The Joy That Does Not Count the Cost

These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
— John 15:11

Into the Word

We think happiness is something we find. We assume it is waiting at the end of the next thing we get, and many of us spend years looking for it in that direction.

Two Kinds of Happy

The ancient Greeks had two words that help us here.

The first is hēdonē (ἡδονή), the happiness that comes from what we take. It is the pleasure of getting what we want, real but short. The house we wanted delivers a season of pleasure, and then quietly reveals that the void is still there, unchanged. One long-term study of lottery winners in Sweden found that a large win made people more satisfied with their circumstances, yet did little for their everyday happiness.

The second is eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), the deeper happiness of a life that is flourishing, lived as it was meant to be lived. Scripture gives that idea a different center. Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). Flourishing is found in what we give and who we become in the giving. We might call it joy.

Joy moves the other way, outward, toward another person. It is what a mother feels watching her child take a first step, or a teacher when a student finally understands. It is what God felt when He looked at what He had made.

The Story of a Mother

In 2014, a fire broke out in an apartment building in Haverhill, Massachusetts. A young mother and her eighteen-month-old son were trapped on the second floor. When the situation became desperate, she did the only thing love could think to do. She held her son as tightly as she could, told him she loved him, and jumped.

She became the cushion. She broke several vertebrae; her son was not hurt. Even after the fall, as debris rained down around them, she shouted at him to run to safety.

From her hospital bed, she told reporters that all the pain, everything she would have to go through, was worth it to see her son run around and play.

People say a mother’s love does not follow reason, and perhaps it does not, but that love saved her son. What she felt as she lay there with a broken spine, watching him run, was joy, the kind that does not ask what it will cost.

Where does that love come from? Not finally from instinct or training or a good upbringing. It comes from God, who placed it in her long before the fire and has placed it in all of us, from the beginning, before we knew what to do with it.

Very Good, and Why

On the sixth day, when God looked at everything He had made, including us, the word changed. The verdict was no longer “good” but “very good” (Gen. 1:31). The Hebrew word is meʾōd (מְאֹד): exceedingly, abundantly, to the fullest degree.

Why?

Because “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and love lives between persons who give and receive, who know and are known. That is why God did not stop at making a world. He made us, beings capable of receiving His love and choosing to return it. He did not build devotion into us the way gravity is built into stone, because He wanted love that was chosen.

He made us to exchange love with Him, to receive His love and return it freely, to make Him glad, and in making Him glad to find our own deepest gladness.

Jesus told His disciples why He was saying these things: “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). Full joy does not depend on circumstances or seasons or how well things are going. It comes from remaining, staying connected to the source the way a branch stays in the vine.

What the Emptiness Points To

When we find ourselves without joy, trying harder will not fix it, and neither will owning more or experiencing more. Joy was never meant to be found in those directions.

The void we feel tells us something about how God made us. It is what hēdonē always leaves behind, and what eudaimonia was always pointing toward. We were made for a love that flows from God, through us, and outward toward one another, and when we try to generate that love from within ourselves, something in us feels the loss, even when we cannot name it.

Before We Move On

The mother on the ground, spine broken, watching her son run, was not thinking about herself. She was not calculating what she had lost or gained; she was given over to something larger than her own comfort. In that moment, she was experiencing what God designed joy to be: a love so complete it forgets to count the cost.

That is the love we were made for. It comes from God first and then moves through us toward others.

A love like that is always worth it, and its joy does not run out.

Original source: The Joy That Does Not Count the Cost — Bible Portal Insights

Want to read more? Visit Bible Portal Insights.