pondering joy

Brennan Manning wrote, "In this vale of tears, no Christian life is an unbroken, upward spiral to the mountaintop. Yet the Christian's basic orientation is one of joy and gratitude." In other words, "Christianity means people who are joyfully thankful people." Thankfulness and joy aren't exactly things I'm too good at it, and for this reason I've been doing lots of thinking and praying on the subject. 

Gratitude and joy, they're interconnected. They're practically bed partners. Gratitude is key in joy, and one could say that it's joy's foundation. Joy is a big deal in the Bible: St. Paul mentions joy sixteen times in his letter to the Philippians. The Bible talks a lot about the joy that a person has in Christ. 

I look at my own life, see the lacking joy, and ask, "Well, what about me?" 

If joy is something every Christian intrinsically has, then why don't I have it? 

If the presence of the Spirit in my life is manifested by joy, what's wrong with me?

If joy is something a Christian has, period, then what's that say about me?

Paul says in Romans 14 that God's kingdom isn't a matter of eating and drinking "but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." He prays in the next chapter, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope." He writes in Galatians that joy is part of the fruit that the Spirit cultivates in our lives: but why should we assume that joy comes without any effort on our part, any movement towards sanctification? Why should joy just fall in our laps? Does the fruit of the Spirit come upon us all at once, or is it something that grows as we ourselves grow in the Spirit? Pondering all this, I've come to look at joy from three different angles.

Joy & Gratitude. This past Thursday night, Karen told us about a time she was in Africa with a local church there. She was blown away by their worship, by their passion, by their hope, and especially by their joy. They radiated joy: their eyes glistened, their faces glowed, there was quick in their step and exultation on their lips. In that impoverished culture, those Christians knew precisely what they had to be thankful for. Undistracted by those things that so easily enrapture us in the Western World--materialism, hedonism, and prestige--the Christians were able to thank God for their bread, for their families, for their lives. Their gratitude to Christ, for all that he had done and was doing and would do for them, spilled out into their lives, manifested itself at joy. We can mock them for being so thrilled with religion; "Of course they would be, they're in Africa! They barely have clean water!" And there's truth to that: but it's a condemnation on those doing the mockery, not the other way around. We have what we need, and those things we bitch about really aren't that important. Living in a culture where we can be self-sufficient and self-serving, we're blinded to how much we have. We lack the perspective to be thankful. 

Gratitude and joy, they're interconnected. Joy is found when we see, and understand, all that we have been graciously given in Christ. Joy comes when we open our eyes to the work of God around us. Joy comes when we realize how fucking undeserving we are and that, regardless, God has given us everything. Harking back to the renewal of the mind in the Spirit, those of us in the western world have a lot more renewing to do in this arena that most of the world. 

We have to open our eyes to how much we have.

We have to realize that what we have comes as a gift.

Yes, we may have worked for it.

Yes, we may have paid for it.

But it's a gift that we live in a world where we can work and pay for such things.

The fact that I live where I live is itself a blessing.

And all that I have comes from that gift itself: everything's a gift.

I need to make a real effort to see the blessings that God has given me because he loves me. Instead of focusing on what I want God to give me, I need to focus on what God has given me. There's no point in measuring my life against other peoples': Facebook only tells us how people want us to see them; people would KILL for my life, both the good and bad; and not everyone has the same path: God calls and uses people in all walks of life. Gratitude is something that has to be practiced, and its practice spills out into all manner of life.

Joy & Hope. Leafing through the New Testament, I can't help but see that more often than not, joy is tied to hope. In Romans 5 Paul says that through Christ "we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God." In Romans 12, Paul tells the Christians in Rome, "Rejoice in hope!" This isn't a polite suggestion or recommendation: it's a command. Rejoice in hope. 1 Peter is littered with the idea of hope, and the entire letter structures the Christian life around focusing on the Christian hope. The Christians are to have joy in hope; and as they come to understand their hope, and mold their lives around it, joy comes as a byproduct. It's so easy to become distracted from the Christian hope, to set it on the shelf and focus on "things that really matter": the new heavens and new earth, glorification, the consummation of God's kingdom, all of that stuff will be completed in the future, but we're here, in the now, so why focus on all that? Peter has a different approach: focus on that hope, mold your life on that hope, let that hope saturate you and fill you and spill out from your life, to the point that people take notice. Why else would he tell the Christians to be prepared "to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you." As it says in Proverbs 10, "The hope of the righteous brings joy."

Joy & Genuine Humanness. The Bible talks a lot about having "the mind of Christ," or "the attitude of Christ," of conforming to "the image of Christ." Jesus stands as the Perfect Human, the model of what God intended humans to be all along. Because of sin, our image as human beings is marred; but Christ stands as the image of genuine human living. The focus of sanctification is becoming more like Christ; the finishing touches on sanctification, finally being made fully and completely human, lies at the end of the road (and the beginning of another). The work of Christ does a lot of things, but it's point is restoration: a restoration of human beings to be in right relationship with God, one another, themselves, and the cosmos as well. A better word would be new creation: God remakes us into genuine human beings, and then he tells us to start living like it (with some handy help from him, of course). Understanding the point of redemption being just that--redemption--enables us to look at the Christian life not as a different way of living that we need to adapt to but the appropriate way of living for genuine human beings. The Spirit works in us and with us to transform us from self-seeking, self-loving people into God-loving, kingdom-seeking people. The point of transformation is to take us from dehumanization to full-fledged genuine human living (and we note that transformation doesn't culminate until glorification, and that's a complete and utter work of God: until then, we won't be perfect, and won't fully radiate our true identity as redeemed human beings). All those descriptions and lists in the New Testament serve as signposts to what genuine human living looks like. The Fruit of the Spirit is perhaps the greatest signpost, a panoramic vision of what a fully-flourishing human life looks like. Joy, being a key part of the fruit of the Spirit, is thus a facet of genuine human living.

As we grow in Christ, as we come to experience him more and more and experience his change in our hearts and minds, we're fitting more comfortably into the clothes of genuine human living. When we're out-of-sync with who we are, there's often a feeling of disconnectedness, of emptiness. But in Christ, we're being brought back to who we truly are, who we're meant to be. As we conform more and more to the image of Christ, to what it means to be truly human, joy seeps through our lives. Joy is certainly something given to us by God, but I'm thinking there's more to it: when we come to embrace who we really are as human beings, and live in a manner that's appropriate for genuine human beings, joy follows. This may be what the New Testament's hitting on it when it talks about the law of liberty, or our liberty in Christ: "How is conforming to a wholly different manner of living anything close to freedom and liberty?!" Sitting on my desk right now is a half-finished model of the U.S.S. Constitution, an 18th century Navy vessel that didn't enjoy such things as engines. The ship had to use its sails in different patterns to use the wind to its advantage. When a ship's sailing with the wind, it's been said to have a certain liberty in its sails; but when it moves against the wind, it stalls or bobs around listlessly. Perhaps it's the same with Christian liberty: when we move in rhythm with how we're supposed to be, we're not stalling or bobbing around like a fishing bobber in an empty pond. We're moving in conjunction with the wind, filling our sails with the Spirit and geuine human living, and that brings us the truest kind of liberty, that liberty of being who we are in the first place. The existentialist's wet dream.