Lesson Three: The Fruit of Joy
8 | SU STA I N
Summary: In this lesson we will be looking at the fruit of joy. We will consider how joy is achieved, and how it should look in the life of the believer. We will also pursue the question of how a person can have joy in the midst of a world that is definitely not set up to make it easy for us.
Lead-in Questions: 1.
Is there a difference between joy and happiness?
2. Is it possible to have joy in the midst of sorrow? How? 3. Is joy an emotion or a state of being? Explain. 4. What would a person be like who had this fruit evidenced in their life?
G RO UP N OT E
A Sign of Something More
Question: Have C.S. Lewis was a convinced atheist as a young man, but you ever had there was always something that tickled his brain about moments of the concept of God. After many years of questioning inexplicable joy the existence of God, he was finally converted to the like those that C.S. belief in the existence of a personal God at the age Lewis described? of 31. Let’s hear how he describes this experience at When, where, and Oxford University: “You must picture me alone in that how often?
room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”4.
This was not, however, Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. On that evening, Lewis was simply giving in to his belief that a personal God existed who expected and deserved to have his commitment and service.
explain how it was that he became convinced of the existence of Christ Jesus, personal salvation, and of the truths of the Christian tradition. For him, the basis of this remarkable change lay in the presence of moments of unexplainable joy in his life that made him aware that there was something or someone standing outside time and space who deserved his complete trust and commitment. This presence he came to believe was God. Though absolutely capable of forcing our hand, this God chose to give humanity the opportunity to choose for itself whether to follow or deny His reality. For Lewis, joy looked like a pattern of individual moments, happening at random times, in which he suddenly felt an incredible sense of something greater; something mystical; something unexplainable that touched him well beyond the realm of his intellect and rationality. Lewis was, at the same time, both drawn to and repelled by this sense of the infinite and supernatural. Though he had traveled down many paths intellectually that led him away from Christianity, he could not shake the fact that there was something (or someone) out there reaching out to him. It took time, but when he converted to Christianity, Lewis became one of the greatest defenders of the faith who has ever lived. Not only did he defend all comers in debates held before the gathered students at Oxford, but his writings became some of the most beloved additions to Christian libraries throughout the world. All this happened because Lewis experienced moments of joy in his life. His conversion story alone should make us curious as to the meaning of the word “joy” as we find it in the list of the various fruit of the Spirit.
The final step of his conversion came a little later, and So, let’s begin our search for the true meaning of this is equally provocative in its description. On September enigmatic, three letter word, “joy.” 28, 1931, Lewis, his brother Warnie, and some friends decided to go to visit the zoo. Lewis sat in the sidecar of Warnie’s motorbike, and what happened next is vintage Lewis. “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached One of the dilemmas of preachers and theologians is how the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in to isolate the meanings of words. Terms like “joy” have thought. Nor in great emotion. ‘Emotional’ is perhaps the such a wide range of usages that it becomes difficult to last word we can apply to some of the most important get a handle on its essence. For example, do joy and events. It was more like when a man, after long sleep, happiness represent the same thing? If not, is joy an still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he emotion, or a state of being that is beyond emotion? is now awake.”5 The dictionary definition of the word includes a variety Lewis wrote the book, Surprised by Joy, in an effort to of meanings, many of which overlap with the idea of
The Definition of Joy
4 C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); ch. XIV 5 Surprised By Joy, ch. XV
