Where's Your Joy?

“As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing…”  ~2 Corinthians 6:10

Where’s your joy? is perhaps one of the most revealing questions we can ever ask ourselves. As Christians, whatever we face, whatever we feel, we should never entirely be without joy. As Paul reminds us in our text, even when sorrowing, he found himself always rejoicing. Is that your experience? How can that even be possible? you might wonder. How can I be joyful when I feel miserable? 

To understand this we need in the first place to distinguish joy from happiness. Happiness finds its roots in our circumstances and our present emotional state. Unlike joy, happiness and sorrow are mutually contradictory emotional states. By contrast, joy and profound sorrow can exist together. Joy is a faith emotion rooted in the truth and hope of the gospel. As such, joy has the ability to reach beyond our situation and beneath our feelings to lay hold of God. True joy sends its tap root into another world. 

Isn’t this what Paul meant when he said, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12)? Sometimes the Christian can feel no joy in the present; his joy resides entirely in the future hope of what God is yet to do. Wasn’t this Jesus’ experience as He endured the cross, despising its shame? He looked forward to the joy God set before Him (Hebrews 12:2).

With a similar perspective, the Christian can sing the psalms of lament, which take up well over one third of the collection. Take David’s plucky attitude in Psalm 13, for example. Without contradicting his opening lament – “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (verse 1) – David ends up saying, “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5–6, emphasis added). The beginning and the end of this psalm go together in the same soul at the same time like this: David feels forsaken, but he believes he is not.

Even in Psalm 88, which is undoubtedly the bleakest song in the whole Bible, in which the psalmist faces life without light (verses 1-9a), death without hope (verses 9b-12), and questions without answer (verses 13-18), his instinct is still to turn Godward despite his confusion. Though his final word is darkness, he is still an intercessor. His faith refuses to let go of the God he can’t seem to wrap his arms around.

Now, getting from the sadness we feel to the joy we believe is a fight – the fight of our lives. How do we get from whence to whither when everything else seems to be conspiring to pull us in the opposite direction? Earlier in 2 Corinthians 6, Paul gives us a few hints:

But as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left. (2 Corinthians 6:4–7, emphasis added)

By Purity– If we allow moral impurity into our mind, our words, or our lives, we will hamstring our soul’s capacity for joy. The age-old principle stands true: garbage in, garbage out. We must guard our soul’s purity like our  life depends upon it, because it does.

By Knowledge– In my experience, my ability to find joy rises and falls with my ability to keep my head on straight. We need to constantly remind ourselves of what we know, the truths of the Christian world-and-life view.

By Patience– If we are to have any chance to be joyful in the face of adversity, we need to cultivate the resilient roots of Christian endurance – the ability to keep on going even when we want to stop.

By Kindness– A bitter, resentful, mean-spirited attitude will always rob us of joy. We must cultivate a benevolent spirit towards everyone we meet. It never fails to amaze me how little flies really can ruin the ointment here.

In each of these areas, we need the Holy Spirit and a genuine love. Hypocrisy is a real joy killer. To that end, our speech must be truthful. When I find myself in a joyless mood, one of the questions I ask myself is, quite simply: What lies am I believing? For what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth” – that which is true at all times, in all places, and for all people – always leads to joy.

Even on his best day, the Christian will always have to fight his way to joy. My prayer this morning is that, through these verses, Paul will give us all effective weapons to wield in our left and right hands.