Fruit of the Spirit: Joy

Philippians 4: 5-10

The Fruit of the Spirit, which Paul lists in Galatians 5: 22-23, are characteristics that were found in Jesus that the Holy Spirit wants to develop in us. The second of the Fruits of the Spirit is joy. 

When I was growing up, I was very suspicious, and a little resentful of people who told me that I ought to be joyful all the time. That was because I had swallowed a couple of wrong ideas about what joy was, and where it came from. 

My first misconception about joy was that joy is just a feeling. We confuse it with having fun. We think of joy like the froth on a beer. We don’t have to be joyful, joyfulness just appears when things are going our way. 

Well, a lot of times things are not going our way. If that’s what joyfulness is, then I didn’t have it. Many times things were not going my way. Life isn’t fun all the time, so how can you be joyful all the time. 

But Jesus was joyful, even when things were not fun. Look at Hebrew 12: 2 “Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (NKJV)

The Cross was not fun. Jesus despised it, both the shame and the pain of it. Yet He still had joy. Joy has to be something deeper than fun. It can’t be just a reaction to our temporal circumstances. 

The second misconception about joy was that joy was faking happiness. We all know people who seem to be stuck with a permanent, phony smile on their faces. They smile when they are sad, just as if they were happy. (Psychologists call this an affect disturbance and see it as a symptom of denial).  People do this because they think they are supposed to smile. They have confused joy in the heart with a look on their faces, and have been told that if they have the look on their faces, that eventually they will have joy in their hearts. They pretend everything’s all right when it isn’t.

 That’s not joyfulness-that’s denial. If I break my leg I don’t have to say, “It doesn’t hurt, I’m all right.” If I pretend that I don’t have any pain, I’m not being brave, I’m lying. My leg is still broken. I would be better off telling people I hurt, and maybe then they’ll take me to the hospital!

But joy isn’t a fake and it isn’t a feeling, either. Joy is a virtue we cultivate until it comes naturally in us. It is learning to not to get trapped in depressive thoughts, defeatist attitudes, and obsession with all the evil in life, but learning to focus our attention on what is good, positive and the virtuous. It is a holistic approach to life that involves our hearts, minds, and actions.

It involves our minds, because it means we understand the true nature of God and the universe. 

Paul says in verse 6, “Do not be anxious over anything.” Anxiety is worry, which is the anticipation that bad things are going to happen. Joy comes from trust that good things are going to happen. You can’t have anxiety and joy at the same time. 

Paul doesn’t just tell us not to be worried. He gives our mind a reason for not worrying.  He says “The Lord is near.”  We can be joyful because our loving Father God is with us, right beside us. The more we believe that, then the more potential joy there is in our lives. Without some knowledge of God’s presence, joy is just an illusion.

We can enjoy a roller coaster, because we know it is safe. It we don’t think it is, we wouldn’t get on it. We enjoy flying because we are confident it will land. If we weren’t we’d be frightened the whole trip. We can enjoy an adventure movie, because we know the hero is going to survive.  Otherwise, we’d probably hate it. We can enjoy life because we know that God is with us, no matter what. If our faith wavers in this, then we hate life. The first sign of wavering faith is that we lose our joy. If we want to restore our joy, then we need to check our faith. 

If we have faith in God, then we need to also have faith in what He created. He has placed in this universe all we need to survive, and all we need to enjoy. We don’t have to seek joy outside of God’s will, we can find plenty in what He has provided. 

Whenever we participate in the fun that God provided, we are engaging in a form of praise to him, whether we are hearing a good joke, looking at scenery, or eating tasty food. He made all this possible. God will never allow this universe to be without enjoyment. He provides good things, even when life is not going our way, there is still plenty of good to see. Life is a joke on death, just when he thinks he has finally destroyed us, we get to join God in heaven. Our fate, our destiny as Christians is eternal joy, of which God gives us abundant tastes in this life. 

