How Do We Get Joy?
As Christians, we are called to defend the truth revealed to us by God in His Word, and there are many men and women throughout history that God has strengthened to do so. All the truth in the world is on our side because it is our God who defines truth. We are called to defend a faith that is reasonable, but just as importantly, we are called to defend a faith that is delightful, a faith that is wonderful, a faith that is full of joy inexpressible (1 Peter 1:8).
God created us to be completely satisfied in Him, with all our desires met, all our happiness fulfilled, all our pleasures satiated in Him. The desire to be happy has been planted in our hearts, not as something that is broken, but as something that makes us whole. It is a reflection of God’s very image – that we should rejoice in the greatest, most wonderful, most glorious thing in all the universe: Himself.
As Augustine said: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and the heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.”
Many of us don’t realize that the restlessness we feel is not meant to be stifled, but satisfied in the only One who can do so. The rest we have in God changes everything. It changes our minds, our affections, our dreams, our desires. It changes the way we think, the way we act, and the way we feel.
One of the greatest and most widely-read apologists who ever lived, C.S. Lewis, loved to use, of all things, Joy as an argument for the reasonableness of our faith. He called it: the argument by desire.
Joy in a Biscuit Tin
It all began when Lewis was a child and his older brother, Warnie, gathered up a small collection of moss, grass, leaves and flowers and arranged a garden in a biscuit tin. Upon seeing it, Lewis says he was “transported…to an Eden of moist and fertile greenness…as long as I live, my imagination of paradise, will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.”
He later described times when an intense desire would suddenly overwhelm him. It was as if he wanted something grand and beautiful – a nameless something, just beyond his reach.
He called this feeling “Joy (with a capital J)”, saying, “Anyone who has experienced it will want it again”. He described it later as: “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
While reading an old Norse poem: “there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself…the unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one….and at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.”
So he went on a journey. To find Joy.
The Idol of Joy
Lewis’ first mistake was believing he desired just Joy in itself. He had felt it while reading a Norse poem, so in an effort to “have it again”, Lewis simply kept reading, engrossing himself for years in the tales of Siegfried, and wandering “the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes”.
But as time went on, Lewis found this feeling of Joy – this beautiful, painful sentiment which had first arrested him in the cold, remote regions of the Northern mountains – was slowly diminishing. Every step that he believed should be drawing him nearer to it, he saw that it was only the more quickly fading away.
The Counterfeit of Joy
That’s when he realized he had it all wrong. He was looking for Joy in all the wrong places.
“If it (Joy) comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside, he at once thinks ‘if only I were there’; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks ‘if only I could go back to those days’. If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a ‘romantic’ tale or poem ‘of perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn,’ he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions, he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If it falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.
But every one of these impressions is wrong.”
The best things often make the best counterfeits. The freedom found in distant hills, the sentiments of romance, the sweetness of literature, the spiritualism of magic and occult, and the genius inspired from intellectual pursuits, seem deep and fulfilling to a dry soul and a thirsty heart. It is only when we try to drink and find our thirst unabated, that we understand it was only a mirage in the desert which distracted us from the true oasis.
Often times, we mistake Joy for being in those things when it is actually shining through them. The low, evil, petty things are seldom the most dangerous counterfeits. Those addicted to alcohol, drugs, or pornography seldom mistake those things for true Joy. They generally realize they are miserable. But when we are enslaved to a good thing – something that should be desired – we don’t always realize the danger of making that our supreme desire.
As Lewis realized, when something is made a god, it becomes a demon. A beautiful thing, glorified as something it is not, becomes terrible. That is why we lose sight of Joy the moment we make it our ultimate goal. Joy can’t be our god. But when God is our God, we get Joy.
The Origin of Joy
So the problem isn’t that our desire for Joy is too strong, but that it isn’t strong enough. It’s pointing to something (Someone!) greater and bigger and grander than anything else in this world.
Lewis argued that all our natural desires, at their source, are meant to be fulfilled. We get thirsty? Well, there’s such a thing as water. We want Joy and can’t get it here? Well, that must mean it comes from somewhere else.
Summed up simply, “If I find in myself a desire which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only reasonable conclusion is that I was made for another world.”
The atheist must come up with a natural explanation of Joy, which leads him to the most unnatural conclusion possible: a Joy apart from God. He must insist that because humans are the highest evolved creatures, our best feelings come from our lower primal appetites. The height of our pleasures and desires are just copies of our animal beginnings. But the opposite is actually true! Our desires do not come from below, but from above, as we reflect the image of God.
The Pursuit of Joy
And that is why Joy points to Christ.
Because it is only when we understand that we are empty, broken, suffering, hungering, thirsting, unfulfilled creatures striving to save ourselves in other broken vessels (Jeremiah 2:12-13), do we find the Perfect Vessel that offers salvation: A Person who emptied himself as we are empty (Philippians 2:7), who was broken as we are broken, who suffered and hungered and thirsted as we suffer and hunger and thirst, who through His strivings, met the law of which we have fallen short, and who through His perfect life, death, and resurrection, has fulfilled the requirements which we have broken.
Joy points to Christ because Christ is its origin.
As Lewis observed, “We are far too easily pleased.”
The Completion of our Joy
A desire to be happy doesn’t make sense in a world of moral and volitional chaos. It also doesn’t make sense that we would naturally evolve something that can’t be satisfied in the natural realm. But as Christians, we know that Joy isn’t just in our future, it’s in our past. It’s not only a prophetic feeling of what awaits us, it’s a memory. We are remembering something that we lost in the fall. We are getting an echo of our original glory, tasting again that thing we were made for. And looking forward to when we will have it again.
Lewis said:
“There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven, but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else…tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if…there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, ‘here, at last, is the thing I was made for.’”
In a soul in which is found the image of God and destined for eternity, we find a reflection of our greatest desire. And it is through that reflection, that we are pointed to Christ.
In Him, is the object attained, the desire satisfied, and the Joy forever fulfilled.