What Is Biblical Joy? — Edwards on the Joy That Holds
⏱ 13 min read
You have read the verses. The joy of the Lord is your strength. Rejoice in the Lord always. These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. You have read them, and you have wanted to feel something underneath the reading, and what you have felt instead is the small private failure of a Christian woman who has been told her whole life that joy is the mark of the faithful — and who, on the long Tuesday afternoons of a hard season, cannot locate it.
The question what is biblical joy is the question of a woman who has noticed that the joy described in scripture does not match the joy described by the bookshop. The bookshop joy is bright. It claps. It produces a particular kind of face. The biblical joy, in the lives of the people who actually had it, sat through long suffering, kept its mouth steady at funerals, walked into prison without trembling, and did not require the face. Something is different. You have sensed the difference. You have not, perhaps, had the language for it.
This is the slow version of the answer. Jonathan Edwards, the New England pastor and theologian who in 1746 wrote a long careful book called Religious Affections on exactly this question, will be the older voice we walk with. Three passages, slowly read. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
The thing biblical joy is not
It is not happiness. That is the first thing to settle.
The modern English word happiness points to a feeling-state — pleasant, brightish, dependent on outward circumstance. The biblical word — the one Edwards spent decades pastoring around — points to something else: a steady orientation of the soul, a holy affection, a settled gladness in God Himself which sits underneath the daily emotional weather and is therefore present in suffering as well as ease. Edwards’s whole life’s work was to defend the distinction. He had watched the Great Awakening produce, in his own congregation, a great deal of religious excitement that did not hold. The excitement was emotional. It was loud. It was, in Edwards’s word, affecting. And six months later, the people who had wept the loudest were often the people whose lives had moved least. Edwards was not against feeling. He was against feeling that was not joined to a settled, ongoing orientation of the soul toward God.
The biblical word for that settled orientation is what Religious Affections was written to describe. The joy of the scriptures is one of these holy affections — not a mood, but a steady inclination of the heart toward God as its highest good, present whether the day is pleasant or hard.
If you have been a Christian woman for any length of time and you have wondered why your devotional life produces less of the bright feeling than the bookshop promised, this is the diagnosis. You have not been failing at joy. You have been quietly working with the wrong definition of it. The thing the verses are pointing at is not a feeling you have to manufacture each morning. It is an orientation you let God grow in you across years. (If self-care and the inner life have begun to look the same to you, Christian self-care: 20 ideas that aren’t bubble baths walks the wider list of slow practices the orientation grows inside; and self-love and gratitude — the Christian practice that doesn’t require either word is the daily companion to the small noticing-work that joy needs to grow at all.)
The first passage: the soul emptied for love
“I felt an ardency of soul to be — what I know not otherwise how to express — emptied and annihilated; to love Him with a holy and pure love; to serve and follow Him; to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity.”
— Jonathan Edwards
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is Edwards writing from his own diary, in a moment he later reproduced because the language was as exact as he could get it. Notice what he says joy looks like, from the inside. Emptied. Annihilated. These are not the words of bright feeling. They are the words of a soul that has stopped trying to fill itself with the things it had been filling itself with, and has gone quiet enough that a different filling — God Himself — can be felt arriving.
The word ardency does the careful work here. Ardency is heat without noise. It is the long steady burn of a coal rather than the bright flare of paper. Edwards’s joy, in this passage, is the heat of a soul finally pointed in the right direction — pointed at God rather than at the small substitute gods of career, comfort, reputation, even religious performance. The pointing is the joy. The emptiedness is what made the pointing possible.
This is the part the modern joy-talk misses entirely. Modern joy-talk assumes joy is something you add — that the joyful woman is the woman who has stacked enough good practices, gratitude exercises, mindfulness minutes and bright music on top of an ordinary life that the cumulative effect is joy. Edwards’s joy moves the other way. The joyful woman, on his account, is the woman who has been slowly emptied — of the substitute fillings, of the chronic self-justification, of the noise — until what is left is the ardency of being pointed at God. The emptiedness is not depression. It is room. The room is where the holy affection grows.
