Heb.1:3 – And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.

Once you finally get it that’s it. There is no happiness in this world that comes even close to the happiness found in Christ. All of us have our own personal version of what happiness looks like and can vary throughout our lives. It can go from childhood fantasies to athletic accomplishments to academic honors or simply success and acknowledgement in your chosen field. Before I saw it I thought my happiness would come through the growth and success of my ministry even though I would never had admitted that. This all changed for me in a revival meeting in August of 1994. In a moment of time I tasted the joy of the Lord, you know the joy that Jesus Himself enjoys by just being with His Father. That was a game changer for me, God Himself became my happiness, not anything that I did or achieved, it was simply Him. Here is how Jonathan Edwards explains this joy, get past His academic 18th Century lingo and you just might discover something in his words.

“God is happy in beholding the brightness of His own glory; but this glory He beholds in beholding His Son, whom, we are told, is the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person. In beholding this perfect express image, He has an infinitely more perfect view of Himself and the brightness of His own glory than a man who beholds his own image in a glass and thus it is that God loves and delights in Himself, in that infinite and eternal delight that is between the Father and the Son. And because God’s happiness thus consists in the communion of the Persons of the Trinity, and the love and delight of the Father and the Son in each other, hence the apostle, when speaking of the special happiness of Christians, and how that therein they partake of the happiness of God, mentions the persons of the Trinity and says, “Our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.””

This is the joy that comes from being loved by God, there is nothing else even remotely like this. One look, one taste, one touch and you will experience a shift in your entire world. This is the joy that you were designed to enjoy, nothing else can ever do.