A Time to Heal | Joyfeatured

When reflecting on words to describe 2018, joy does not make the top of my list. Instead my mind floods with a list of “t” words like trying, tempestuous, transitional, and just plain tough. A friend messaged me earlier this week to say “Happy New Year” and finished her message by saying “May 2019 be a year that brings even greater amounts of joy and satisfaction in Jesus.” What does this mean coming out of a year of trial and turbulence?

The God of Emotion

In planning our Women’s Weekend I had a hope of calling us to see our God as a God who has colorful emotions and in that has created us in His likeness. God’s Word talks to us about grief, anger, love, fear, hate, jealousy, enjoyment, delight, mourning, and dancing …because our God is a God who feels. Our God created emotions, and in His Word He commands our emotions. In God’s Word, He does not only command our actions, our deeds, or our works; God commands the ways we feel. I think it is only appropriate that we, as people who have feelings, look into, understand, and question ourselves against this.

In building our main teachings for the weekend, we each took time to answer the question: How do we rightly experience emotions and respond in any situation or season according to God’s Word? I hope in previous recaps on grief and anger your minds are starting to think a little bit about this.

The Emotion of Joy

We see joy in the differing seasons mentioned in Ecclesiastes 3. A time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate. We clearly feel more enjoyment over the times of laughing, dancing, and love. But after the poem ends, in verse 12 and 13 we read: “I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”

Joy is defined as a feeling of great pleasure and happiness. In this context words like joy, enjoyment, delight, pleasure, and happiness will be used interchangeably.

The Experience of Emotion

Before growing to understand that my life should serve my faith in the Lord, and not the other way around. My emotions were whimsical. Nostalgia came easy. And up until that point, I lived a life of following my feelings. In the beginning stages of taking my faith seriously—I understood the call to put to death sin in my life. In many ways this took the shape of putting to death emotions I had or pleasures I found in different things that I was growing to recognize as unhealthy. For me this meant shutting off the radio when a song came on that reminded me of old habits I enjoyed. It meant starting to question my instincts and reactions, which were guided by feelings I was used to following. This meant being cautious with my desires. Through this process I began to develop a thinking that feelings were corrupt and couldn’t be trusted. Most of my habits or things I had become comfortable with in my life made this true. But this was not a flaw in the feelings themselves, this was a flaw in how I was experiencing them. Just like we can have selfish grief, or unjust anger, we can have false joy, in our fallen condition we are capable and even bent toward enjoying rotten things. But this does not make the feelings bad, because God calls us to feel and shows us how. He teaches us how to rightly sit in our grief, when to justly feel anger, and how to experience the fullness of joy.

When my husband and I first started dating he taught me the most simple way to define what it means to be a Christian, is to love or enjoy God more than anything else. I think up until then I had understood believing there was a God. I had began to grow in serving the Lord with my actions, and through fighting against my sin. But it was new to me to begin to rightly understand the role of emotions in my faith. The book True Feelings by Carolyn and Nicole Mahaney says, “In a sincere effort to honor God, many of us have assumed that it doesn’t matter how we feel, we just need to obey. We’ve conceived of Christian duty mostly in terms of thoughts, words, and actions, but not feelings.”

Another book I found on this topic Teach Us to Want by Jen Pollock Michel says, “I stripped from my vocabulary the language of desire. It was, of course, what I had to blame for all the trouble I had gotten myself into in the first place. I was beginning to confidently believe that the only way of discerning what God wanted me to do was, in every case, to find the path that seemed least desirable and most difficult. There and only there could I be assured to find God’s will. Surrender would always be hard; obedience would always feel grueling. I am a woman who has struggled long with an inordinate fear of her selfishness, a woman who has wanted a measure of certainty for finding and following the will of God. Many, like me, imagine desire and faith in a boxing ring, facing off like opponents. We don’t suppose both can be cheered at the same time. At the end of the day, one will be left standing. The other will fall. We easily dismiss desire, arguing that the goal of the Christian life is obedience. Why promote desire?”

Pastor John Piper’s organization Desiring God is full of wonderful, solid resources. Piper summarizes his philosophy of the Christian life by saying “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. He says, “No one has to choose between being happy, and glorifying God.” What this does not mean, is that we live in our sin because we think it makes us happy. This means we look to God’s Word to understand what true happiness is. When we do we will see that in our faith, joy is not optional but is essential.

Our internal struggle with understanding whether desire is right or wrong is based on the object we are desiring.

Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 43:4 calls God our “exceeding joy.” And Psalm 16:11 says “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

Emotional Connection of Hunger, Thirst & Treasure

To make this even more plain to us, the Bible puts our desires in a context we can all understand and compares them to hunger and thirst. We know what is feels like to be thirsty, and the satisfaction that comes with then taking a drink. Psalm 42:1 says, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” We hear again of our souls thirsting for God in Psalm 63:1 “My God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Last year as women we memorized Psalm 34:8 “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” or Psalm 119:103 says: “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Jesus tells us in the new testament in John 6:35 whoever comes to Him will never hunger and whoever believes in Him shall not thirst again. In this he speaks to our highest satisfaction being Him. C.S. Lewis refers to God in the Psalms as the “all-satisfying Object.”

