What is joy and how is it different from happiness? This week, I teach the kids about my own journey from sorrow to joy and we’ll talk about Jesus’s joyful life.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.
Joy was one of the hardest fruit of the Spirit for me to begin to understand and God is still teaching me about it. I grew up very sad, scared, and felt very hopeless. I don’t remember ever being very happy and if I was, it wasn’t for long. I was one of those kids who was bullied relentlessly by boys and girls at school, at the city pool, in my neighborhood, on the school bus, on my way home from church, and there was just no place I felt I was safe except for at my adopted grandma Schwoerer’s house down the street from me. I would duck in there on my way home from school every day to get away from the other kids on the walk home from the bus stop, which was about ten or fifteen minutes from my house. By the time I grew up, I was very used to feeling like I had no reason to live but I wasn’t ever willing to kill myself or anything like that. I am grateful for that because what I didn’t know then was that someday God would begin to heal me and teach me about joyfulness, but also about the importance of being sad and allowing other people to be sad. I learned that joy and sadness are both needed for all of us to be whole and healthy humans who can become mature for serving God.
Some of Jesus’s qualities were easier to grow in than others. I think that forgiveness was the first one I began to learn about and as I got better at doing that (and it took a long time to get better at forgiveness because I wasn’t only sad but I was very angry too), I found that I was able to begin to be kinder and more gentle and to get more and more control over myself and my reactions to things. Of course, sometimes I still have bad reactions when I get taken by surprise and someone does something that reminds me of something bad that happened in the past—whether they meant to or not. Also, I had a lot of small strokes when I was younger and so my brain is a bit broken. I have to take pills to help my brain do what it is supposed to do. If I don’t, my brain starts freaking out and getting really confused about stuff! My medicines help me have a normal brain. Having a broken brain is really yucky. I keep hoping God will heal my brain totally the way he healed my son’s hips, but maybe I need to be this way so you can know you don’t have to be afraid or embarrassed if your brain is broken too. After all, our brains are organs no different than our hearts, tummies, eyes, or anything else that can be messed up. I wear glasses too and I sure wish I didn’t have to, but I can’t see much of anything without them. Speaking of which, have you ever noticed that in movies or tv shows when they live in the future or in some magical world, that even with magic, they can grow back bones but people still need glasses? What gives???
All that is to say, that being joyful is more complicated than most of the other fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about and Jesus shows us through His life. We can start being more gentle and kinder just because we know we should, but we don’t really have that sort of control over being joyful, which isn’t exactly the same as being happy. Let me explain that. I would have times when I was a kid when something fabulous would happen and I would be happy or I would get a sudden rush of some thrilling feeling, but as soon as it was over I was sad again. I wanted to be happy, but for a lot of reasons I just wasn’t. No one really enjoys being sad and scared and angry all the time—sometimes is okay but all the time isn’t okay. We love it when we are happy—in a good mood and enjoying life. But being joyful is very different—being joyful is about hope. Hope is when we really believe that things will be good or at least better in the future. When we don’t believe that, we can’t be joyful no matter what. We can enjoy food or fun or whatever, but we won’t have real joy. Joy is better than happiness the way fresh ripe strawberries from the yard are better than the half-ripe ones you get at the supermarket. Or the way a juicy ripe peach is better than a hard green one on the tree. We can’t be happy when we are sad, right? Because happy and sad don’t go together. But we can have joy and sadness at the same time. If my best friend is really sick then I am very sad and I am not happy about it at all. I might cry a lot and worry, because those are logical things to do when someone we love is hurting. But even though I am sad about my friend, I can still have hope that they will get better and be joyful about that. I can’t be happy about them being sick, but I can have a lot of joy when I think about how much God loves my friend and that I can trust God with my friend.
When someone dies, we are very sad. Even when someone reminds us of something funny they did, we can smile and laugh for a minute thinking about that good thing (which they would totally want us to remember and smile about if they loved us) but we don’t stop being sad. We don’t stop crying. But even though we are miserable and missing them terribly, we can remember that God can be trusted. We remember that this life, where we get sick and die and bad things happen, isn’t all there is. One day, Jesus will come back here as King of the whole world and when that happens, no one will get sick anymore or cry or worry about having enough food or people being allowed to hurt us and get away with it. But it can be hard to remember that, really hard. We have to practice—not practice being happy, because that would be fake, but practice remembering the promises God has made about what will happen to everyone who loves Him in the future. It was only about ten years ago that I realized how important it is to remember those promises.
