Misery loves company, but joy craves a crowd.
Eternities before the cosmos, there was the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit enjoying each other in rapturous delight. But the Trinity was thinking of a bigger crowd. God’s plan was to gather countless sons and daughters into his thunderous waterfall of joy.
In this plan, Jesus Christ commands center stage, and the Father never tires of bragging about him: “Behold . . . my chosen, in whom my soul delights” (Isaiah 42:1). In Jesus, the Father sees the fountain of all the intelligence, grandeur, and goodness that ever was. (The Holy Spirit doesn’t mind this at all.) So, if we want to know what — or Who — fills the heart of God with joy, the Father himself tells us in Matthew 3:17: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
Jesus is joy incarnate. He swims in elation, and he is positively driven to share his pleasure with us. Why? Because joy is multiplied in a crowd. As he says in John 15:11, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Jesus longs to fill his disciples with the kind of deep, unshakable joy that sustained him through his own sufferings (Hebrews 12:2). And if you believe in him, you are among that blood-bought crowd.
But there’s a catch.
No Suffering, No Joy
As the solemn Monarch of all, God shares his joy on his own terms. And those terms call for us to suffer, in some measure, as his beloved Son did when he walked on earth (Philippians 1:29). God’s joy does not come cheap. It costs us. For if Jesus endured his cross for the joy that was set before him, should we expect any less? Peter tells us, “To this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21).
But do not fear. Our call to suffer for the sake of Jesus comes from a God who is tender beyond description. In your pain and weakness, he is nearer than a brother (Proverbs 18:24), he heeds your cry of affliction (Psalm 9:12), he treasures all your tears (Psalm 56:8), and he’ll reward your endurance with all the joy eternity can muster (2 Corinthians 4:17). Perhaps best of all, if we suffer with him, “we will also reign with him” (2 Timothy 2:12). Oh, the joy!
For years in my wheelchair, I was blind to all this. I hated my quadriplegia. I was saturated in a culture of comfort and convenience like a pickle in a jar of vinegar, soaked in self-centeredness and totally unaware of the grievous offense of my grumblings and complaining. With such immature faith, I was trusting Jesus only in my imagination.
Then God lobbed a hand grenade into my wimpy walk with Christ: I now had chronic pain on top of quadriplegia. The misery of it all forced a choice. Was I, in fact, going to trust God or not? A wise friend showed me Philippians 1:29: “It has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” God had granted — or gifted — me with compounded suffering so that my actual trust in him would make Jesus look great.
The whole thing had lionhearted appeal. I can do something that will please God? And so I vigorously put my trust in God. Over time, doing so purged me of complaints, pressed me up against my Savior and his grace, disciplined my heart and mind, stretched my hope, made me hungry for truth, and taught me to give thanks in times of sorrow and pain. My suffering put me on a new path — one toward holiness.
And therein lies the joy so ecstatic and effervescent that it is like stepping under a thunderous waterfall of delight. Whenever infections, pressure sores, and pneumonia intensify my pain, I press harder against God, shun more sins (like anxiety and fear), and ascribe greater glory to Christ. And so he cracks open the floodgates for more joy, and I can’t help but say, “I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). More than content, I am hands-down, slam-dunk happy. “For you, O Lord, have made me glad” (Psalm 92:4).
His River of Delight
Do I still struggle with my disability? Of course. And squirm from awful pain? Yes. But it doesn’t diminish the joy. For I am “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10).
You are not meant to live in a pickle jar. You are meant to swim in a river of delight. So then, “share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). Open your heart to the full tank of pleasure spilling over heaven’s walls (Psalm 16:11).
Friend, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s plan to rescue humans is not only for man’s sake. It is for God’s sake. The Father is gathering a battle-tested crowd — an inheritance, pure and holy — who will delight in his joy and make it their eternal ambition to worship his Son in the happiness of the Holy Spirit. God is love, and the wish of love is to drench with delight those for whom God has suffered.
And soon, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will get their wish.