Friend, that drive to be happy… God put that there inside of you. And it’s your job as a Jesus lover, a child of God, to FIRST and FOREMOST passionately pursue pleasure that is all-satisfying… that can only be found in Jesus Christ. Read that scripture again and soak it in…

“You make known to me the path of life…”

What questions do you have? What answers do you need? What decisions need to be made? Who are you really? Why are you here? What’s your purpose in life? HE will make known to you the path of life. He will answer those questions. He will direct your steps. He will guide you, lead you, walk alongside you. But you have to stick close. You can’t hear the voice of someone who is far away. You can’t follow along The Path of Life when you are on your own path doing your own thing. You need to be close to Jesus.

“In your presence there is fullness of joy…”

I want it. You want it. We all want it. We all NEED it! If you are a follower of Jesus and you could not be easily identified by others as a joyful person… you need to spend some more time with Jesus, sweet friend. In His presence, there isn’t just a little joy, some joy, or enough joy. It says in His presence there is FULLNESS of joy! I want to be filled to overflowing with so much joy it just leaks out all over the people around me until they are filled up too because of the presence of God in my life! Wowza! I’ve got tingles all over my arms thinking about the kind of JOY I have in the presence of God! Take notice: it doesn’t say “In your presence, sometimes there’s joy,” and it doesn’t say, “In your presence, there is joy if you [x y z].” There are no qualifiers in the statement. It’s just what happens when you step into the presence of God as His baby girl! As His beloved daughter! As His favorite kid!

“At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” 

In his presence, there is joy overflowing. And at his right hand, which symbolizes a special place of honor, there are pleasures forevermore. Eternal, everlasting, never-ending pleasures. 

Listen. I don’t think the people of God can do the work of God and fully obey the will of God if we do not understand the position we hold in the Kingdom of God. If you feel like you have to earn it, you don’t understand what your salvation bought. Eternal life is just one part of the package. It’s a side-effect of an even greater work. Salvation found only in Jesus Christ restores you to your place as a sinless, righteous son or daughter of God. You were made for the Garden, we stepped off the Path of Life and royally screwed up the world, and lost access to the Garden which is a picture of perfect intimacy with the Father. What did Adam and Eve do in the Garden? Walk around every evening talking with God. In person. They had perfect communication with God. They were in perfect standing with God. There was absolutely no shame or hindrance between them and their Father. Joy was EASY to find. Joy was ALWAYS around because God was always around! They were FRIENDS with the God of the universe and HE was their dad! 

That is what you and I were made for! Because of sin, we lost access to God who is our eternal joy! Jesus made a way back for us by sacrificing his perfect life on behalf of our sin-filled lives so that we could be God’s kids again… so we could go back to the Garden. 

If you love Jesus and have been saved, but are still walking around like you are carrying the yoke of slavery to sin… girl, pick yourself up and dust yourself off! You are a child of God. You are the head and not the tail. The devil may strike your heal but you will crush his head. You live with the eternal, everlasting, never-ending, all-fulfilling, all-encompassing victory of Jesus over every sin in your life! If that doesn’t fill you with JOY I don’t know what will!

Pray that verse over yourself. You remind yourself that, because of Jesus Christ’s work on the cross, you have 24/7/365 from now until forever access to JOY. You tell yourself the truth…

• I don’t need to worry about all the questions. God will guide me as I stay close to hear His voice.

 

• I was made to live in the presence of God and in His presence is the fullness of JOY!

 

• I am seated with Jesus at the right hand of God - a place with pleasures forevermore!

 

• I was made for JOY and ETERNAL PLEASURE that can only be found in Jesus!

So today, go find the fullness of Joy! Go be in the presence of God. Worship, read the Word, soak up His presence, spend some time in prayer… like more than 2 minutes. Get on your knees, lay facedown, whatever… just get in His presence and get your heart back in the Garden! Your joy will start spilling out all over! I promise! 

“God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him.” - John Piper

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Well, sweet friends, I must be honest with you: I have been procrastinating sitting down to write about joy for about as long as I possibly can. 

It's like JOY is a loaded word right now. It's like my heart doesn't even want to go there right now because mostly I just feel tender; mostly I'm just lamenting; mostly I'm just crying out; mostly I'm just in need. 

