What Is True Joy?
What is joy anyway?
All the talk around here about joy demands some kind of definition. What do we actually mean when we use the word?
In agreement with Jonathan Huggins his article, “Does God Want Us Be Happy?”, Christian happiness is something quite different from contemporary pop-culture happiness. Notice that I’m not drawing a thick line between “happiness” and “joy,” as if the former word is more carnal and the latter distinctly Christian. I think the any of the English synonyms for happiness are valid, and the emphasis should be placed on the qualifier. There is Christian joy and worldly joy, Christian pleasure and worldly pleasure, Christian mirth and world mirth, and so on — and the key is knowing that difference.
World happiness, as Huggins explains, is being all about evanescent and effervescent feelings (fancy words that mean temporal buzz). But Christian happiness, and we’d argue true happiness, can only be found by seeking God and the things God loves, for God’s sake.
We see this in Scripture in places like Psalm 1 and Matthew 5.
The Psalm 1 man is the “blessed man” — or, the happy man — whose delight is in the law of the Lord. Jesus uses the same concept in his famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, (verses 3–5), and so forth.
In this sermon Jesus describes people who are blessed (happy!), and then he gave the rationale:
because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, because they shall be comforted, because they shall inherit the earth.
The blessed one is the happy one.
In his article, Huggins comes alongside the biblical understanding of “blessed” by adding the witness of historical theologians who contemplated the meaning of joy (in particular, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas). In summary, true joy is inseparable from goodness and wisdom. And if I might combine goodness and wisdom, they can be summarized as holiness. True joy is inseparable from holiness, experienced in union with Christ.
I tried to make this point in Never Settle for Normal, also leaning on Augustine for help:
According to Augustine, the basic criteria for happiness is first, that we have what we love; second, that we love what we have; and third, that it not be a bad thing (or in other words, we must love an object worthy of love).
This final thread of this criteria is what Huggins (and others) call goodness — which we might define as loving the right thing. Wisdom, which comes alongside goodness, is loving the right thing in the right way.
And loving the right thing in the right way, as I mentioned above, is an apt description of holiness.
It is conformity to the image of Jesus by union with him. This is required for true happiness. And now it probably makes sense for why we say true happiness can only be found in God. Or to put it more precisely, John Piper explains:
Christian joy is a good feeling in the soul, produced by the Holy Spirit, as he causes us to see the beauty of Christ in the word and in the world.
