Psalm 16:11

Psalm 16:11

B.

“You make known to me the paths of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

Joy is a mysterious and elusive thing.  I cannot say that I be able to define accurately.  One thing I can say with authority is that joy has much more to do with harmony and satisfaction than with pleasure.  Though satisfaction implies pleasure, pleasure does not produce satisfaction.  We spend our lives seeking to prosper, and when circumstances work out in our favor, or when we get what we desire, we experience happiness, but happiness is only the child of joy.  It is fleeting, like a spike in our adrenaline, which, after it has overwhelmed us with excitement, slowly descends to normal and safer levels of operation.  Similarly, the periods in our lives when there is general harmony but not an acute thrill never produce satisfaction, but limbo, and at long intervals, we struggle with losing our identity in the rushing wave of time or other nameless anxieties.  To be satisfied with whom we are and what we have is to no more allow the desire for more to rule us.  When we do this, we admit, in a certain sense, that what we have and who we have become, is ‘all there is’.  From a worldly standpoint, this seems more like defeat then contentment, and if we acquiesce to it, we have nothing left to expect then the slow advance of death.  This kind of contentment produces pain and not joy.  To be content is to want no more of life then what live gives you.  The last thing life gives us is death.  Therefore, to be content is like suffering a kind of death before death happens, and satisfaction is only available to those who are willing to do this.  If there is no life after life, however, then the last thing life gives us—death—is not a gift but an insult, rendering everything in which we were satisfied…unsatisfactory.  So, as I do not understand joy with the authority of an aged and mature believer, by knowing Christ, I do have the ability to apprehend the joy He has produced in me so far.  I am sure I will write about joy at many times and in many ways, but for the time being, this is my simple description of one of the greatest promises—life to the full:

The marks of Christianity are the marks of one who suffers.  In all the religions of the world and their false candy-coated messages, they are all claiming one thing: “We can give you what you need to enjoy life.”  They agree that something is missing with respect to the coherence of life to offer the good that we seek, but what they offer is a loose patch to cover they pain so that people may enjoy this life.  What Christ offers us is not a joy that attends itself to this life, though we do begin to strands of it here in our lives on fallen earth.  What Christ provides is what we need to endure the pain of this life, so that we may last this one and partake in the real goodness that consists of the next life.  The joy we experience in this life is much more associated with expectation and not fulfillment—like a child waiting for Christmas morning. When we find that true joy and goodness have not been reserved for this life, but for the next, our life becomes expendable.  Expendable, in this sense, does not mean wasteful or worthless.  It means our present lives only receive value as we use them to serve the value inherent in the next life.  We are able to give our lives freely to the command of God to use our lives to reach and serve others in regard to the most precious truth—our most precious Savior—and when we do this, God certainly ‘expends’ our lives.  He uses us, but not in a way that preserves this life, but causes the outer man to waste away as the inner man—the one that endures to the next life—is built day by day.  On the outside it looks like we are living lives of poverty and sorrow, when it is actually for this very reason—suffering—that joy grows nearer to our hearts.  God confounds men and their temporal value by creating what they truly desire in those who acquire it by means of what all other men seek to avoid—suffering.  We must understand, though, that suffering is not just beatings, revilement, or imprisonment.  Sometimes it merely means parting with a valued object when we give it to someone else to enjoy or abstaining from an cherished activity when we find it drawing us away from Christ.  Suffering, whether great or small, is merely the process of being torn from the passing world that our bodies crave, and so, we call this ‘dying to self’. 

Pain is the one thing in this life we cannot avoid.  Death is the curse, and all men are cursed.  So, in my opinion, men who live lives trying to establish and preserve this life are the ones who truly suffer, since they know that no matter how much they build or how fiercely they defend their own lives, they cannot protect from death.  Reconciling the inevitability of death as harmonious with the natural order of life is to devalue life in one’s heart and to become blind to even the most obvious truth—that there is lasting value that produces enduring joy.  When I say that satisfaction and contentment comes only with the death of the desire for more, I am describing the very nature of what the bible calls crucifying the old man.   Joy is produced in Christians by a certain kind of death that is experienced before death actually happens.  When we give up our temporal desires for God’s eternal desire, we become free to sacrifice our lives for Him who saves. When we do so, we become closer with the One whom we desire, and in His presence is fullness of joy.