For the depleted Christian woman, this is the consolation hidden in the very thing she has been afraid of. The emptied feeling of a hard season — the loss of the bright mood, the going-quiet of the bookshop joy, the inability to manufacture the conference face — may not be the disappearance of joy. It may be the soil being cleared for the older kind. Edwards’s joy grew in soil that had been emptied. Yours may be growing in soil being emptied right now.
What this older joy actually feels like in a week
It is not constant gladness. It does not produce a particular face. It is closer to a low and steady warmth somewhere behind the breastbone, present whether the morning was easy or hard, that allows a woman to keep going at the right pace through both. The grieving woman who is held by the older joy still weeps. The exhausted mother who is held by it still says she is tired. The widow who has it still misses him. Joy in the older sense does not subtract any of these. It underlies them.
This is what Nehemiah 8:10 actually meant by the joy of the Lord is your strength. Not that the bright mood will carry you through. That the underlying orientation of the soul toward God — the His-ness of your gladness, the fact that He Himself is what you are glad about — is the load-bearing thing inside a week that would otherwise have nothing to bear it.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s is, in its quiet way, an attempt to build a daily home for that orientation. Not a daily fix. A small page each evening that keeps the soul in proximity to the One she is being slowly oriented toward, so the orientation deepens by a small amount through the year, the way a tree’s roots deepen by a small amount through a year, without ever looking like an event.
The second passage: the practice that shows what you place your happiness in
“This your practice shows, that you place not your happiness in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it twice. The sentence is short. The diagnosis is precise.
Edwards is preaching to people who would have said, if asked, that they loved God. They sang the hymns. They knew the catechism. They attended the meeting. And Edwards, with the pastoral exactness he was known for, is naming what their practice — the actual shape of their days, not the words of their profession — was demonstrating about where their happiness was actually being placed.
The point is not that they were liars. The point is that the human heart’s actual locations of happiness are revealed not by what it claims but by what it returns to when it is tired. The Tuesday-evening default. The pull of the phone before the pull of the page. The arrangement of the day around the small consolations that have, quietly, become substitutes for the bigger one.
Edwards’s question, gently translated for the modern Christian woman, would sound like this: what does the actual shape of your week reveal about where your happiness is being placed? Not the answer you would give on the church-foyer Sunday morning. The answer your Tuesday afternoon reveals on its own.
You will know the answer. Most women do. The Tuesday afternoon defaults to wine, or to the scroll, or to the silent withdrawal from a marriage that has not been tended, or to the small administrative tasks that feel productive but are really a way to avoid the harder quiet, or to the planning of the next thing that will make the present thing bearable. The defaults are not catastrophic. They are simply where you have placed your happiness, and the placement is, Edwards would say, the obstacle to the older joy.
The older joy requires the re-placing of the happiness. Slowly. Not with the violence of a New-Year resolution. With the patient daily turning of the Tuesday-afternoon default toward God Himself, in small ways the week can hold. The five-minute sit with the verse. The honest evening sentence. The walk that is not for fitness. The phone put down at nine in the evening. The candle lit at the kitchen table. The five quiet minutes with Him before the children wake.
These are not techniques for happiness. They are the slow re-placing of the happiness. The joy grows where the happiness has been placed in the right soil. (If the verse-and-page rhythm is the practice that has gone missing, how to start a gratitude journal you’ll actually keep is the patient companion to a daily small return.)
A small somatic note on what the older joy does to the body
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Edwards’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to your week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let your back rest against the chair — not sit up straight, just rest. Take one slow inhale, and on the exhale, let the shoulders drop by half an inch. Notice the small unbracing in the chest. The chronic bracing that the modern Christian woman lives inside — the held breath of the day’s small anxieties — is the somatic shape of joy placed in the wrong soil. The body has been carrying the weight of the wrong placement, all this time, in the held shoulders and the short exhale.
