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By Mike Stewart
MANY OF US lack any lasting joy in our lives simply because our image of God is
wrong. Many Christians believe that God is not very happy and that if they live
a holy life pleasing to him, they should not be happy either.
Many believe that the more in touch with ‘reality’ you are, the sadder you become. This is not true. In fact, quite the reverse is
true. As we become more in touch with reality, we discover that, despite
seeming evidence to the contrary, joy and not sorrow lies at the heart of the universe and that God is very happy indeed.
God most joyous
In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard observes:
“We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that
he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The
abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All
of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets
of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and
depth. . .
“We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera
or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we
may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal
experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what
we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a
perfect being . . .”
Most of us seriously underestimate God’s capacity for joy. The reality is that the more in touch with God we are, the
more joyful we become. We discover that C.S. Lewis was correct when he wrote, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
I’m reminded of the fellow in Jesus’ parable of the treasure hidden in a field. You may recall that having found the
hidden treasure, the man, “in his joy,” goes and sells everything he has in order that he may buy that field.
This was no hardship for him. If anyone had asked him, “Is this hard for you to sell all your possessions?” I can imagine him replying, “Are you crazy? This is the best thing I’ve ever done! Have you seen that treasure in the field? It’s worth way more than anything I own . . .”
The gospel of you
What then is the gospel according to you? Is it a pearl of great price, a
treasure hidden deep in a field that you would happily sell everything you have
in order to possess it? If you don’t consider it worth everything you have, then it’s not the full gospel for you. Keep digging until you find that treasure. Go for
gold and don’t stop until you find it.
Too often the gospel according to me runs something like this: “Rejoice in the Lord when things are going well and worry when they’re not.”
This is not worth selling all that I have for. It’s not even worth going to the thrift store for. I can say from personal
experience that this is a worthless gospel.
Learning to be joyful in the Lord is not an attempt to avoid human suffering and
pain. Joy is a quality of life that is rooted in God and lived out in the real
world in which we live, in all our varied circumstances and trials.
We are called to rejoice in the Lord, not in our circumstances. This is possible
because God’s character toward us never changes, despite what may be happening to us at any
given time in our lives. Because of this, some people have discovered that the
greatest joy can arise from the greatest troubles. James Birrell, a boy who
died of cancer at eight years of age said, “You can’t let cancer ruin your day . . .”
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Theologian Karl Barth defines joy as “a defiant ‘nevertheless!’ set at full stop against all bitterness and resentment and despair.” Being joyful in God is something that we do regardless of our circumstances . .
. It could be that joylessness is a sin and one that is all too tolerated by
the church . . .
In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce writes of his protagonist’s decision not to become a priest. Stephen Dedalus has a vision of what would
happen to his face and how it would become like the faces of all the religious
people he knew, “A mirthless mask reflecting a sunken day . . . sour faced and devout, shot with
pink tinges of suffocated anger.”
This ought not to be. There is a being in the universe that wants you to live in
sadness, but his name is not God. No one is more joyful than God and no one is
more miserable and sad than the devil. There is a voice from heaven and there
is a voice from hell, and we are called to listen and discern carefully.
The sadness of Satan
We do well to consider these words from St. Francis De Sales: “The evil one is pleased with sadness and melancholy because he himself is sad
and melancholy and will be so for all eternity, hence he desires that everyone
should be like himself.”
The devil’s voice makes me sad and overwhelmed and leaves me feeling hopeless and useless.
Jesus’ voice is different. Sometimes I find that what he says seems so easy, so light,
so pleasurable, too good to be true – and yes, even funny at times.
If we find ourselves lacking in joy these days, it may be because we have a
wrong image of who God is and it may be that we are listening to the wrong
voice.
Wisdom says, “Then I was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind” (Proverbs 8:30-31).
Mike Stewart is rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Abbotsford. This excerpt is from No Crowds Present (Fresh Wind, 2007).
December 2009
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