Enjoying God: Part 2 (6)
Also that day they offered great sacrifices, and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women and the children also rejoiced, so that the joy of Jerusalem was heard afar off. Nehemiah 12.43
“But none of these things move me; nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.” Acts 20.24
More than merely contagious
You have perhaps heard the saying, “Joy is contagious.” Think about it. When you are around people who are filled with joy, whose faces radiate joy, and who tell or sing of joy with their voices, does not that joy affect you as well? When you listen to an exuberant Christian singing group, does not their joyful sound begin to resonate in you, and their joy transfer to you? When someone reports with joy a word of good news—a new baby safely delivered, say, or a friend healed from some sickness or injury—do you not enter that joy as well?
Joy is like a sweet fragrance. A whiff of it, and people start looking around, seeking its source. We ae called to be a fragrance of Jesus to the world, and that fragrance includes joy as one of its most significant scents (Gal. 2.22, 23). Not everyone will be pleased to be around us when we are joyful—when the fragrance of Christ is emanating from us. But those who know the Lord, or who are open to Him, when they are in the presence of one filled with holy joy, will certainly lend their souls to spreading that fragrance as far as they can reach.
For it is the case that joy is not only contagious, it is boosting. When God makes us joyful with great joy, as he did the people of Jerusalem in the days of Nehemiah, we boost one another up to greater heights of joy, joy that can be heard “afar off.”
When God brings us into His joy, we are boosted above all negative affections—fear, anger, resentment, distrust, and the like. Joy is a booster to our soul, lifting us, as joy persists and grows, into a greater experience of the Presence of the Lord of joy.
Think “booster”
A booster, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, provides help or encouragement “to increase or improve.” It is a “source of help or encouragement leading to increase or improvement.” I think it’s safe to say that joy is like that. Joy does that. Joy is a booster for our soul, and those who bring us into the joy of the Lord boost us out of our temporal condition into the eternal Presence of the Father of all joy.
Joy is a booster like the first stage of a mighty rocket. The booster stage of a rocket has one job: Get this machine beyond the pull of earth’s gravity. So also joy, when God grants it to us, provides a kind of escape velocity from the pull of sin. When we are rejoicing in the Lord the last thing we want to do is sin. Joy is thus a crucial ingredient in the transformation of our soul—heart, mind, conscience. And, as joy does its transforming work in us, it can become an agent of grace to others as well.
Or joy is like a rising tide. The more a tide moves up the beach, the more it lifts everything around it. When we are rejoicing in the Lord—truly rejoicing in Him—we rise like the tide, moving up the beach of eternality to hug the Shore which is our God. Some tides are so strong and lively that people can surf on them as they race up rivers, boosting surfers filled with the thrill of the power beneath them. And as joy increases in this way, all other thoughts and affections are lifted with it, drawn up toward the Lord so that He can transform them all.
The joy with which God makes us rejoice with great joy can boost us to new heights of grace and transformation, so that the joy at work through us can be a source of growth and improvement in Christ for people to whom the Lord sends us each day.
Racing in joy
We probably all remember the classic testimony of Eric Liddell from the film, Chariots of Fire: “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure!” He wasn’t the first to experience the joy of the Lord in racing. Paul declared that his only desire was to finish his race with joy—the work God had appointed to him and in the performing of which Paul persistently knew joy.
The joy Paul knew boosted him to greater heights of joy and endeavor for the Lord. Consider Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail (Acts 16). Beaten, humiliated, and locked in the stocks, yet, like Habbakuk, Paul knew the joy of the Lord. He knew it so truly that he and Silas began to sing. The joy expressed in that singing was contagious to the Philippian jailer and his household, thus extending Paul’s ministry in an unlikely venue to an unlikely man.
Read and know the joy of Paul in an epistle like Philippians, written while he was in custody in Rome. Paul was so filled with joy that he was fairly reaching up to be drawn through the veil into the Presence of the Lord. He spread his contagious joy throughout that epistle, and we feel it and are drawn into and boosted upward as we read.
Joy is an important and buoying aspect of our spiritual lives. Seek the joy of the Lord. Bask in it. Lift up your hands to receive more of it. Let it lift you nearly through the veil into the eternal Presence of the Lord. Then rejoice as it works its transforming power in your life and boosts the people you serve in the Name of Jesus.
Search the Scriptures
1. Meditate on Nehemiah 12.43. Would you say that the “great joy” God had granted them was having a boosting effect? Explain.2. According to the Psalms, singing is an excellent vehicle for expressing joy and thus being boosted in it. Have you ever experienced this while singing in church? What was it like?
3. Both Paul and Eric Liddell found joy in the work God had given them to do. How would you counsel a new believer to find joy in their work?
Next steps—Transformation: Whom will you “infect” wth the joy of the Lord today? How should you prepare for this?
T. M. Moore
If you have found this meditation helpful, take a moment and give thanks to God. Then share what you learned with a friend. This is how the grace of God spreads (2 Cor. 4.15).
How should joy affect our lives as Christians? Our booklet, Joy to Your World!, can show you how both to know more of the Lord’s joy and to invite others into it as well. Order your copy by clicking here.
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Except as indicated, all Scriptures are taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
