Packer bristles, and rightly so, when the spiritually shallow of our day speak casually of joy in terms of religious frivolity, fun or that sort of light-hearted levity that fails to equip and empower God’s people to suffer well. Indeed, he cuts across the grain of standard but largely misguided Christian opinion when he insists that biblical “joy” is inextricably tethered to our grasp of deep doctrinal truths. I’ll let him speak for himself:
The secret of joy for believers lies in the fine art of Christian thinking. It is by this means that the Holy Spirit, over and above his special occasional visitations in moments of joy, regularly sustains in us the joy that marks us out as Christ’s. Our Lord Jesus wants our joy to be full. Certainly, he has made abundant provision for our joy. And if we focus our minds on the facts from which joy flows, springs of joy will well up in our hearts every day of our lives; and this will turn our ongoing pilgrimage through this world into an experience of contentment and exaltation of which the world knows nothing. (God’s Plans for You, 125)
My reading of the biblical text, with Packer’s considerable help, leads me to regard “joy” as something akin to spiritual euphoria. Joy, then, is a feeling, or better still an affection, a deep, durable delight, if you will, that is the fruit of a mind immersed in the truth of who God is and all that he has savingly secured for us in his Son.
The Joy of Crucifixion
Packer was awakened to this life-changing truth as he read Scripture with the help of the 17th-century Puritans. Contrary to widespread misperception of the Puritan vision for life, these men helped Packer see that there is immeasurable joy in heeding the call of Christ to self-denial and the happy (never morbid) embrace of the rigors of discipleship in a fallen and broken world. The counterintuitive call to take up the offense of the cross (Mark 8:34–35) serves only to intensify and deepen the spiritual euphoria of knowing God in Christ.
What, then, might we learn about Christian experience from the life and thought of this latter-day Puritan (Packer turns 89 on July 22)? Countless lessons, to be sure, among which is the encouraging, Christ-exalting truth that “holiness is essentially a happy business” (Rediscovering Holiness, 87).