Joy involves our hearts as, too. Emotional joy originates in the Spirit of God. Jesus describes the spirit as a spring of living water, which comes up out of our insides. That inner spring of joy is available to all who trust in Him. Jesus has placed the joy of the Lord inside you, so that you can draw upon it in your times of greatest trouble and darkest grief.

There is joy even in times of pain. We see this in laughter heard at a funeral. We see this in prisoners joking and laughing in jail. We see this in the smiles of nurses and hospice workers. Even in the darkest days of our lives, there is still joy!

Despair happens when we let negative emotions completely smother our joy. Sadness is the elephant in the room. When we lose someone close to us, get sick, or go through a divorce or bankruptcy, our grief and depression is so great that for a time we can see nothing else. This happens to all of us. At times, depression is so strong that we think there is nothing to rejoice about. When this happens, joy is not missing in our lives--it’s just been hidden.

We shouldn’t assume that the only way to get joy in our lives is to get rid of all pain. Joy is like drilling for oil in the ocean. We don’t have to move the ocean. We just have to build a rig on top and push aside enough water and rock to get to the oil and pump it out. When our heart has been broken, we don’t have to remove all the pain to have joy. We just have to set aside enough of the pain to find the happiness that God put in the universe beneath the pain. We have to give ourselves permission to set aside our hurts and find the joy of the Lord.

That’s what worship is. We come to church, because we have learned to set aside this world for a short time, so we can remember the source of joy in Christ. Praising God and thanking Him opens up a channel of joy that we can draw on when everything else seems hopeless. It’s our oil rig, sinking down below the surface of life to touch the reservoir of joy beneath.

Don’t wait until the pain goes away to experience joy. Give yourself permission to set aside your grief for a few moments of joy. Make new friends, join a group, try something new and wholesome. Joy is still there. God has placed it in the universe. You will find it when you look.

Joy is also an action. Paul says in verse 5, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice!”  This is a command. Go out and rejoice in God!  Just to make sure we heard it, he says it twice!  He would not have commanded us to rejoice if it were not possible to obey. 

You don’t have to do anything to be miserable and depressed. Depression is easy. You just sit at home and mope. But to rejoice, we must do something. Happiness brings more happiness. 

Rejoicing is not simply a reaction to a feeling—it is also a means of accessing the joy within. We must seek it, find it, and let it out.

All the words in the Old Testament translated “praise” and “joy” that they are action verbs, describing bodily actions. They tell us to jump up and down, to brighten the face, to lift the hands, sing, dance, and lift the chin. Our minds cannot concentrate on something unless our body is involved. We can’t sit back and hope joy comes to us. We have to seek joy. People who are friendly, have more friends. People who act joyfully really do enjoy life more, are more successful, and are able to accomplish more. We don’t deny our problems--we just act upon the joys we have. 

Paul tells us in verse 8, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  We cannot think upon honor if we are not willing to act honorably; we cannot think on justice without acting justly; we cannot think on purity without acting purely; we cannot think on what is commendable without commending people; we cannot think on excellence without applauding excellence; we cannot think on loveliness without celebrating it; we cannot think something worthy of praise without praising it. Whatever we think on needs to be acted upon with our bodies, faces, and our actions.

This isn’t what faking is. It is a recognition that real joy doesn’t come from circumstances, but from the recognition that the Lord is near.

In The Little Flowers of St. Francis, St. Francis was asked, “How is the joy of God made perfect?”

He answered, “When you are happy, the joy of God is not perfect in your life. When you are warm and well fed, the joy of God is not yet perfect. When all men speak well of you, the joy of God is not perfected. But when you come to a castle on a cold, rainy night, seeking food and shelter, but the lord of the castle turns you from his door and beats you and you are forced to spend the night in the rain, hungry and hurting in the cold; yet you can sing praise to God, then the joy of God is perfect in you.”

We don’t learn joy from success and good treatment. We learn it from Christ, even when happiness has fled. We have to look for it to find it. Anyone can rejoice in the midst of happiness. It takes a Christ-centered heart to find happiness in the midst of sorrow, sadness and defeat. That’s when we really show the fruit of the Spirit, and follow in the footsteps of Jesus.