The reason we haven’t seen more of that
kind of thing is that until recently, the Body
of Christ has put very little emphasis on joy.
There was even a time when we thought the
more grief-stricken you were during church,
the more spiritual you were.

There is nothing further from the truth.
God is full of joy. Jesus is a man of joy. So
if we’re going to follow after Him, we’ll have
to be full of joy too!

Joy used to be my weakest area, spiritually.
I spent so much time majoring on faith that
I didn’t pay much attention to it. But the
Lord eventually taught me that you can’t live
by faith without joy.

That’s because it takes strength to live by
faith. We’re surrounded by a world that is
flowing toward death. The natural pull of it
is always negative. When you leave things
alone and don’t work against that negative
flow, they always get worse—not better. If
you leave a garden unattended, it dies for
lack of water or gets taken over by weeds.
If you leave a house unattended, the paint
peels off and the boards begin to rot.

To move toward life you must constantly
swim upstream. If you ever get too weak
spiritually to do that, you’ll find yourself
being swept back toward sickness, lack or
some other form of defeat. So you can never
afford to run out of strength.

No wonder the Apostle Paul wrote,
“Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say,
Rejoice” (Philippians 4:4)! To rejoice means
to re-joy, to back up your spiritual truck and
get another load of it.

Paul understood the link between joy and
strength. That’s why he prayed for the
Colossians to be “strengthened with all might,
according to [God’s] glorious power, unto all
patience and longsuffering with joyfulness”

(Colossians 1:11). If you were to diagram that
sentence and take out the intervening phrases,
you would find it actually says we are strengthened
with all might with joyfulness!

Paul reaffirmed what was true in
Nehemiah’s day under the Old Covenant is
still true today under the New Covenant. The
joy of the Lord is our strength!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries