Theopedia

Joy

“The joy of the LORD is your strength.”

— Nehemiah 8:10

Definition

Joy is the settled, Spirit-produced delight of a believer’s soul in God and in the certainty of his favor, distinguished from happiness that depends on favorable circumstances. Scripture names it among the fruit of the Spirit, alongside love and peace (Gal. 5:22-23). It flows from a believer’s justification, adoption, and sanctification, and from the assurance that these are real, so its ground is God’s own character and promises rather than present conditions.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession and the wider Reformed confessional family agree in tying joy to a believer’s assurance of grace rather than treating it as a free-floating feeling. The confession states that a true believer “may in this life be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.”1 It goes on to make joy a duty as well as a privilege: believers are to “give all diligence to make [their] calling and election sure, that thereby [their] heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance.”2

The Westminster Larger Catechism states the same link. Asked what communion in glory the members of the invisible church already have with Christ in this life, it answers that they have, as “an earnest” of their future inheritance, an “enjoy[ment of] the sense of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, and hope of glory.”3 Both confessions locate joy as a fruit that follows from assurance rather than a feeling pursued for its own sake: joy is evidence of grace already at work, not a substitute for it, and its absence in a particular season does not by itself mean grace is absent (see Objections and Responses below).

Biblical Basis

Paul lists joy second among the fruit the Spirit produces, immediately after love (Gal. 5:22-23). Nehemiah tells the returned exiles, weeping over the Law they had just heard read, “the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Neh. 8:10): joy here does not merely console but actively strengthens obedience. Paul makes the same connection when he defines the kingdom of God as “not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17) and prays that God would “fill you with all joy and peace in believing” (Rom. 15:13); Peter tells suffering believers they “rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” even without having seen Christ (1 Pet. 1:8).

Christ himself repeatedly ties his own joy to his disciples’. He tells them he has spoken to them so that “my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11), promises that after his resurrection “your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22), and prays, on the eve of his death, “these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves” (John 17:13).4 Joy is not incompatible with real suffering: Paul describes his own ministry “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10), and the Thessalonians received the word “in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thess. 1:6).

Doctrinal Significance

Bavinck names joy, alongside peace, among the benefits already possessed by those united to Christ through faith: believers assured of God’s love “are now already the beneficiaries of peace… joy… and eternal life.”5 On this reading joy is not merely a pleasant byproduct of salvation but part of its present, “already” reality: an earnest of the believer’s future glory rather than only a future hope. Watson makes the same point about its purpose rather than only its ground: joy “carries the Soul through Duty chearfully,” so that a Christian who serves God joyfully serves him differently, and more willingly, than one who serves out of mere duty or fear.4

Historical Development

Puritan formulation: joy as the Spirit’s own fruit

Reformed orthodox and Puritan divines of the seventeenth century gave Christian joy sustained, dedicated treatment as a mark of the Spirit’s work rather than a matter of temperament. Thomas Watson devotes an entire chapter of his catechetical Body of Practical Divinity (1692) to joy, opening from Galatians 5:22 and defining it as “a sweet and delightful Passion, arising from the Apprehension and Feeling of some Good, whereby the Soul is supported under present Troubles, and fenced against future Fear.”6 Watson distinguishes worldly from spiritual joy at length: spiritual joy reforms the person it fills rather than corrupting him, is felt within rather than merely displayed on the face, and endures under affliction rather than evaporating with circumstance, whereas worldly joy tends the opposite way on each point.7 He also catalogs the “seasons” in which God ordinarily grants his people this joy: at the Lord’s Supper, before a season of suffering, after a spiritual conflict with temptation, after a period of felt spiritual desertion, and at the hour of death.6

Writing in the same period, Stephen Charnock treats joy as inseparable from the Spirit’s presence in worship: “A heart filled up to the brim with joy, is a heart filled up to the brim with the Spirit; joy is the fruit of the Holy Ghost (Gal. v. 22).”8 Charnock distinguishes this joy, which “hath God for its object,” from a lesser joy that terminates on the sensible comfort itself rather than on God as its end.8 Thomas Goodwin likewise treats the “joy unspeakable and full of glory” of 1 Peter 1:8 as one of the Spirit’s own comforts to believers, alongside the peace that “passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7).9

Modern development: Christian Hedonism

In 1986, John Piper’s Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist reframed the pursuit of joy in God from a fruit that follows grace into the explicit motive for obedience itself, arguing that God is most glorified in his people when they are most satisfied in him. Theopedia treats this development, including its own confessional assessment and the objections raised against it, in its own dedicated article, Christian hedonism.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic theology, following the Council of Trent, warns against the “rash presumption” of holding with confidence that one belongs to the number of those predestined to life.10 The Reformed confessions instead ground joy in a believer’s ordinary, attainable assurance of his own salvation (see Confessional Witness above): the two traditions differ over whether that assurance is itself an ordinary privilege open to believers or a presumption to be warned against.

Objections and Responses

Commanding an emotion is incoherent, so Scripture’s repeated commands to rejoice cannot really be commanding a feeling. Watson’s answer is that spiritual joy, while a real “Passion” or affection, is pursued through appointed means rather than summoned directly by an act of will: he lists setting apart time for God, mourning over sin, keeping a clear conscience, and persistent prayer as ordinary means by which God grants it.11 The command to rejoice is a command to pursue and use these means, not a demand to manufacture a feeling from nothing.

If joy depends on the Spirit’s presence, its absence in a genuine believer’s experience must mean he lacks true faith. Watson denies this directly: joy “doth not so belong to the essence” of faith or assurance that its absence disproves either.2 A believer may have, in Watson’s terms, “Real, though not Royal Comforts”: a settled “Joy in God” even where the fuller, more felt “Joy from God” is lacking.11 The 1689 Confession makes the same allowance elsewhere, teaching that a true believer’s assurance itself may be “shaken, diminished, and intermitted” by various causes without his state of grace ever actually being lost.12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, “Of the Assurance of Grace and Salvation,” para. 1. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 83. ↩

  4. Watson, Body of Practical Divinity, 213, “Of Joy.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩

  6. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 211, “Of Joy.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Watson, Body of Practical Divinity, 212, “Of Joy.” ↩

  8. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse IV: On Spiritual Worship,” 205-275. ↩ ↩2

  9. Thomas Goodwin, The Work of the Holy Ghost in Our Salvation, in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1863), book I, 3-72. ↩

  10. Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 62, citing the Council of Trent, session 6, chap. 12. ↩

  11. Watson, Body of Practical Divinity, 214, “Of Joy.” ↩ ↩2

  12. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 18, para. 4. ↩