Love - Week 4

We often think about joy as an experience of happiness based on favorable circumstances: a stroke of good luck, a personal achievement, or a long-held desire finally being satisfied. But when joy depends on circumstances, it fades fast when the good times end. 

Advent joy is not about general happiness stemming from good times. It’s a deep sense of safety and freedom people feel because of God’s loving character, which remains constant through all circumstances, and because God can be trusted to ultimately bless and heal creation as he promised. Similar to the joy a friend’s presence brings on good days and bad, we experience joy as God walks with us through the fluctuations of life’s positive and painful circumstances. 

In the Bible, people express joy both when God delivers them from situations of oppression and while still in the middle of exile, persecution, and pain. As people remember God’s loving, rescuing actions throughout history, they wait in joyful hope for him to act in the future, even when that waiting requires patient suffering. 

This kind of joy is about being united with the God who walks with us and trusting that he will one day wipe away every tear. It looks to the future but also takes root in our present reality.

The season of Advent invites us to experience joy not because everything is perfect but because God is with us and his joy is already breaking into the world.

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another. - John 15:9-17

On the day of Jesus’ advent, an angel announces to a group of shepherds that God’s promised king is arriving in Bethlehem. This message is “good news of great joy which will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10). For centuries, Israel languished under foreign empires, longing for the arrival of God’s promised king who would bring lasting justice, peace, and healing (see Isa. 9:6-7, 11:1-9). But when the angel joyfully proclaims that this king has finally come, the people are not expecting this kind of arrival—or this kind of king.

Jesus does not overthrow human enemies or establish a dominant throne in Jerusalem. Instead, he challenges the root cause of his people’s suffering by fighting their true enemies—sin and death. These are the powerful forces of corruption that not only fuel Rome’s oppression but also enslave all humanity and compel every form of evil. By defeating these enemies, Jesus invites us into a new way of life in his Kingdom of humility, generosity, and love.

Jesus explains that by living according to his instruction, people receive his own joy, which eventually becomes “full” or “complete” (Greek: pleroo, John 15:11). And the most fundamental way to follow his instruction, he says, is to “love one another, just as I have loved you” (John 15:12).

Jesus is not inviting people to embrace generally warm affections toward others. He wants them to love others as he has loved them. Real joy is rooted in the self-giving love of Jesus.

How might embracing Jesus’ self-giving love reshape the way you seek joy and live toward others this Advent?