Sitting in God's Joy

Where I focus, I will go. What would happen if I chose to sit in God’s joy of me? Perhaps some of the old would be washed away.

It was a deep approval. The smile, the welcome, the love.

The banner was stretched out wide, saying, ‘This is home’.

It was joy.

What is joy?

I think it is difficult to describe because bunched into a three-letter word are emotions of happiness, delight, peacefulness, security, and an attention to the now not the past or the future. A sense of everything being right in the here and now of this moment.

We are captured by the joy. A new baby is born after the struggle of labour, and there is joy.

A sunrise after a wild stormy night — and there is joy.

A battle with cancer and the report comes back ‘cancer free’ – and there is joy.

That child who runs away from home and abandons all the values of his parents, yet after many years returns, and there is joy.

How often does joy come after suffering?

Perhaps we only know the deepest draughts of joy after we have gone through the darkest nights of the soul.

We don’t like that idea.

We want joy without suffering or hardship.

Yet if we look at biblical examples, we see that joy always comes later

Naomi holding baby Obed Ruth 4:6
Jesus – ‘Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.’ Hebrews 12:2
May those who sow in tears
    reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
    bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
    carrying their sheaves. Psalm 126:5-6

Coming home

Coming home may be a familiar joy to you.

Home is not simply a house, but more a place of belonging. A place where you are known, held, and loved.

I want to go home. I’ve been travelling for too long. I know some who have been exiled and sent away from home. An estrangement from ‘home’.

Others may not know what a genuine sense of home is like. They may have had faint wisps of it now and then, but the depth of home was never fully known.

The old gospel chorus has these lines ‘This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through’ and ‘And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.’

Perhaps we sit in a flow of joy but don’t even know it. Every now and then we might get tastes of it, and so we long for more, but full awareness is not there yet.

Sitting in God’s Joy

The people of Israel had come home. They had been taken away from home and exiled to Babylon.

The walls of their home had been destroyed, and the temple of Yahweh pulled down.

Utter destruction. Complete loss. Exiled and estranged from home.

Out of this heart place of grief and loss have poured out words of lamentation. Lamentations 3

In the books of Nehemiah and Ezra, we find an inflection point. A change has happened.

The tide that was going out has reached its limits, and now the tide has turned and the water is returning.

Inflection points. Places of change.

The people of Israel had returned and rebuilt the temple (the heart of Jerusalem) and the walls – the defining boundaries of who they were.

Now it was time ‘cut the ribbon’, as such.

You know how it is.

A building has been built and then there is the grand opening. People make speeches and a ribbon is cut or a plaque uncovered, and the building is ‘officially opened’.

We have a meal. Congratulations are shared.

This is what happened in Nehemiah 8.

Everyone gathered. Speeches were made. The Torah (the first five books of our Bible) was read and explained.

It was a moment of recognition of the ways of God and simply how far Israel had strayed away from them.

We all do that, but there is always an inflection point where we are called to return.

There was weeping. Grief flowed as they realised how they had gone so far away from God’s loved intention for them.

Grief is the passing through of what was. Rob Bell

There was a passing through of all the losses. The pain, the struggle, the missed moments.

There was a cathartic outpouring of tears.

For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law. Nehemiah 8:9

Sometimes you just need to cry and let it all out.

But then comes relief. Heart truth to heart pain.

Then he said to them, ‘Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.’

So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, ‘Be quiet, for this day is holy; do not be grieved.’ Nehemiah 8:10,11

The joy of the Lord is your strength

There is a kind of joy that I want to sit in.

I think it’s a kind of joy that is on the move. It flows like a river.

It pours out towards me. Always consistent, but I am frequently unaware of this flow.

It’s the joy of heaven that I think Jesus refers to it in the stories of the lost coin, lost sheep, and lost son.

There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents [shifts their focus back] than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. Luke 15

I have a taste of it. It gives me strength.

It’s the joy that says

I see you; I know you; I love you
I see the struggle you have in this foreign land, in this foreign place, in exile and estrangement.
I am with you, and there is a larger plan at work.
Come into this assurance, this approval deeper than words, and know a solace in the suffering
Focus your eyes on me and not your circumstances
My joy over you – I really do love you, and when I think of you I do a little dance Zephaniah 3:17 – is full
In this flow of joy is your truest home

This flow of joy becomes a safe place I can run into. A refuge and hiding place.

When the old life, the memories, the ghosts, the shame slingers, the guilt goblins, want us to return to times of exile and estrangement, we instead quietly recognise the flow of God’s joy that swirls around us.

We form this swimming or bathing into a habit of focus.

We discover about ourselves a new cleanliness.

I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:25-26

Choosing God’s joy

Let’s not sugarcoat it. Life can be hard.

I receive emails from people telling me just how hard life can be.

They wonder, ‘Where is God?’

They scream at injustice and rage in pain.

Life can be hard. I know it.

Then I write about sitting in God’s joy.

I even mock myself at the ridiculousness of the concept, yet I know it’s real. I know there is a flow.

There is grief – the passing through of what was. There is a season for it. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Our default negativity biased brain tracks us to pain and loss.

Choosing joy is much harder. It requires a conscious effort to form new brain neuron pathways. New rope bridges.

I am choosing joy.

Joy is essential to the spiritual life.
Whatever we may think of or say about God, when we are not joyful, our thoughts and words cannot bear fruit.
Jesus reveals to us God’s love so that his joy may become ours and that our joy may become complete.
Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing—sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death—can take that love away.
Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God’s love for us. . . .
Joy does not simply happen to us.
We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day.
It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us. Henri Nouwen

Can you choose joy too?

Quotes to consider

Do you want joy? Then open your heart to suffer. Suffering involves the ruthless paring away of all that will keep joy at bay. Dan Allender Sabbath
What is joy? I can no more define joy than I can beauty. Perhaps it is best to say that joy is a touch of sweet madness that comes when we sense God is closer to us than our own heartbeats. Dan Allender Sabbath
Joy has little to do with moments of success, reward, or honor. It is related to circumstances, yet it is not centered on something working out well. In fact, most of my joy has come within the frame of dark and troubling times. It has come in the midst of heartache and confusion. It seems uniquely related to death—death of a friend or even a friendship, the death of dream or an illusion that masqueraded as a worthy desire. Death has been the inevitable frame for joy. Dan Allender Sabbath
I believe there is a profound correlation between gratitude and joy and the absence of gratitude and despair. Dan Allender Sabbath
Most of us are spared life-wrenching tragedy, but none of us escapes the heartache of living in a fallen world. Dan Allender

Questions to answer

Choosing joy feels like going against the flow of life. Yet, choosing joy, God’s joy, can be like coming home to something radically different. What will you have to let go of to know God’s joy?
Joy seems to come after suffering. Is this true?
How would you define joy? What stories or metaphors would you use to explain joy?