“But the angel said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid, for look, I proclaim to you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be the sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When was the last time you were truly and completely happy? Depending on your circumstances, that could have been quite some time ago. Maybe you can’t even remember the last time that happened. For you, every day is a slog. Work is a drudgery. Family is just frustration. Friends are fleeting. And social media sucks most of the rest of the life out of you. The thought of being happy is a nice one, but not something you see very often. Well, our next gift of Advent is not happiness. But it can lead to it in some most unexpected places. Let’s talk today about the gift of joy.

If you have ever heard or read a message on joy, you’ve probably encountered the line the joy and happiness are not the same. We hear that often enough that we start to wonder if perhaps joyful people aren’t supposed to be happy; like if you’re happy, you’re probably missing out on joy. That’s not necessarily right, and you shouldn’t be suspicious of happiness like that. Preachers who have made you feel otherwise have done you a grave disservice.

That being said, happiness is an emotion, and emotions are fickle things. Someone whose life is utterly devoid of joy can still experience happiness in a given moment. On the other hand, because joy is a state of being and not merely an emotion, we can experience the delight of joy even in moments when we are as far away from happiness as we can possibly imagine.

The gift God gave us in Christ is the gift of joy. It was joy that the angels proclaimed to the shepherds on that quiet night in the fields around Bethlehem. They shouted from the heavens of good news of great joy for everyone. This little baby was the bearer of the greatest joy the world had ever known. How could that be? Because He came bringing with Him a way out of the dreariness and despair of sin and an entrance into the only life that is truly life. This child arrived with the promise of wholeness where once only brokenness was all that we knew. With His birth came the hope that one day everything really would be right with the world once again. These are all the harbingers of joy.

This effusion of joy in a world still marked by sin, however, is not a recipe for permanent or even regular happiness. All of this joy that our Savior brings is predicated on the understanding that the kingdoms of this world will one day fall. They will all crumble before the kingdom of our God. Their power and might will fail. Their control will slip away. Their glory will be reduced to mere rust. Anywhere this heavenly joy rears its head, it does so with this proclamation of the victory of Jesus on its lips.

Well, as you might expect, the world doesn’t much care for this. Where we keep all of this joy to ourselves it might mostly leave us alone (although there’s no guarantee of that), but where we try to share it with others, it will begin working determinedly to shut us down. This will come in a number of different ways, but the most frequent will be to steal our happiness. The world cannot gain access to our joy, but it can rob us of every happiness we ever wished to know. It will take our happiness and then try to convince us that it has successfully taken our joy. Yet this is all a ruse. Our joy is held securely in Christ where the world cannot touch it. It must instead deceive us into giving up what it can never truly take.

Following Jesus won’t always be a happy journey. There’s just no way around that and even Jesus Himself was honest about it. But once we have the joy that He gives, no one and nothing can take that away from us. There is power there that the world simply can’t match. And so, this Advent season, receive afresh God’s gift of joy in Christ and stand firm in the bulwark of His love when the world comes after you. In Him you have already won the victory.