Two kinds of joy?

 

According to these verses, I’ve understood that being filled with the Holy Spirit is accompanied by the fruit of the Spirit:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22–23)

Today’s reading has me carefully defining joy. First, the joy of the Lord is not like regular happiness or elation. It does not depending on circumstances. Sometimes this joy is obvious and almost hyper, but on many occasions, it is deeper and comes bubbling up even when a normal person would be experiencing the opposite. In other words, God’s joy is there no matter what, but with this caveat: if I have unconfessed sin in my life, it eludes me. Loss of that joy is a signal that I need to confess something. Usually I know right away what it is by the absence of joy and other fruit of the Spirit.

Also, this does not mean that I’m no longer a Christian or united to Christ. It is simply His signal to me to keep short accounts with the Lord, much like a few of the psalms where the writer expressed how he felt because of his sin. However, today’s reading says this:

“People who live in their emotions feel at one with Christ that they look no farther than this feeling. They often delude themselves with thinking they have come into the divine union, when all the while their nature and dispositions are still under the sway of self-love.”

While the author goes on to say that emotions are untrustworthy and are largely the result of our physical condition or our natural temperaments so It is a fatal mistake to make them the test of our oneness with Christ, I say this ‘joy’ cannot be the same joy that the Holy Spirit produces. God’s joy gives me no delusions about my union with Christ. How do I know that? Loss of His joy drives me to acknowledge and confess sin while loss of the human emotion of joy simply raises more human emotions such as anger, annoyance, or efforts to ‘fix’ it by changing my circumstances.

Certainly my union with Christ is a fact, even one of those salvation truths that produces joy, but that joy is not about the union but about how I am living out that union. It makes no sense to be one with Christ and act as if the world’s way or sinful ways are going to make me happy. This is putting the source of that union on my ‘works’ instead of on the grace of God and the redemption that is in Christ. This union is not broken by sin. However, the joy of the Lord takes a blow when I let sin tell me what to do instead of following the leading of God’s Spirit. If my focus is on being filled with Him, I will discern the difference between my emotions and His.

Actually, the reading is warning against thinking I am a Christian because of my emotions. My understanding about joy is a different barrel of apples. I am a Christian because of Jesus, not because I feel joyful. I am filled with the Spirit and feel His joy when I walk with Him. Joy is not a test of unity with Christ in salvation, but it is a test of unity with Christ in the way I live as a Christian. Can I say what Jesus said?

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. (John 5:19)

In case I think this is not important, this is what Jesus said about the value of doing what God says over the value of merely being a joyful person:

If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” (John 10:37–38)

PRAY: Jesus, it seems to me that Your joy is a test of my obedience. But You also teach me that I cannot make joy my focus. Up front, obedience often does not seem to be something that will give me joy, but that is not the kind of joy You give — as a reward. Instead, it is a joy that is like peace, beyond understanding yet evidence of You in my life and always there to give evidence that I united to You.