't think that if I just read a bunch on the topic I'm going to be able to make myself joyful. But, since I'm going to be reading about it in the Bible and praying about it a lot, I'm pretty confident that God will help me on the whole experiencing-joy front.)
I started my study in Deuteronomy. Specifically Deuteronomy 16:15, which says, "For seven days you shall keep the feast to the Lord your God at the place that the Lord will choose, because theLord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you will be altogether joyful." Deuteronomy 16 talks about the three big feasts/festivals--Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths. Verse 15 is talking about the Feast of Booths, which celebrates the harvest and remembers the time the Israelites spent wandering in the desert. Verse 15 basically says that during this time of celebration and remembrance, the people should be joyful (verse 14 actually commands them to rejoice). But why? (And actually, during this time some Jewish families still build "booths" to eat and sometimes sleep in, which is kind of like camping, and anyone who knows me well knows that that isn't on the top of the list of things that would bring me tons of joy....although I'm all for a good fort, which according to this website building your family booth is kind of like.)
During this feast, the joy comes from two things--remembering what God did while the Israelites were in the desert and celebrating what He just did with the harvest. In short, it's about what God has done.
So that's the first thing I'm learning about joy. It's not about me at all really; it's about God. Thankfully, I haven't been in the desert and am not a farmer, (I did get 8 plants when I moved to my new apartment, and 5 of them are still alive!) but God has provided for me in a ton of other ways, most of which I don't really think about that often. But maybe if I did think about them more, I would be more joyful.
I have a wonderful family, a great church where I've met some amazing women I'm so thankful to know, a job that I love most of the time and coworkers who I love all of the time, my great new apartment, plus lots of other things. But the biggest thing God has done is save me. The biggest thing is Jesus and everything His sacrifice means. It means I'm forgiven. Even though I don't remember that all the time. And even though I still sin a lot. It means I'm His child. Even if I take for granted or all out forget how much that means He loves me. And it means I get forever with Him. Even though most of the time I don't think that's a big deal, when in fact it's really the biggest deal ever.
But really what it means is that my "well-being, success, and good fortune" are 100% secure. And it means the "prospect of possessing what [I] desire," mainly getting to be somewhere where there's no more pain and sin, where I'm face-to-face with Jesus, is 100% likely. So I guess when you look at it that way, there's no reason for me to not have joy. And when you look at it that way, the dictionary definition is 100% correct.
