A Joy Worth Bearing

Joy is a serious thing.

And it is, in a way, a heavy thing. Nothing to be trifled with. It is something to bear, not as a burden, but as a reward of great weight.

Joy is really the main objective in life. The Westminster Shorter Catechism declares that “Man’s chief end [purpose] is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” We were designed to enjoy.

Adam was created for a variety of reasons: naming, cultivating, taking and holding dominion; but his walks with God in the cool of the day, the joy of relationship with his Creator, was the pinnacle of his purpose.

Joy calls our hearts. We want it. We seek it in a variety of places. The lack of God in our hearts creates a void that we can’t bear. We will seek to fill it with temporal things that fade and disappoint.

But our pursuit of purposeful joy does not stop when we reach conversion. It is an ongoing journey. Our God-sized void is not filled immediately. In fact, being God-sized, it is infinite. It is what C.S. Lewis calls our “inconsolable secret“: our inner yearning for more of God. It is easily buried, as Lewis points out, but it remains in all of us.

The fulfillment of that joy, always growing but never exhausted, is what makes life feel alive.

To know such a joy is a heavy thing. There are only a few moments in my life that I can say that I might have been close to touching this gloriously heavy joy.

What makes the joy of divine relationship so heavy, so burdensome? Here also Lewis offers helpful insight:

To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

This is a joy worth bearing: that we are indeed God’s handiwork, his magnum opus, his children. It’s a joy that demands we face our own undeserving and recognize the utter injustice of our situation. It calls us to heed that, indeed, the scales are tipped in our favor. This joy calls us to lay down our arms, and our plowshares. It bids us drop our doing at the threshold and enter our Father’s house with nothing left of our wealth except what has been given to us.

Our culture has idolized self-sufficiency. As men, we are uniquely tempted to idolize it. True men, we tell ourselves, lean on no charity. We are responsible for ourselves. We make our own way. We are not given things for free, that we might enjoy rewards we did not earn. We disdain “trust-fund babies”. We praise “self-made men”.

The truth is, there will be no self-made men at the throne of God. Every man there will stand on someone else’s work.

Responsibility is good. Self-sufficiency is also good, to a degree. Hard work is good.

But this joy of being free and hopelessly indebted, all at once, is worth bearing every day.