Joy

The word for today is Joy.  The French word for Joy, is Joy.  (I can learn this kind of French vocabulary)

We’ve been wrestling with conflicting things we’ve heard in the last few days and we thought we would share them with you.

Sunday morning we listened to a sermon by Tim Keller on “Missions.”  He used John 17:13-19 as his text and talked about the need for Jesus’ disciples to get out and serve, and when we do that, it will bring “joy” to our lives.  Joy!  Not comfort, but Joy.  It struck us that it seems like we are always seeking joy in our lives and here is a way Jesus says is a fool proof way we can get it.  Joy should be a by product of ‘getting out.”

Then we went to church Sunday night and the sermon was on “Not giving up.”  The man who was giving the sermon asked, “How many of you at one time or another have just wanted to give up and go home?”  Just about everyone raised their hands.  Most of these people are missionaries who have given most of their lives to be here or places like this, yet were not always feeling joy.  If anyone is going to feel the joy from “getting out” then these people should be feeling it, yet, it’s not always there.

Then one of our new friends here expressed just how hard it was and how tired she was.  To us, if you have spent 20 years of your life in Niamey, you get to feel tired.  But according to Jesus, aren’t you also supposed to feel joy?  She is tired, not joyful.  I’m not sure “joy” has been the emotion that tops the chart for us either.  Was Jesus wrong?

We think the answer lies in the word joy.  It has two meanings.  Each meaning can have a great impact on our worldview.  The meaning of joy that Sally and I were using was one of pleasure.  Some other words with this meaning are happiness, bliss, and ecstasy.  This definition is about us and how we feel.  I have to tell you, you don’t always feel this joy in Niger.

The other definition of joy is delight.  With delight, you don’t “delight” something; you take delight “in” something.  The focus of the delight is not you it is the thing you take delight in.  Our expectation of joy had the wrong focus.  Tim Keller is still a good preacher and Jesus was not wrong.  Getting out doesn’t always make us feel happier, getting out gets us closer to Jesus so that we can increase our delight in him.

The people here are not always feeling pleasure and happiness but they sure have a delight in the Lord.  Maybe Jesus was trying to tell us that when we feel unhappy or overwhelmed the best cure is to get out (out of ourselves) and find delight in the Lord by serving wherever he might send you.

But there’s a worldview lesson here too.  If our worldview is a belief that our lives should be filled with times of pleasure and happiness we will experience the highs of those times when we feel joy, but we will also feel those times when we don’t.  However, if our view is a belief that our lives should be lived so that we take delight in the Lord, then no matter where we are emotionally, we can do things to find a joy in the Lord.

We’re working on changing our worldview while we are here.  The change doesn’t come easy.