If we live day to day without joy, it's a good indicator that we have lost sight of Christ's redeeming work. I heard that in a sermon a while ago, and it resonated strongly with me. As it would with anyone. Lift up your heart, we sing in church. Lift up your voice, rejoice, again I say, rejoice! We all want to experience this life-changing, steadfast joy--no weak common emotion like happiness, mind you, but something deeper and fiercer and stronger, as the word choice conveys. Is it a huge, impossible challenge for you to have a happy life, to find contentment in your everyday? For so many years I lived with the impression that happiness lay several boxes away. Friends. Success. Affirmation. Aesthetics. Comfort. Tick those boxes and you've completed the formula for happiness, no? Even as Christians, we still tend to have the same mentality. To experience the "joy of the Lord" that Nehemiah 8:10 talks about is such a surreal, transient thing that we hardly dare talk about it, maybe dismiss it as "charismatic", (*cough Reformed background weakness cough*) assume that we're not 'holy' enough to have reached that stage of loving God, we've got to first improve our spiritual disciplines and kick those bad habits entirely and... I think that when we've lost sight of this joy that we as Christians are entitled to have, it's because we've lost sight of Christ--in our focus on doing things for Him, we neglect to enjoy Him. Amid all the distractions of our busy lives, our faith soon gets reduced to another set of to-do's. Read the Bible more. Get devotions in every day. Reach out to others. But we forget that we don't have to have ticked all these boxes--an impossible task, by the way, at least while we're here struggling through the gory process of sanctification--to enjoy Him. That His joy, peace, and love are tangible in our lives, are directly relevant to our lives, in the midst of all we haven't done, shouldn't have done. I think that is possibly the biggest lesson I've learnt this year. When I stopped to reflect on the past year and consider how I'd grown spiritually, my first response was guilt and discouragement. In so many of the ways I'd determined to grow this year--pray more! have more courage to talk about Christ! be more patient and loving!--I'd failed. Not even failed to make progress; in some cases, actually regressed. And so I felt, on the heels of that realization, that no, I hadn't "grown spiritually" much this year. But the next moment I reconsidered that conclusion. Though I didn't have any ticked boxes or graphs to show for it, I felt that wasn't entirely true. This year has been a difficult year for me, a year full of change and often weariness. Of realizations that one by one take a little bit of sparkle away from how you see the world, the future. But amidst all that struggling, all the failure, even, I felt as though one lesson had cleared through the mist--learning to see how the person of God relates directly to my life, learning to appreciate and understand the significance of God's attributes. And that enabled me to experience for the first time a kind of durable, everyday joy--a taste of the "peace which surpasses all understanding;" (Philippians 4:7) of why we call Him the "God of all comfort." (2 Corinthians 1:3-4) I think I won't do a good job explaining this, but I can only try. For example. So many times I found myself repeatedly asking for forgiveness, for the same besetting sin, that even I got frustrated at myself, almost couldn't dare to imagine that God hadn't lost patience with me by now, that I hadn't made a mockery of Christ's atonement for me. Humanly speaking, there was no reason why not. I ran out of excuses. Forced to face, exhausted and speechless, the unpleasant fact that I just clung too tightly to sin. And that was when I realized anew what GRACE and MERCY, those abstract, often dry terms which we use to describe God, actually meant. Their very real and direct application to my life--right now. Not only at the point of my conversion, but as a necessary and vital part of today, of what gave me hope, what encouraged me. Our joy--as our hope, our peace, and so much more--is steadfast and strong because it does not depend on us. On our current mood or our current situation. It is based on Him, on Who He is; and that never changes, never fails us, is never less than we need. This year, in different ways and over different stages, I've been realizing slowly just how significant each one of God's attributes are to me. A newfound appreciation and understanding of Who He is, and simultaneously who I am; and how He changes my life. I'd memorized in the Shorter Catechism Who God is: God is spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. But what does that actually mean? To put it more specifically--what does that mean for my life, today? This coming year, no matter what it brings for you--pain, affirmation, loss, growth, change--may you answer that question for yourself.
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