Intro:
So often it is easy to let our emotions determine how we feel. Yep, I’ve done that too! Hi this is Dorette Schaal with your dailyeword. How about telling our emotions how to feel? It sounds backward, but we really can choose joy even in the midst of feeling down or discouraged, or negative circumstances. We can shut off the enemies echo in our ears, and choose to believe the truth of God’s Word. We know where our joy comes from. Here is your dailyeword.
Did you know there is a difference between happiness and joy? An easy way to tell the difference is joy lasts and lasts, and is a result of our relationship with God. Happiness is usually temporary. We are happy because of circumstances, or because somebody likes us, or things went our way. Joy isn’t dependent on how things are going. We have joy, just because we have Jesus. That doesn’t mean that the devil won’t try and steal our joy. If we start looking inward, and keep our focus only on ourselves, we can miss seeing the big picture of life, and totally lose our joy. We can look at circumstances and because everything isn’t going smoothly, we can let joy slip away. The best thing to do is continually draw from the joy that is on the inside (Is 12:2,3) When we are saved, we experience a joy that the world doesn’t know about (I Peter 1:8). We can have complete contentment, and a joy that lasts and lasts, that isn’t dependent on how happy we feel at the moment (Phil 4:11-13). God’s joy can become part of who we are. We can be joy filled, so we can be joy spilled to our world. Splash a little joy on someone you know. You’ll lift their day, and because what we give comes back to us, we’ll get a bucket full of joy in return! So keep your joy bucket filled to spill some joy on someone else.
The words you write are always spot on… thanks