Joy To The World! In a few days, this familiar Christmas Carol will be heard round the world. Joy to the world. The Lord has come. More correctly, Joy to the world for those who come to know the Lord Jesus as Saviour. You see, happiness is not a word we can understand by looking it up in the dictionary. In fact, none of the qualities of the Christian life can be learned out of a book. Something more like apprenticeship is required, being around someone who out of years of devoted discipline shows us, by his or her entire behaviour, what it is. Moments of verbal instruction will certainly occur, but mostly an apprentice acquires skill by daily and intimate association with a “master,” picking up subtle but absolutely essential things, such as timing and rhythm and “touch.”
For the Christian, circumstances are incidental compared to the life of Jesus, the Messiah, that all Christians experience from the inside. For His is a life that not only happened at a certain point in history, but continues to happen, spilling out into the lives of those who receive Him, and then continues to spill out all over the place. Christ is, among much else, the revelation that God cannot be contained or hoarded. It is this “spilling out” quality of Christ’s life that accounts for the happiness of Christians, for joy is life in excess, the overflow of what cannot be contained within anyone person. Indeed, Christmas time is a reminder that God brings Joy To The World.
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