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 A few years ago Canadian writer Mike Mason (author of The Mystery of Marriage, The Gospel According to Job, etc.) launched what he called "an experiment in joy": he made up his mind to be joyful in the Lord every day for ninety days. A moody person by nature, for him this was a radical experiment that changed his life. Throughout the ninety days he kept a journal, which eventually became a book on joy entitled Champagne for the Soul.
What follows is part of a series of ten excerpts from that book (now in a new edition by Regent College Publishing, available through Amazon.ca).
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God. Psalm 42:5
One mistake I made throughout my experiment in joy was to think it was somehow up to me to make joy happen. If I wasn't as joyful today as I had been yesterday, I'd worry, What am I doing wrong? Or worse, What's wrong with me?
This isn't the way of joy at all. The moment I start wondering if something's wrong with me, an anxiety sets in that bars me from joy. As long as I'm anxious, I cannot be joyful. The path to joy is through trust in my Lord, not distrust of myself.
The question What's wrong with me? was answered the day I became a Christian. What's wrong is that I'm a sinner and always will be in this life. So what else is new?
What's new is that Jesus takes away my sin and removes it as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12) and there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). The good news of redemption, not the stale news of sin, is the Christian's focus.
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I cannot be joyful if I continue to harbor a nagging feeling that, in spite of all Jesus has done, there remains something wrong with me. More than just doubting myself, this is doubting God. The Lord may be ever so wonderful, but if I think He has failed with me, I will secretly view Him as a failure. Unhappiness is ungodliness.
Many of us could benefit from taking ten minutes a day not just to count our blessings, but to count the ways we bless others. Instead of dwelling on the bad in ourselves, what if we deliberately took time to dwell on our good qualities? So much unhappiness derives from poor self-image. How can we be happy if we don't see ourselves as gifted, righteous, pure, beautiful? How can we be happy about a holy God if we persist in seeing ourselves as unholy? Rather than running ourselves down, we need to agree with God who has raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6). To believe in God is to believe also in ourselves.
Do you believe the gospel? Do you believe Jesus has literally taken away all your sin? It's one thing to glimpse this truth in moments of insight, but has it sunk in that you can actually live this wayevery day, all day long, without any condemnation? Could you bear this? Can you stand to know the truth about yourself, no matter how glorious it may be? Or are you too used to dragging around that load of guilt and shame, paying for your own sins and worrying your way to heaven?
In Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, when the pilgrim Christian finally arrives at the cross and the open tomb, the great burden he's been carrying fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then Christian gave three leaps for joy.7
The realization of the gospel is always accompanied by a total release from condemnation and a resulting lighthearted joy. This is how we know we're in touch with the real thing and have not been led astray.
December 6/2007
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