More Than Happy: The Secret to Joy When Life HurtsSample

“It will be a cold day in hell when I become a pastor.”

I spoke those words at 14 years old because a woman began stalking my father, a pastor. She would wait in the parking lot for us to leave, watching from her car. She called our house two or three times a day for a year and a half. We never answered our phone without it going to voicemail first. She wrote letters, made up lies, and did many crazy things.

Her name was Joy.

In case you didn’t read the description of this plan, after many years of wrestling with God, I did become a pastor. However, it took me over a decade to deliver my first sermon on joy. My bitter memories held me hostage for far too long! So, if you’re struggling with joy, then you’re in the right place!

We live in a culture obsessed with happiness. It's people's number one goal. If a marriage stops making us happy, we end it. If this job no longer makes me happy, we quit and find a new one. The church sometimes can react to this happiness-obsession by treating happiness as an enemy, like Jesus came to make you the most miserable person on earth. But the Bible is not anti-happiness. God is not anti-happiness. Our enemy is not happiness. Satan, our true enemy, deceives us by dissatisfying our souls with what can't satisfy.

Happiness isn't bad, but it's very temporal in this world. You can trace the physical manifestation of happiness to a chemical released in your brain via a big dump of dopamine. While happiness like that is temporal, joy is transcendent. When we experience it, it touches something in our hearts, reminding us that we were made for more than this world.

The prophet Habakkuk understood this. He lived through dark days, when the fig tree did not bud and there were no grapes on the vines. He endured a season where the olive crop failed and the fields produced no food. There were no sheep in the pen or cattle in the stalls. Despite all of this pain and suffering, Habbakuk wrote in chapter 3, verse 18 NIV: “yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.” Though there's no bread, no produce, no meat, he still chose to celebrate in the Lord.

God offers us a rich, yet unfinished, joy in this life. When you think about a moment you experienced genuine joy, there was probably a longing for more, maybe a longing for it to last longer. Joy remains unfinished because we are created as eternal beings with desires that can only be met in eternity.

Tomorrow we'll explore how joy and pain aren't mutually exclusive, but can actually coexist in ways that surprise us.