So I ask myself, "Why not? Why aren't we as joyful as Jesus planned for us to be?" Well, first, "joy" is not "happiness." Happiness is an emotional response to our perception of how pleasant our circumstances are. Joy is not quite that. The secular site, Differencebetween.net, says that happiness is "an emotion experienced when in a state of well-being" but joy "comes from the inner self." It is connected to "the source of life within you." So happiness is dependent on circumstances and joy is dependent on God. But in thinking through this, I think I might have stumbled on something. Tell me what you think.
Three times Jesus said He came that our joy may be made full (John 15:11; 16:24; 17:13). One of them was a little more explicit.
"But now I come to You; and these things I speak in the world so that they may have My joy made full in themselves. (John 17:13)The "full joy" He's referencing isn't ours so much as it is His. The "full joy" He talks about is "My joy made full in themselves." Not merely human joy, then. And what was it that was Jesus's joy? Well, He expressed it in His High Priestly Prayer in the chapter that this verse comes from. His primary concern for His whole life was "Glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You." (John 17:1) His primary point was God's glory.
Could it be, then, that the full joy He had in mind for us was His joy and that His joy was full when He was pursuing God's glory? Could it be that our greatest joy -- full joy -- can be experienced at those times we are pursuing God's glory? Could it be that our joy is made full the closer we get to God's glory? If that's true, and if everything we do is to be to the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31), it would stand to reason that the gap in "full joy" is the same as the gap in our pursuit of God's glory. And if that's true, we might have a direction to go, right?
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