The Key to Joy  

Embracing the truth about our identity.

Ask anyone around what makes me break out in a sloppy grin or lights up my eyes these days and they won’t hesitate to answer. They know it’s my granddaughters.  

These precious girls are just a year apart. One can now sit up on her own and is attempting to crawl. She is full of smiles and squeals. The other is walking and starting to speak in sentences. She is a bit shyer and more mischievous. Every time I’m with them, I marvel and giggle at the simplest things. The way they interact with each other or respond to new foods. Their first reaction to the swings at the park, or how they respond so differently to strangers.  

In short, they bring me joy. So much joy!  

Most of the time, unless you are raising teenagers (just kidding), we delight in children. We wonder in awe at how they see and respond to the world around them. Our hearts are full of a deep love that we often don’t understand and cannot explain.  

Yet, when we think of God, and imagine how he sees us, we think the opposite. We feel like he is watching us out of the corner of his eye, ready to pounce any time we do something wrong. We imagine him shaking his finger in our face with the expectation that we should know better. We see him with a stern, disappointed face, rather than a face that is smiling out of love and delight.  

Yes, that’s right. God delights in you.  

He sees you with the same deep love and joy that you see your children and grandchildren. He enjoys spending time with you. He laughs when you do something silly, and he is happy to be with you each day.  

The book of Ephesians tells us specifically how God sees us.  

In this book, the apostle Paul shares that God chooses us, we are adopted into his family, redeemed, forgiven by his grace, and granted an eternal inheritance. Paul wants us to see that God has lavished more blessing on us than we could ever imagine.  

“God adopts us into his family and makes us his heirs,” says Marcus Warner, author and former pastor. “We are given authority, title, status, and security. We become members of the divine, royal family.”  

When we decide to follow God, he no longer sees us as sinners. He sees us as saints. Saints! This becomes our identity. He puts our sin in our past and sees us through the eyes of righteousness. He is thrilled to have us in his family. We bring him joy.  

You bring him joy!  

Did you know that the identity center of the brain is also the brain’s joy center?  

“This is good news,” Marcus says, “because it means God designed us so that our true self is who we are when we are living with joy.”  

From a scientific perspective, joy is a high-energy reaction to a relational connection. When we feel personally connected to God, for example, we feel joy.  

Our struggles come when we lack joy and are missing this relational connection.  

With God, the lack of joy invades our being when we misunderstand our identity. When we start believing that God cannot possibly love us or want to be around us, we lose focus in our true identity and buy into messages of shame and fear instead.  

What if you altered your view of God? What if you lived life with the freedom that comes from seeing yourself the way God sees you?  

You would experience joy. A lot more joy!  

I want to leave you with this blessing from Numbers 6:24-26: 

May the Lord bless you and protect you. May the Lord smile on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord show you his favor and give you his peace. 

---

Beth Bramstedt is the Church Life Pastor at Christian Fellowship.