Joy is usually confused with happiness. But while happiness is said to our circumstances, environment, and personality, happiness is worried with what’s happening, and joy is a more lasting and solid affection. Here are five steps to rediscovering joy:
5 Steps to Rediscovering Joy
1. Distinguish joy out of your circumstances.
The readers of Peter’s first letter were experiencing suffering. They were undergoing “trials,” and these of a “grievous” kind. And yet, they were still capable of experience joy. The world tells us that joy is about what we have now; the Bible tells us that joy is about who we’re in Christ. The world tells us that joy is inconceivable after we are suffering; the Bible reveals the apostles singing in jail and the apostle Paul writing his most joyful letter (Philippians) in prison.
2. Focus your joy on him.
The readers of Peter’s first letter discovered joy due to him – that’s, due to Jesus. “Though you have got not seen him, you’re keen on him. Though you don’t now see him, you think in him…” (1 Peter 1:8). When our eyes are focused on ourselves, we’ll find many reasons to be miserable. When our eyes are on him, there’ll all the time be reasons to rejoice.
3. Realize that joy comes from faith.
Peter tells his readers that though they don’t see Jesus because they consider in him, they’ve joy. Martin Lloyd-Jones would famously say that the difficulty with Christians is that we hearken to ourselves when we should always be talking to ourselves. Tell yourself to trust in him. Tell yourself who he’s in order that you might exercise your faith and put that faith in him.
4. Grasp the character of Christian joy which is that it’s “crammed with glory” or “glorified.”
The form of joy that Christians experience is a foretaste of heaven’s joy. It is glorified joy. Listen to how Jonathan Edwards described it, “Although the enjoyment was unspeakable, and no words were sufficient to explain it; yet something may be said of it, and now words more healthy to represent its excellency than these, that it was stuffed with glory; or, because it is in the unique, glorified joy.”
Fifth, enjoyment of the reality that if you have got faith in Jesus, you might be “obtaining the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:9). This salvation is what the prophets searched and spoke about, and is so extraordinary and amazing that even “angels long to look” into it (1 Peter 1:12). Who couldn’t rejoice to think that they’ve that which Isaiah and Ezekiel and Amos foretold and searched and inquired about, and which the very angels of heaven because it were stoop down from heaven, craning their necks, to see higher!
Some people have more upbeat personalities than others. Some struggle with depression and anxiety, while others are temperamentally more inclined to happiness. Among God’s giants, there have been those that wrestled with sadness for much of their lives (Martin Luther; Charles Spurgeon). Despite the human number of personalities and the human condition by which all of us find ourselves, there may be lasting joy for the journey in Christ!
Photo Credit: Conner Ching/Unsplash
