CHAPTER 5: ARE JOY AND HAPPINESS AT ODDS WITH EACH OTHER?

WHILE RESEARCHING AND WRITING my book Happiness, I had dozens of nearly identical conversations.

Someone would ask, “What are you writing about?”

I’d respond, “Happiness.”

Unbelievers were immediately interested. Believers typically gave me an odd look and responded warily, “Do you mean joy?”

A pastor friend wrote to tell me why it would be a big mistake to write a book about happiness. He told me what he’d been taught to think: “Happiness changes from moment to moment and is reflected by our moods and emotions. Joy is a spiritual peace and contentment that only comes from God. God’s desire is not to make us happy in this life but to give us joy from our relationship with Christ.”

Many people I’ve talked with believe that Scripture distinguishes between joy and happiness, and that the Bible depicts joy as godly and happiness as ungodly.

Is Happiness the Opposite of Joy?

A book on Christian ministry has a chapter called “Happiness vs. Joy.” It says, “Joy and happiness are very different.”[1]

In a chapter titled “Joy versus Happiness” another Christian author states, “Happiness is a feeling, while joy is a state of being.”[2]

Another book claims, “Joy is distinctly a Christian word. . . . It is the reverse of happiness.”[3]

In an article called “Jesus Doesn’t Want You to Be Happy,” the author states, “As you read through the gospels you’ll see plenty of promises of joy, but none of happiness. And they are infinitely different things.”[4]

Happiness is the reverse of joy? The two are infinitely different? The Bible makes no promise of happiness? Emphatic proclamations against happiness are so common among believers that many assume they must be true.

What is the scriptural, historical, or linguistic basis for making such statements? There simply is none! God makes no significant distinction between joy and happiness. They are synonyms!

Don’t get me wrong. Joy is a great word, and I use it frequently. But there are other equally valid words with overlapping meanings, including happiness, gladness, merriment, delight, and pleasure. These are all part of what linguists call the same “semantic domain,” or family of words. Depicting joy in contrast with happiness has obscured the true meaning of both words.

If you look in Hebrew and Greek lexicons at the many different words translated joyful, glad, merry, and delighted, you’ll find that in nearly every case, these words are defined as “happy.”

John Piper writes, “If you have nice little categories for ‘joy is what Christians have’ and ‘happiness is what the world has,’ you can scrap those when you go to the Bible, because the Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction.”[5]

Secular sources agree that happiness and joy are synonyms—much more alike than not. Joy, in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, is defined as “a feeling of great happiness” and “a source or cause of great happiness.”[6] Every dictionary and thesaurus attests to the predominant overlap of meaning between happiness and joy.

Don’t we instinctively know this? Think of our common expressions using the word joy:

In each case, isn’t joy obviously synonymous with happiness?

Joy Isn’t Inherently Godly

Isaac Watts (1674–1748), who wrote “Joy to the World,” also spoke of “carnal joys.”[7]

Charles Spurgeon recognized the difference between false and true joy:

Christ would not have us rejoice with the false joy of presumption, so He bares the sharp knife and cuts that joy away. Joy on a false basis would prevent us from having true joy.[8]

Someone can have Christ-centered happiness or Christ-denying happiness. The former will last forever; the latter has an exceedingly short shelf life.

Notice writer A. W. Tozer’s (1897–1963) negative use of joy and positive use of happiness sixty years ago: “Human beings are busy trying to work up a joy of some sort. . . . They turn to television programs. But we still don’t see the truly happy faces.”[9] Tozer realized that artificial attempts at finding joy can’t create the happiness that comes only from Christ.

There’s a Biblical Link between Joy and Happiness

The following passages emphatically refute two common claims: (1) that the Bible doesn’t mention or value or promise happiness and (2) that joy and happiness have contrasting meanings.

In fact, the Bible overflows with accounts of God’s people being happy in him. Realize that these are not one-person paraphrases; rather, each of these translation teams consisted of Hebrew and Greek scholars who came to a consensus as to the best English renderings. (Emphasis has been added by the author.)

New International Version

Holman Christian Standard Bible

New Living Translation

God’s Word

New English Translation

New Century Version

Good News Translation

Is It True That Joy Isn’t an Emotion?

A Christian writer says, “We don’t get joy by seeking a better emotional life, because joy is not an emotion. It is a settled certainty that God is in control.”[10] Another says, “Joy is not an emotion. It is a choice.”[11]

The idea that “joy is not an emotion” (a statement that appears online more than 16,000 times) promotes an unbiblical concept.

A Bible study says, “Spiritual joy is not an emotion. It’s a response to a Spirit-filled life.”[12] But if this response doesn’t involve emotions of happiness or gladness or delight or good cheer, in what sense is it “spiritual joy”?

Some claim that joy is a fruit of the Spirit and therefore not an emotion. But in Galatians 5:22, love and peace sandwich the word joy. If you love someone, don’t you feel something for them? And what is peace if it doesn’t involve feelings of contentment and satisfaction?

A hundred years ago, every Christian knew the meaning of joy. Today if you ask a group of Christians, “What is joy?” most will grope for words and come up with only one emphatic opinion: that joy is different from happiness—and superior to it.

Saying joy is without feelings is like saying rain isn’t wet or ice isn’t cold. Scripture, dictionaries, and common language—except the recent language of some churches—simply don’t support this separation.

When God calls us to rejoice in him, does he care only about what we think and do, not how we feel about him? No. He commands us to love him not just with all our minds but with all our hearts (see Matthew 22:37).

Yes, it’s possible to obey and serve God without feeling joy. But God rebukes those who do (see Deuteronomy 28:47-48). In other words, he emphatically says he wants us to feel joy!

