We are all looking for more joy in our lives and according to this we should be filled with it if we are listening to Jesus. This joy Jesus speaks about seems so unreal, so intangible. Yet, according to His words that joy should be there and overflowing as believers in Him. Is it there but we just don’t realize it? The fact is, yes, it is there and we need to experience it as evidence of the life of Jesus in us.
Paul was perhaps the most articulate about this puzzle. According to Andrew Murray (Abide in Christ, p 176) “He understood the paradox of the Christian life as the combination at one and the same moment of all the bitterness of earth and the joy of heaven. ‘As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing’ these precious golden words teach us how the joy of Christ can overrule the sorrow of the world, can make us sing while we weep, and can maintain in the heart, even when cast down by disappointments or difficulties, the deep consciousness of a joy unspeakable and full of glory”.
This is the joy we speak and sing about in this season. It is the goal of each of us to find it (or Him) deep in our spirits and proclaim it in our souls. Having just lost another precious member of my family I have been challenged again to possess the joy that is there as I realize the presence of Jesus Himself. I am touched with that joy as I remember my mother’s last words, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going to be with Dad”. There was the evidence that that joy was true and real even in the moment of death.
I pray that all of us will realize the “joy of heaven” and that we will let it overrule the “bitterness of earth”.
May His joy be in you,
Dennis Deardorff
Director of Group Life and Men’s Community
New Hope Community Church
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