Last time we looked at joy is joy in God, a choice that we make or is joy in God, a feeling

that just sort of comes and goes.

And Monday we saw that joy in God is not a choice.

It's not a choice, but a God given spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth and greatness

of God.

That's what you said, Pastor John, a great episode of Love That Response.

Joy is a gift, it's a supernatural gift, a divine awakening to true beauty.

And that leads to Dan's question today.

Dan is in Wheaton, Illinois, and he writes this, Pastor John, I have greatly appreciated

your emphasis on joy in the Christian life.

Indeed, the Psalmist tells us to rejoice always.

Paul describes himself as sorrowful yet always rejoicing.

Since the Bible commands us to have joy in God, are we in sin to the degree that we

lack joy, or could our lack of joy sometimes be the result of sin, but not a sin in itself?

Whenever we're dealing with the emotional dimension of the Christian life, which is most of

it, I think, a simple yes and no answer is seldom

adequate.

And I was thinking about why this is, and it might be helpful for me to just think out

loud with Dan for a minute, why endless qualifications sometimes seem to be necessary.

One is that words that refer to emotions are so flexible because they carry meaning,

but the meaning, the name of an emotion has to correspond with your experience of the

emotion because that's the nature of emotions and our experiences of emotions are so different.

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