We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
- The US Declaration Of Independence
It sounds good doesn't it? This idea of inalienable rights that the founders of the United States started the country with, even though all men being equal didn't mean that those who didn't own land could vote, or that women had much in the way of rights or that slavery would be abolished in 1776. Still, it was a nice ideal that in some ways we're still working toward. And it does seem that we are all created with a drive to and an innate sense of a right to pursue happiness. But maybe that idea that we have we can and should pursue happiness is not inborn but rather a learned response to growing up in the US. It's also important to remember that the founding fathers proclaimed the right to pursue happiness, which really is not to be confused with the right to be happy.
We get those mixed up sometimes, so we start feeling like if something isn't making us happy we have the right to discard it, or change it or replace it, or abandon it, even if it is a person or relationship. Even the simple right to pursue rather than feeling entitled to have messes us up when we become so self centered and self seeking that we stop caring about others as we push toward the prize of happiness. We get a lot like Black Friday shoppers who in the name of the holiday remembering the selfless love of a Savior trample one another, fight, trick, manipulate and basically treat our fellows as little more than mobile obstacles. I did it. In my selfish pursuit of pleasure and happiness, the two things I confused with joy, I would run over anyone who got in my way. Lying, cheating, manipulating, using, stealing, and the like were just tools for getting what I wanted when I wanted as easily as possible, consequences to others and sometimes myself, be damned.
Happiness is a very nice bonus, but what I have found is more to be desired is joy. Happiness is externally created. It comes from situations and circumstances being a way that creates a positive emotional response. It comes from outside us, so when the outside doesn't cooperate with making us happy, we are sad and miserable. And we try to change it. We try to make others behave as we want in order to make us more happy, we avoid discomfort, or, having lost the understanding of what the joy we need is and how to get it, or having never experienced the richer, more satisfying and less transitory experience of joy, we seek to manufacture it through chemicals, distractions, sensual pleasures such as food or sex, entertainment, and other ways and means we use try to capture or cultivate joy ourselves for ourselves.
But joy is not captured or created by changing or controlling the external. Joy, which is not tied to circumstances and situations and therefore doesn't fade away when difficulties and discomforts come our way, is a fruit, a result, of something else. We are born with an innate need to have relationship with our Creator. The naturally occurring results of that relationship are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, basically a life worth living. When we don't have that relationship we are deficient in those results like joy, peace, and love and feeling the need makes us pursue them. And we mess it up. We chase acceptance, admiration, respect, sex, etc. when what we need is love. We pursue pleasure and happiness in place of joy, and confuse getting our way without conflict for peace. For every wonderful result of relationship with God there is a counterfeit, or counterfeits, that promises to fill the need but never quite does.
Joy is ours because Jesus came for us, to make a way for us to have that relationship that brings that list of things we crave from birth. He makes us free. He measures up in our place in all the ways that we couldn't and didn't and won't ever. The joy that comes from knowing we are loved of God, as we are and not as we should be, and cared for enough by Him that He won't leave us the mess He found us in, that joy that comes from the comfort and presences of the Spirit of God within us, the joy that comes because Jesus took our failure and gave us His ability to do it right, that joy doesn't change with the change of external situation and circumstance. It is joy that can endure darkness and difficulty. It is more satisfying than happiness, more to be desired, and it isn't temporary or fleeting, and we don't have to trample or disregard others to grab it. Just the opposite, we will find that when we love others as He does, it brings us closer to Him and gives us even more joy, even when we have to deny ourselves, our comfort, our pleasure, or our security in order to do so.
Joy to the world, to each and every one of us, because the Lord has come. Let every heart make room for Him and find freedom from sin and sorrow as far as the curse of a fallen and broken world is found.
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