FMF: Joy!

Sadly I missed out on the Five Minute Friday Party last week because (not-so-sadly) I was away for a family overnighter, but great news, I'm back for this one!  So here goes, five minutes of unedited writing on the topic of Joy.

Ready...GO!

This topic couldn't be more fitting for this week because lately everywhere I turn I have been hearing the words "joy", "celebrate", and "free".  I've been thinking a lot about these things lately and about how we were created to be joyful, and to celebrate this gift of life that we have been blessed with.

So many times we can confuse joy with happy, when really the two words are as different as night and day.  Happiness is more of a feeling that is driven by our outward circumstances and situations, whereas joy is an inward state of the heart.  It is a strength that sustains throughout difficult seasons and spills out carrying us over to the other side.

So how does joy equal strength, and what does it have to do with celebrating and being free if it isn't happiness?  Well for me joy brings strength because it causes me to change my focus from the present circumstances, and to look toward God and His faithful promises.  These promises bring hope because they shift my perspective into an eternal one instead of a here-and-now one.  When I look at eternity, and more specifically eternity in Heaven with my Savior, I become free from the effect of the cares of today, which are fleeting and momentary (as the Bible says) and am strengthened to carry on in celebration of what lies ahead.

STOP! (Okay...so I went 5 min over again...so-o-o-o-ry! Still a newbie here) ;)

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Join in the Five Minute Friday Party with Lisa-Jo Baker.
How? Just write for 5 minutes on the given topic and link it up here.

The only rule is that you must visit the person who linked up before you and encourage them in their comments.  (Yay! Building community!) :)

Created to Worship

So often I've heard it said among Christians, "don't be led by your emotions", or "emotions are deceiving", to the point that I end up feeling like I can't hear Christ through my emotions, or if I feel a feeling in my times of conversing, or worshiping Him that I can't trust those emotions, therefore they have no validity in the moment and I should shut them off.

However, during some time spent worshiping God today the thought suddenly occurred to me that what if God not only wants me to experience Him in my thoughts, but also in my feelings....that what if...those feelings are a way for me to feel Him and be directed by Him, a way to experience His love, His joy, His peace, and His fulfillment.

By nature, and being an "artistic" sort of person it could be said that I am fairly emotional and sensitive to things that others would not normally respond to.  I've always tended to view this as a bad thing because of all of the negative things I've heard from Christians about our emotions; however I don't recall reading anywhere in the Bible that the Holy Spirit only wants me to experience Him in my mind, and in this moment spent worshiping today when this thought occurred to me I felt so full of God's presence as I let the guard down in my emotions and felt free to finally experience Him in my emotions without any condemning thoughts to hold me back.

In that same moment of being free to experience Christ in my emotions I was singing the words, "To worship You I live. To worship You, I live, I live, to worship You", and in that moment I felt such peace, joy, and a fulfillment that can't even come close to being matched, flood over my emotions, and overtake every thought, and every part of my being.  And in that split second everything made sense....I was created to worship....what I worship is my choice, I can choose to worship the created things that fill my world, or I can choose to worship the Creator of those things and of my very soul.  In that moment, the only sensible thing to do was to worship the Creator, the only One great enough to be worthy of worship and worthy of praise; nothing else even comes close to being worthy of that kind of adoration.  This is how I want to live my life... to worship Christ and experience that kind of deep fulfillment, and peace fill up my entire being...over and over and over again.  Nothing else will do, and I won't settle for less.

To worship You Jesus I live,
Crystal