I resonate a lot with Gay's article and maybe you do, too. It doesn't take much time to scroll social media, catch a glimpse of the news or to talk with neighbors and family and friends to see a great deficit of joy in our world right now. 

When I think of joy, I think of just a fullness and at the same time, a weightlessness. Joy is overwhelming. Joy is like surface tension: have you ever seen drops of water on the surface of a coin? The water just fills and fills and fills until it makes almost a dome shape and somehow, it stays intact. Somehow it doesn't burst- but it's filled to the brim and just ready to burst. 

I can think of many times when my insides have felt just like that surface tension looks, like I could just burst. I cannot contain myself. The tension of being held in is too much and I just want to spill that joy over onto all around me!! What good does this joy do if I don't release it?? I have to do something with it! 

Although this particular season has not exactly been marked by the fullness, lightness and tension that I envision joy to be, this does not mean that joy has been absent. I am still learning about true joy that is found in the Lord; He is still teaching me.

In this wrestling with joy, friends, the Lord did something so unexpected and ridiculously beautiful.

One day a couple of weeks ago, I woke up full of joy. Just. FULL. Everything seemed different to me; brighter, more beautiful, more hopeful. I wondered about it, especially since the day before had seemed like a real battle with heaviness and darkness. 

The next day, as I scrolled my Facebook memories, there was a message from a sweet woman I had befriended eight years ago that day. As soon as I saw it, my heart leaped and I immediately understood what had happened. 

The day before, eight years ago, was the day that I surrendered my life to Christ. 

I had forgotten, but God remembered. 

He cared enough to remind me. 

He celebrated. 

And my soul needed to celebrate with Him. 

Just as I was filled with joy that day eight years ago, like a dam bursting in my heart; so was there joy in heaven over my repentance and salvation (Luke 15:7). 

Sisters, if we are feeling weighed down by our circumstances, maybe we need to cry out to the Lord: “Restore unto me the joy of your salvation.” (Psalm 51:12)

Maybe what the Lord had to say to the church in Ephesus is for us today, too: “I know that you have persevered and endured hardships for the sake of my name, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then how far you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.” (Revelation 2: 3-5a) 

When I surrendered, when I was saved, on my knees and face tear-stained at the altar on June 3, 2012, I was radically changed. It was perceptible. I was eager. I went home and immediately began seeking His face with a hunger. I longed for more of Jesus, I did everything I could think of to get to know my Savior, this Lover of my soul. He permeated every part of my heart, my soul and my life. In an instant. With just one look.  

I had found this Jesus to be real, to be true. He is magnificent. He is better than anything in this world; He is even better than I can imagine, even now. 

So, then: have we in some way or another abandoned the love we had at first? 

Let's return to Him with repentance. We will surely receive refreshment for our weary and overwhelmed souls. 

Be still, sister, and sing this to the King of your heart. 

I'm still in love
You're still enough for me
Still all I want
You're still my everything

No one ever cared for me like Jesus
His faithful hand has held me all this way
And when I'm old and gray
And all my days are numbered on the earth
Let it be known
In you alone
My joy was found

I've found my joy. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fpUvEKd91w

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Joy. I wrote about joy on my blog two years ago. I rambled on about pizza, and a dream and whether the dream was from my subconscious,  from God,  or just indigestion from the pizza I had eaten from the previous night.

I had written the dream down in my journal because I rarely remember dreams as vividly as that particular one and I know that God sometimes speaks to me through those kinds of dreams. 
​
I'd like to share some of what I wrote then with you now. Not the dream part, but the joy part.

Just 7 days after the journal entry about the dream I wrote these words...

May 10, 2018. Thursday p.m.
WHERE IS THE JOY?!?!
That's it. Just three words. 
 
I honestly don't even remember what happened to prompt me to write those words down, but apparently, at the time something had occurred that made me question God.

You see, over a span of two years, I had multiple people prophesy over me that God is going to restore my joy. I thought...what? I have joy! I'm not a 'joyless' person.  

And then it occurred to me... when I was younger I had so much more joy that it was evident to others around me.  My mama would tell me that I was such a happy little girl that I would go around singing all the time. When I was twelve she wrote a short poem about me. Here are the last lines of that poem...

