Some of a Christian’s joy is not based on our current circumstances, but on our future circumstances: We’re happy because of what’s coming next. Namely, when Jesus returns, sets up his Kingdom, and straightens the world out.
A fair number of Christians believe all our joy is based on future circumstances. They’re not happy now: They’re downright bitter, angry, and cynical. But they look forward to the future. In fact, they’re the folks who usually reinterpret “joy” to mean patience—and they patiently wait for the future, where they expect Jesus will avenge them against their enemies. (What’re the chances they won’t be happy with the future either? Better than average.)
Skeptics don’t understand hopeful joy. They mock it as “pie in the sky when you die, by and by.” They’re outraged by how often people use future joys to justify present suffering. They’re right to be outraged: Future joy is no justification for present suffering. It can help us survive it, but it is never an excuse for it. There’s nothing in the scriptures which say, or even hint, that suffering speeds up Jesus’s return, or a lack of suffering delays it.
Christ’s own suffering achieved the Kingdom, but he suffered so we won’t have to. Anyone who preaches otherwise is trying to con you into doing their dirty work. One of our duties as Christians is to stop the suffering in the world—not make excuses for it, and especially not to add to it. Adding to it is the devil’s job. Helping the devil puts us on the wrong side.
But while future joy doesn’t justify suffering, suffering happens. Jesus warned us it’s a usual part of our universe. He wants us to take comfort in future joy—
Joy and hope.
A byproduct of faith is hope, the belief, based on trust in God, that something will happen. God is the god of hope, and when we believe in the things he tells us will happen, the Holy Spirit fills us with joy and peace.
The problem—which I run into all the time—are the folks who put their hopes in the wrong thing. They claim certain scriptures are God’s promises to them personally, and they’re not. They take their fondest wishes, indiscriminately apply, “God works everything for our good,” and presume God’s working out those wishes. It’s false hope. There’s a lot of it going round. Yet Christians regularly base our hopeful joy on it.
We shouldn’t take joy in anything other than God’s real promises. We will be disappointed otherwise. When people base our joy on false hope, and our false hopes turn out to be nothing, we swing from joy to despair. We doubt everything. Including the things God has said, the things we can bank on. And while it’s perfectly all right to ask questions of God, despairing people don’t bother to listen to the answers: Their great happiness is replaced with great unhappiness, and they’re bitter and untrusting and don’t wanna put faith in anything, much less God. Lots of them even leave Christianity altogether.
Avoid false hope like the plague. Figure out which promises of God are real promises, and put your faith into them. Base your joy on those hopes. Don’t base it on just anything which sounds good. Don’t dream of pie in the sky. Look to the Kingdom, which will come. Look to a world where God’s will is done, exactly like it’s done in heaven. Look forward to that. That’s solid.