Joy In Action
Joy practically demands to be shared. When we’re experiencing joy it’s difficult to keep it hidden. True joy transcends life’s most difficult situations and gives us the peace and confidence we need to persevere. James writes about this joy when he says, “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let that endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
In that first chapter of James he goes on to talk about the need to not only hear the word of God, but to do the word of God. In fact, much of the book of James deals with putting our faith into action. That’s so much easier to do when we allow the joy of our faith to help us endure whatever the world has in store for us.
In fact, the things we do by allowing our joy to spur us to action are the only outward signs of the change God is accomplishing within us. James ends the first chapter of his book with a call to specific action, “Pure and undefiled religion in the sigh of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
Jerry Williams