...How does your laughter grow?
With God's merry blessing,
We can all learn a lesson__
By watching your inner glow!

In my teens, an older gentleman in the choir at my church nicknamed me Happy. Even my husband has told me that I don't sing around the house the way I used to. I realized that I'm not THAT joy-filled girl anymore. What happened?

A song is playing in my head. Cue the song, Where is the Love? sung by Roberta Flack. Only in my head, I am hearing the word love replaced with the word joy.

Where is the joy?
You said was mine all mine, 'till the end of time
Was it just a lie?
Where is the joy?

I know ...I know! The rest of the song is totally inappropriate to my point. Still...it's on replay in my brain. And so I cry out with the words of the psalmist, "Restore to me the joy of my salvation!"

Sometimes,  life creeps in...disappointment, unmet expectation, family illness, death, you name it...bringing with it all the drama and trauma to destroy our boundless joy in the Lord. It can happen...and the boundless energy that joy brings is replaced with a 'tired' that just sits in your bones. You know what I mean? Even though we are relatively happy and still trusting in the goodness of God...that bone aching weariness can set in and steal our joy. 

I think that I struggle with that weariness from time to time. Life can be hard. I struggled even writing this article about joy because I have been feeling the angst of the current climate of unrest in our world. When there is unrest, when there is uncertainty, in some sense we lose a bit of our security. 

Security...we all long to feel secure, loved, safe, protected. When I was a little girl I felt all of that at once...loved, safe, protected, secure...all of it.  Perhaps that is why I was a joyful child. Laughter came easy. 

Even though my dad died when I was just 10 years old, my mother managed to continue to make us all feel safe and secure. As my mom explained to us, God had chosen to take my daddy home instead of letting him die the slow, painful death his doctors had predicted. God loved us so much that he took daddy home to not only prevent his suffering but our own as well.  So, instead of such a traumatic event taking away my sense of security, it reinforced it because I was secure in knowing that God was taking care of me, my daddy, and our family. God is good. And my joy was abundant because I was not abandoned. I was not alone. I was secure in His hands. 

As a child, the ability to trust God is so pure and simple.  But then as we grow up, life happens, and our sense of security weakens. And we begin to ask God questions. 

Job, who lost everything, had questions too. Pain tends to do that...pain from loss, physical pain...emotional pain...leaves us asking, "WHY?" 

Job asked that same question from different angles. He wrestled with the big questions. God, what is your purpose in all of this? Please God, help me understand your ways! Why am I even here on this earth? I'm thinking Job surely lost his joy because in losing it all he lost his sense of security.

Job, had friends who failed him miserably. They began well...they took the time to just sit with him...not talking, just offering their presence. But then they opened their big mouths and began offering their own opinions as to why Job was suffering and it all went downhill from there. Job's pain actually worsened! There is no joy in being judged by one's friends. 

In Job 38:1 we read...

John 15 is one of my absolute, hands-down favorite chapters in the Bible! Words penned in red spoken by my Savior, Jesus. I love the picture He paints for us. Check this out …

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the gardener. Every branch in Me that does not produce fruit He removes, and He prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit… 
​
Remain in Me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in Me…

I have told you these things so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”

Ten times in the first eleven verses Jesus used the word “remain”. I hope you are stepping in the truth of the matter here. If we want joy ~ we must remain in Jesus. 

I looked up that word remain since it is the obvious key to joy. This totally blessed my socks off! Are you ready for this? By definition it means to continue to exist, especially after other similar or related people or things have ceased to exist. (Google Dictionary) Push pause and let that sink in.

Immediately the hymn “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” * came to my mind that says – 

“Though none go with me
I still will follow
no turning back 
no turning back.” 

So, what does it look like to remain in Jesus Christ? 

For starters, let’s get in the Bible and find out who this man is that refers to Himself as the Vine and the only One who can give us the joy that we are thirsty for. When you and I read the Bible and meditate on it, the Spirit of God will teach us not only who He is but also who we can be as His followers! 

It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. A journey. That’s where the remaining comes in. 

