Battle for Joy
I’ve been thinking about “joy” lately. It began a while back with these words, quoted by John Eldredge in Walking With God: “The battle in your life is against your joy.” When I look at my life and those around me, all too often joy seems to be in short supply. Everything from daily trials to major world events like the recent financial crisis seem to overwhelm any sense of joy we might muster.
But what is joy? One source defines joy as “the emotion evoked by well-being… good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires.” If this is right, then joy is the natural condition of those whose lives are “hidden with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3) We, the formerly lost and broken, have been redeemed in Christ and adopted into God’s family as sons and daughters – if that’s not good fortune, I don’t know what is! And if the true desire of every heart is to know and have relationship with God… check!
Just before His betrayal to the Jewish leaders, Jesus told His disciples to have true joy. “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love. When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!” (John 15:9-11, NLT, emphasis mine) The joy given to Christ-followers comes from the very heart of God. It is our emotional response to God’s love.
In the spiritual war that we’re fighting, our enemy knows that he can’t defeat the infinitely superior power God gives His soldiers. So he goes after our joy. Without it, we become weary, unmotivated soldiers lacking the will to fight.
To kill our joy, the enemy uses his oldest and most effective ploy: getting us to doubt God’s heart and intent. This is, after all, how he killed mankind’s original joy in Eden. The path to Adam and Eve’s sin began with accepting that God might withhold something “good” (the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil) from them.
A line in another book, The Shack by William Young, helped me see the relationship between my understanding of God’s love and my joy: “Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions.” A paradigm is what one believes to be true about reality. I believe that the sovereign and wise God, creator and master of the universe, is personally interested in my heart and deeply loves and cares for me. If this is the “lens” through which I see, or perceive, everything around and in my life then I am full of joy. But if the enemy can blur or obstruct my view, changing my perception, then my joy becomes elusive or disappears altogether.
The joy that God gives his children is something that no circumstance, possession, or person can give or take away – unless we let it. Zealous, unshakeable, overflowing joy is rooted in knowing and trusting God’s heart. Whatever the war brings today or tomorrow, the truth is that not only is the joy of the Lord our strength – it’s also one of our best weapons.