I was reading a book by NT Wright, one of my favorite authors, and he said something I hadn’t really thought about before. He said that the problem most of us have with being frustrated about all the evil in this world is because we don’t really believe that we will be alive again with Jesus one day and that the things that make us unhappy and sad and angry now, won’t be a problem anymore. We get really angry about people getting away with doing bad stuff because we don’t really believe that God is going to do what is right by us when Jesus is King. I was like, “Whoa! What???” But I realized he was right. I was miserable not only because of all the people who had hurt me but because I was living like nothing was going to be any different. I was believing that I would be hurting and angry forever. I was acting like God was a liar—not on purpose but because I hadn’t ever realized that was what I really believed on the inside. Oh sure, I talked about the world to come when we all have perfect resurrected bodies and Jesus as our real life King here on earth, but it was all just talk. I wasn’t living like it was true—I mean, I was teaching and reading the Bible all the time and all of that good stuff, but I didn’t have any hope that I would ever feel any less miserable. So, I had no joy.
One night, God began to change that. I told Him that I wanted really badly to believe that His promises are true about our future with Jesus. I was laying in bed, crying and just so upset about all the hurts in my past. And then God told me that I needed to fill up my joy tank and I was like, “what??” He showed me two memories from when my kids were little. Simple little things that filled my heart with true joy. He told me to remember those when I was feeling hopeless and I was surprised how quickly my joy tank would fill up just thinking about those two things. I am even smiling right now thinking about them. I always smile at those things and I get a warm glowy feeling inside my body. I hope you have memories like that. Ask God to help you if you can’t remember anything. When my son Andrew was in first grade, I would walk down the street and take him and his twin their lunches and he wouldn’t let me leave until I had kissed his eyelids there in front of everyone. And when they were four, they used to strip down naked and run in the backyard while I would chase them with a hose. The sound of them laughing and enjoying themselves always fills up my joy tank.
I began doing this every day and I found that bad things, when they would happen, bothered me less because a full joy tank gave me a shield. That shield would keep a lot of the bad away from me so that I could be less sad and angry. The really, really good memories don’t get old or wear out. They make me just as joyful today as they did twenty years ago when they first happened. I think to myself, when Jesus comes back, I will feel like that all the time. I will feel His love the way I felt the love from my twins—only way more because Jesus loves me way more than my kids do. He loves you like that too, I promise. I don’t expect you to totally believe that today and have it all down perfectly—I still don’t. The fruit of the Spirit isn’t something we make ourselves—if we are like trees then fruit is something that has to grow slowly. At first, the fruit is going to be small and hard and even a small breeze can knock it off the tree before it has a chance to get nice and ripe. It won’t taste very good—we don’t start out gentle, kind, patient, and loving. We start out loud and selfish and demanding what we want right when we want it. Like a hungry baby who wants milk NOW. No baby has good fruit, right? If they weren’t so cute we’d never put up with them being so annoying, smelly, and loud at times. When babies grow into toddlers, they won’t just scream but might even hit and bite and kick if they aren’t happy. But if everything goes right, they will become more and more like civilized human beings and will even grow to care about other people’s feelings. But at first, they absolutely do not. They are just stumpy little trees sucking in sunlight and water so they can get bigger and they don’t care about what other trees need. We are all like that at the beginning.
When we accept Jesus as our King, the Holy Spirit is like a seed planted inside us that grows bigger and bigger and we become different kinds of people—or at least we should. Some of the changes happen right away and we don’t even have to work at it. Just BOOM, big change that everyone can notice. That’s a miracle that shows God really is our King. Like, oh man, I used to use really bad words all the time. ALL THE TIME. Really bad. But then Jesus talked to me and I accepted Him as my King and two weeks later someone at work said to me, “When did you stop swearing?” I was like, “What?” I hadn’t noticed. It was a miracle. It would have been hard to stop without God just doing that because I was swearing a lot. When I stopped, everyone noticed. So, they knew that Jesus really was the King of my life and I wasn’t faking. I had a lot of other problems still but no one could ignore that something big had happened in my life. When I think about how much I have changed, that also makes me joyful because I used to be just so awful!
