All through my season of depression and my current season of refinement and deep purpose I keep telling myself, “Choose joy, Cheyenne. Choose joy!”
I tell myself over and over that
- Joy is a choice NOT a feeling
- Joy is a quality of the fruit of the Spirit not an emotion.
Psalms 30:5 keeps rolling around in my head:
For his anger lasts only a moment,
but his favor lasts a lifetime!
Weeping may last through the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
I love this promise. I hold on to it. Cling to it. In the past, it’s been my candle in the darkness. My life-preserver in the storm. But this time, there was something missing. Not in a bad way, but I felt there was something more out there. Something I was missing…I just couldn’t figure out what it was.
Then this past week I looked up joy in my New Bible Dictionary, and here’s what I learned:
- In both the Old and New Testaments
- Joy is an attribute, a character trait of both the individual Believer and the Church at large
- Joy can be accompanied by emotion of happiness but doesn’t have to be because our joy comes from God and not ourselves
- Joy is established in God Himself, it’s part of His character and then it’s extrapolated from Him to us
- Joy depicts the Christian life here on Earth
- Joy looks forward to our eternal like with Jesus in Heaven
- Joy is a gift from the Holy spirit “which may be interrupted by sin, [*ouch!] every believer is called upon to share in the joy of Christ by a daily walk with Him and a daily practice of rejoicing in the knowledge of Him and His salvation.”
And there is was! The missing link.
Joy is a gift from the Holy spirit “which may be interrupted by sin, [*ouch!] every believer is called upon to share in the joy of Christ by a daily walk with Him and a daily practice of rejoicing in the knowledge of Him AND His salvation.”
A daily walk with Him.
A daily practice of rejoicing in Him.
A daily practice of rejoicing in His salvation.
This is something we share with other Believers and with Jesus Himself every single day we have our feet on this planet!
This definition brought me back to the basics: the dailiness of our needs and our calling requires the dailiness of our faith in order to completely surrender to Him and His will.
“Give us this day our DAILY bread.” Jesus prayed. Tomorrow is a new day and has it’s own requirements. Yesterday is gone. God, give us what we need to be faithful and to serve you TODAY.
Then I immediately thought of Psalms 51:12:
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and make me willing to obey you.
Relishing in the joy of Jesus’s salvation (and everything that entails). Not my salvation. His. His salvation. His grace. His gift. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
A gift I can accept or reject.
And from that JOY comes COMPLETE surrender.
So I guess we got two verses this week. Not one.
Pray with me:
Jesus, restore the joy of Your Salvation to me! Infuse me with it. Illuminate all the dark corners with it. Leave nothing untouched. Unrefined. Because once I fully grasp the JOY of YOUR salvation, complete surrender will be natural. How could it not be? Lord, help me deliberate. Diligent. Determined to make this a daily practice so when the storms blow, when the tears come in torrents, when depressions looms, when seasons of refinement consume me I will KNOW the true meaning of The JOY of the Lord is MY Strength!
Blessings, xoxo
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