Listen When He Speaks, March 2018: Joy

Joy, like love and the other Fruits of the Spirit, is in short supply, though there are plenty of counterfeits. Is joy easier to define than love? Like love, is it a choice?

Read more about how love is a choice.

What is joy?

If you Google the definition of joy, you get “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.“ Okay, so that’s a dictionary definition of joy, but wouldn’t it be cool if Googling joy actually brought a feeling like that?

Any way…

There’s nothing wrong with feeling “great pleasure and happiness,” but the Biblical Fruit-of-the-Spirit joy is more than that. Scripture tells us that we can have joy in our suffering. Because our suffering, when we yield to God in it, brings good. In us, and through us.

Read about how living in joy is living in reality

Jesus suffered terribly in Gethsemane. He was about to suffer beyond our imagination, and He had to choose to let His Father’s will be done despite how much it would cost Him… and His friends couldn’t even stay awake to pray with Him, you know, those friends He’s warned they were about to betray Him. On the way to the cross, He was mocked, spit on, and beaten until He was too weak to carry His cross. Isaiah told us He was beaten so badly, it was difficult to recognize Him as a man. He knew what lay beyond, and could embrace that joy as He suffered.

Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.

Hebrews 12:2b, NLT

How can we have joy when times are hard? By choosing our focus. Read more.

Joy is a choice

James told us to consider our hard times as joy. Because hard times test our faith, which grows our endurance. As we endure, we grow and become whole.

So, yes, like love, joy is a choice.

But they’re more than that.

Joy is the fruit of abiding in Christ

In Listen When He Speaks, we’re looking at the Fruits of the Spirit this year. And love and joy are the first two listed. There are times we have to choose to express love, and choose joy over despair. They’re examples of how change can work from the outside in. The consistent choosing, the acts it inspires, will change our heart. It may take a while, but when we choose to look at others and situations from God’s perspective, our vision changes, and we find our desire to choose love and joy deepens. Like muscles, they strengthen with exercise. They become our default instead of our grit-our-teeth-and-do.

But it’s even better than that, too! As we stay connected with God through Christ, the Holy Spirit grows these things in us. In part through the outside in of choosing His will, whether we want to our not, but also from the inside out.

When we choose to honor God and obey or choose to rest in Him, connected to the Vine, it’s His strength and wisdom we rely on. It’s in Him and through Him we achieve and receive joy.