And that’s one of the things I want to share with you—the importance of having perspective. Perspective is what lets us see things as they really are—sometimes people call it “the big picture.” I wish I had perspective when I was a little kid but I didn’t know God and I didn’t know that life could be any better. I saw shows like Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver and enjoyed them but figured it was also kinda nonsense because those people were happy, loving, understanding and patient with each other. I didn’t know that people actually could be happy and that families and homes could be happy. Because I had only ever known one kind of life, I didn’t have enough information to understand that things should be different and actually could be different. I got told things like, “Everyone gets bullied,” but I know that isn’t true and shouldn’t be true either. There were bad things in my life that I thought were the same for everyone, but they weren’t even normal! Most people didn’t live like that! When I heard things like, “Every family has problems,” I got very sad because that meant to me that things couldn’t ever be any better for the rest of my life. I had no hope because I was being told that the hurts I was going through were normal when they aren’t and that I should just accept it. Being around angry people isn’t normal. Being around alcohol and drugs isn’t normal. Being hit and yelled at and insulted and bullied isn’t normal. Not even with families that aren’t believers in Jesus, and so these things shouldn’t ever happen when people say they love Jesus. Love is the only thing that should be absolutely normal.
I have a loving family now that I am grandma aged. I have a husband and two grown-up sons who love me and take care of me. I love them and take care of them. It’s nice. Being with them and knowing I am safe gives me a lot of joy. If I had known when I was a kid that my life would be this way someday, I would have felt a lot differently. I wouldn’t have been as sad and depressed and I would have had hope. And that doesn’t mean that my life is perfect now. My brain is still broken. One of my sons was born with special needs and although I am happy about him, I don’t like that his body doesn’t work the way it should. But I know for sure for sure that his body will be perfect when Jesus comes here as King and my brain will be perfect too. And I won’t have to wear glasses anymore but I think I will look strange without them so I might wear them anyway. I just won’t have any lenses in them, just glass.
Now, there are people who will tell you that being joyful means never being sad but if Jesus is our best example of being joyful (and He has to be because He has all the best fruit) then we have to look at what the Gospels say about Him. Jesus called twelve of His many disciples so that they could be closest to Him and be with Him all the time. I bet Jesus enjoyed their company—usually. But sometimes He was irritated with them because they were so clueless about so many things. But He was still joyful because He knew they would be going out into the world to tell everyone about Him and the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus was worried and sad about how He was going to die but He was full of joy because He knew what was going to happen to Satan and that the whole world could be saved from sin and death. When Jesus saw that everyone was sad about His friend Lazarus dying, Jesus cried so hard that people noticed and were amazed at how much Jesus loved him. But Jesus was also full of joy because He knew Lazarus was about to come alive again and He knew how happy everyone would be. Jesus was sad the night of the Passover because He was about to be arrested but also told everyone how much He had been looking forward to celebrating with them. Jesus had all of our normal emotions even though He was perfectly joyful.
You see, Jesus knew His future and everything that was going to happen. He knew that God’s promises to His chosen people and to the whole world were finally coming true. This is what they had been planning for and working toward and waiting patiently for since the very beginning of our story as human beings. Jesus looked forward to Satan being kicked to the curb and sin and death finally being drained of all their power to kill us and hold us as prisoners. He knew that when He left us, the Holy Spirit would come and make a home inside of us all and that we would be God’s new Temple, a Temple made up of people from all over the world, who spoke all sorts of different languages. Jesus was not happy about how it had to be done but He was joyful about the results. The Cross was going to be horrible, make no mistake about that, but when He came to life again and then went to the Father, amazing things would happen. The world was going to change forever. The people who were once idol-worshippers, who bowed down to fake gods, were going to build the very first hospitals and they would rescue the babies that were abandoned to die on the hillsides outside their cities—the babies parents didn’t want. People were going to start living in new and strange ways, and when everyone else noticed, they were going to start asking why. We live in a world now where even people who don’t believe in Jesus live better lives than before He came. The world was a horribly wicked place, more than we can possibly imagine, but Jesus changed it. And everywhere people believe Him and make Him their King, He keeps changing it.
