Is Joy a Choice or a Feeling?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.000 | Is joy a choice or is joy just a feeling that comes and goes?

00:00:11.000 | That's a great question, one our culture asks all the time.

00:00:15.000 | And if our joy is a choice, whose choice is it ultimately?

00:00:20.000 | That actually was the question I attempted to answer in my book,

00:00:23.000 | The Joy Project. I know a number of you have read that book.

00:00:26.000 | I think that's a better way to frame the essentials of Calvinism,

00:00:31.000 | the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism.

00:00:33.000 | God's sovereign joy in pursuit of us.

00:00:38.000 | But here's the specific question on the table today as it comes to us

00:00:42.000 | from Susan in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

00:00:44.000 | Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast.

00:00:46.000 | My question is pretty straightforward.

00:00:48.000 | Can you tell me if joy in God is a choice that we make

00:00:52.000 | or is our joy in God a feeling that comes to us after we do

00:00:56.000 | a certain something else first that will then lead to joy?

00:01:02.000 | Here's an amazing fact to start off with.

00:01:06.000 | If you consider all the forms of the word choose or choice or decide or decision,

00:01:16.000 | the New Testament never applies those words to the act of choosing God

00:01:23.000 | or choosing Christ or choosing Christianity.

00:01:27.000 | I think that would come as a shock to a lot of people.

00:01:30.000 | One almost exception is Mary choosing to sit at Jesus' feet

00:01:36.000 | while Martha did the housework, but she's already a follower.

00:01:41.000 | In fact, the one place where choosing Jesus is mentioned, it's denied.

00:01:49.000 | In John 15, 16, Jesus said, "You did not choose me. I chose you."

00:01:55.000 | In other words, when the disciples chose to follow Jesus,

00:02:01.000 | that wasn't ultimately their choice.

00:02:04.000 | It was God's choice. He was decisive in that event.

00:02:08.000 | God's choosing us is mentioned over and over and over in the New Testament,

00:02:13.000 | but our choosing him is not mentioned, not with the words choose or decide.

00:02:20.000 | Now, if you go to the Old Testament, there's that famous statement of Joshua

00:02:27.000 | in chapter 24, verse 15, "Choose you this day whom you will serve,

00:02:34.000 | whether the gods of your fathers that they served in the region beyond the river

00:02:39.000 | or the gods of the Amorites. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

00:02:47.000 | So Joshua is happy to call for a choice to serve God or not.

00:02:55.000 | But then a few verses later, he says this. This is verses 22, 23 of chapter 24.

00:03:04.000 | "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve him.

00:03:11.000 | Then put away the foreign gods that are among you

00:03:16.000 | and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel."

00:03:22.000 | Now, why did Joshua add, "Incline your heart"?

00:03:28.000 | He said it because there is such a thing as choosing to serve God

00:03:36.000 | while the heart is far from God.

00:03:39.000 | Jesus said that. He said it in Matthew 15, 8.

00:03:44.000 | "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."

00:03:51.000 | So they are choosing to go to church on Sunday morning.

00:03:57.000 | They choose to sing. They choose to pray.

00:04:00.000 | They choose to go to the synagogue. They choose to give tithes.

00:04:04.000 | And on the outside, they look like they've chosen God.

00:04:09.000 | They have not chosen God.

00:04:11.000 | They have chosen religion to hide the fact that their heart wants something else besides God.

00:04:20.000 | That's why Joshua said, "It's not enough.

00:04:23.000 | This is not enough to choose to serve God.

00:04:26.000 | Your heart must incline to the Lord.

00:04:31.000 | The Lord must be your treasure.

00:04:33.000 | Not the praise of man, not health, not wealth, not prosperity."

00:04:38.000 | Now, the way all of this relates to Susan's question

00:04:44.000 | is that this inclination of the heart that Joshua and Jesus refer to

00:04:52.000 | is deeper than a choice.

00:04:55.000 | It's a kind of joy in God.

00:04:59.000 | So Joshua was saying what Psalm 100 says.

00:05:05.000 | If you're choosing to serve God, then let that choice be acceptable to God.

00:05:14.000 | Let it be honoring to God by, Psalm 100 verse 2,

00:05:19.000 | "Serving the Lord with gladness."

00:05:21.000 | That's a command. Serve the Lord with gladness.

00:05:24.000 | That is, have your heart inclined to God.

00:05:28.000 | Not just choose to serve Him.

00:05:30.000 | Serve Him with gladness.

00:05:33.000 | For a choice to be pleasing to God and honoring to God,

00:05:38.000 | it must be rooted in the heart's taste for God.

00:05:43.000 | Gladness in God.

00:05:46.000 | In other words, a choice for God, a preference for God that honors God

00:05:54.000 | must be rooted in the heart's experience of God as preferable.

00:06:00.000 | What makes a choice to serve God real is that the choice expresses

00:06:08.000 | the fact that the heart has found God to be preferable, desirable, valuable.

