John 15:11 (NLT)
“I
have told you these things so that you will be filled with My joy. Yes, your
joy will overflow!”
Have you ever stopped to think and reflect
on the fact of this verse…….that the Lord Jesus Christ desired that His
disciples and all His followers be filled with joy; actually filled with HIS
joy? The joy He is talking about is
“chara” (“Car-rah”) that literally means cheerfulness and calm delight. As you read these words, can you honestly say
that you are filled with cheerfulness and calm delight? Yet that is what Jesus wants you to be and to
overflow with cheerfulness and calm delight.
I know that when I reflect on this I confess that this is very difficult
for me. To have the kind of joy that
Jesus is referring to here probably is very difficult for the great majority of
Christians to experience and practice.
Yet, why is this so?
The famous British theologian, C.S. Lewis,
described joy and happiness this way: “A
car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything
else. Now God designed the human machine
to run on Himself. He Himself is the
fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed
to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to
make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace
apart from Himself because it is not there.” (Mere Christianity, Macmillan,1952,
p. 50).
What does John 15:11 and Lewis’ analogy
teach you (and definitely teaches me as I write this)? Joy—cheerfulness, calm delight—comes from God
through Christ. Joy is one of the 9
attributes or fruits of the Holy Spirit.
If you are not feeling joy, you are at that moment not being filled with
the Holy Spirit. You are allowing the
worries and stresses and fears of this life and world to steal away the joy
that is quenched within you. Remember
the promise of Philippians 1:6—there is certainty that God is in control of
what’s going on in your life, now and forever.
Prior to verse 11 of John 15, Jesus gives all kinds of promises and
reassurances (read John 13, 14, and 15) and that’s why He said in verse 11 that
His joy may be in you because of all these things that He had just spoken about
(things like His love, certainty of eternal life, answered prayer, peace, and
security).
The letters of the word “joy” give the
secret of how to experience true joy: Jesus—Others—Yourself. These are the priorities of the Christian
life. The person who does not have joy
in his/her life has YOJ with the Y being greatly dominant. There is no source of true joy when you focus
on yourself or even focusing on others without any focus on Jesus. The great challenge for all of us is to transform
from a self-focused life to a Jesus/God-focused life. That comes only through faith and trust in
what the Lord teaches through His Word.
“Joy is not the absence of
trouble, but the presence of Christ” -- W. Vander Haven
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