The Father said twice, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5). To be well pleased means to feel pleasure. Whether you call those feelings joy, happiness, gladness, or delight—and I think any and all are appropriate—the Father certainly felt them toward Jesus, and so should we.

When the Father said of his Son the Messiah, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights” (Isaiah 42:1), did he have feelings toward his Son? Have you ever delighted in someone without having strong feelings about that person? Weren’t the Father’s feelings toward his Son joyful?

The psalmist said, “I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God” (Psalm 43:4). Can you imagine saying to someone, “You are my exceeding joy,” without feeling strong emotions toward them?

Reducing joy to an unemotional, otherworldly, purely “spiritual” state strips it of the delight God intended.

Throughout the 1987 movie The Princess Bride, the Sicilian mastermind Vizzini repeatedly uses the word inconceivable to describe event after event that actually happens. Finally, Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

His statement also applies to Christians who frequently use but often misunderstand the word joy. It doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

The notion that we can have joy without happiness has perverted the meaning of both words and helped spawn a culture of Christian curmudgeons. Feeling morally superior, they may affirm that they have the joy of Jesus deep in their hearts, but apparently it’s so deep it never makes its way to their faces. It never comes out in their words, either. Consider the number of “Christian” social media trolls who do nothing but look for opportunities to demean, criticize, and mercilessly judge motives.

Teaching seminary students about preaching, Charles Spurgeon said, “When you speak of heaven, let your face light up with a heavenly gleam. Let your eyes shine with reflected glory. And when you speak of hell—well, then your usual face will do.”[13]

There’s a Rich History of Equating Joy with Happiness

Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) cited John 15:11—Jesus’ prayer that his “joy might remain in you” (KJV)—to prove this point: “The happiness Christ gives to his people, is a participation of his own happiness.” This proves that joy and happiness were interchangeable to him. Edwards wrote of “the joy and happiness that the church shall have in her true bridegroom”[14] and spoke of believers as “these joyful happy persons.”[15] Edwards used the words joyful and happy to reinforce, not contrast, each other.

Charles Spurgeon said, “May your Christian life be fraught with happiness, and overflowing with joy.”[16] Spurgeon’s views of happiness and joy, evident in hundreds of his sermons, are completely contrary to the artificial wall the contemporary church has erected between joy and happiness.

With the help of Logos Bible software, I discovered that Spurgeon used happiness or happy more than 23,000 times in his sermons, the vast majority of them favorably.

Spurgeon routinely used joy and happiness interchangeably. He said, “A happy Christian attracts others by his joy.”[17] Spurgeon described his conversion this way: “Oh, it was a joyful day, a blessed day! Happy day, happy day, when His choice was known to me, and fixed my choice on Him!”[18]

Spurgeon also declared, “Joy is a delightful thing. You cannot be too happy, Brothers and Sisters! No, do not suspect yourself of being wrong because you are full of delight. . . . Provided that it is joy in the Lord, you cannot have too much of it!”[19] Spurgeon gave that single qualification—“in the Lord”—when it comes to our happiness or joy. Happiness to Spurgeon was biblical and God honoring, not suspect or second class.

Spurgeon would have fully agreed with Mike Mason:

When I’m joyful, I’m happy, and when I’m happy, I’m joyful. What could be plainer? Why should I want anything to do with a joy that isn’t coupled with happiness, or with a kind of happiness that is without joy? Happiness without joy is shallow and transient because it’s based on outward circumstances rather than an attitude of the heart. As for joy without happiness, it’s a spiritualized lie. The Bible does not separate joy and happiness and neither should we.[20]

We Need to Correct the Anti-Happiness Message

In the twentieth century, many Bible-believing churches moved from Spurgeon’s “You cannot be too happy” to “God doesn’t want you to be happy.”

Some Christian leaders—Oswald Chambers was one among many—saw the word happiness applied to sinful activities (e.g., people abandoning their families to “be happy”), so they started speaking against happiness-seeking.

Their hatred of sin and disdain for pursuing it in the name of happiness was fully justified. But their response should have been, “God is happy and built us to desire happiness. He promises the highest form of happiness in Jesus. But we should seek happiness in him, never in sin.” Sin, by the way, is never the friend of happiness; it is its ultimate enemy!

It’s not too late to convey this message of Christ-centered happiness to our children and grandchildren and churches. Since they long for happiness, it’s a message they desperately need to hear. Getting this message across requires both our words and our consistent example of living what the Bible calls the “good news of happiness.”

I agree with Joni Eareckson Tada:

We’re often taught to be careful of the difference between joy and happiness. Happiness, it is said, is an emotion that depends upon what “happens.” Joy by contrast, is supposed to be enduring, stemming deep from within our soul and which is not affected by the circumstances surrounding us. . . . I don’t think God had any such hair-splitting in mind. Scripture uses the terms interchangeably along with words like delight, gladness, blessed. There is no scale of relative spiritual values applied to any of these.[21]

So what’s the difference between what the Bible calls the “good news of happiness” (Isaiah 52:7) and the “good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10)? There is no difference. Both happiness and joy are great words. We need both of them, along with their synonyms, which include pleasure, gladness, cheer, and merriment. No one word is big enough to describe the sheer delight of who God is and what he has done for us in Jesus.

For too long we’ve distanced the gospel from what God created us to desire and what he desires for us—happiness.

We need to reverse the trend. Let’s reclaim the word happiness in light of both Scripture and church history. Our message shouldn’t be “Don’t seek happiness” but “You’ll find in Jesus the happiness you’ve always longed for.”