Joy: The Art of Self-Forgetfulness

Joy is a serious issue. We give up too quickly on experiencing it, especially if it has been a long time since circumstances have been favorable. I think part of the reason why we give up on it is because we think that joy is optional in the Christian life, when it isn’t. I said at the beginning of this series that the fruit of the Spirit isn’t multiple choice. You can’t decide that you are going to be peaceful without having any self-control. You aren’t going to choose love and leave patience on the table. And you cannot take goodness and leave behind joy. 

So is joy just another word for lack of sadness? Well, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times before, joy isn’t just another word for “happiness,” something that changes by circumstances. Jesus wasn’t slap happy all the time, as His weeping before the then-occupied tomb of Lazurus, and the then rebellious house of Jerusalem. Jesus experienced sadness to the point that Isaiah said that He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Yet in all of that, He didn’t fail God’s commands in any way, including this command to rejoice always. 

So what is joy? Joy, as we will see in a moment, is happily self-forgetful worship of the transcendent Christ. And this is to be done in all circumstances, even sad ones. How are we to do that? The quick answer is, “Have a good long look at Jesus and what He has done for you.” My old seminary dean once put it this way when defining joy, “Christian joy is marked by celebration and expectation of God's ultimate victory over the powers of sin and darkness, a victory actualized already in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ…" (Timothy George, 401). Christian joy constantly keeps the cross, resurrection, and consummation in mind. 

Let’s see how I got here. The first step is to see that joy is commanded of you. Did God really say that? Well, yes! In fact, we aren’t just called to rejoice, but we are to rejoice always! The Bible doesn’t say in our passage here in Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice…when it is convenient” or “Rejoice…when it comes to mind,” or “Rejoice…when you’re feeling it.” It is, “Rejoice always, and again I say, rejoice.” It’s not like Paul just got a little overzealous on this point in this letter, as the exact same command is given again in 1 Thess. 5. One preacher put it this way, “Unsaved people do not rejoice in God, pray to God, or give thanks to God. Religious people rejoice sometimes, pray when they feel like it, and give thanks when things are going well. But Christians rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances. This is not the believer's response because we are impervious to life's dangers, toils, and snares. It is our response to life because we are in Christ Jesus" (H.B. Charles, here).  

Now, perhaps, Paul and Pastor Charles are just forgetting about how hard people’s lives can be! It is also no accident that the command to rejoice comes from Jesus as well in Matthew 5:11-12, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad…” Did you catch that? Jesus is commanding you to rejoice and be glad when you are being persecuted, made fun of, and slandered because you are following Jesus. Jesus is saying, “Hey, following me is going to make the world hate you, and when that happens, you should be rejoicing.” Now, why does Jesus get away with saying that? If any of us were to command that for ourselves, we would be called total narcissists at best. Delusional is probably the better word. So why does Jesus get to say it? 

If you can answer that question, then you are well on your way to experiencing joy. So what is the answer to the question? The answer to the question of why can Jesus say we are to rejoice, sing, be glad when people are slinging stones at us to kill us, or slinging words at us to get us canceled because of our stand for Jesus, is because Jesus is the main character of this world’s story. You and I are not the main character. We are not the center of the universe. Jesus is. So when we are contributing to Jesus’ will on earth, yet the earth doesn’t like it, we are still advancing the main character’s agenda. 

We can see this play out on a small scale when we see a mom give birth. I’ve been in the delivery room twice now for this process. I’ve never birthed a child and never will, but as an outsider, I can tell you, with deep conviction, that it is a rather painful process. Prior to children, I could never imagine why people would sign up to do that more than once. But it wasn’t until I held my children in my arms, and watched my wife hold our children in her arms, I understood. At the end of a pregnancy, there is a baby. What makes a mom sign up for that process again is self-forgetfulness. I don’t mean she doesn’t remember the pain. I mean that she isn’t thinking about herself in that moment. She is thinking about her child. Yes, pain is real, but it is in the context of a birth of new life. And in that the mother finds joy. 

Again, I say that this is a small scale. Because even as significant as that child is to that mother, that child isn’t the main character of the universe either. It is one of approximately 385,000 other babies that were born in the world on that day. Advancing through the pregnancy process advances the life of that little one, but living the Christian life advances Jesus’ agenda. So no matter what happens, we can rejoice. 

This requires a great deal of self-forgetfulness, though. But how? How do we forget ourselves when we live inside us? Well, walk with me on this. The starting point to self-forgetfulness and then to joy, is to recognize that you are not enough for yourself and you never will be long term. There is no amount of fun that you could have to satisfy your heart. No amount of money will ever grant you peace. No amount of affirmation will grant you confidence. No change in marital status that will ever grant you wholeness. You have to be convinced of this. Otherwise, you will constantly fall into the trap of seeking out things for yourself and be disappointed eventually over and over again. 

But you can’t just stop at forgetting yourself. Because if that were all that it was, then the Buddhist could have told you that. Buddha will tell you that the reason why you are sad is because you have desires. If you would just get rid of those desires through self-denial and meditation, you will be above feelings of disappointment. Now, besides desiring to get rid of desires, which is apparently the only desirable desire, that only gets you to non-feeling. God wants something more than numbness for you. He wants you to have joy. Joy isn’t found in you. 

