Welcome back to the podcast. We're on the topic of joy again. Namely, is our joy commanded

by God as an act of obedience, or is our joy in God made authentic by being spontaneous?

A common question posed to Christian heedness and a great question asked by Emily today.

Dear Pastor John and Tony, thank you so much for this podcast.

I have a question that comes from listening to two of your more recent episodes.

In them you stated that Joy is not a choice but a sovereign gift. To quote you

Pastor John quote Joy is a God-given spontaneous experience of the beauty, worth, and greatness of God."

Then in the next episode you discuss that we are commanded to rejoice by Jesus, Peter, and Paul, implying that we have

some control over our rejoicing.

Those are from Apj's 1983 and APJ 1984.

Pastor John, can you explain how this works,

spontaneous joy and commanded joy?

This is such an important issue because not only does it relate to joy, but it relates to all the behaviors and all the decisions and all the emotions of the Christian life.

The paradox between an emotion being given by God and being commanded by God runs through the whole Bible. And the reason it does,

the reason it runs through the whole Bible is because it's at the heart of living a life that glorifies God

by depending on God in doing what he commands us to do. When God commands us to do things

or believe things or decide things or feel things

he's treating us as genuinely responsible moral persons in his image unlike all the animals.

He's honoring us as a kind of beings in his image who can perceive things and think about things and evaluate things and then feel and act in accord with how we think and evaluate.

But while he created us to be morally responsible persons,

he did not create us to be independent from him and his enabling power.

Because if we use our own native powers to analyze the world, think it through, make decisions, experience emotions, perform actions,

...