00:06:16.000 | When Jesus said that people had chosen to honor God with their lips

00:06:21.000 | but not with their hearts because their hearts were far from Him,

00:06:26.000 | He meant their hearts did not taste God as desirable.

00:06:32.000 | They didn't taste God as valuable.

00:06:35.000 | They didn't taste God as preferable.

00:06:37.000 | Their taste was for the praise of man, not God.

00:06:42.000 | So my answer for Susan is, no, joy is not a choice.

00:06:49.000 | It is deeper.

00:06:51.000 | It is the gift of an experience of God as desirable, preferable, valuable.

00:06:59.000 | It's not a mere choice.

00:07:01.000 | It is the God-given spontaneous response to seeing God as desirable,

00:07:09.000 | tasting Him as good, as preferable to other satisfactions.

00:07:15.000 | That's what it means in 1 Peter 2, verse 2, when it says,

00:07:20.000 | "Desire the pure spiritual milk if you have tasted that the Lord is good."

00:07:29.000 | Tasting is not a choice.

00:07:32.000 | If you put a lemon in your mouth,

00:07:36.000 | no amount of choosing can make it taste like sugar.

00:07:41.000 | It's not a choice.

00:07:42.000 | It's the way your taste buds are designed,

00:07:45.000 | and there are taste buds on the soul that are either ruined or alive,

00:07:51.000 | which brings us then to the other part of Susan's question

00:07:55.000 | and how our spiritual taste buds might be changed.

00:08:00.000 | And she asks, "Is joy in God a feeling that comes after we do something else

00:08:10.000 | that leads to joy in God?"

00:08:14.000 | Now, the very fact that we're talking about joy in God,

00:08:20.000 | not just joy generically, but joy in God, that God is our joy,

00:08:24.000 | implies that we need to have some knowledge of God

00:08:30.000 | in order to have authentic joy in God.

00:08:33.000 | That means that any steps we can take to put ourselves in the way

00:08:39.000 | of true knowledge of God may prove to be the very action

00:08:43.000 | that leads to joy in God.

00:08:45.000 | So in that sense, yes, yes, Susan, joy in God is a feeling that comes

00:08:52.000 | after we do something else that leads to joy in God,

00:08:57.000 | namely listen to the truth about God.

00:09:03.000 | If joy in God is the heart's experience of preferring God,

00:09:10.000 | desiring God, treasuring God, then it's not surprising

00:09:15.000 | that the main thing we can do in order to experience this

00:09:21.000 | is look intently at God's greatness, God's beauty, God's worth in his word.

00:09:30.000 | Faith, Paul says, and I would say, "And the joy of faith,"

00:09:35.000 | to take that phrase from Philippians 1, "Faith and the joy of faith

00:09:41.000 | comes by hearing and hearing or reading by the word of God."

00:09:48.000 | And there is another action, I'll just mention one more,

00:09:52.000 | that we can do and should do in the pursuit of joy in God.

00:09:57.000 | We should pray, pray two prayers with the psalmists.

00:10:02.000 | They prayed like this because they had the same experience

00:10:06.000 | of sometimes feeling what they ought to feel and sometimes not feeling

00:10:10.000 | what they ought to feel in regard to the joy we should have in God.

00:10:15.000 | Psalm 119, verse 18, "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things

00:10:22.000 | out of your word." And Psalm 90, verse 14,

00:10:27.000 | "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, O God."

00:10:32.000 | So we should pray to have eyes to see and hearts to feel.

00:10:39.000 | So in summary, Susan, joy in God is not a choice.

00:10:45.000 | It is a God-given, spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth,

00:10:51.000 | greatness of God. But there are choices that we can make

00:10:57.000 | that may lead to that experience because the Bible says,

00:11:01.000 | "Look, look and pray." Look at the Lord in His word

00:11:08.000 | and pray for eyes to see and a heart to feel.

00:11:14.000 | Amen. Satisfaction in God, that is a God-given,

00:11:19.000 | spontaneous experience. It's as if there is a sovereign joy

00:11:24.000 | pursuing us, seeking us out, choosing us, giving us new desires

00:11:29.000 | for the glory that we behold. Beautiful. Thank you, Pastor John.

00:11:33.000 | That, again, is the theme I pick up in my book, The Joy Project,

00:11:37.000 | if you want more on this. Sovereign joy in pursuit of us.

00:11:41.000 | A better way, I think, of reframing the five points of Calvinism.

00:11:45.000 | And I mention my book here because it's a whole book inspired by one paragraph

00:11:49.000 | from Pastor John's 1998 biography of Augustine.

00:11:53.000 | One paragraph from that incredible bio message became my entire book,

00:11:58.000 | The Joy Project. You can download the entire thing right now

00:12:01.000 | at DesiringGod.org. Speaking of joy, the Bible, all over the place,

00:12:06.000 | commands us to rejoice, commands us to rejoice.

00:12:11.000 | So if I'm not joyful, I'm sinning, right?

00:12:16.000 | Hmm. That's the question next. I'm Tony Reinke. See you on Thursday.

00:12:21.000 | (end)

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Is Joy a Choice or a Feeling?

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