John 15:9-17
Joy and Love
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
Galatians 5:22-25
Fruit of the Holy Spirit
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
Jesus teaches us that His Father LOVES Him, so He LOVES us...He tells us, if we can keep His commands, we will remain in His LOVE...Just as He has kept His Father's commands and by remaining in His Father's commands, He remains in His Father's LOVE...Jesus tells us this so that a Joy may be in us -His Joy, and then our Joy may come and be complete...He gives us a new command and teaches us to Love each other, as He has LOVED (His Disciples)...His new command is this: Love each other...
If we can keep His commands, we will get a Joy, this Joy, His Joy...Jesus uses the terms Love and Joy in this teaching...Jesus did not use the word happiness, but uses the word Joy...Most of us have an idea of what we mean by Love, but what about the word "Joy."...Jesus does not call this Joy happiness...He does not call this Joy pleasurable...He does not call this Joy an ecstatic feeling...And although I do not think that this Joy is happiness, or pleasure, or peace or contentment -I do believe this Joy is a feeling and that is related to these things and related to the fruit of the Holy Spirit...So, I believe this Joy is connected to the Spiritual and the Soul...
C. S. Lewis says this about Joy: “I call it Joy...'Animal-Land' was not imaginative...But certain other experiences were...The first is itself the memory of a memory...As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery...It is difficult or find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it...It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse...withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased...In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else...The quality common to the three experiences...is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction...I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure...Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world...But then Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.” ...
Joy, according to Lewis, is an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction...This feeling or Joy is very fleeting, but real...But this Joy is almost imaginative, but yet not imaginative...Because of this imaginative-unimaginative mystery around this "Joy", he only got and felt a glimpse of this Joy...And he says it is not happiness, and it is not a pleasure...This Joy is greater than any happiness or any pleasure...But it does have something in common with happiness and pleasure...In fact, he says, that anyone who has ever tasted this "Joy" , if it were in our power would ever exchange it for any happiness, or pleasure, we have ever had in the world...Anyone who has experiences of this kind of Joy will always want it again...Pleasures and happiness are within our power, but this type of "Joy", is never is in our power...
Imagine having this Jesus type Joy...Jesus says that He has told His Disciples these things, so that "His Joy" may be in them and that by having His Joy then our Joy may then be complete...Having this "Jesus Joy" inside of us, seems like a very good thing, and it is...It seems that something is very good in us...Something like the indwelt Holy Spirit in us...Something that guides and helps us, and is searching for His Truth...Maybe this sense of Joy is given (or somehow related) to us by the Holy Spirit that is indwelt in us...The fruit of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control...
Jesus does use the word complete in His teaching, and says that "our Joy can be complete."...Our Joy can become complete, if His Joy is in us...We can be complete if Jesus is in us, and we are following His commands and doing His work...And if we love one another...This Joy is a transcendent Joy, one that is beyond our earthly feelings...