Is joy a choice or is joy just a feeling that comes and goes? That's a great question, one our culture asks all the time. And if our joy is a choice, whose choice is it ultimately? That actually was the question I attempted to answer in my book, The Joy Project.

I know a number of you have read that book. I think that's a better way to frame the essentials of Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, the five points of Calvinism. God's sovereign joy in pursuit of us. But here's the specific question on the table today as it comes to us from Susan in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast. My question is pretty straightforward. Can you tell me if joy in God is a choice that we make or is our joy in God a feeling that comes to us after we do a certain something else first that will then lead to joy?

Here's an amazing fact to start off with. If you consider all the forms of the word choose or choice or decide or decision, the New Testament never applies those words to the act of choosing God or choosing Christ or choosing Christianity. I think that would come as a shock to a lot of people.

One almost exception is Mary choosing to sit at Jesus' feet while Martha did the housework, but she's already a follower. In fact, the one place where choosing Jesus is mentioned, it's denied. In John 15, 16, Jesus said, "You did not choose me. I chose you." In other words, when the disciples chose to follow Jesus, that wasn't ultimately their choice.

It was God's choice. He was decisive in that event. God's choosing us is mentioned over and over and over in the New Testament, but our choosing him is not mentioned, not with the words choose or decide. Now, if you go to the Old Testament, there's that famous statement of Joshua in chapter 24, verse 15, "Choose you this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of your fathers that they served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites.

But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." So Joshua is happy to call for a choice to serve God or not. But then a few verses later, he says this. This is verses 22, 23 of chapter 24. "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the Lord to serve him.

Then put away the foreign gods that are among you and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel." Now, why did Joshua add, "Incline your heart"? He said it because there is such a thing as choosing to serve God while the heart is far from God. Jesus said that.

He said it in Matthew 15, 8. "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." So they are choosing to go to church on Sunday morning. They choose to sing. They choose to pray. They choose to go to the synagogue. They choose to give tithes.

And on the outside, they look like they've chosen God. They have not chosen God. They have chosen religion to hide the fact that their heart wants something else besides God. That's why Joshua said, "It's not enough. This is not enough to choose to serve God. Your heart must incline to the Lord.

The Lord must be your treasure. Not the praise of man, not health, not wealth, not prosperity." Now, the way all of this relates to Susan's question is that this inclination of the heart that Joshua and Jesus refer to is deeper than a choice. It's a kind of joy in God.

So Joshua was saying what Psalm 100 says. If you're choosing to serve God, then let that choice be acceptable to God. Let it be honoring to God by, Psalm 100 verse 2, "Serving the Lord with gladness." That's a command. Serve the Lord with gladness. That is, have your heart inclined to God.

Not just choose to serve Him. Serve Him with gladness. For a choice to be pleasing to God and honoring to God, it must be rooted in the heart's taste for God. Gladness in God. In other words, a choice for God, a preference for God that honors God must be rooted in the heart's experience of God as preferable.

What makes a choice to serve God real is that the choice expresses the fact that the heart has found God to be preferable, desirable, valuable. When Jesus said that people had chosen to honor God with their lips but not with their hearts because their hearts were far from Him, He meant their hearts did not taste God as desirable.

They didn't taste God as valuable. They didn't taste God as preferable. Their taste was for the praise of man, not God. So my answer for Susan is, no, joy is not a choice. It is deeper. It is the gift of an experience of God as desirable, preferable, valuable. It's not a mere choice.

It is the God-given spontaneous response to seeing God as desirable, tasting Him as good, as preferable to other satisfactions. That's what it means in 1 Peter 2, verse 2, when it says, "Desire the pure spiritual milk if you have tasted that the Lord is good." Tasting is not a choice.

If you put a lemon in your mouth, no amount of choosing can make it taste like sugar. It's not a choice. It's the way your taste buds are designed, and there are taste buds on the soul that are either ruined or alive, which brings us then to the other part of Susan's question and how our spiritual taste buds might be changed.

And she asks, "Is joy in God a feeling that comes after we do something else that leads to joy in God?" Now, the very fact that we're talking about joy in God, not just joy generically, but joy in God, that God is our joy, implies that we need to have some knowledge of God in order to have authentic joy in God.

That means that any steps we can take to put ourselves in the way of true knowledge of God may prove to be the very action that leads to joy in God. So in that sense, yes, yes, Susan, joy in God is a feeling that comes after we do something else that leads to joy in God, namely listen to the truth about God.

If joy in God is the heart's experience of preferring God, desiring God, treasuring God, then it's not surprising that the main thing we can do in order to experience this is look intently at God's greatness, God's beauty, God's worth in his word. Faith, Paul says, and I would say, "And the joy of faith," to take that phrase from Philippians 1, "Faith and the joy of faith comes by hearing and hearing or reading by the word of God." And there is another action, I'll just mention one more, that we can do and should do in the pursuit of joy in God.

We should pray, pray two prayers with the psalmists. They prayed like this because they had the same experience of sometimes feeling what they ought to feel and sometimes not feeling what they ought to feel in regard to the joy we should have in God. Psalm 119, verse 18, "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things out of your word." And Psalm 90, verse 14, "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, O God." So we should pray to have eyes to see and hearts to feel.

So in summary, Susan, joy in God is not a choice. It is a God-given, spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth, greatness of God. But there are choices that we can make that may lead to that experience because the Bible says, "Look, look and pray." Look at the Lord in His word and pray for eyes to see and a heart to feel.

Amen. Satisfaction in God, that is a God-given, spontaneous experience. It's as if there is a sovereign joy pursuing us, seeking us out, choosing us, giving us new desires for the glory that we behold. Beautiful. Thank you, Pastor John. That, again, is the theme I pick up in my book, The Joy Project, if you want more on this.

Sovereign joy in pursuit of us. A better way, I think, of reframing the five points of Calvinism. And I mention my book here because it's a whole book inspired by one paragraph from Pastor John's 1998 biography of Augustine. One paragraph from that incredible bio message became my entire book, The Joy Project.

You can download the entire thing right now at DesiringGod.org. Speaking of joy, the Bible, all over the place, commands us to rejoice, commands us to rejoice. So if I'm not joyful, I'm sinning, right? Hmm. That's the question next. I'm Tony Reinke. See you on Thursday. (end) (music) (music)