Even when we look at the bad things going on now, when we look at what the world was like before Jesus, we can have a lot of hope. More people accept Jesus as their king every single day, all over the world. There are still people groups who speak different languages who haven’t heard about Jesus so He can’t come back yet but we also get closer every day to the whole world knowing about Him. Right now in places like Africa and the Middle East and Asia, so many people are hearing about Jesus and loving Him and we can be so happy about that! In the Book of Revelation in the Bible, we see everyone who loves Jesus gathered together, singing in all the different languages, all equal, every color and all that. Jesus did what He did because He wants to be King of everyone. He wants sin and death to be dead and gone forever. He wants to win and He has won and He will win. That’s a promise. He won’t break that promise. He can’t break that promise. And when He does keep all those promises, we will all be together and we will all love each other and we will sing and dance together and we won’t be sick or in wheelchairs or old or anything. It will be a perfect world with a perfect King and everything that is wrong now will be fixed. Because I believe that is true, I can have hope even when I am sad, worried, scared, or angry about what I see going on around me. Being joyful doesn’t mean that I don’t cry. Being joyful doesn’t mean that I am grateful and happy about everything I see happening around me. Being joyful doesn’t mean I can ignore the bad things happening to other people. Being joyful means that I know how things are supposed to be and will be and it especially means that I can work with Jesus right now to make things better for the people who are hurting.
I want to tell you about the Quakers. The Quakers are a group of Christians who love God a lot. When Americans were buying people off of the slave ships coming from Africa, the Quakers knew that it was wrong—absolutely wrong. They knew that you can’t love your neighbor as yourself and kidnap them from their homes, buy them and sell them, force them to work, make it illegal for them to learn to read and write, and hurt them with whips and make them live in poverty and even take kids away from their parents and sell them to someone else. The Quakers knew that no one would feel loved if this happened to them and so they couldn’t get away with doing it to any other human being no matter what. The Quakers looked in their Bibles and saw in Exodus that God rescues slaves. They saw in Deuteronomy that runaway slaves shouldn’t be returned to their masters but had to be allowed to live in whatever city they escaped to. They saw that Jesus said over and over again that we cannot do to anyone else what we would hate to have done to us. Their Bibles said that in Jesus there is no Greek or Jew, slave or free, and man or woman. That means rich people can’t buy poor people or abuse them. Men can’t hurt women and children. White people can’t treat brown people like they aren’t as good if they want to say they belong to Jesus. The Quakers took their Bibles very seriously and so they fought against slavery in the government. They preached against slavery in the churches. They helped runaway slaves to escape and to give them what they needed to make a new start in life. The Quakers risked their lives and everything they had because they had hope in a future where people believed what God said in the Bible about all people from all over the world worshipping Him together as equals even though people were doing what was evil all around them.
That was in America, but in Britain there were men and women like William Wilberforce doing everything they could to make people understand that slavery is wrong—even though there were very few slaves in Britain and most of their slaves lived in places like Jamaica and Haiti making sugar in dangerous conditions. The only way anyone can do things like that is if they have hope and joy—if they know that things will be better, and that God promises they will be better, that He wants them to be better, and expects us to do what we can to make those promises happen. They were joyful to see no slavery or hate or abuse in the future with King Jesus and it made them sad and angry that people, even Christians, were okay with it then. Our joy in seeing what God has planned for us should always make us want things to be good now and not just okay. That’s our job. The Quakers and William Wilberforce always fought slavery without being violent and without being hateful and insulting. They were sad and angry but didn’t act like the rest of the world to do God’s work. They did amazing things because they wanted the people who were enslaved to feel that joy too.
I love you. I am praying for you. The people who were enslaved here in America had a lot of hope because they saw God freeing the slaves in Exodus. They knew that’s the kind of God He is. They understood that the people who were abusing them weren’t doing God’s will and that God would make things right some day. If they could believe that then so can we. I think they will be singing the loudest of all when Jesus comes back as King!