I asked Jesus Christ to come into my heart March 12, 1981. My salvation and eternity were sealed that night! That part was once and done - I pray yours has been as well. With that established, let’s return to the analogy that Jesus gave us in John 15. 

I became part of the vine that night. By reading the Bible, being taught and discipled by godly teachers and preachers, I have grown spiritually and the roots of my faith have gotten deeper. And guess what the fruit of that looks like? Yep, joy. Mmmmm say that word with me joy.

Joy is so different than happiness. 

Happiness is dependent on my circumstances. Case in point: I purchased an adorable dress last summer. My post COVID quarantine-menopausal body has jerked the happy right out of my dance about that dress! See what I mean? Happiness is temporary and overrated! 

Joy remains regardless of my circumstances because of who I am in Jesus Christ. Remember ~ it’s all about remaining in the Vine! The size of my dress doesn’t determine my identity nor the joy thereof! Can I get an amen?!

Now, take a sip of sweet tea or your favorite coffee and let’s switch gears.

Jesus gave us a heads-up in verse two of John 15. God, the Gardener, prunes every branch so that it will produce more fruit.

Sometimes God will cut things out of our life that brings us happiness. (Don’t spit that drink, sister!) He always prunes with purpose! He wants to produce something deeper in us. Something beautiful and more meaningful than temporary happiness. He wants us to have joy in His Son and our Savior!

The more I keep His commands and walk in His ways, the more He prunes non-essentials out of my life. As a result, the fuller and more complete my joy is!

I can’t produce joy in and of myself. No amount of retail therapy, pill, drink or earthly pleasure can bring me true, unadulterated joy! That, my pretty and wise sister, can only be found in Jesus Christ. 

But take heed … you have an enemy that hates God and, therefore, hates you. Jesus gave us another heads-up about that schemer known as Satan. In John 10:10 Jesus warned us: “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” 

So, you know what we have to do? Guard our vineyard!  

Song of Solomon 2:15 says, “Catch the foxes for us – the little foxes that ruin the vineyards – for our vineyards are in bloom.” 

Mmmmm, girl, when you remain in Jesus by spending time in His Word and begin understanding who you are in Him, your joy-fruit will be in full bloom! That’s when you better watch out! Satan will attack! 

He hits below the belt and he will use the people we love the most to try and steal our joy! He uses financial hardships, family drama, workplace chaos and the like to kill and destroy your joy! 

Don’t put up with that! O Holy No! 

It’s times like this that we are going to run to Jesus and tell Him to catch those foxes that are trying to steal, kill and destroy our vineyard of joy! Because, listen to me, those ‘people’ are not our enemy! Paul told us in Ephesians 6 that we don’t fight against flesh and blood! There’s a much bigger war that has been waged! Before you freak out, there’s good news!

Jesus went on to tell us in John 15 and 16 that we would face all kinds of trials and tribulations in this world. So, girlfriend, let’s not be caught off guard by them. Don’t get down and discouraged! Because in John 16:33 Jesus said, “Be courageous! I have conquered the world.” 

(I can’t believe John didn’t use an exclamation point right there!!)

Whew, that deserves a HALLELUJAH! 

That’s the Vine that I want to remain in right there! HE is my Source of joy and the ultimate Defender of my vineyard!

Let’s put this ensemble together …

If we want joy, we must …

• Remain in the Vine – Jesus Christ – by reading and meditating on His Word. Though none go with me I still will follow!
  
  
• Expect to be pruned by the Gardener! God always prunes with purpose! Happiness is temporary – God wants us to have deep, unadulterated, and complete joy that can only be found in the Vine!
  
  
• Guard your vineyard! Watch out for the foxes that come to steal your joy! We don’t fight flesh and blood, so don’t fall for the schemes of Satan - the real enemy! Remember ~ Jesus has overcome the world!
  
  

Here’s to joyfully remaining in Him! You are so loved!! 

*I Have Decided to Follow Jesus, WORDS: St. 1,2, Garo Christians; st. 3 John Clark

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Tina Craighead is a speaker, blogger, and leads Still Waters Ministry. You can catch up with Tina on facebook, her website, or by email!

Head over to the Community to join the conversation!

Head over to the Community and join the conversation!