Joy is found when you see God. From Earth to the sun is 93 million miles. That’s a good distance, but there is a lot more of the universe that we can see. It turns out that, as near as we can tell, the observable universe is about 93 billion light years across. For reference, light travels nearly 6 trillion miles a year. Now multiply that by 93 billion and you get the size of the universe as near as we can tell. Honesely, that is such a large number, it doesn’t even really compute. And God is bigger than that. He made all that. He didn’t need to make it that big, but He wanted to show us just how big He is and how small we are. The God who made all of that is who we are talking about. That’s the one who commands you to be joyful. 

Now are you able to look at that God and say, “Well, He can’t make a difference to my joy.” Well besides that being ridiculous and sinful to say, let’s go with it for a minute. Maybe the bigness of God didn’t impress you. What about His relationship with you? 

Did you know that God is actually committed to your joy? He sends the Holy Spirit to produce Joy in you. He tells you that He works out all things together for good for those who love Him. That’s true. Do you believe that? Psalm 16:2 says, “I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” and verse 11 says, “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” God isn’t some sort of toxic boss who demands you be happy or He is going to get you. God is inviting you to see where your true joy comes from, and it is Him! He wants to do good things! We cut Jesus off earlier in Matthew 5:12. Remember when He was saying, “rejoice and be glad” under persecution? He gave you the reason! “FOR great is your reward in heaven!” Why can we, must we, be joyful under persecution for Jesus’ sake? 

There is something greater coming. What is that thing? It apparently makes all the suffering here worth it. Paul tells us just that in Romans 8, where he describes all of the horror of life as a “light, momentary affliction” compared to the glory that is coming. It is better than having the power to boss around the spiritual world. When the disciples were able to cast out demons in Luke 10, Jesus said not to rejoice in even that but rejoice that their names were written in heaven. How can heaven stand up to that kind of hype? Because God Himself is there! Not only the One who created all of that, but came down from that exalted throne to live among us, suffer and die to take away our sins! We were so audacious as to disobey a God like that who is above all things and wants our good, and instead of simply getting rid of us so He could delight in billions of galaxies He made who do exactly as He commands, He goes down to take our punishment for us. In order to maintain His perfect justice sin against an eternal God must be eternally punished, but in His creativity, Jesus takes all the punishment on Himself. He becomes sin who knew no sin, who hates all sin, BECAME sin so that He could bear the punishment for sin, so we could go free. And it is freely offered to you. We did everything wrong, He did everything right, and is offering to switch places with you, so you can be considered perfect in God’s eyes and thus have a place in heaven. And not just a place in heaven, a place of God’s joy over you, not because of who you are, but because of who you are in Christ. When He looks at you, He sees His Son Whom He loves eternally. 

Catching a vision of that is finding transcendence. Forgetting yourself isn’t enough. It is looking into the face of God where you find joy, even as you are being persecuted for it. 

Well, what if all that isn’t enough for you? It could be that you haven’t applied all of what I have just said to your situation. You might have been content thus far to have the Bible be true over there but not in your real life. You could have just made God to be a philosophy that works for some people rather than a Real Person who has done real things in your real life.

But it could also be that you just can’t see it yet. It could be that God hasn’t moved in your life. Because there is one last step to joy. Yes, it requires self-forgetfulness, yes it requires a view of transcendence, but it finally requires full dependance on God to grant it to you. You cannot obey the command to be joyful without God’s help any more than you can obey the command to be truthful without God’s help. And just like you sin in other ways, you will sin in not being joyful in all things. You will get wrapped up in yourself and try to worship yourself by doing what you command. That’s not joy. That’s not obedience. Joy is worshiping God despite any and all circumstances fueled by the good news of the gospel. 

But if you have never experienced that, then today I invite you to come to Jesus. Leave yourself behind, there won’t be room for that. Transfer your trust to Christ, and leave behind your sins, including your lack of joy in Christ. Christ invites you to not just serve Him, but enjoy Him. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Glorify God and enjoy Him forever. If you don’t know how to do that, then I would encourage you to keep coming back here. As Sinclair Ferguson points out, keep looking at the means that God gives you, His church, His Word, His listening ear in prayer, and in them you will see Him. And you will find joy. 

So what does this mean on Monday? God is committed to your joy in Him, and the world is committed to distracting you from it by reminding you of yourself. When your body hurts, God is doing something with that. When you are facing another day in a role you hate, remember the gospel and not just that it means that things will be alright in the end, but that you can begin to enjoy that now. Heaven is near and it is sure. Focus on that. 

Kids are actually good at that. Have you ever promised a kid something? They remember. And when you don’t deliver, the disappointment is impressive, because they have been thinking about that all day. They have modified their behavior around that promise. Patience may not be their strongest quality, but those kids can believe. We have to warn them about disappointment when their joy gets to be too much! 

Y’all, we have been promised more. He who promised is faithful. He never breaks a promise. So preach that to yourself, ask for joy, ask for what God commands you to have, and you will find it.