FULL JOY

The vine and branches passage ends with Jesus telling His disciples why He said everything He said. He wanted His joy to remain in them, and He wanted that joy to be full, and those two things together are what the whole passage has been moving toward from the very beginning.

The word full is doing significant work in that sentence because it rules out the version of joy that most of us settle for, the partial, intermittent, circumstances-dependent version that arrives when things go well and departs when they do not. What Jesus was promising was a joy so complete that it does not have room for the anxiety and fear that normally move in when circumstances deteriorate, because it is not rooted in circumstances at all but in Him, and He does not fluctuate.

Paul wrote from a prison cell in Philippians 4:4 that the believers in Philippi should rejoice in the Lord always, and then he said it again, and the repetition was not rhetorical enthusiasm but a deliberate emphasis, because rejoicing in the Lord always is only possible if the joy is located in the Lord rather than in what the Lord is currently allowing. Paul had found in his own experience that the fullness of joy Jesus described in John 15 was genuinely available in the hardest of places, because it was the fruit of staying tethered to Jesus, and the tether held in prison just as well as it held anywhere else.

REFLECT
• What would it mean for you to have the fullness of joy Jesus describes, and what do you think is currently standing between you and it?
• As you close this plan, what one decision will you make to stay more consistently tethered to Jesus this week?

PRAYER
Lord Jesus, I want the fullness of joy You described, Your own joy, remaining in me as a permanent reality. I know it only comes through staying connected to You, so I choose to stay. Let that choice be the one that changes everything else. Amen.

TODAY'S READING: John 15:11; Philippians 4:4