John Piper says in his book Desiring God “God is not worshiped where He is not treasured and enjoyed. Praise is not an alternative to joy, but the expression of joy. Not to enjoy God is to dishonor Him. To say to Him that something else satisfies you more is the opposite of worship. It is sacrilege (meaning misuse of what is regarded as sacred).” Sometimes what we miss in our search for happiness, is that only the Lord fills the deepest longings of our hearts. This may be why letting go of other things which we had hoped would fill that hole, feels painful. But holding to them would be sinful. And moving them out of our way is the path to growing in true satisfaction. There is a difference between believing there is a God and treasuring God. This could also be said as: There is a difference between believing there is a God and being deeply converted to genuine followers of Christ.

Matthew 13:44 says: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” Here we see a man coming to know the Lord could be said as rightly seeing the kingdom of God as more valuable than anything else. And in his JOY he sells all that he has to enter into God’s kingdom. What we see here is: The kingdom of God is so valuable that losing everything we have on earth, but getting the kingdom, is a gain. The saving grace of Christ allows us to see the kingdom of God is so valuable we are joyful to let go of everything else for it. Philippians 3:7-8 says “Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.” In Matthew the man sells everything he has so that he can have the kingdom. In Philippians 3:8, Paul suffers the loss of all things that he may gain Christ. Their stories are the same. This mirrors for us in Matthew 13:44 and in Philippians 3:8 the people who receive the kingdom treasure it more than everything else. We see in Matthew 13:44 for that strong desire, joy is essential.

Philippians 4:4 says, “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice.” Here we are commanded to always have joy. Randy Alcorn in his book Happiness says, “All the psalms of lament, the entire book of Lamentations, and many other Scripture passages reveal the importance of realism and sorrow in the Christian life. No treatment of joy and happiness should deny or minimize such texts. Indeed, a truly biblical worldview and an authentic doctrine of joy and happiness fully recognize and embrace the realities of suffering in this present age. Happiness in Scripture is all the deeper and richer because it doesn’t require denial or pretense, and can be experienced in the midst of severe difficulty.” We need to comprehend that right grief, anger, and joy do not oppose one another. How is it possible that we have joy in all circumstances?

We see in 1 Peter 1:6 & 8 we are rejoicing in our salvation, in the resurrection of Christ, in our belief in Him, in God’s great mercy to cause our belief in Him, and that right now we are grieved by trials and our genuineness is tested. But the genuineness of our faith is more precious than gold. James 1:2-3 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.” Psalm 119:70-72 says, “I delight in your law. It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.”

We see and agree, that not every decision that is good, right, or holds weight, needs to be painful or feel dutifully sacrificial. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit. As we grow in the Lord, our desires will be shaped, and our joy in Him will grow. Our happiness or enjoyment, if aimed rightly should weigh in on our decision making.

Testing Our Emotions

Romans 12:1-2 say: “I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” In this life it is possible to have Christ-centered happiness or Christ-denying happiness. God is the universal source of happiness for both believers and unbelievers. Is there happiness outside of knowing God? Yes, but it is temporary, it is only in this life and is contingent on positive circumstances. It is truly vanity and chasing after wind. There are times we see holiness at odds with happiness, and in those times we are misunderstanding true happiness. In the garden, in Genesis 3:6, we read: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” By taking and eating Adam and Eve invited sin into the world, but in the book of Matthew, Jesus calls us to take and eat of himself. What we miss, when we get caught up in the language of food, is He is saying He Himself will satisfy. When we say God desires our holiness above our happiness, this is true when we are finding happiness in sin. When we are seeking God as our greatest pleasure and treasure our holiness and our happiness are the same. We should always hold our desires with an open hand and trust how the Lord plans to mold and form our days. Our wanting or enjoyment of good things can take the place of God in our lives. But our wanting and enjoyment of good things inline with God’s will for our lives is His design. Specifically for women we may feel this heavily in wanting to be married, or wanting children, or to do well, enjoy, and feel productive in our work. It is not wrong to want these good things. Our delight becomes wrong when it is pointed directly toward sin, or indirectly by taking the place of our highest treasure in Christ.

With all of this being true, I want to close by recognizing we are broken people, and live within the fallen conditions of the now-world we are in. I want us to have a right view of who God is, and what God’s word says to us about our seasons and feelings. We should take time to test and think through our emotions, we should also allow ourselves to feel and experience them. What we feel will point us to many truths about what we are believing. There will be seasons when we feel we don’t desire God. There will be seasons when handling our emotions rightly seems to come naturally. God’s word speaks to us and guides us through all seasons and our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Reflection

How have your desires changed as you’ve grown in your relationship with the Lord? How do you relate to when Matthew 13:44 says “sells all that he has”? If you don’t personally relate, consider examples already given.