The Joy Project A True Story of Inescapable Happiness
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00:00:12.720 | Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:00:17.280 | We tend to think of our pursuit of joy as a fundamental right, perhaps.
00:00:24.560 | But it is certainly fundamental to our nature.
00:00:28.680 | We are by nature, created nature, not fallen nature, pleasure seekers.
00:00:34.880 | We want to be happy.
00:00:38.280 | And we are also chronic failures when it comes to finding the kind of joy that will last
00:00:44.560 | for more than a fleeting moment.
00:00:47.080 | What if the deepest joy that we seek really can't be found at all?
00:00:54.280 | What if the deepest and most durable happiness we could ever possess is a kind of joy that
00:01:02.080 | breaks into our lives and overcomes all our boredoms and ultimately finds us?
00:01:09.280 | What if the truest and deepest and most lasting joy is actually out of our reach, but somehow
00:01:17.440 | reaches back for us?
00:01:20.680 | Here at Desiring God, we ask serious questions about happiness.
00:01:26.200 | We don't think there is anything more important for a human soul than being found by eternal
00:01:33.040 | joy.
00:01:35.260 | We ask very serious questions about joy, and we seek solid answers in the Bible.
00:01:44.480 | That's the purpose of our new book.
00:01:47.440 | The title is "The Joy Project, A True Story of Inescapable Happiness."
00:01:54.960 | The Joy Project pursues these serious questions about joy through a story, through the unrivaled
00:02:02.800 | narrative of God's plan for our joy.
00:02:06.600 | The story begins and ends with God.
00:02:10.520 | From all eternity, before all time, God was alive with volcanic joy.
00:02:17.680 | Joy is essential to the very nature of God in the fellowship of the infinitely happy
00:02:25.240 | Holy Trinity.
00:02:27.800 | The Father loves the Son and finds Him supremely well-pleasing.
00:02:32.960 | The Son loves the Father and delights in all that He is.
00:02:36.960 | The Holy Spirit streams omnipotently with His joy between the Father and the Son.
00:02:46.360 | So God needs nothing.
00:02:49.300 | He has no deficiencies, and He is free from all evil, therefore, and full of all good.
00:03:00.560 | So what does God's eternal, unbounded, overflowing joy mean for me?
00:03:09.720 | For you?
00:03:12.520 | It means I am not a pawn on the chessboard of a needy God.
00:03:18.320 | Rather, He created me not because He needs me to make up for some deficit that He has,
00:03:26.720 | but because He delights for His creatures to share the joy that He has in Himself.
00:03:35.200 | We don't stumble onto this joy.
00:03:38.980 | It pursues us.
00:03:41.360 | It finds us.
00:03:43.860 | It is the amazing outcome of God's astonishing plan to pull us into His own joy forever.
00:03:54.000 | The Joy Project takes us into the most profound story in the universe, retold in a short book
00:04:00.840 | by Tony Reinke, one of our writers at Desiring God, a very thoughtful and skilled writer,
00:04:07.360 | a writer you can trust and enjoy.
00:04:11.880 | You can download the whole book free of charge in three digital formats.
00:04:16.400 | Go to DesiringGod.org/TheJoyProject.
00:04:20.840 | I hope you'll read it.
00:04:22.080 | I hope you will rejoice in it.
00:04:24.760 | The Joy Project, a true story of inescapable happiness.
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