Take one more slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go slightly further out than usual. Let the diaphragm release the small held-back portion it has been holding back. That fuller exhale is what the body does when the soul’s happiness is, for one small moment, placed in the right soil. The body knows. The body has always known. It just needs the soul to give it permission to land.
Then continue reading.
The third passage: the rational knowledge that opens to taste
“The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it slowly. This is Edwards’s bridge between the head and the heart, and it is the passage that quiets the false choice the modern Christian woman has been handed.
The false choice runs like this: either I think about God carefully, in which case my faith is cold and intellectual, or I feel God strongly, in which case my faith is warm but shapeless. Edwards refuses the choice. The rational knowledge is the soil. The Spirit’s breath is what lets the soil grow the tasting of God’s sweetness. The two are not opposed. They are sequenced.
This is what Religious Affections was written to teach. The holy affections — the steady orientations of the soul toward God — grow in a heart that has seen what is true about Him. Not seen in the academic sense. Seen in the slow contemplative sense — the long looking at scripture and at His character until the seeing becomes a kind of recognition, and the recognition becomes the taste Edwards is describing.
The biblical joy is the taste. It does not come from concentration. It does not come from manufacturing feeling. It comes from the slow looking — at Him, at His character, at what He has said — until the Spirit, in His own timing, makes the looking turn sweet. Your job is the looking. The sweetness is His.
This is why the bookshop joy fails the depleted woman. The bookshop joy skipped the looking. It went straight for the sweetness. It promised the taste without the slow contemplative grounds the taste actually grows in. Edwards’s joy, by contrast, is patient. The woman who walks the rational knowledge of who God is — through the slow reading of scripture, through the careful turning of a phrase, through the years of half-paragraphs lived with — finds, over time, that the Spirit has been quietly turning the knowledge into taste. The taste is the joy.
You cannot rush this. You also cannot manufacture it. What you can do is keep showing up to the slow looking. The verse in the morning. The half-paragraph in the evening. The line that catches you at four in the afternoon. The quiet noticing of who He has been in the small mercies of the week. The looking accumulates. The Spirit, in His own time, turns it to taste.
What is biblical joy, by the time you get to the end of Edwards
It is the steady orientation of the soul toward God as its highest good.
It is the slow ardency that grows in a soul that has been emptied of the wrong fillings.
It is the re-placing of the happiness, week by week, from the Tuesday-afternoon defaults back to nearness with Him.
It is the taste the Spirit gives a soul that has been doing the slow looking long enough that the looking has become recognition.
It is not constant brightness. It is not the conference face. It is not a feeling you have to manufacture by Sunday morning. It is the underlying gladness in God Himself which is present in suffering as well as ease, and which a Christian woman grows into over years rather than days.
The verses make sense again, after Edwards. The joy of the Lord is your strength — yes, because the orientation of the soul toward Him is the load-bearing thing inside the week. Rejoice in the Lord always — yes, because the rejoicing is in Him, not in the circumstances, and He is the same on the hard day as on the easy one. That your joy might be full — yes, because the fullness is the slow filling of the emptied soul with the steady ardency of being pointed at the One it was made for.
This is the biblical joy. It will not feel like happiness. It will feel like something deeper, slower, sober, and able to hold. (The sibling reads in this contemplative-fathers series sit at what is the peace of God — Murray on the peace that passes and what is the joy of the Lord — Spurgeon on strength through joy.)
☕ Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short verse and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that keeps the soul in proximity to the One the older joy grows around, until the proximity becomes the joy.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Edwards’s slow vocabulary — holy affections, the steady orientation, the taste that grows from looking — into a daily companion built for the Christian woman whose joy has begun to feel like a different word than the one the bookshop is selling, and who is ready, slowly, for the older kind.
